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It turns out the guy (who is a cross between Wyatt Earp and Brian Dennehy with his trenchcoat and white hair) is a local reverend who gets worked up about things in general, and it is not the presence of Richard, Lily, and Isabel that is getting him in a tizzy. But he still hates the 4400 and wants to eradicate all mention of them in the town, which includes threatening the local shopkeeper with harm if he doesn't get rid of Jordan Collier's book. It just so happened that Lily was in the store to buy the book, and when the reverend notices Lily and the baby, and decides that they should be stoned or burned at the stake or something. Before he can do anything, Isabel, who is a very special baby if you haven't guessed, conjures up some wind and blows out the windows of the shop. This is just enough to give Lily time to find Richard and prepare to escape.

Lily and Richard are packing up at the cabin. They are trying to pack up as much as they can, but the reverend finds them. They are able to escape because Richard removes the distributor cap on the reverend's truck (I actually have no idea what he removed, but a distributor cap seemed sensible). Richard and Lily think they have gotten away with only minor damage (shotgun through the back window), but while on the road south, the reverend catches up to them. Since they aren't exactly well-off, they aren't driving any sort of performance machine and the reverend rams them off the road.

Lily and Isabel weren't unjured, but Richard has a serious gash in his ankle, and it might be broken. Nevertheless, they try and get away from the reverend, now joined by his two sons, who are chasing them through the woods. Like any good psychotic, rural man of the cloth, this reverend knows how to hunt, so he's looking at footprints, and sees blood, and notices where they stopped to eat some berries. With Richard's injuries, they just can't move that fast, and so Richard decides he is going to make a last stand so Isabel and Lily can get away. Richard was in the Air Force, so he does know a thing or two about survival, and so he is able to knock out one of the reverend's sons and force the other one to give up his weapon. He can't, however, figure out how to stop the reverend, who is able to get the better of Richard, and then goes off to find Lily and Isabel.

Now, we know that Isabel is not like other children. When she was still in the womb she was able to take out Jordan Collier, and she seems to have some sort of power over nature. It turns out you can add mind control powers as well. Richard hears a couple of shots and goes to find out what happened. He fears that either Isabel or Lily was hurt. When he gets to the scene, he sees that the reverend has shot his son, but is saying that "she" made him do it. "She" was Isabel, and she wasn't through. She proceeds to give the reverend a heart attack, and when the second son comes over and sees what happens, he first aims his gun at the others, but Isabel is back at work. This time, she gets the guy to point the gun at the bottom of his chin and blow his head off.

This whole chain of events is disturbing to say the least. Not that these guys died, because who takes it as their mission to kill a baby. But god, that baby is able to control nature and get people to kill themselves, and she has no fears about being messy. Her mission accomplished, Isabel now lets her parents take control, and they hitchhike their way as far as possible from the triple homicide.

Back at Homeland Security, things are getting worse. They removed Tess, but the people from the hospital haven't stopped. In fact, they have doubled their efforts because a fire destroyed some of their work. Tom and Diana are beginning to entertain the idea that perhaps Tess is crazy, but still correct. They smuggle her out of custody and back to the hospital, where everybody is placing the finishing touches on things. This doesn't go well with the bosses, and so they send a SWAT team out to put an end to things. It turns out that Tess's visions are almost verbatim from the works of a science fiction novelist. We thought that perhaps she really did remember what it was like when she was gone, which would make her the only person with memory of the abduction. Instead, she really is just insane.

Tom and Diana refuse to believe it, and Diana has even fallen under the spell, helping put together the final pieces of the structure. Tom is busy holding back the SWAT, but the structure is finished. Diana turns up the juice, and Tess awaits the return of the future humans to take her back. But there was no magic explosion or burst of light, just an ear-splitting sound, and Tess was still there when it was finished. She was in shock, but everybody else acted as if nothing had happened, as if they didn't know they had been building this thing for so long. Tom and Diana were discouraged, realizing they had wasted all of that time on a dead end.

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Posted by J-Unit on June 12, 2005 3:54 PM