The 4400® Promises Broken by David Mack

Author:David Mack [Mack, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 2009-10-26T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-NINE

11:45 A.M.

IT 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.

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