Back at Nina’s thankfully empty house, the three of them sat on the soft, musty couches in the dim living room, trying to rethink their strategy, to brainstorm and see if they could make any headway with the coded notebook. But within minutes, the fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and stress—combined with the lack of sleep the night before—caught up to them with a vengeance.
Before long they were all out cold, as if they’d been sapped.
Walter woke to the soft, gentle clink of a teacup and saucer. When he peeled his sandpapery eyelids open, he saw that the fluffy Himalayan cat had curled up on his chest and Abby the pregnant blonde was sitting crosslegged on the floor, drinking a cup of tea and leafing through the pages of a large book featuring the art of Alphonse Mucha.
“Hi,” she said with a sunny, childish smile when she saw that he was awake. “Would you like some tea? I just made a fresh pot.”
“My dear,” Walter said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes and gently moving the placid cat from his chest to the couch so he could sit up. “In this moment, I believe my body needs caffeine more than it needs oxygen.”
“Did somebody say caffeine?” Bell asked from underneath a purple and red paisley throw pillow.
“Four hundred and fifty milligrams, administered intravenously, please,” Nina said, sitting up, rotating her neck, and twisting her tangled hair into a topknot. “With cream and sugar.”
Abby looked at Nina, then back at Walter with her big eyes even bigger than normal. Walter followed her gaze back to Nina and saw what Abby was seeing. The bruising, the spit lip, the signs of their ill-prepared hand-to-hand struggle with the killer. Walter’s hands flew involuntarily to his own face, running his fingers over the damage there. Even the slightest contact made him wince.
His body hurt, too. Everything hurt.
Nina, noting the shocked look on Abby’s sweet, simple face, shook her head, letting her red hair fall back down.
“You should see the other guy,” she said.
“Wow,” Abby said. It was all clearly more than she could wrap her pretty blond head around. “I mean... wow. I’d better... you know... go get that tea.” She got to her feet with minimal struggle, considering her enormous belly, and then drifted away into the kitchen.
Walter took the killer’s notebook from his pocket and was about to open it when Nina gave him a sternly arched eyebrow and a terse shake of her head.
So he slipped the notebook back into his pocket as Abby returned from the kitchen, balancing a tray of steaming mugs, a fancy silver Victorian creamer, a bouquet of mismatched spoons, and a whimsical ceramic sugar bowl shaped like an octopus. The minute she set the tray down, the three of them fell on the tea like animals. Walter drained more than half of the scalding hot liquid in one foolhardy gulp, utterly unmindful of his burnt tongue.
“Thank you, Abby,” Nina said, getting to her feet with her mug in one hand and gesturing toward the stairs. “Now, will you excuse us? We’re going to go on upstairs. We’ve got a few things to discuss.”
“Oh...” Abby said. “That’s cool.” She picked up the lazy cat. “I’ll just hang out down here with Cat-Mandu.” She turned the feline over and cradled him like an infant, any shock or questions about their bruises long gone from her mayfly mind. Even if she realized that they didn’t want her overhearing their conversation, she didn’t seem to care at all.
She set the cat down and went back to her book without another word.
Walter and Bell followed Nina up the stairs, mugs in hand.
Back in Nina’s large Spartan bedroom, the three of them plunked their sore, beat-up frames into the same seats they’d chosen before the madness. Nina and Bell together on her tightly made bed, and Walter at the desk by the windows.
“Okay,” Nina said. “We’re all thinking it, but I’m going to say it. That was really, really stupid. If I hadn’t brought my gun, we’d all be dead.”
“But we saved the passengers,” Walter argued. “You said so yourself—isn’t that what matters?”
“Nina’s right,” Bell said. “We didn’t think things through, but we got lucky. Next time, we might not be so lucky. We need a plan.”
Walter nodded, duly chastened.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “So from here on out, we need to find a way to fight the killer with brains, not brawn. Attack this problem like scientists, not... Dirty Harry.”
“Right,” Bell replied. “And what is the first thing a scientist does when confronted with surprising or atypical results?”
“Repeat the experiment.”
“Repeat the experiment?” Nina echoed. “We almost got ourselves killed today. If you want to repeat that, you can count me out.”
“I’m not talking about repeating the events of today,” Bell began.
“Repeat the original experiment,” Walter finished. He felt that old familiar flush of excitement—the one he got when he and Bell were perfectly synchronized in their thinking process, on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. “Recreate the original formula. We need to see if we can reopen that gate.”
“Because if we can do that,” Bell said, pausing to let Walter finish.
“We can send him back.”
Nina looked from Bell to Walter, a slight frown creasing her brow.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” she asked. “I mean, the last time you opened this gate, you let a killer stroll right in to our world. What if it happens again?”
“She’s right,” Bell said. “What if we unleash a whole army of Zodiacs?”
“But I don’t see any other way to stop him,” Walter said. “We can’t just let him keep killing.”
“Okay,” Nina said. “What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I’ll stand by with Lulu.” She pulled the handgun from her purse and gave it an affectionate pat. “Anyone or anything comes through that gate, I’ll let ’em have it.”
“I don’t know if I can condone that plan of action,” Walter said. “I mean, yes, clearly the last person or being that traveled through the gate has an unquestionably violent and unstable disposition. But that doesn’t mean that every single individual from the other side of that psychic gateway can be condemned to death, based solely on the actions of one man.
“I wouldn’t want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example,” he continued. “The next being that passes through might be a scholar or a scientist or a grandmother not unlike the ones we saved today.”
“Fair enough,” Bell acknowledged. “But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.”
“Also,” Walter said, taking out the killer’s notebook and laying it on the desk, “I think it would be wise to spend some time working on decoding this. It may contain information about the world on the other side of the gate. Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“You see if you can get anywhere with that notebook, Walter,” Bell said, pulling his own red notebook from an inner pocket. “And Nina and I will see about acquiring the chemicals and equipment required to recreate our original formula. Good thing I keep every single formula written down.”
But Walter was barely listening. He opened the notebook to the last written page and stared at the groupings of letters, searching out double pairings and running a series of simple substitutions in his head. He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina’s typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.
12
Some time later, although Walter couldn’t have guessed how long if he’d been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.