Lois laughed uneasily. “No, really, what’s your secret? Are you some kind of magician?”
Clark hesitated. His voice was neutral. “Would you prefer to believe that?”
“Maybe one of your foster parents was a stage magician,” Lois said. “I’ve never really gotten a good look at what you keep in that bag of yours.”
“So I keep all sorts of gadgets hidden in my bag and use it to trick people?”
“it’s the only explanation that makes sense,” Lois said.
Clark was using his bag as a pillow. He sat up and unzipped it, dumping its contents out on the blanket in front of him. All that was in it was some clothes, a wallet, soap, shampoo and deodorant. He seemed angry for some reason.
Lois stared at him for a moment, wondering why he was getting angry.
“I’ve never shared this with anyone,” Clark said, staring at the blanket in front of him. “My parents knew of course, but I never told anybody else.”
“Told them what?”
“I’m not human,” Clark repeated.
“Well, your workload certainly isn’t human,” Lois said, “And you certainly don’t act like the other boys, but that’s no reason to get down on yourself. It’s an improvement, really.”
Clark sighed; it was an irritated sound. “My parents weren’t really my parents. They saw what they thought was a meteor crashing, and they found a small spaceship.”
“How small?” Lois asked, trying to keep her voice from sounding like she was humoring him.
“Small enough to hold a baby,” Clark said. “Me.”
“So your parents found you in a mock spaceship…maybe it was a hoax.”
“Government men came a few days later and the ship disappeared,” Clark said. “My parents pretended that they’d adopted me from a relative.”
“Maybe your parents were just telling you stories,” Lois said. “Trying to make you feel special. I know I sometimes wish my parents had tried a little harder.”
Clark was silent for a long moment, then he chuckled. “I’ve thought about what this moment would be like for a long time. Sharing this is a big deal for me. For some reason it never occurred to me that people wouldn’t believe me.”
“You start talking about being from space, people are going to put you in the loony bin,” Lois said. She regretted saying it almost immediately, considering that he probably had more than one friend who had actually been in a psychiatric facility.
She wondered why she couldn’t just be quiet and act accepting. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do with a crazy person?
The problem was that Clark was the least crazy person she’d ever met. His life should have been a shambles, given all the challenges he faced every day. However, he was steady in a way that she only wished she could emulate.
She was going to need him over the next few days if she was going to survive; this wasn’t the time for him to break down.
“My parents thought I might be human,” Clark said. “Maybe Soviet, part of some sort of rocket program. They used to put monkeys and dogs in capsules, why not rockets?”
“If the Russians had launched a rocket into the middle of Kansas, we’d probably be standing in a radioactive crater.”
Clark nodded, seemingly less irritated. “It wasn’t until I got older that they started to realize I was different.”
“This is starting to sound like a bad Children of the Damned rerun,” Lois said uneasily. Clark didn’t seem crazy.
“I always hated that movie,” Clark said. He shuddered. “I hated Close Encounters of the Third Kind, too. I had nightmares about being abducted, taken because of what I was.”
“You were saying you were different?” Lois asked. She was getting better at sounding sympathetic; maybe she’d just been caught too off guard.
“I never got sick,” Clark said. “And after the age of three I never got hurt. I kept getting faster and stronger; by the time I was ten I could run a two minute mile.”
“Don’t you mean a ten minute mile?”
“Two minutes. My dad timed me once,” Clark said.
The best athlete in the world couldn’t run thirty miles an hour, not even while sprinting, and certainly not at the age of ten.
“It got worse after my parents died. By the time I was thirteen I could lift refrigerators with one hand. My senses started getting sharper; I could see things and hear things that nobody else seemed to be aware of.”
“Not voices,” Lois asked, a little horrified.
“I got accused of spying a lot,” Clark said, as though he hadn’t heard her. “Then I started setting fires with my eyes.”
Lois frowned. It sounded like the sort of rationalization a young child would make for why he was setting fires. The urge to set fires came from somewhere within him, probably because of his anger over his parents’ deaths.
She resisted the urge to reach out and pat his hand, knowing that it would seem condescending.
“It started getting harder to judge how much force to use; sometimes it seemed like my strength was doubling every month. An amount of effort that was fine one time would have me slamming a door the next. I broke a lot of things, and sometimes when I played with the other children I’d leave bruises.”
Clark stared at his hands. “None of that works very well in foster care. I couldn’t tell anyone; my father had warned me that I’d get cut up like a frog if I told anyone, and I was terrified someone would find out.”
What he was saying fit with the record she’d seen, which it would have if he was rationalizing away his real behaviors.
“So when I came on a bully beating up on one of my foster brothers, I tried to be careful. I barely tapped him, but when I did, I could hear bones breaking.”
Louie had said it had looked like someone had hit the kid with a bat, even though witness had said otherwise. Lois frowned.
“I thought I’d killed him,” Clark said. “I got scared and I ran.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Lois said. Louie would have told her if he had, and there was no statute of limitations for murder.
“He had to have physical therapy,” Clark said. He shook his head. “I swore then that I’d never hurt anybody again. What scares me is that it hasn’t ever stopped. I’m still getting stronger every day, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down.”
“it can’t be that bad,” Lois said. “You were able to fight the guys on the team without hurting them.”
“I keep having a dream,” Clark said. He closed his eyes. “Everybody is made of tissue paper, and no matter what I do everything I touch dies.”
“I can see how hard this is for you to tell me,” Lois began, “But you can see how it would be a little hard to believe.”
Clark looked up at her for the first time. Without taking his eyes from her, he reached over and grabbed the leg of the futon with one hand. A moment later Lois found herself three feet higher than she had been.
She stared at him, her mouth open.
**************
“Maybe you’re a mutant,” Lois said. “Or part of some scientific experiment. It didn’t have to be the Russians.”
“This isn’t Star Trek,” Clark said. He kept staring at her like he was waiting for her to reject him. “Nobody has that kind of technology, not even Star labs.”
At her look, he said, “I had a year where I didn’t do anything but read, and I read a lot faster than most people.”
“The government wouldn’t exactly publish books about it if they did have that kind of technology.”
“Even if they were able to do it, why would they stick a valuable mutant baby in a rocket and just launch him into space for no reason?”
“Why would aliens?” Lois asked.
Clark shrugged. “My mother had a theory. You remember the story of Moses in the basket?”
Lois shook her head. Her father hadn’t approved of church and her mother had found it inconvenient.
“The Pharaoh had ordered that all Hebrew boys be drowned at birth. His mother hid him in a basket and put it in the river to keep him safe.”
Lois had seen the Ten Commandments; now the story came back to her. “So you’re saying they put you in a ship to save you?”
“Maybe,” Clark said, although he looked doubtful. “I’ll never really know. Did they abandon me, or did they save me? Why didn’t they come with me? What kind of parents would abandon their child?”
It was obvious that he’d thought a lot about this. The question wasn’t just about his hypothetical alien parents, though. Lois could see that it was about more than that.
“I don’t think your parents meant to leave you,” she said. “They just died.”
“I was there,” Clark said. “I just wasn’t fast enough to save them. Kind of like tonight, except that I would have been.”
“Surely you can’t be…” Lois began, then she stared.
Clark was standing across the room, his blankets folded up neatly where he’d been. She hadn’t even seen him move, although she could feel the wind of his passage.
“How strong are you?” she asked.
“I was strong enough to throw a pickup truck a hundred feet at fifteen,” Clark said. “I’m much much stronger now.”
He paced. “I can hear everything in a thirty mile radius. I can see the flag on the moon left by the Apollo astronauts. I can see through anything if I want, except lead. I should have known.”
“You can hear people pee?” Lois asked, horrified. Obviously he was more concerned about what had happened to Joe, but she was actively trying not to think about that.
“I hear everybody pee,” Clark said. “And everything else too. I can block it out sometimes, if I focus on just one thing. It took a while to learn how to do it, which made school really different. Imagine trying to
listen to your teacher in the middle of a crowd of thousands. Luckily I had it under control by the time I came here, or I’d have gone crazy.”
Lois stared at him. It was hard for her to imagine having gone through that alone.
“I was seeing through people’s skin for a while,” Clark continued. “And it took me a while to realize that I see at least thirteen colors that ordinary people don’t. I remember what it was like before, but it looks different to me now.”
It made him sound superhuman, and in many ways he was. Yet somehow, despite everything he was the most human person Lois had never known.
“I keep going over and over in my head, the things I could have done,” Clark said. “I could have made his gun so hot he couldn’t hold it. I could have jumped over the fence and ripped the gun out of his hand so fast he couldn’t see me. I could have stood up and let him shoot at me. Instead, I just crouched there, frozen.”
“Could you have made it hot enough to make him drop it in time without making the gun explode?” Lois asked.
Clark frowned, then reluctantly shook his head.
“If you’d grabbed it out of his hand, wouldn’t you have ripped his hand off?”
“I could have put my finger in the barrel.” Clark said.
“You know how well that worked for Bugs Bunny,” Lois said dryly. “The gun would probably explode anyway, and then you’d have revealed what you are to them.”
“Joe would be alive,’ Clark said stubbornly.
“Are you sure about that? Could you watch him every second of every day, especially once they knew who your friends are?”
Clark looked at her, stricken.
“Joe Malone was pretty much Tom’s only friend in the world. Nobody else could do much more than tolerate him,” Lois said. “Bill Church knew that and still shot him in the head not two feet from his son. If he’s willing to do that, what would he be willing to do to Brother Wayman, or Charlie or any of the others?”
Clark looked at her stubbornly. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“You can hear what happens in thirty miles…what happens if they round your friends up all at the same time and take them to another city?”
Clark closed his eyes. “That’s what I’m most afraid of…that I let Joe die just to keep my secret.”
“You didn’t have any good options,” Lois said. “Have you ever thought about what kind of weapon you’d make?”
Clark frowned.
“If I was Bill Church, with the morals of a weasel, I’d kidnap your friends and make you work for me.” Lois said. “He could make you rob banks, knock over armored cars, even break people out of prison. You could be a weapon of mass destruction, and the minute he found out about it he’d be thinking of ways to use you.”
Lois leaned forward. “It’s not just the Churches you’d have to worry about either.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark said, although it was clear from his expression that he did.
“If the government found out about you, they’d use you like a one man army. If they’d had you, the hostage crisis would have lasted like a minute and a half.”
Straightening, Clark said, “I wouldn’t mind stopping terrorists. All I ever really wanted to do was help people.”
“What happens when they want you to invade Nicaragua? Maybe the Middle East? Worrying about the politics of losing too many soldiers is one of the few things holding us back, but if they had you…that kind of power would be addictive. It might not start out that way, but eventually they’d end up using you to conquer the world.”
“I can hardly hold an entire country by myself,” Clark said dryly. “I can only be in one place at once.”
“You could kidnap government leaders until somebody was elected that they liked,” Lois said. “You could destroy oil refineries, factories, airports…just the threat of you would be enough to make some countries give in.”
“I think you’re exaggerating,” Clark said, but he looked troubled. “The United States can already do that kind of thing.”
“At a million dollars a missile,” Lois said. “Using you, it’d be fast, and it’d be free.”
Clark scowled and stared at the floor.
“On the other hand,” Lois said, “That means you’re more dangerous than you realize.”
“I won’t kill anyone,” Clark said. “I just…can’t.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to. As long as they don’t know about you, what you are gives us a whole world of options.”
Clark looked up.
Her mind racing, Lois explained the basics of the plan that was forming in her mind. Getting justice for Joe wasn’t their only priority. As long as the Churches controlled a criminal organization, neither they or any of their loved ones would ever be safe.
They were going to have to go to war.
