The 4400® Promises Broken

by David Mack

  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.

  It was Jordan Collier.

  Shawn discarded his empty bottle and walked forward, away from the sick and wounded, to meet Jordan’s people. Heather and several employees of the Center stepped out of the crowd to stand close at Shawn’s back.

  Nearly four years earlier, Jordan had converted the Center from its previous use as an art museum into a safe haven for the 4400. It had been his first headquarters as the de facto leader of the Promicin-Positive Movement, his sanctum sanctorum. It also was where Jordan was seemingly assassinated by a sniper—an event that had put the responsibility for running the Center on Shawn’s young and, at the time, utterly unprepared shoulders.

  The months that followed had brought many bitter ordeals for Shawn, but the cruelest test had come after Jordan’s nigh miraculous return from the grave. Shawn had opposed Jordan’s plan to distribute promicin to the public, because while Jordan could accept that 50 percent of all who took the drug would die agonizing deaths as a result, Shawn couldn’t. They’d parted ways with more than a little mutual hostility.

  Despite the fact that Shawn had helped cure Jordan of his possession by one of the Marked and had brokered negotiations between Jordan and the agents at NTAC, the two men remained separated by the kind of bitterness that existed only between those who once were friends.

  Jordan came to a halt in front of Shawn, and the crowd that followed him stopped a few rows at a time, creating a ripple effect that worked its way backward though the snaking mass of bodies. Both Jordan and his entourage of hundreds—which Shawn noted included Gary Navarro, Maia Skouris, and his own cousin, Kyle—were caked in dark gray dust.

  “Hello, Shawn,” Jordan said.

  Taking care to keep his conscious mind blank just in case Gary was telepathically eavesdropping, Shawn dipped his chin and replied with guarded suspicion, “Jordan.”

  “I can see you’re busy,” Jordan said, nodding at the supplicants who were massed in front of the Center’s entrance. “And we’re a bit pressed for time ourselves, so I’ll get to the point: we’re here to ask for sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary?” Shawn narrowed his eyes. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, Shawn, I’m not.” Gesturing at the people behind him, he continued: “I know that not all of my people are 4400s. Some took promicin by choice; some were exposed during the epidemic. But the soldiers who’ve come to kill us don’t care how any of us got promicin. To them, we’re all just targets.”

  Jordan cast a nostalgic look at the curving white façade of the Center. “When I opened this place, it was for the original returnees, because that’s who I thought I was meant to serve.” He paused, then looked Shawn in the eye. “When you and I parted ways, it was because I thought my purpose was to spread promicin. I believed that convincing everyone to take it would solve the world’s problems, and that the costs, however tragic, would be worth the gains.”

  His face slackened with remorse. “But I was wrong. And you were right, Shawn. We can’t save humanity by condemning half of it to death. That’s not a future worth fighting for.”

  Everyone around them was quiet, huddled in a hush of tense anticipation. The history of animosity between Shawn and Jordan was well-known, and it seemed as if everyone sensed that the future of the Movement, and of Promise City, hinged on Shawn’s reply.

  He offered his hand to Jordan, who accepted it.

  As they shook hands, Shawn declared for all to hear, “Let’s get everyone inside.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  12:01 P.M.

  DIANA CURSED UNDER her breath as another barricade of burning cars and stacked debris forced her to make her sixth unplanned detour down a side street in as many minutes.

  “Told you we shoulda taken I-Five,” Tom said.

  She snapped back, “You want to drive?” Gesturing with one hand at the smoke-filled disaster zone outside their vehicle, she went on, “Say the word, Tom! If you can predict which street the nutjobs’ll block next, be my guest and take the wheel!”

  Tom seemed to be concocting a reply, but he placed his right hand over his mouth and looked out the window instead. Diana chalked up his silence to a tiny victory of discretion.

  She made a right turn onto Beacon Avenue South and hoped that this time she might make it to South Spokane Street, and from there to the Seattle Freeway.

  They got as far as the three-way intersection at South Forest Street and Seventeenth Avenue South before the shooting started.

  Large-caliber bullets ripped across their car’s hood with a chattering roar. Steam geysered from the engine and obscured the windshield with a spray of atomized grease.

  Diana stomped on the brakes. She and Tom ducked as another barrage blasted out their windows and showered them with glass.

  Then came a crackling noise, like that of an electrical transformer dancing with lightning.

  Peeking over the dash, Tom and Diana saw two civilians, a man and a woman, emerge from behind a parked car on their left and extend their hands toward an auto repair garage on their right—which, Diana realized, had been the origin of the gunfire.

  The man hurled wild bolts of forked lightning from his fingers into the garage, illuminating the soldiers hiding inside and igniting fires around them at the same time. The woman next to him threw fireballs under the cars and trucks parked in the garage’s lot, detonating their gas tanks like bombs.

  Red-hot shrapnel peppered Tom and Diana’s car. Then came a flurry of burning gasoline that set their vehicle ablaze, along with half the street in front of and behind them.

  Tom unlocked his door. “Stay low, move fast, and head for the green building behind us. We should be out of the crossfire once we get past its corner.”

  “Ready,” Diana said, unlocking her own door.

  A metallic creaking from outside coaxed Diana to peek over the dash again. Cars that moments earlier had been parked along the street ahead of them hurtled through the air at the one being used for cover by the two civilians.

  The man and woman scrambled in panicked retreat as several tons of metal rained down. The automotive projectiles tumbled over them, like giant steel dice.

  Tom and Diana’s car wobbled and started to rise.

  They gave each other the same wide-eyed stare.

  “Time to go,” Tom said.

  They opened their doors and rolled out of the car onto the street, which was littered with broken glass, jagged steel, and burning fuel. Diana landed hard and narrowly missed a fiery smear of oil.

  She hoped the wall of jet-black smoke rising from the exploded vehicles would impair the soldiers’ vision enough to let her and Tom scramb
le to cover behind the corner of what she now saw was the Beacon Hill Library.

  Behind her, their car soared away and smashed through the front of a nearby house.

  Tom reached the corner of the library less than a second before she did. As she slipped behind him and put her back to the wall, she asked, “Okay, now what?”

  “Don’t look at me,” he said over his shoulder. “I got us out of the car. Next bright idea’s up to you.”

  “Great,” she muttered. She was about to suggest they go back the way they’d come, until she saw the angry mob moving toward them from that direction. “I think we have a problem.”

  Following her worried stare, Tom let out a groan of dismay. “You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “A mob that’ll kill us for being with NTAC, jarheads that’ll kill us just for being here. We can’t win today.” He cast a quick series of glances at the library. “Stay close,” he said, jogging to the building’s rear entrance as he drew his Glock.

  He stopped a few feet from the glass door and fired three shots, shattering the portal into shards. Then he reached in, unlocked the door, and pulled it open. “C’mon,” he said. “We’ll go out the other side, into the parking lot.”

  She followed him into the library, an elegant, modern space with a lofty arched ceiling whose shape and jutting, riblike exposed beams made Diana think of the inside of a cartoon whale. They raced past the long, curving shelves and freestanding stacks to the far side of the building. Tom opened the door to the parking lot, and they hurried back outside.

  They were two steps out the door before they saw they’d stumbled past four riflemen in black-and-gray urban camouflage lying in ambush behind some foliage near the door. The soldiers spun and raised their weapons.

  The NTAC agents raised their hands by reflex.

  “Whoa!” Tom said! “Friendlies!”

  “Identify yourselves,” said the closest of the soldiers, all of whom Diana saw wore no rank insignia or identification.

  “Agent Tom Baldwin, NTAC,” Tom said, “and this is my partner, Agent Diana Skouris. We have ID in our pockets.”

  “Slowly,” said the soldier.

  Moving with deliberate caution, Diana and Tom each kept one hand raised while using the other to pull their flip-folds with their NTAC credentials from their pants pockets. They handed them to the soldier, who studied them, then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, handing back the credentials. “The whole city’s a free-fire zone, so you two better take cover on the double.” With a dismissive upward nod, he added, “Get going.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said, tucking his ID back into his pocket. Diana did the same, and stayed close at Tom’s side as they started moving toward the street.

  A flash of motion on Diana’s right turned her head. Five people were running on a narrow strip of grass between the library and a redbrick apartment building: a man shepherding two young girls and a woman carrying an infant.

  The older girl had blond hair exactly like Maia’s.

  The younger one had radiant halos of jade-colored light around her head and her hands.

  Both girls shrieked and twitched as the soldiers raked them with a spray of bullets. Their father screamed in anger, their mother wailed with grief, and the infant cried in pure terror as they fell beside the girls, ripped apart by a storm of metal.

  Diana stopped and stared, mesmerized and aghast.

  The blond girl lay dying, racked by spasms and choking on the blood in her mouth. Then her eyes dimmed, and she lay still. Her family’s blood speckled her face and her hair.

  Tears of rage burned in Diana’s eyes.

  The girl’s hair looked exactly like Maia’s.

  The soldiers broke from cover to verify their kills.

  Diana drew her Glock and opened fire.

  Her first shot slammed through the lead soldier’s head, and he fell backward, through a plate-glass window into the library.

  Her second shot ripped through another soldier’s throat. He dropped and hit the ground like a sack of wet cement.

  The next soldier turned and raised his rifle halfway into position before Diana’s third shot struck him in the face.

  The last soldier had her in his sights, and she prepared to die.

  Then came another crack of pistol fire, and the soldier fell backward with a bullet hole in his forehead.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw a gray wisp of smoke rise from the muzzle of Tom’s pistol. He lowered his weapon.

  Diana did the same as she threw a guilty look at Tom. “I guess I just picked a side.”

  “So did I,” he said with no hint of regret. “Yours.” He holstered his Glock. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  12:27 P.M.

  THERE HADN’T BEEN time for Jordan to shower, but he had stolen a few moments inside an executive washroom on the top floor of The 4400 Center to rinse the tacky gray filth from his hands and face. His clothes and shoes remained irreparably soiled, and his long hair was matted to his head by the sticky dust, which had taken on the consistency of paste when it became wet.

  He picked up a bottle of water and guzzled two mouthfuls, grateful to have his mouth cleansed of the taste of ashes.

  Jordan didn’t think of himself as jaded. The faces of those who perished for the Movement haunted him; and yet, staring at his dirty, haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror, he felt oddly sanguine about the horrors he’d lived through less than two hours earlier.

  I must be in shock, he thought. This is my mind coping with trauma. When the danger is past, I’m going to feel this. He sighed and regarded himself with a grimace. I can hardly wait.

  He took a hand towel from a stack next to the sink, patted his face dry, and rubbed the moisture from his hands. He dropped the towel in a laundry basket on his way out of the bathroom.

  His bodyguards Emil and Tristine were standing outside the bathroom door, exactly where he’d left them. The duo fell into step behind Jordan as he walked quickly down the hallway to the executive meeting room.

  The double doors of the main entrance were propped open. Inside, assembled around the long, dark conference table, was a war council that consisted of Jordan’s and Shawn’s top people. Their attention was focused on a handful of large maps.

  “Bring me up to speed,” Jordan said, edging into the group beside Kyle, who was standing next to his cousin, Shawn.

  Pointing at makeshift markers—including a match-book, an eraser, someone’s car keys, and a silver dollar— placed on a map of the greater Seattle area, Kyle said, “Our remote-viewers have seen three groups of enhanced soldiers inside Promise City, in addition to multiple units of regular military personnel.”

  “The enhanced soldiers,” Jordan said, studying the map. “What do we know about their capabilities?”

  Shawn replied, “They have at least one telekinetic, possibly two. The squad that attacked the Space Needle a few minutes ago had an electrokinetic, a pyrokinetic, and a guy who can paralyze by touch.”

  “Most of the others have abilities geared toward information gathering,” Gary added. “Lucas and Hal helped me scout most of them a few minutes ago. They’ve got the expected assortment of trackers, remote-viewers, limited precognitives, psychic transmitters, healers, and so on. The only guy I’m really worried about seems to be the one in charge.”

  Jordan cast a worried glance at the young telepath. “Why? What’s his story?”

  “That’s the problem,” Gary said. “I have no idea. All I know about him is what little I’ve been able to read from the minds of his men, but most of them don’t know much besides his name, rank, and specialty: Commander Eric Frost, Navy SEAL.”

  From the corner of his eye, Jordan saw a young man whisper to Shawn and hand him a sheet of paper. While Shawn read the report, Heather crossed her arms and asked Gary, “Do we know anything else? Even small details might make a difference.”

  Gary said, “Including Frost, there are thirty enhanced soldi
ers working as a single unit inside Promise City. From his troops’ memories, I found out they entered the city through some underwater sewage tunnels in Elliott Bay. Once they got into the city, they split into three groups of ten men.”

  Shawn interrupted, “His troops are wreaking havoc all over Belltown. They’re knocking out sections of the freeways and starting fires faster than we can put them out.”

  Nodding, Gary continued. “I think their job is to keep us busy and off-balance while Frost and his team head east and look for us. The last time his men saw him and his command team, they were crawling back into the Mercer Street flood control tunnel, on their way to a manhole at Eighth and Roy.”

  “Which means they’re probably coming here,” Jordan said. “Where are they now?”

  “No idea,” Gary said. “Frost is able to hide himself and the men with him. We haven’t been able to find him with telepathy, remote-viewing, or anything else.”

  Looking hopefully at his brooding shaman, Jordan asked, “What about you, Kyle? Any suggestions on how or where we might head off Commander Frost and his team?”

  Kyle stared at his shoes, then shook his head in defeat. “Sorry,” he said. “Cassie and I are drawing a blank. But we know their mission is to cap us, so we ought to start digging in. Cover the windows and doors, post sentries, the works. Maybe even—oh, I don’t know—get our hands on some guns?”

  Gary added with an apprehensive sidelong look, “Guns might not be a bad idea, Jordan.”

  “I don’t think we need them,” Jordan said. “But if they’ll make any of you feel better, be my guests.” He pointed at the assorted objects dotting the map. “While we’re getting ready for a showdown with Frost, let’s not forget to deal with the regular troops.” Looking at Gary, he asked, “Is Marisol still holding the line in Georgetown?”