The 4400- the Vesuvius Prophecy

by Greg Cox

  He shrugged. “Nope. Just curious.” Frankly, he had never quite figured out what a smart, attractive woman like Diana saw in a science geek like Marco, but, hey, his partner’s personal life was none of his business. With one divorce to his name, and a 4400 girlfriend he’d first met in an imaginary reality, he was in no position to throw stones. “Any progress?”

  “Not really,” she confessed. “DeMeers doesn’t seem to have associated with his fellow 4400s much. He’s stayed in touch with a couple of returnees he met in quarantine, but nobody on any of our watch lists.”

  Tom glanced at the address book. “Who knows? It might be worth checking out some of those connections anyway, if nothing else pans out.” In the meantime, he had been reviewing security camera footage from Pike Place Market in hopes of identifying the mystery man who had tried to intercept DeMeers before them. As he stared at the grainy black-and-white footage, Tom wondered again just how the nameless leatherneck had managed to get away from him yesterday. The security footage confirmed that the man had seemingly vanished into thin air. He has to be a 4400, Tom concluded. That’s the only explanation.

  Working on that assumption, he ran a screen capture of the stranger’s face against the 4400 photos in their electronic database. Tom watched the mug shots scroll across the screen until an electronic chirp announced that the computer had found a possible match. “Hold on,” he told Diana. “We may have something here.”

  She circled around the desk to join him as he reviewed the file of one William Patrick Gorinsky, abducted February 28, 1947. According to the profile, “Bill” Gorinsky was an ex-Marine who had mysteriously disappeared after returning home from World War II. Twenty-six years old, biologically speaking, he had yet to display any paranormal abilities. At least none that we know of, Tom thought. He squinted at Gorinsky’s mug shot, comparing it to the blurry screen capture occupying another corner of the screen, as well as to his own memories of the disappearing man at the Market. “That could be him. And he’s got the right military background.”

  “Problem is,” Diana said, “he’s also got an airtight alibi.” She pointed at the screen. “Read a little further. William Gorinsky has been confined to a mental hospital for the last three years.”

  Abendson Psychiatric Hospital was a sprawling complex of imposing red-brick Victorian structures, each large enough to house several dozen inmates. A wrought-iron wind vane spun atop the shingled roof of the main building. A chain-link fence enclosed the hospital grounds, which were located, along with several other hospital and medical facilities, on “Pill Hill” in south Seattle. Tom and Diana had first visited Abendson last year while dealing with a mentally disturbed 4400 named Tess Doerner. They were met at the door by the director of the hospital, Doctor Nicholas Clayton.

  “Good to see you again, agents.” Clayton was a lean, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed black beard and a somewhat hangdog expression. A long white jacket attested to his profession. As doctors go, he had always struck Tom as something of a cold fish. His bedside manner needed work, which probably explained why he had ended up as an administrator. “I trust Mister Farrell is still well?”

  Shawn had been briefly confined at Abendson during his mental breakdown the previous week, before Isabelle forced Daniel Armand to restore Shawn’s sanity. Tom hadn’t really had an opportunity to talk much to his nephew since then, but his understanding was that Shawn was indeed back to normal. Aside from the occasional attempt on his life, that is.

  “Shawn’s fine,” Tom said. “Thank you for assisting us today.”

  “We’re always happy to cooperate with the authorities.” The doctor handed them a pair of visitor’s passes to affix to their jackets. “Especially where our 4400 patients are concerned.”

  He guided them past the reception area and down a long beige corridor. Shuffling figures, often escorted by nurses or orderlies, trundled past them, sometimes muttering to themselves. Bedroom slippers swished across the scuffed linoleum floors. The faces of the patients held haunted, dazed expressions. A nurse pushed a pill cart from room to room. Tom guessed that many of the inmates were highly medicated. Bursts of hysterical laughter or tearful cries occasionally came from behind closed doors. The smell of antiseptic pervaded the corridor.

  Tom tensed involuntarily, the medicinal sights and smells raising unpleasant associations. He had spent too much time in hospitals during the three long years that his son Kyle had lain in a coma, the victim of a botched attempt to yank him into the future. The mysterious cabal behind the 4400 disappearances had meant to abduct Kyle, but had snagged Shawn instead, while accidentally leaving Kyle in a vegetative state. Tom still hadn’t entirely forgiven the manipulative time travelers for what they’d put his family through.

  “William Gorinsky is in Ward fifty-nine,” Clayton explained, “a facility specifically devoted to caring for 4400s who are having difficulty coping with the enormity of what happened to them.” His voice took on a slightly pedantic tone as he expounded on the topic. “Although the vast majority of the returnees have adjusted to the twenty-first century, a small fraction of them have suffered nervous breakdowns, delusions, and other disorders.”

  They arrived at a pair of locked double doors. A sign on the door read:

  WARD 59

  A secure area.

  Authorized personnel only.

  All visitors must be approved at Reception.

  A hospital employee manned a glass booth adjacent to the doors. Clayton signaled the guard who buzzed them in. Tom took note of the tight security measures; it would be tricky for Gorinsky to sneak out of the ward undetected.

  They entered a spacious rec room furnished with an assortment of worn tables and couches. Handfuls of 4400 patients clustered throughout the room, engaged in various harmless activities. Jigsaw puzzles lay partially assembled atop card tables. Quiet games of solitaire and bridge were in progress. A chubby senior citizen played chess against himself; it took Tom a minute to realize that the pieces were changing colors at random. A TV set, set to a classic movie channel, droned softly in the background, but nobody seemed to be paying it much attention. Tom vaguely recognized the faces of the patients from the datafiles back at NTAC. At first he was surprised to see nearly a dozen returnees in the mental ward, but then he considered all that the 4400 had gone through. Each and every one of them had been abruptly plucked from their lives, then deposited in 2004 without any warning or explanation. Some of them, like Shawn, had only been missing for a few years, but others had found their old lives hopelessly lost in the past. Loved ones had grown older, moved on, or even died of old age. Homes and possessions had been consumed by time; jobs and careers had been rendered obsolete. And as if that weren’t traumatic enough, they also found themselves endowed with bizarre new abilities beyond their comprehension, which caused them to be regarded as dangerous freaks by large segments of the population. Sometimes even their own friends and families rejected them, like poor Lily Moore, whose once-loving husband took out a restraining order against her. When you think about it, Tom reflected, it’s a wonder more of the 4400 aren’t basket cases.

  A nurse was busy dispensing pills to the inmates, who washed them down with little paper cups of water. “Is the promicin inhibitor administered to your patients?” Diana asked. Carefully applied, the inhibitor could be used to suppress a returnee’s paranormal gifts. The patient’s blood work had to be rigorously monitored, though, to avoid the fatal side effects that had killed over twenty returnees.

  “Only to those whose abilities pose a threat to themselves and others,” Clayton stated. “For obvious reasons, we’d like to avoid a recurrence of what we went through last year.” Tess Doerner, a paranoid schizophrenic with the ability to control people’s minds, had taken over the entire hospital before Tom had figured out how to resolve the situation peacefully. “But many of our patients have not manifested any abilities at all, including William Gorinsky.”

  We’ll see about that, Tom thought.

>   “Doctor Clayton! Doctor Clayton!” A young woman came running up to them. Bell bottoms, tie-dye, and love beads made her look like she had just stepped out of 1968. A peace sign was painted on her cheek with lipstick. Her radiant face was alight with excitement. “Have you heard the news? Neil Armstrong just walked on the moon!” She pointed at the TV set; there was a burst of static and an old Fred Astaire movie was suddenly replaced by grainy NASA footage of the first moon landing. The patients watching the movie protested meekly. “It’s one small step for man, a giant step for mankind!”

  “That’s quite thrilling, Jessica,” the doctor humored the woman. “But can you please put the television back the way it was? I think some of our friends were watching that other program.”

  Jessica blushed in embarrassment. “Oops! I’m so sorry.” She snapped her fingers and the movie picked up where it had left off. “I guess I got carried away a little. But just think of it . . . man on the moon! Can you believe it? I’ll bet we’ll have lunar colonies by the year 2000. . . .”

  “No doubt.” Clayton signaled a nearby orderly, who gently led Jessica away. “My apologies for the interruption. A truly sad case. She literally refuses to accept that nearly forty years have passed since her abduction.”

  “I got that impression,” Tom said. He wondered how many of the doctor’s patients were caught in a similar time warp. Kyle had originally had trouble adjusting to the three-year gap in his memory, but at least he still knew what year it was. Thank goodness he hadn’t ended up in a place like this.

  Leaving the rec room behind, Clayton escorted them down another hallway. Open doors offered glimpses of various patients’ private rooms. They looked relatively cozy, at least compared to the detention cells back at NTAC headquarters. A hefty Samoan orderly waited outside a closed door near the end of the hall. An embossed label identified it as Room F-19. Gorinsky’s name was scribbled on a slip of paper affixed to the door. Tom remembered the orderly from previous visits to Abendson. Matt, wasn’t it, or maybe Mike?

  “Good afternoon, Matt,” Clayton greeted the orderly. He paused before the door to deliver another lecture. “Mister Gorinsky is one of our most severe cases. He’s confined here because he kept compulsively returning to Highland Beach, where the returnees first appeared, in hopes of finding a way back to his own time. He nearly died of exposure a couple of times, waiting for a glowing ball of light that never came. Now he swings between angry rages and near-catatonic depression.” He nodded at the orderly. “Matt’s here in the event that Mister Gorinsky gets violent, although I doubt that will be a problem today. Alas, he’s been particularly withdrawn lately.”

  Except when he’s on the run through Pike Place Market, Tom thought. Assuming we’ve got the right guy.

  His hand upon the doorknob, Clayton hesitated before admitting them. “Might I ask the nature of your interest in Mister Gorinsky?”

  “Just routine,” Diana assured him. “His name came up in the course of an ongoing investigation.”

  “Well, I doubt you’ll get much out of him,” Clayton said, “but you’re welcome to try.” Accompanied by the massive orderly, he led them into a small, tidy bedroom. Barred windows offered a view of the landscaped grounds outside. Lace curtains, drawn back to admit the afternoon sunlight, tried to mitigate the intimidating effect of the sturdy iron bars. A hunched figure, wearing a ratty white bathrobe, sat in a wheelchair by the window, staring silently at the shrubbery outside. He did not react to the visitors’ arrival. “Bill?” the doctor addressed Gorinsky. “You have company.”

  His face turned away from them, Gorinsky did not respond. Tom could only see the back of the man’s head, but the close-cropped red hair and thick neck matched his memories of the fugitive at the Market. Broad shoulders drooped forward. Mottled scarring on the man’s neck suggested that he had been seriously burned sometime in the past. The discolored flesh resembled melted wax. Funny, Tom thought. I don’t remember noticing that before.

  “Bill? Mister Gorinsky?” Clayton tried again, but to no avail. He might as well have been speaking to a marble bust instead of a real live human being. The doctor sighed and shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. When he gets like this, nobody can get through to him. We’ve even tried electroconvulsive therapy to jolt him out of these depressions, but without much success.”

  “Electroshock?” Tom reacted in surprise. Doctors still used that? He’d thought that shock treatment was a barbaric practice that had been abandoned years ago, along with leeches and prefrontal lobotomies. “You serious?”

  “Actually,” Diana enlightened him, “ECT is making something of a comeback. Granted, the technique was abused back in the bad old days, but a more refined version has shown impressive results when it comes to treating clinical depression.”

  “You don’t say.” Tom took her word for it, but the idea still sounded like something out of a Frankenstein movie. As far as he recalled, none of Kyle’s doctors had ever suggested shocking Kyle with hundreds of volts of electricity to snap him out of his coma. Tom wondered if he would have ever agreed to such a treatment if it had been proposed. Probably, he conceded, I was desperate enough to try anything. Ultimately, though, it had been Shawn’s newfound healing power that had finally roused Kyle from the coma.

  Maybe Abendson needed to introduce Shawn to Gorinsky.

  “Let me give it a try.” He stepped forward and turned the wheelchair around to face him. Gorinsky did not protest being moved; he just kept on staring blankly forward. His hands gripped the armrests of his wheelchair. Tom spotted more scarring on Gorinsky’s left hand. He knelt down to make eye contact with the man, but the patient’s unfocused green eyes stared right through Tom as though he was invisible. Stubble carpeted his jowls. His jaw hung open slackly. A tiny tendril of drool hung from the corner of his mouth. If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected Clayton of lobotomizing the veteran as well as zapping him full of current.

  “Mister Gorinsky?” Tom said. “I’m with NTAC. We’d like to ask you some questions. Is that all right with you?”

  Gorinsky gave no indication that he heard Tom. Another bout of déjà vu struck Tom as he recalled the hours he’d spent talking to his son’s inert form. Gorinsky didn’t have feeding tubes hooked up to him, as Kyle had, but Tom felt the same sense of futility when it came to communicating with the unresponsive returnee. He grimaced ruefully. At least I’m used to talking to people who can’t talk back.

  “What do you think?” Diana asked. “Is it him?”

  He scrutinized the silent inmate’s face. Gorinsky looked somewhat flabbier and more overweight than the beefy leatherneck at the Market, no doubt a result of his sedentary existence at the hospital, but the face was almost dead-on. Tom didn’t remember the scar tissue on the man’s throat, which extended all the way up to his chin, but it was possible that he had overlooked the burn marks during the earthquake and subsequent foot chase. He recalled the same face glancing back at him during that frantic pursuit through the lower levels of the Market. The fugitive’s pissed-off expression had been very different from the vacant visage before him, but the basic features looked identical. Extracting a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket, he held up a printout of the screen capture from the security footage. He looked back and forth between the black-and-white photo and Gorinsky. Marco had used his computer magic to enhance the image as much as possible.

  “It’s him,” Tom said finally. He rose to his feet and looked at Diana. “I’m certain of it. This is the guy who got away from me yesterday.”

  “That’s quite impossible,” Clayton insisted. “Mister Gorinsky never left this room, let alone the hospital yesterday. My staff can attest to that.”

  “We’ll need to take statements anyway,” Diana stated, “from any nurses or orderlies who were on duty yesterday afternoon.”

  Clayton didn’t put up a fuss. “Of course. I’ll inform the staff to give you their full cooperation.” He steered Gorinsky’s w
heelchair back toward the window. “Still, I’m certain there must be some mistake here. As you can see, Mister Gorinsky is in no condition to go gallivanting about the city.”

  Glancing around the room, Tom noticed various personal touches. A vase of fresh daffodils rested on the windowsill. An open box of “Applets & Cotlets” rested on the bedstand, next to the current issues of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. A stuffed bulldog wearing a U.S. Marine uniform sat on top of a wooden chest of drawers.

  “Does he get many visitors?” Tom asked. Somebody appeared to be taking an interest in the institutionalized patient.

  “Just his brother,” Clayton answered. “Phil Gorinsky. He visits fairly regularly, although not as often as he did in the beginning.” He shrugged philosophically. “I find that even the most devoted friends and family start to curtail their visits if there are no real signs of progress. I suppose I can’t blame them.”

  Tell me about it, Tom thought. His ex-wife, Linda, had sat at Kyle’s bedside day and night for the first year or so, but eventually she couldn’t bring herself to haunt their son’s hospital room every day as Tom had. He had understood why she’d given up hope, but it had still become a source of friction between them. Ultimately, their marriage had not survived their ordeal. He wondered what kept Gorinsky’s brother coming back. Faith? Optimism? A sense of obligation?

  “Tom, look at this.” Diana lifted the stuffed bulldog from the dresser to expose a framed photo propped up behind the toy. The black-and-white photo, obviously taken in happier times, showed a smiling Bill Gorinsky, proudly decked out in his Marine uniform, posing with his arm around the shoulders of another man who could have been his mirror image. Aside from a navy uniform, the second man was a dead ringer for Gorinsky. “He has a twin brother,” Diana realized along with Tom. “An identical twin.”

  Wait a second, Tom thought. Was it the twin at the market yesterday?