THE 4400® WELCOME TO PROMISE CITY (5 page)

“You see,” Burkhoff said defensively. “I’ve taken every reasonable precaution.”

So far, so good,
Diana admitted, reassured by the sight of the equipment. Burkhoff seemed to have spared no expense to protect his samples.
We should probably confiscate them anyway.
The samples needed to be in the hands of responsible authorities, not somebody as erratic as Kevin Burkhoff, who meant well but often let his scientific zeal overwhelm his judgment, as when he had experimented on Diana against her will.

She was already trying to figure out how she was going to get the samples away from Kevin, despite Tess’s worrisome ability, as he stepped forward to wipe the frost from the window.
Maybe we need to come back later when Tess isn’t around?

A startled yelp escaped Burkhoff’s lips. “No!” he gasped, practically pressing his nose against the clear Plexiglas barrier. “It’s not possible!”

Diana tensed, alarmed by the anxious sound of his voice. “What is it?”

He spun around to face her. The stricken expression on his face was the last thing she wanted to see. He looked pale as a ghost.

“The samples,” he blurted. “They’re missing!”

R
ICHARD
T
YLER COULDN’T SLEEP.

Lying on his bunk, the prisoner stared at the ceiling of his lonely cell. Muted fluorescent light spilled through vertical steel bars from the empty corridor outside. A rangy black man in his mid-thirties, he had worn nothing but an orange prison jumpsuit for months now. His shaved head rested against a lumpy pillow. His dark mustache and goatee were neatly trimmed. Although lightsout had been hours ago, he lay awake listening to the nocturnal sounds of the cell block. Muffled snores and sobs came from the adjacent cages; it seemed like more and more positives were taking up residence in the maximum-security prison every day. Rumor had it that both Collier and The 4400 Center had been lobbying aggressively for the release of Richard and his fellow “political prisoners,” but without much results. Richard hadn’t even laid eyes on a lawyer since he was apprehended in Seattle months ago. Chances were, he was going to rot in this cell for the rest of his life.

That’s what I get for taking on the entire U.S. government,
he thought.
Even if they didn’t give me much choice.

Not for the first time, he wondered what his life would have been like if he hadn’t been abducted by the future back in fifty-one. When he’d shipped out to Korea, he had certainly never intended to end up behind bars in the twenty-first century. A good part of him wished that those meddlesome time travelers had left him alone. Then again, if he hadn’t gone AWOL from his own era, he would have never met Lily …

His gaze was drawn to a solitary snapshot taped to the wall. The color photo depicted a beautiful blond woman cradling a grinning toddler on her lap. The little girl’s dark skin matched her father’s. Both mother and daughter beamed happily.

Lily. Isabelle.

Richard’s throat tightened as he recalled taking the photo up at the cabin, back before Lily died and everything went to hell. It had been a beautiful summer day in the mountains. Blue skies. Birds singing in the trees. The snapshot was his sole worldly possession and also his most prized. The precious photo was a reminder that once he had been more than just another inmate, that he had been a loving husband and father. For a brief time, they had been happy.

The dim lighting made it hard to make out his loved ones’ faces. Feeling a sudden need to see his family close up, he raised his hand and extended his fingers toward the photo. His mind instinctively reached out for it …

Nothing happened. The snapshot stayed taped to the wall several feet away. It didn’t even flutter.

Oh yeah.
He smiled ruefully. Funny how quickly you could get used to moving things with your mind. And how much you missed the convenience of it once it went away. Daily doses of the inhibitor had done a number on his telekinesis. Where once he could hurl heavy objects just by thinking about it, now he couldn’t lift a feather unless he did it the old-fashioned way … with his fingers.

Sighing wearily, he got out of bed and started across the cell. The concrete floor felt cold beneath his bare feet. Apparently, the warden wasn’t inclined to blow his budget on heating. Judging from the recent quality of the meals, there had been some cost-cutting in the kitchen as well. He didn’t want to know what kind of meat was in last night’s stew.

He was only halfway to the wall when heavy footsteps echoed in the corridor. They came to a halt right outside his cell. “Whoa there!” a gruff voice challenged him. “What you doing up and about, Tyler? Don’t you know it’s past your bedtime?”

Richard groaned inwardly as he recognized the voice. Turning toward the door, he saw a pair of uniformed guards, standing on the other side of the bars. And not his favorite guards, either.
Just my luck,
he thought.
Grogan and Keech
.

He had nothing against most of the guards stationed here. They were just doing their jobs. But Grogan and his sidekick were different. They got a sadistic charge out of throwing their weight around and making life harder for the inmates. Petty dictators with a grudge against the 4400. They were the last thing Richard needed tonight.

“Just stretching my legs.” He retreated back to his bunk. Hopefully, that would be enough to placate the guards.

It wasn’t.

“Is that so?” Grogan taunted him. He was a bullnecked bruiser with a florid complexion and a prodigious beer belly. A handlebar mustache carpeted his upper lip. A crew cut barely covered his scalp. A Colt pistol was holstered against one hip. A billy club rested against the other. He looked Richard over suspiciously. “How do I know that you weren’t up to no good, Tyler. Plotting a late-night escape maybe?”

I wish,
Richard thought. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Damn right you’re not!” He chuckled at his own wit, then glanced at his partner. “You believe the nerve of this guy? Thinking he can put one over on us?”

A scrawny, sallow-faced rodent with greasy black hair, Keech was the Laurel to Grogan’s Hardy, except that neither of them was particularly funny. “Lotta nerve,” he agreed sourly.

“Hey!” Grogan feigned alarm. “You feel that?”

“Feel what?” Keech asked.

“That pull!” Grogan extracted an electronic keycard from his breast pocket. It wobbled between his meaty fingers as he pretended to have trouble holding on to it. “He’s tugging on the key with his brain. Trying to pull us closer.”

Very funny,
Richard thought, not at all amused by the guard’s antics. Of course he was doing nothing of the kind.

“Oh yeah,” Keech agreed, playing along. “I feel it now.”
He limped toward the door, as though pulled by an invisible force. A sneer twisted his lips. “Cocky sonovabitch.”

Grogan unhooked his club from his belt. “Guess we’d better teach him a lesson.” Smirking, he ran the keycard through a scanner by the door. An electronic lock clicked open and the barred door slid to one side. Grogan swaggered into the cell, brandishing the billy club. He smacked the truncheon against his palm. “Can’t let these freaks think they can pull their tricks on decent folks.”

“You got that right,” Keech said. He accompanied Grogan into the cell.

Sitting on the edge of his bunk, Richard tensed as the guards approached. His memory flashed back to that time in Korea, right before he was abducted, when a bunch of his fellow Air Force pilots had beaten him to a pulp for daring to date a white woman … Lily’s grandmother, in fact. This whole scene was feeling way too familiar.

He held up open palms. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Who cares what you want, you terrorist freak?” Grogan spat venomously. “Ever since you scum came back from God knows where, nobody in the country is safe. You think we’ve forgotten about fifty/fifty? Nine thousand Americans are dead because of people like you and Jordan Collier!”

Richard considered pointing out that he’d had nothing to do with the disaster, that he had been locked up in this very cell when the outbreak had ravaged Seattle, but figured that would be a waste of breath. Grogan wasn’t interested in listening to reason.

Richard braced himself. Was it worth trying to fight back? He was outnumbered and unarmed.

Grogan spotted the family portrait on the wall. “Well, get a load of this.” He yanked the photo from its perch and held it up for Keech to see. “Check out Mrs. 4400 here. Gotta hand it to you, Tyler. You may be a good-for-nothing radical, but you’ve got fine taste in fillies.” He leered at Lily’s portrait. “I wouldn’t mind getting a piece of that.”

“You and me both.” Keech licked his lips. “Bet she’d like that, too. Both of us,” he spelled out, in case anyone missed the painfully obvious innuendo. “At the same time.”

Richard glared at the men. Just seeing Lily’s photo in Grogan’s grubby hands made his blood pressure spike. “Leave that alone.”

“Or what?” Grogan dared him. “You gonna tell Jordan Collier on me?” He ripped the precious photo in half and dropped the pieces onto the floor. “Too bad she’s six feet under!”

Redneck bastard!
Anger took over and he lunged at Grogan. He only got a couple of steps before Keech smacked him in the side of the head with his club. Richard crashed to the floor, his head ringing. His vision blurred momentarily. He tasted blood inside his mouth.

“You saw that!” Grogan crowed. “The crazy skel jumped me.” He savagely kicked Richard in the ribs. “You like that, you stupid freak? Have a heaping helping of self-defense!”

Gasping in pain, Richard tried to scramble to his feet,
but Grogan punched him in the face hard enough to loosen teeth. Blood sprayed from his lips. Keech clubbed him in the back, knocking him facedown onto the floor. The room spun around him.

“Hey!” an irate voice shouted from across the corridor. Lifting his head, Richard spied another prisoner standing behind the door of one of the opposite cells. A muscular Hispanic man with a shaved head, he gripped the bars of his cage. “Leave him alone! He doesn’t deserve that!”

The protesting inmate was a new addition to the cell block, having just been incarcerated earlier today. What was his name again? Sanchez?

“Mind your own business!” Keech snarled, but the attention seemed to make him uncomfortable. Backing out of the cell, he played lookout in the hall. He fidgeted with his truncheon. “Okay, that’s enough fooling around,” he hissed at Grogan. “Let’s get this over with.”

Grogan reacted as though his crony had lost his mind. “You kidding? I’m just getting warmed up.”

“Don’t push our luck.” Keech looked around furtively. He wiped a sweaty palm on his trousers. “Just waste him, all right?”

The guard’s ominous words penetrated Richard’s dazed and aching skull. Horror merged with pain. This wasn’t just a beating, he realized.
They’re out to kill me!

And there was nothing he could do to stop them …

“Okay, okay,” Grogan said grudgingly. “Don’t have a meltdown.” He scowled at Richard, clearly unhappy at having his fun cut short. “Time to say good-bye, Tyler.” He ground the fragments of the family photo beneath his
heel and drew his pistol from its holster. “Give Blondie a kiss for me when you see her in hell.”

He cocked the pistol.

Richard wondered if Lily would really be waiting for him on the Other Side.
We already crossed time to find each other …

“That’s enough!” Sanchez yelled from his cell. He shook his fist at the guards. “You ignorant
cabrons
asked for this!”

He punched himself in the jaw … hard. His bizarre behavior briefly distracted the guards from their mission of murder. “What the hell?” Grogan muttered. “You gone
loco,
Sanchez?”

Ignoring the guard’s inquiry, Sanchez stuck his fingers into his mouth and wrenched a loose molar from his gums. He hurled the bloody tooth through the bars of his cell. It clattered against the hallway floor before cracking apart with a peculiar ring that sounded more like broken porcelain than shattered enamel.

That’s not a real tooth,
Richard realized.
It’s an implant.

The cracked shell split in two to reveal a miniature sphere of energy, about the size of a pea, that shimmered with a strange unearthly radiance. There was something eerie about the glow emanating from the orb, which didn’t resemble light as much as a photo negative of light, casting shadows instead of illumination upon the startled faces of the guards. They stared agape at the flickering sphere. Richard blinked in confusion.

I don’t understand,
he thought.
What’s happening?

Then the orb unfolded like a flower blossoming in
fast motion. The very fabric of reality seemed to twist and contort before Richard’s eyes. A blinding flash lit up the corridor, forcing him to look away. He squeezed his eyelids shut against the sudden glare. Grogan swore obscenely. “Holy crap!” Keech exclaimed.

The flash was over in an instant. But when Richard opened his eyes again, he was amazed to see four strangers standing in the hallway where the orb had been only seconds before. All four—two men, a woman, and a young boy—were dressed entirely in black, like cat burglars or commandos. Ski masks concealed their faces. One of the men was panting hard, like he had just run the marathon. The woman stretched her limbs, as though she had been cooped up in a cramped space for far too long. “Thank God!” she exclaimed. “I couldn’t take much more of that.”

“What?” the tired man quipped. “Too cozy for you?”

“Shut your mouths!” Grogan barked. Overcoming their shock, the guards drew their sidearms on the intruders. “I don’t know who you clowns are, or where you came from, but don’t move a muscle!”

The second man, an African-American from the look of him, stared at the guns. “Careful with those.” He sounded not at all concerned by the weapons pointed at him. “You’re playing with fire.”

“Wha—?” Grogan squealed. The metal gun turned redhot in his grip. Flesh sizzled. Yelping in pain, the guards let go of their weapons. The molten guns crashed onto the floor. Grogan clutched his scalded palm. Keech sucked on his burnt fingers. The men whimpered pathetically.