The 4400® Promises Broken (27 page)

Glaring over his shoulder, he snapped, “You want to do this?”

“I would if I could,” she snipped.

He heard footsteps right outside the door. It opened with a long creaking whine of dry hinges.

Kyle saw the muzzle of an assault rifle edge into the room. His finger tensed on the trigger of his handgun. He held his breath to steady his hand.

Then Cassie whispered, “Don’t shoot,” and she gently placed her hand on Kyle’s arm and lowered it until the gun was pointed at the floor.

Marco Pacella stepped into view, then made a sharp pivot in Kyle’s direction.

Raising his arms in a gesture of surrender, Kyle called out, “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

The NTAC agent lowered his rifle and nodded to someone behind him. “Clear,” he said.

Jordan followed Marco into the office and did a worried double-take at Kyle. “What happened to Gary and Maia?”

“We got separated,” Kyle said. He asked Marco, “Why aren’t you with Kendall?”

“I was covering the retreat,” Marco protested.

They all recoiled from resumed bursts of rifle fire just outside the office’s main door. Marco waved Kyle back. “Get behind the chair.” Then he pulled Jordan with him behind the desk. “Get down,” he said, dropping to a crouch and aiming over the desktop at the door. Jordan dropped out of sight beside him.

The door to the outer office swung inward, and once again Marco averted his aim. Maia scrambled into the room, followed by Shawn and then by NTAC agent Jed Garrity, who backed in while keeping his rifle trained on whatever might appear behind them.

“Stay out of the doorway,” Jed said as he kneeled and pushed the door most of the way shut. He left it open just enough to aim through the crack. “I dropped three out of four hostiles in the hallway, but it’s a good bet number four’s calling in reinforcements.” Glancing back, he said to Jordan, “If you’ve got any cavalry to call in, now’s the time.”

Marco stood, walked quickly to Jed’s side, and said, “If I can get a look down the hall, I can pop behind them once they’re in position, set up a crossfire.”

“Risky,” Jed said. “But worth a try.” He shifted left to
let Marco look past the barely open door and scout the corridor beyond the outer office.

While the two NTAC agents whispered their plans to each other, Kyle heard choked, muffled sobs behind him. Shawn was crouched behind the desk with his face in his hands, his chest heaving with grief. Kyle went to his cousin, kneeled, and gripped his shoulders. “Shawn? What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Heather,” Shawn choked out, his face still hidden in his palms. “They just … she …” He inhaled with a sharp wet hiss of intake, but then seemed unable to go on.

Cassie kneeled beside Shawn and looked at Kyle. “He loves her,” she said. “He thinks she’s dead, but she’s not— not yet, anyway.” With a pointed stare at Kyle, she added, “Tell him!”

“Shawn,” he said, leaning closer to him. “Listen to me. Cassie, my power, she’s telling me Heather’s alive. There’s still time to save her.”

Looking back in alarm, Jed said in a harsh whisper, “Are you crazy? He can’t go out there!”

Cassie took hold of the back of Kyle’s neck. Her touch was firm but also strangely comforting. She whispered in his ear, and he repeated her words to the others. “The soldier who was masking all the others is dead,” Kyle said. “Jed got him. Our people can see the others now. We can
fight back
.”

Everyone else was processing the news as Shawn went quiet and stood. He wiped the tears from his face. His reddened eyes took on a steely quality as he lifted his right hand.

“I can sense her life force,” he said. His voice trembled as he added, “It’s fading fast.” Recovering his composure, he closed his eyes, lifted his left hand, and concentrated. “I can sense the soldiers, too. They’re coming up the far stairs. They’ll be here in ten seconds.” When he opened his eyes, they had a coldness that Kyle had never before seen in his cousin. “Maia,” Shawn said in a tone that would brook no debate, “get inside the bathroom and lock the door. Kyle, Jordan, take cover. Jed and Marco, guard the door till I get back.”

Shawn walked to the door as Maia sprinted into the bathroom and locked herself inside. The NTAC agents blocked the exit. “No,” Jed said to Shawn. “You can’t go out there unarmed.”

“I’m not unarmed,” Shawn said. “And Heather needs me.”

He stepped between Jed and Marco, who backed apart and let Shawn pass. Kyle watched his cousin step through the door.

“We’ll have your back,” Jed said, and he nodded for Marco to follow him as he stepped out behind Shawn.

As Marco stepped out and pulled the door closed, he said to Kyle and Jordan, “We’ll be right outside. Stay down.”

“Dibs,” Jordan said, pulling out the chair and stuffing himself into the space under the desk. Kyle stepped quickly across the office and ducked back behind the heavy chair.

Cassie strolled cavalierly after him and draped herself over the chair’s back. “This is your chance,” she said.

He whispered back, “Chance to what?”

“To shoot Jordan. No witnesses. You can say one of the enhanced soldiers popped in, plugged the promicin messiah at point-blank range, and popped out. No one’ll know.”

If he hadn’t already been backed into a corner, he would have recoiled. “No, you’re crazy! Gary’s a mind reader!
He’d
know.” Nodding at the bathroom, “And so would Maia.”

“Gary’s no longer necessary to the Movement,” Cassie replied. “And Maia’s expendable.”

Gunfire thundered on the other side of the office’s door. Then came several blood-chilling, guttural howls of suffering.

“No,” Kyle said. “I’m not doing this!”

She grabbed his hair and pulled it. “You have to! Dammit, Kyle, get up and be a man! Shoot!”

He twisted free of her grasp. “Really? Pulling a trigger will make me a man? Okay, then …” He turned the pistol toward his face and put its muzzle inside his mouth.

Cassie rolled her eyes and let out a sigh of disgust. “Now you’re just being stupid, Kyle.”

Shawn walked out of the office suite into the elevator lobby. Heather lay on the floor to his right, surrounded by shattered glass and tiny bits of debris blasted from the desk and walls.

From behind him, he heard Marco plead in a strained whisper, “Shawn! Come back!”

He ignored him. There was one man alive in a room on the left side of the hall leading away from Heather. More were coming up a stairwell at the far end of that
passageway. All were coursing with aggressive energy and adrenaline.

Even though Shawn couldn’t see any of them, he sensed their vital essences with such clarity that he knew where every one of them was. He felt their every footstep, tasted their every breath, heard their heartbeats as if they were his own.

They were behind the corner. Waiting.

“I know you’re there,” Shawn said, challenging them.

One man pivoted around the corner with his arm cocked, a grenade in his hand.

Shawn raised his left hand and stopped the soldier’s heart.

The man gasped, twitched, and fell to his knees.

He dropped his grenade. It rolled behind him.

Someone shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

Soldiers scrambled around the corner, hurdling over their fallen comrade in a mad dash away from the live grenade. They ran almost halfway up the corridor toward Shawn before the grenade exploded, filling the hall behind them with fire and smoke. A few of the soldiers stumbled and fell.

The two in front lifted their rifles to aim at Shawn.

They froze before they finished the movement.

All five men in the hallway convulsed and turned cyanotic. In seconds they were on their knees, each of them in more pain than he had ever felt before.

Inside the office on the left, the last man tensed to strike. He exhaled and spun as he stepped toward the doorway, his sidearm in his hand—

—and fell to his knees as Shawn stopped the man’s lungs from expanding to draw another breath.

Standing over Heather, Shawn held six men’s lives in his left hand. He kneeled beside his mortally wounded love and felt her life slipping away. Her last spark of neuroelectricity was dying in the tissues of her brain. Her lungs were full of her own blood. Her organs had been savaged by the telekinetic assault.

Shawn placed his right hand on her forehead. He remembered the sensation from just a few hours earlier, of healing a man outside the Center without needing to touch him. The implication of that moment had been immediately clear to Shawn. If his power had grown to the level where he could heal without making contact, then the reverse was also true: he could kill without making contact.

With his left hand he took the life from six men who had come into his home to deal out death.

With his right hand he gave that life energy to Heather. He mended the damage inside her body, purged the fluid from her lungs, and replenished the vital sparks that danced between her synapses. In the span of a breath and a heartbeat, he pulled her back from the edge of death’s dark frontier.

Mere yards away, six men died to make her miracle possible, but Shawn felt not one ounce of guilt, not a moment’s regret.

Heather’s back arched as she drew a breath, sharp and deep, the kind of greedy gasp that only the resurrected can muster. Her eyes snapped open, first in shock, then in fear,
then at last in relief. She sat up and embraced her savior. “Shawn!”

He hugged her and wept with gratitude, certain that he had made the right choice. To save Heather, he would take six lives, or sixty, or six hundred, or six thousand. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to protect her.

Nothing.

“The building’s secure,” Jed said to Jordan. “And we have a clear zone out to at least one mile from the Center.”

Jordan nodded. “Good,” he said. “Communications?”

“Getting there,” Marco said. “Your people took out the military’s jamming systems, so short-range walkie-talkies are coming through loud and clear.”

More of Jordan’s advisors filed into the private office. It reminded him of a time only a few years earlier when the room had been his sanctum, before his apparent assassination had left the Center and its myriad responsibilities to Shawn.

“Good news,” Emil said. “U.S. forces are being routed all over the city. Madrona’s clear, and the Marines are using Broadmoor Golf Course to evac their people on Black Hawks.”

Lucas added, “We’ll have Beacon Hill clear by sunset, and the troops that came in from Fort Lawton are on their way back.”

“Excellent,” Jordan said. He looked at Kyle. “Any advice from Cassie on what our next move should be?”

Kyle rubbed his temples wearily. “No,” he said.

Outside the office, Shawn ministered to other casualties
of the battle inside the Center. At the front of the line was Gary, the victim of multiple gunshots, who had been found unconscious one floor below, minutes after Shawn had slain the troops outside his office. The telepath jolted awake in a state of panic and shouted, “Where’s Maia?”

“It’s okay,” Shawn said, restraining the muscular ex-athlete with a gentle hand against his chest. “She’s fine.” He pointed inside the office, where Maia stood beside Jordan. The girl waved to Gary, who relaxed and sat back.

Marco turned and eyed Jed with a quizzical expression. “Wait a second. What’re you doing here? You were in Yellowstone with Tom and Diana.”

“Got hit by a car,” Jed said. “What about you? Weren’t you supposed to disarm the bomb?”

Dismay widened Marco’s eyes. He looked at Jordan. “Who’s keeping an eye on the mission in Yellowstone?”

“It was Lewis,” Jordan said, “but he …”

Looks of anxious confusion traveled from person to person. It became painfully clear that the need to monitor NTAC’s efforts to stop the antimatter bomb had fallen off the radar during the attack on the Center.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Marco said.

4:04
P.M.

I
T SOUNDED LIKE
applause.

On the other side of darkness, it was everywhere—a steady wash of sound, a fall of white noise, a dull random patter, a faint irregular percussion.

Tears ran across Diana’s face, but they weren’t her tears. She wasn’t crying. Blind and motionless, numb and silent, she lay as droplets kissed her face.

Warmth and pressure attracted her attention.

“Diana,” the voice said. It sounded distant, like someone calling from the far side of a large house with many rooms.

Awareness flooded back. She opened her eyes.

Everything was brighter than blinding.

Raindrops pelted Diana’s face and body. She lay on her back, in the middle of the road.

Tom was on one knee at her side.

She swallowed to clear the thick, sticky sensation from her mouth, then rasped, “Tom?”

He held her hand. “I’m right here.”

“What about the bomb?”

“Ticking down,” he said. “Jakes must’ve tripped a dead-man switch that started the timer.”

She turned her head toward the white SUV, which lay on its side several yards down the road. “Is he …?”

Nodding, Tom said, “He’s dead. I checked.”

Diana felt no shame in taking some measure of satisfaction in that news. “Have to … stop the bomb.”

Her partner frowned. “I tried. Most of that thing is parts I’ve never seen before. Plus, the control panel’s smashed. Only part that still works is the countdown timer.”

As her pulse quickened with alarm, she asked, “How long?”

He looked at his watch. “Ninety-one seconds.” Cracking a rueful smile, he said, “I don’t suppose you happened to bring a manual for disarming superadvanced munitions?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Left it in my car.”

Seconds passed as Diana regarded the lonely road strewn with wreckage and surrounded by barren landscape. She knew that they were well within the caldera’s danger zone. When the bomb detonated, it would unleash the extinction event that would wipe the human race from the Earth.

We blew it
, she realized.

Admitting the failure to herself gave her courage. All was forfeit, so she had nothing left to lose. She tightened her grip on Tom’s hand. He looked at her.