Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

As they turned right and started for Nina’s car, shouts from down the block cut him off. He saw a young blond man in bell-bottom jeans and a bright yellow shirt turn the corner, running right down the middle of the street. He was maybe twenty-one, tops, with a sensual, girlish mouth that didn’t look like it belonged on the same face as his big shapeless nose and close-set eyes, half hidden under feathered hair.

He had a wild panicked expression that made a lot more sense when a shouting gang of men in workman’s overalls rounded the corner behind him and started chasing after him. The young man was faster than the bigger men, but he was tottering on a pair of precarious platform shoes, and as Walter watched, the inevitable occurred.

The blond man twisted his ankle in a pothole, and nearly fell. The front runner of the gang of work men, a huge, beefy but disturbingly baby-faced man with thinning black hair, caught up to the blond man, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, spinning him around and then hauling back a meaty fist.

“You set my goddamn car on fire!” he bellowed.

The young blond man cowered and covered up.

“I didn’t!” he screamed. “I was just trying to get away. It’s your fault. You pushed me!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?” The man sneered at his cohorts “He says it’s my fault.” He turned back. “You want to know what’s your fault? This.” He laid a fist into the young man’s gut that doubled him up and sent him retching to the ground. “Don’t got much to say about that, do you?”

“Leave him alone!” Nina called.

She was striding toward the men, fearless, while Walter and Bell were hanging back. But before she had taken two steps, the young blond man screeched like a bird of prey and every parked car on the street exploded, as if a dozen bombs had been set off in perfect synchronization.

Walter, Bell, and Nina fell back, crashing into the warehouse wall and shielding their faces with their arms as great billows of flame erupted from the gas tanks of the cars, and bits of shrapnel pinged off the bricks around them.

The eruptions sent the workmen running back the way they came, swearing or praying—or maybe both. The young man in the bell-bottoms ran the other way, crying and covering his wavy blond hair as the cars blazed all around him.

“It wasn’t me!” he wailed. “I swear it wasn’t me!”

Bell sat up and stared after him, shaking his head.

“Amazing,” he said. “Poltergeist activity, pyrokinesis, phantom wounding, gamma bursts. All that potential power locked inside ordinary human beings, just waiting to be harnessed or released. We haven’t even begun to reach our full potential as a race.”

“Or our full potential as mass murderers.” Walter turned on Bell, furious. “We have unleashed monsters. Turned people’s own minds against them. Allowed frightened innocents to lash out at the pain of the world with the strength of gods! This is a nightmare!”

“Yes,” Bell said, “but imagine if one could harness these powers of the mind, at the same time as we were amplifying them. If the formula could be perfected and used in a more controlled setting, perhaps with younger subjects whose minds are still open. Think how powerful the human race could become.”

“Too powerful,” Walter said. “There would be a psychic apocalypse that would tear apart the very fabric our universe.”

Nina stood close by.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “What about the band? What’s happening to them?”

Bell laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re as safe as they can be, in the warehouse. It’s built to withstand tons of damage. And the way they were playing, I doubt they have any idea what’s happening out here.”

She nodded. In the distance, police sirens were wailing. Someone had called in the fires. She looked down the street in the direction the blond man had run.

“Come on,” she said. “We’d better try to calm that poor guy down before he blows up any more...”

Crash!

She stopped as a section of the wooden fence that surrounded the shipyard smashed flat to the sidewalk. They looked up to see what might follow.

An old boat, rusted and wrecked, with its engine missing and its hull smashed full of jagged holes, was hovering a few feet above the ground and slowly drifting as if caught in a lazy current. It had knocked down a section of the fence, and was now drifting into the next section, splintering the boards and snapping them off at ground level.

Bell swore.

“What now?” Walter asked.

Walter and Nina stared as they saw that the boat was not alone. Behind it, in the dark of the shipyard, other huge shapes floated and spun, all caught in the same inexorable current—propellers, anchors, heavy chains, rusted boilers, engines. It looked like a slow motion cyclone, with all the junk circling the center of the yard.

An army of terrified rats was fleeing down the street like a squirming brown river. Walter watched in horror as several straggler rodents were swept up into the whirlpool, squeaking and defecating in fear as they sailed through the air end over thrashing end.

“Oh, God,” said Nina. “It’s expanding.”

Just as she said it, the rusted out hull of a fishing trawler mashed into the wall of the welding shop next door. It glanced off again just as slowly as it had hit, and only dislodged a few bricks, but Walter saw that Nina was right. The entire whirlpool was getting wider, and more and more junk was going to start smashing into the surrounding buildings.

Walter started across the street.

“Someone’s in there, doing this,” he said. “We have to stop them. We have to bring them down.”

Bell caught his arm and tried to pull him back.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “We could be crushed! We have to get out of here.”

Walter turned on him.

“You remember last time?” he asked. “You said it wasn’t our fault because we didn’t know what would happen. This time we did know what would happen, and we did it anyway. It’s our fault, Belly! The radiation. The fires. We have to do what we can!” He turned to face Nina. “Wait around the corner and warn the firefighters about the radiation in the alley. Say you saw a man with a weird kind of bomb, or a mushroom cloud, or something like that.”

“A weird bomb?” Nina rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that sounds believable.”

“Look I don’t care what you tell them,” Walter responded, “as long as you make them understand that the area must be cordoned off. I am going into that yard.”

Walter wrenched his arm out of Bell’s grip and hurried across the street. Nina gave Bell a hard look.

“Alright, Walter,” Bell groaned, then he raised his voice. “Alright. I’m coming.” He backed away from Nina. “Go home as soon as you talk to the firemen. We’ll meet back at your place.”

“Let’s just hope that my car isn’t on fire,” she said with a look.

24

Allan breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped out of an underground parking garage. The woman had been dealt with, and already the sparks were subsiding.

This had not been a Zodiac killing. It had been another act of necessity. Not that he minded taking the extra lives, but he felt as if his talents were ultimately being wasted. The bum. The Chinese man at the warehouse. They just weren’t up to his usual standards. They would be reported as a simple street crime, nothing more. Not even his good friend Special Agent Iverson would know it had been him.

At least he had been able to share Desiree with Iverson. He’d written a long, detailed letter describing all the special moments, and speculating how many other human cockroaches had been taken out by the aftereffects of his little one-night stand. And when the time was right, he would write a letter to Iverson about Miss Nina Sharp and her little friends.