The 4400® Promises Broken (17 page)

In fourteen minutes and ten seconds, they would exit the tunnel via the manhole at Roy Street.

If everything went according to plan, in less than twenty-four hours Promise City would once again become Seattle—and Jordan Collier and his movement would be on their way to history’s dustbin, where they belonged.

11:45
A.M.

I
T WAS THE MOMENT
that Dennis Ryland had been waiting for.

Every cable-TV channel he flipped to brought him images of chaos and unrest in Seattle. A gaping hole in the city’s downtown skyline belched black smoke into the sky. Panicked residents, opportunistic thieves, and violent malcontents mixed in the dust-shrouded streets to wreak mayhem.

He sipped his coffee and smiled.

That’s more like it
, he gloated.

It pained him to know that his old office in the former Haspelcorp Building was gone, reduced to slag and ashes by one blazing ray from space, but such were the fortunes of war.
A small price to pay if it convinces the president to let me rid the world of this menace once and for all
, he told himself.

Outside his window, Tacoma was the very portrait of
drab serenity. Except for the television spewing news of an erupting civil war less than a twenty-minute drive away, it was a perfect summer’s day in Seattle’s often-overlooked neighboring city. Dennis considered waiting until after lunch to capitalize on the crisis in Promise City, then thought better of it.

No time like the present
, he decided. He walked to his desk, set down his coffee, and relaxed into his chair. His fingers keyed in his security code for Haspelcorp’s encrypted hard-line link to its Nevada research laboratory. Moments later, the system confirmed his codes. He used the graphic interface to initiate a real-time video channel to the lab.

An animated wheel replaced the cursor on his monitor. As it spun, the word
BUFFERING
appeared beneath it.

Dennis sighed and imagined the slack-jawed look of stunned surprise that his boss Miles would be wearing when he learned the truth about how Dennis had invested the company’s research budget during the past three months. Then he let himself daydream for a moment about the smorgasbord of high-level government jobs that would once again be within his grasp after the White House learned that he personally had spearheaded the solution to the world’s promicin problem, while simultaneously sparing the country and the world a bloody, protracted war.

I could be in line for a cabinet post
, he assured himself.
Maybe a diplomatic posting
. It almost made him laugh to think of himself as an ambassador, or to imagine people addressing him as “Your Excellency.” He made
up his mind: he wanted to be the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas.

The little wheel on his screen was still spinning.

What’s taking so long?
he wondered. He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his desk drawer, lit it, inhaled, and breathed an off-white plume of sharp-odored smoke across his monitor.

The channel stopped buffering. The spinning wheel vanished and gave him back his cursor. A moving image filled his screen.

At first the picture was too dark for Dennis to pick out any details. He thought that perhaps the lab was in night mode, shut down while the scientists rested.

Then he saw the flames. Small licks of orange fire poked into the bottom of the frame, silhouetting the shapes of broken machinery in the foreground.

Dennis turned up the brightness on his screen and fiddled with the contrast to coax more of the scene into view.

The lab had been destroyed. It looked as if someone had detonated a bomb inside it. All the computers were smashed. The priceless, ultrahigh-tech devices that he had acquired at great risk and expense had been reduced to smoldering junk.

He switched between the lab’s many internal secure video feeds and was only marginally thankful that the surveillance system had been hardened against a calamity such as this.

What the hell happened?
His mind raced with idle speculations. Had the lab been attacked by Collier’s people?
Could it have been corporate espionage? Might the U.S. government have traced the movement of sensitive materials to the lab and raided it in the name of national security?

As these questions circled each other in ever-more-paranoid flights of hysterical panic, he tabbed quickly through the lab’s multiple video feeds, struggling to form a mental picture of what might have transpired out there in the desert.

When he finished, he realized that what he found most troubling were the things that he
hadn’t
seen.

He hadn’t seen any of the scientists’ bodies.

He hadn’t seen the corpses of any attackers.

And he hadn’t seen any sign of the device that his trio of mysterious researchers had been assembling.

He abandoned his wilder theories and applied Occam’s razor, fixing his mind upon the simplest explanation that fit the available evidence: the scientists and their invention were gone, and the lab had been demolished by means of arson.

Feeling his blood pressure rising with each puff of his cigarette, Dennis closed his left hand into a fist and felt his jaw clench with rage as he faced the truth.

Those assholes ripped me off.

Then a nagging feeling of dread made him wonder why. Were the scientists just looking to steal his thunder by unveiling the promicin neutralizer themselves? That seemed unlikely. If they had planned to give the device to the government, why go to the trouble of persuading Dennis to subsidize it at Haspelcorp and shelter the project in a hidden lab?

Maybe they plan to sell it
, Dennis thought.
But who the hell would buy it? A foreign government? Another corporation?

Nothing about this mess made any sense to him. All that he knew for certain was that if he didn’t recover that device soon, it was going to cost him his job—and possibly much more—when Miles found out the desert lab had been totaled.

Too distracted to smoke or savor his java, he extinguished his cigarette in his coffee mug. The butt plunged into the brown dregs with a low hiss.

I can’t ask the company’s security division to help me get the device back
, he reasoned.
They’d have to file a report with the board, and that’d be my ass. That rules out the cops and the Feds, too. But nobody else has the resources to find something like this in a pinch …

His eyes drifted across the knickknacks on his office shelves, then landed once more on the wall-mounted TV screen. The cable news channel was running (for the millionth time that morning) its loop of overtaxed first responders in Seattle.

That was when Dennis realized what he had to do, and whom he had to ask for help, while he still had time to save his neck.

Disgusted but duly impressed by the dark irony of his situation, he silently cursed God while laughing out loud.

He had to go back to Promise City.

11:55
A.M.

T
HE AIR OUTSIDE
The 4400 Center stank of sweat, smoke, and blood, and it was filled with cries of pain.

Shawn Farrell was beyond tired, but the wounded continued to appear in droves. They had come from every part of the city: from the points where soldiers had breached its defenses; from the aftermath of the Collier building’s collapse in Belltown; from the riot-torn streets of Beacon Hill.

“Please help us,” they’d said. Some asked for shelter. Most begged for his healing touch. A few offered money.

Heather Tobey, bless her, had forced some sense of order onto the desperate throng. Even as Shawn had reeled from the overwhelming demand for his aid, she had put the staff of the Center to work triaging the wounded. Those with the most grievous injuries were brought to Shawn first. The rest were organized according to their needs.

One soot-stained, bloody face followed another.
Shawn’s hands were sticky with the half-dried, reddish-brown blood of others. Every body he repaired took its toll on his own, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn anyone away. So he went on.

Tears streamed from his eyes as he despaired at all the ways people found to hurt each other. He wept for the woman stabbed by a stranger, the young boy beaten by a gang of p-negative teens merely because he could turn playground sand into glass sculptures with his promicin ability, the man felled in front of his four-year-old daughter by a sniper’s bullet.

One horror after another was placed into his hands.

His strength was leaving him, but he couldn’t stop.

A family of four, their bodies and faces burned red and black because a renegade fifty/fifty had set their home ablaze in a misguided act of vengeance, joined hands as Shawn laid hands on the children’s foreheads. He felt the flames that had tried to devour them, the agony of two parents stumbling through a wall of fire while trying to shield their sons beneath their bathrobes, the fear and the suffering of the children.

Shawn stumbled backward, and the family looked up at him, their faces healed and their bodies whole, their blackened garments the only evidence of their brush with tragedy. They shed tears of joy and reached out to embrace him, but he was already being pulled toward another victim in need of succor.

He mended broken bones, regenerated ruined eyes, reattached severed digits, repaired ruptured organs, and erased the scars of fire.

When he paused to breathe, he scanned the crowd and saw that the number of those in need had only multiplied. There was no rest in sight, no sign of a respite from his labors. All he wanted to do was surrender to fatigue and sleep for a day, a week, a year. Pressure pounded in his temples and behind his eyes. It hurt so badly that it made him sick to his stomach and left him feeling dizzy and overheated, as if he had a fever.

Going on was too much to contemplate. He felt ancient, run-down, utterly exhausted in the most literal definition of the word.

He bent over, hands planted on his knees, and made himself breathe slowly in an effort to clear his head.

Within moments, Heather was at his side, one arm resting gently across his shoulders, the other supporting his chest. “You need to stop for a while,” she said, her voice soft but freighted with concern. “This is taking too much out of you.”

“I’m okay,” Shawn lied. “I just need a moment, that’s all.”

Apparently unconvinced by his performance, Heather frowned at him, then waved to one of the Center employees nearby. “Bring me water, some sports drinks, and a breakfast bar,” she said to the man. Then she added with urgency, “Quickly.”

While the young man sprinted inside the Center to fetch fluids and nourishment, Heather stayed by Shawn’s side and kept him standing when all he wanted to do was lie down and pass out.

He wondered whether anyone would notice how she doted on him and deduce that they were, in fact, lovers.

Straightening his back, he let his head loll back until he was looking at blue sky. The sun was almost directly overhead, and it beat down on him with a tangible fury. He became aware of the sweat that coated his forehead and soaked his blood-and-grime-sullied white dress shirt.

Drawing an especially deep breath brought Shawn not relief or reinvigoration but a sharp stab of pain between the upper ribs on his left side. He winced and doubled over.

Heather caught him as she cried out, “Shawn!”

He bit down on the pain and forced it into retreat. “I’m all right,” he said to her. “This’ll sound weird, but I don’t think it was my pain I was feeling.”

Her face twisted in confusion. “You felt someone else’s pain? Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Shawn said, nodding. “It felt just like it does when I lay hands.” He turned slowly, searching the faces in the crowd. “Someone near me is having chest pains, bad ones.”

Sitting on the ground beside the Center’s driveway was a semiconscious, middle-aged man clutching his chest; he was balding, heavyset, and flanked by a frightened-looking woman of a similar age who Shawn guessed was his wife. The man’s eyes had the distant, glassy quality of someone whose life was slipping out of his grasp. Behind the gaze was a silent plea for help.

Shawn met the man’s gaze and held it.

Opening his senses and his mind, Shawn felt the dull aches and irregular jabs of the man’s failing heart. He lifted one bloodstained hand in the man’s direction and closed
his eyes. In his imagination, he saw damaged cardiac muscle, clogged and hardened arteries, and potentially fatal clots waiting to break free into the man’s bloodstream.

One by one, Shawn unmade each ailment. With each effort, the pain in his own chest grew deeper, until it felt as if a vise were crushing his ribs and squeezing out his last breaths.

Then it was done, and he gasped, suddenly free of the pain. He fell backward into Heather’s arms. The employee she’d sent inside had returned, and he handed Heather a bottle of orange-flavored Gatorade with its cap off and a straw poking from it. She held it in front of Shawn’s mouth.

“Drink,” she insisted.

He sipped from the straw, slowly at first. Each mouthful of the sweet and vaguely salty beverage renewed a tiny fraction of his depleted strength. Before he knew it, he’d emptied the bottle. He blinked, recovered his bearings, and said to the male employee, “I’ll take that breakfast bar now.”

It took Shawn less than thirty seconds to devour the chocolate-covered granola snack. As he washed it down with the bottle of water the man had brought him, he saw through the surrounding woods that more people were walking down the long, tree-lined, curving driveway of The 4400 Center.

How many this time?
he wondered.
Twenty-five? Fifty? A hundred more souls in need of a healer?

The approaching crowd swelled in numbers, and Shawn noticed that most of them were without any sign of serious injury. As they rounded the last bend in the
driveway, the person at the front of the procession stepped into view.