I had this scene attack me but I have neither the time nor the inclination to write this story.
The challenge: writing a story beginning with this scene:
Lois Lane walked into the morgue, curious as to why Dr. Sprengler, one of the senior medical examiners, had called her. ‘To confirm the identification on a body,’ he had told her over the phone. But he had refused to give her any other hints.
She had talked to her sister just that morning and her parents were out of town. Lois knew she would hardly be the one called in to identify a co-worker and even there, every one was accounted for except for Clark and he was out on an assignment, somewhere. Exactly where, she wasn’t sure, but Perry did occasionally send them on separate stories.
“Miss Lane,” Sprengler greeted her, looking up from the body he was working on. “I’ll be right with you.” He nodded to his assistant and stripped off his blue nitrile gloves as he came around the table. The stench of the body was overwhelming.
“A floater,” he explained. “Washed up in Senre Ville. We figure he was that sailor that fell off the
Anna Maru last week.”
“You wanted me to identify someone,” Lois reminded him.
Sprengler nodded. “He was found last night in an alley about a block from the Planet. No wallet.”
“So what makes you think I can ID him?”
“What we did find on him was a Daily Planet press pass.” As Sprengler spoke, he pulled open one of the cold storage units and motioned for her to look at the body inside.
This was the part she always dreaded. Seeing what was once a vital living person reduced to an object. She had closed her eyes and now opened them to look. A Caucasian male, longish dark hair falling over his forehead, a bruise coloring one cheek. She knew him. It was the face that had looked over at her from his desk for the past four months.
“He’s Clark Kent,” she managed to stammer. “He left yesterday afternoon to work on something… I don’t know what it was. Mister White might know.”
“You’re certain this is Mister Kent?” Sprengler asked. There was an odd tone in his voice, almost as if he had expected a different answer.
“I’m certain,” Lois said. “How did he die?”
“We don’t know, yet,” Sprengler told her. “But the police believe he was in an altercation of some sort sometime before it happened. His knuckles are scraped and there’s bruising consistent with that.”
“Is this all you needed me for?” Lois asked. She wanted out of there, away from the smell of death, away from the cold of the storage unit, away from the reality that her friend, her partner, was laying in the morgue.
“This, and the answer to one question,” Sprengler said. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “Do you have any idea why he would have had Superman’s uniform with him?”
Remember, within comic book canon, just because he's in the morgue doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a deathfic...
