Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

A moment later, Walter could hear Iverson’s voice up above.

“They have another accomplice!” he cried. “Caucasian male, thirties, about six one and bald, with a beard. I saw him sap Davis, and then the four of them ran off, that way!”

There were more agents thundering through the trees, but farther back and up the slope to the left, misled by Iverson’s ruse. Walter lurched after Nina and Bell, chest heaving, as they dodged through a thick stand of young elms. He saw something dark ahead of them, beyond the trees, which quickly resolved itself into the blackened timbers and tar paper walls of the ruined shack. The nose of the rented car stuck out from behind its far corner.

They ran to it, hopping over charred debris, opened the doors and threw themselves in, Nina and Bell in front and Walter in back. Nina jammed the key into the ignition and cranked it.

The big V8 roared to life.

She dropped the shift into drive and stomped on the gas. It was too much. The tires spun in the leaf mold and mud, going nowhere.

Two agents were crashing through the elms. Walter could tell by the glint of moonlight that they had guns out.

“Easy,” Bell said.

“I got it,” Nina said. “Got it.”

She let up on the accelerator and tried again, more slowly this time. The wheels caught. They were rolling.

An agent grabbed at the car, catching a side-view mirror and smacking the driver’s side window with the butt of his gun, starring it. Nina sped up, roaring down the narrow track, and the agent let go as a tree threatened to scrape him off. The other agent skidded to a stop behind them and fired.

Walter and Bell ducked, but Walter heard no impact, and the next second they had taken a curve. The agents were out of sight.

“Not out of the woods yet,” Nina muttered.

Walter frowned, thinking it a very obvious thing to say, then realized that she meant it metaphorically.

“Those guys are going to catch us in a matter of minutes,” she said, “if we don’t find some way to slow them down.”

The paved road appeared ahead of them. Nina swerved out onto it in a spray of gravel, then rocked back into line and sped down the hill. Walter looked behind. He couldn’t see anything at first, but then he could. Headlights raced under the trees, reaching out for them.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Nina barreled down the gravel road at a terrifying speed. This was no Volkswagen Beetle, but she didn’t seem intimidated by the Detroit behemoth, and slung it along the twisting track with an admirable—if heart-stopping—fearlessness.

At last they came to the state highway. Nina bumped up onto it without braking, then roared west with her foot pinned to the floorboard. The highway was smooth and clean, but almost as twisty as the smaller road. They were screeching around the curves.

“This is where they’ll catch us,” she said.

“Then what do we do?” Walter asked. “What’s the point of running?”

“For a scientist,” she replied. “You have very little imagination.”

Another dirt road was coming up rapidly on the left side of the road. Nina glanced in her rearview mirror, then swerved toward it, killing the LeSabre’s headlights. Bell hung on with both hands. Walter grabbed the door handle and looked back. The FBI cars still were out of sight behind the curve of the highway.

The big car slammed down onto the dark dirt road at speed, almost smashing Nina’s head into the ceiling as the jolt sent her bouncing out of her seat. She drove forward about ten yards then hit the brakes and skidded to a stop in the muddy gravel.

She, Bell, and Walter looked back. A narrow sliver of the highway was just visible through the trees. One second. Two seconds. Three. Two sets of headlights howled by, and then two seconds later, a third.

“Is that all of them?” Bell asked. “How many were there?”

“I didn’t see,” Nina said. “But if there are any more, they’re probably still up at the cabin, trying to catch Roscoe and the boys. Time to go.”

She turned the headlights back on, put the LeSabre in reverse, and backed out of the side road onto the highway. But instead of going east, she went west.

“You’re going the wrong way,” said Bell. “The connector to the Five is west.”

“They’re going to turn around eventually, William. I don’t want to be behind them when they do. We’ll take the 101 back.”

“Didn’t you say that took longer?” Walter asked. “We need to get back to San Francisco as soon as possible.”

“That’s okay,” she replied. “I’ll just go faster.”

Walter exchanged a look with Bell, then put his seatbelt on. It was going to be a long trip.

34

Miranda was wrapping up her shift at the Roxie, sweeping cigarette butts and scattered popcorn out from under the seats and turning out the lights inside the candy display cases. She tossed out the last of the sad, mummified hot dogs that had been spinning on the hot rollers all day, and wiped down all the spigots on the soft-drink dispensers.

It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it certainly wasn’t the worst, and she got to see all the movies for free. She’d proved herself to be so reliable that she’d been given a set of keys, and the added responsibility of locking up every Monday night. She took that responsibility very seriously.

Monday nights were usually pretty dead, anyway. They were closed on Tuesday, and Wednesday was when they changed the feature, so by Monday night, pretty much everyone already had the current film.

Besides, who goes to the movies on Monday night?

This past week they’d been running this French animated film called Fantastic Planet, which she had to admit she didn’t really understand. Clearly she wasn’t the only one, since it hadn’t been very popular, and this last late show had been nearly empty—except for a young couple who were way more into each other than the movie. And that same creepy guy with the glasses who’d come in alone every Monday night for the past month.

For some reason, that guy had left early, twenty minutes before the end of the movie, and Miranda wasn’t sorry to see him go. She always had the feeling that he was watching her when she wasn’t looking.

As she reached into her purse to get the keys to lock up the theater, her fingers brushed against a bottle of Miss Clairol Born Blonde hair bleach. She’d been carrying it in her purse for a full week now, trying to get up the nerve to use it. On her way through the lobby, she paused to look at her own reflection in the mirror behind the candy counter.

Skinny, no kind of body at all beneath her polyester uniform. Freckles. Stick-straight brown hair. Such a blah-bland Breck girl. No wonder Matt barely even noticed that she existed.

Matt MacIntyre was the shift manager. He was twenty-five, and knew every single movie ever made. He had a bleach-blond shag haircut and an earring in one ear. He liked Ziggy Stardust and the New York Dolls, and made all his own clothes, or bought them from thrift stores and ripped them up, embellished them, and remade them so they looked way cooler than anything you could buy in the trendy boutiques.

She once complimented him on a purple scarf he was wearing and he’d smiled and wrapped it around her neck, telling her she could have it, that it matched her “Liz Taylor eyes.” That had been the best day of her entire life.

She wore that scarf every single day, and when it stopped smelling like him, she’d gone over to the Liberty House department store at Union Square and secretly doused it with the spicy cologne he wore—Halston Z-14 for Men.

When she went home, she wrapped that fragrant scarf around her face and listened to “Bad Girl” by the New York Dolls, over and over again, imagining that she was that bad girl in the song. The kind of girl that guys would beg to be with. A tough, sassy blonde, with glitter eye shadow and platform shoes, and attitude to spare.