Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Wrong Clark (193/???)

Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found Here

Here’s the link, if you need to refresh your memory on what happened in Part 192

Part 193

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Drinking Tea Down the Rabbit Hole
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Brenda Muldoon was working in her office, trying to piece together a plan. She had knowledge and she needed to figure out the best way to use it to her advantage.

Lex Luthor was a mean, arrogant cuss of a man, who not only thought he was God’s gift to women, but who also hated everything about women, except what he could take from them. He used his charm to become intimate with women, and once they fell for him he used that obsession to control them. Usually, that meant he used them and discarded them, ruined and miserable. Brenda had noticed this about Lex the first night that they met five years before.

It had been at some charity cocktail party shortly after she had moved to Metropolis and Lex Luthor was just becoming well known for his philanthropy and business sense. Sally, a woman Brenda had met and admired at a previous hospital function, had bragged about Luthor’s interest in her.

Brenda had asked if she had drunk too much. In actuality, she had really been worried that the woman had taken some of the drugs she pushed.

‘No,’ replied Sally, before begging Brenda for some medical advice – as a gynecologist – on the best way to ensnare him. She tried to get Brenda to swear on the doctor-patient confidentiality not to tell another soul, despite the fact that Brenda wasn’t her doctor, before launching into her problem. Apparently, Sally and Luthor had been dating in secret for some weeks. He had recently told her that he loved her, and she now was ready to rocket their relationship forward. Dollar signs shining in her eyes, Sally had insisted that Brenda tell her the best way for him to get her pregnant.

As her opinion of this woman spiraled downward, Brenda had informed Sally that men of Lex Luthor’s ilk did not marry to legitimatize children and they rarely had unprotected sex. If they did happen to get a woman pregnant, they threw money at the problem until she went away. Whether the money was given at the beginning before sex was involved or months later, didn’t matter. The result was the same; the man had essentially taken what had once been a driven and successful businesswoman and turned her into a whore. If Sally had been serious about catching this prize fish, she shouldn’t have opened her legs to him in the first place. Men desired more that which they could not have.

Sally declared she would never come to Brenda for advice again and stormed out of the ladies’ room.

Good riddance, Brenda had thought, knowing Sally wouldn’t be the last person to come to her for free advice.

Long before she ever heard of Lex Luthor, Brenda had learned men couldn’t be trusted, period. Oh, sure, there were the occasional exception to the rule, but by and large, men were scum. Not only that, but they knew that they were scum, and therefore, respected any woman who treated them as such.

Therefore, that was the rule by which Brenda had lived her life and it had worked just fine for her. As long as she stayed in control, men acted like excited jellyfish around her, and they were both happy. Men got sex that made all other varieties pale in comparison, and Brenda regulated the when, the where, and the how. She had long since discovered that if she dressed in leather and snapped a whip, men frankly didn’t care what she did to them or had them do.

Two days after the cocktail party, LexCorp bought out her acquaintance’s pharmaceutical company and Sally had been fired. Well, her and fifty of her colleagues. By the end of the week, Brenda heard through the hospital grapevine that Sally had swallowed too many pills and never woke up. It wasn’t a surprising twist, after Sally had realized that Mr. Luthor was only using her to gain privileged information about the company where she worked.

After that, it had become a game for Brenda to guess at each party she attended whom Lex Luthor was going to bed. She would then make a mental note of the women’s names and places of employment in order to cross-reference them with which company LexCorp would next overpower, knock the girders out from underneath, and buy for pennies on the pound. She had made many a pretty, silver nickel with her bets by buying and selling stocks at just the right time.

Brenda made sure to keep her own distance from the man, though. She wasn’t interested in his type of games or the kind of relationship most women of her acquaintance were. She had never coveted what her sister Claire had – a mortgage in the suburbs, motherhood, and a couple of sniveling leeches. It was also one of the reasons she had expunged from her medical records the fact that she was barren. That type of trait tended to make a man like Lex Luthor take note, either because he wouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of his actions or because it would lower the risk factor, and therefore the pleasure it would bring him.

Anyway, what her body could and couldn’t do was nobody’s business but her own. She made enough money to live more than comfortably, so that she didn’t require the income from a spouse or a lover. If Luthor ever came to her, Brenda would let him know from their first interaction who really was in charge. She had no interest in letting any man push her around.

However, since her career and lack of family ties to ruin or use to his advantage made a dalliance with Dr. Muldoon a waste of Luthor’s time Topside, their relationship hadn’t even made it to introductions. Moreover, she had nothing he could use to blackmail her into doing something against her supposed ethics. Luckily for Brenda, she had found her current late night activities much more satisfying than being the goodie-two shoe that her sister Claire had always thought she was. True, those were activities polite society usually publicly frowned upon while acting upon them in private, but the men who knew about her charms weren’t likely to talk, as doing so would put them out of her favor. Besides, the men had just as much to lose, if not more, by any disclosure of their relationship. A man with nothing to lose had nothing to bargain with and nothing she could use to exert her control over him.

When she had been invited to be one of the doctors in Metropolis’s very own post-apocalyptic society, code named “New Dawn,” Brenda had reveled in the thought. Bending a man such as Luthor to her will was a challenge that caused Brenda to salivate. She knew from the get-go who was behind the society, despite him not officially revealing himself until their third day underground. It was the sort of elitist thing a wealthy man like Lex Luthor would do to feel as if he were doing his part in a crisis.

Many of her male friends had been saddened to learn at the beginning of the year that she had begun a monogamous relationship and would no longer be able to see any of them. It had been one of the criteria for members of New Dawn that they sever all ties with people so that they would be available to move into the ark should the asteroid strike at the end of February. She had told her men that if they didn’t give her cause to regret their friendship, she would be sure to contact them again should things not work out with her new man. With Superman around, none of the chosen Luckies had known if the asteroid would still be the danger to Earth it was foretold to be. Clearly, Nightfall had been even too much for the Man of Steel to handle.

If the world never ended, she would've been just fine. Since her world had ended with Nightfall, she knew exactly how she could position herself to be the most powerful woman in the new society, controlling everyone underneath her by pulling the strings of the king. No man had ever rejected her. No man who had experienced her pleasures had not been willing to do anything to experience more. She had heard through the Metropolis rumor mill of a drug that made one temporarily addicted to love. Brenda didn’t need such a drug to make a man addicted to sex with her.

Therefore, Brenda had stolen from Metropolis General Hospital and her own clinic a trunkful of drugs the women of the New Dawn would need for when they started bearing the fruit of the first spring. The stored ova had been a last minute addition, on top of the drugs, in case she herself needed to give birth as queen of New Earth, as the name had been changed to.

All had been going according to Brenda’s plan. She had knocked Luthor off-kilter when she revealed her respectable doctor image only to be a disguise for her true self. She had Luthor eating passion fruit out of the palm of her hand. He had done whatever she requested to prove to her that he was a worthy alpha male, as she knew he would. As if he could convince her of that; however, it had been fun knocking about his ego so.

Luthor, the arrogant bastard who hated women, could jump in the incinerator for all she cared. Brenda had to admit that she found a kind of freedom to not caring for a jerk she made crawl naked across the floor or beg for mercy when she had him tied down. She knew she would never lose her heart to any of them, because she could never respect such a man. They were as unlovable and heartless as sex toys, in Brenda’s opinion.

Then Luthor had to go and get himself shot, causing everything to unravel. Suddenly, the strong man who had fought against every one of her demands disappeared and was replaced by a docile, nervous, and modest man. Controlling such a man took another set of skills.

When Lex’s eyes began to mist up when she told him that she didn’t sleep, let alone cuddle with patients, she should have known she was in trouble. He had said that he didn’t think he could sleep if she left him alone with his nightmares. She volunteered to send him one of the women she had chosen for him to impregnate, despite the fact that sex after surgery wasn’t recommended. Instead, he had declined her offer by reaching up to her cheek from where he lay in bed, and saying tenderly, “I only want you.”

Lex had seemed emotionally vulnerable in a way Brenda hadn’t expected. He had needed her for something other than sex. She couldn’t recall the last time a man had wanted her in that way; maybe it was because he was the first. She had tried to resist his charms, the manner his expression brightened whenever she entered his chamber, and the way he kept not wanting to speak of his former life only to hear her opinions on their future life in New Earth.

When he finally placed his hesitant lips to hers for the first time after being shot, her heart was already his.

For the first time in her life, Brenda had made love with a man as a joining of equals, no whips, no cuffs, no games. She knew one wasn’t supposed to fall for one’s mark. She had never believed in fate before, but Lexy, as he asked her to call him in private, was her one. He even came up with a ridiculous nickname to call her.

It was only later as she reviewed how timid a lover he was, how changed from the man she had dealt with previously that she concluded that she hadn’t fallen for Luthor. The billionaire must have brought a body double with him into the L.U.C., and that was the real man she loved. She checked and double-checked Lexy’s body for major plastic surgery scars to confirm this theory but found none. Could it have simply been the difference between playing games and being with someone about whom she cared? She figured it might have been, because she wasn’t the same person she once was either.

It wasn’t until April, when a strange noise had awoken Brenda in the middle of the night that she had realized that not all was as she had assumed with her lover. She had gone to her door, only to see Luthor Underground Community Ambulance, LUCA, parked at the end of the hall. It had been the sound of the LUCA that had awoken her.

Next to LUCA, Asabi had been moving one of the corridor’s large potted palm plants to the side. Hidden behind it, there was a door. She hadn’t needed to wait long before this door opened and Asabi lifted someone whose face was covered with bandages out of a wheelchair and into the waiting LUCA.

At first, Brenda had thought the patient was the missing Nigel St. John, returning to the fold. She had gotten Asabi to confess that their Chief of Security had snuck Topside out some emergency escape hatch after the shooting of Kirk Devlin. Frankly, she had always hoped Luthor had killed the man. The only problem with either of these theories was that St. John was the man pushing the wheelchair. The elevator door closed with the wheelchair still inside and St. John waiting in the LUCA as Asabi pushed the palm plant back in front of the doorway.

Brenda had softly shut her door, waited until she heard the LUCA go past, and then stealthily followed it. By the second turn, Brenda knew exactly why Luthor had closed the sex room to the rest of the community, despite it being against her wishes. Someone else was moving in. Sure enough, Asabi had stopped the LUCA outside of the sex room, removed a large set of keys, and started to unlock the door.

Whoever this person was, it wasn’t one of the chosen members of New Earth. This person had also received medical services Topside, so the entire civilization wasn’t gone, as Luthor had said it was. This thought had caused Brenda to start grinding her teeth.

“Mr. Luthor wants you alone to care for her,” Brenda had heard St. John tell Asabi.

Asabi had appeared displeased about this arrangement. “We have nurses and doctors aplenty down here to take care of…”

“And what are we going to tell them? That Mr. Luthor’s fiancée was rescued from the no longer existent Topside?” St. John had scoffed, and then growled as Asabi unlocked the next lock. “You should have unlocked this apartment before picking us up!” He had looked up and down the corridor, but Brenda’s knees had already buckled at the word “fiancée” and she had slid down the wall out of sight.

Fiancée? Brenda’s stomach shifted uneasily. He was engaged to be married? Who would want to marry that insane man? She shook her head. She had known many Topside women before Nightfall who would have readily married him. However, his money meant nothing now, just pieces of paper to burn. Sure, she had considered marrying him herself to gain power in the L.U.C., but that was before she had learned about his multiple personalities.

That was the only logical explanation she could come up with for his odd behavior, except a plastic surgery double and she had already ruled that out. Most of the time, he was this sweet, loving man who worshipped the ground she walked on, as was her right, but then there were other times when he didn’t. Such as the time he backhanded her across the mouth when she complained about him closing the Luckies’ sex room, but later, he cowered in fear when she brought out her whip to teach him a lesson.

“Can’t we tell them that though Metropolis is in ruins, some people survived the fallout, including her?” Asabi had retorted, moving down to the next lock. “I have my hands full guarding Lexy.”

‘Lexy’ was a strange thing for Asabi to call his boss, especially since it was the same romantic nickname that Lex had asked Brenda to call him in private. It told her one thing for certain, though. That Luthor might be crazy, but he and Lexy must be two completely different men with the same face. She had exhaled with relief. Her lover was still hers to control. How odd that Lex Luthor’s twin brother was named Lexy. If Asabi was guarding Lexy, where was Luthor?

“Do as you’re told, and he’ll honor his agreement and return your keycard to you,” St. John had warned. “Don’t, and you’ll receive the same exit plan as Devlin and the others.”

Brenda had felt a chill creep down her spine at these words. What kind of ‘exit plan’ was that? she wondered. St. John had shot Kirk Devlin to death when he supposedly attacked Luthor. Who exactly were the others? Had Luthor killed other people or had them killed? On the other hand, maybe St. John had meant that Lex Luthor planned to kill the entire Luthor Underground Community. Why would Luthor kill all one hundred and eighty-nine of them? One hundred and eighty-eight without Devlin. One hundred and eighty-six without Luthor and St. John. She shook this thought out of her head. She would figure out the exact number later.

Finally, unlocking the last lock, Asabi had opened the door, which St. John then held for him as he retrieved Luthor’s fiancée and carried her inside. St. John had returned to the LUCA and driven it down the corridor to its charging station, so that nobody would know that it had been used. Brenda took this opportunity to return to her bedroom before he could see her.

Had Kirk Devlin discovered that some people had survived Topside post-Nightfall? Was that why Luthor and St. John had killed him? Devlin had no reason to kill Lexy unless he, like everyone else, had confused Lexy with his brother. Had the physicist wanted to have the survivors join them in the L.U.C.? On this one fact, she had to agree with Luthor. The L.U.C.’s facilities and resources could only hold and feed so many people, and preselected disease-free people too. No, she had decided that they couldn’t risk the survival of the human race by bringing in others to their closed community. On the other hand, St. John had said that their exit plan was the same as Kirk Devlin’s, and Devlin was dead. Therefore, perhaps they weren’t humanity’s last chance. Luthor had mentioned his children were in another ark located elsewhere. It just didn’t make sense to destroy this one.

The elevator, on which St. John and Luthor’s fiancée arrived, was evidence that Lex Luthor had lied to her and everyone else in the L.U.C. Not only was there another way to leave before the main exit opened in three years, as they were told upon their arrival was the only way out, Luthor might not let them leave at all. This emergency exit wasn’t some five hundred meter ladder they needed to climb to the surface as Asabi had suggested when she had pressed him about St. John’s disappearance. This was a secret elevator, which meant that there was a building still intact Topside for it to go up to. She knew enough about how elevators functioned to know that they needed pulleys and other electrical equipment, wenches, engines, motors, steel cables, all of which should have been knocked out by Nightfall’s impact, or so they had all thought.

Then, again, their physicist was dead. Did the L.U.C. even have an engineer she could ask? She had begun to wonder what other lies they had been told. Would Luthor have put in a five hundred meter hydraulic lift elevator? That seemed implausible.

For Brenda and Lexy to become defacto leaders of the L.U.C. and New Earth, St. John, Asabi, and Luthor would have to permanently go. She had drugs at her deposal she could use to poison them. She could then have Lexy tell everyone that Asabi and St. John had died because they had brought a survivor from Topside down to their community and gotten sick. Lexy, of course, would slip into Luthor’s shoes with no one the wiser, other than herself.

After that night, Asabi started to spend large blocks of time caring for Luthor’s fiancée, so Brenda had been able to sneak in more of her free time with Lexy. For the first several weeks, she had fed Lexy hints that he should punish St. John for not protecting him and letting Devlin shoot him, as well as to Asabi for treating him as a child.

When she felt he was ready, Brenda admitted to Lexy that she knew that he wasn’t the Lex Luthor. She told him everything. How Asabi and St. John could still travel to Topside, because they had a secret elevator. How if Lexy got rid of Luthor’s right hand men, he could take over the L.U.C. and run New Earth the way they had always discussed, with him as king and her as queen.

In response to her admission, Lexy had confessed that he too had visited Topside since Nightfall. It hadn’t been destroyed as his father, Lex Luthor, had told everyone in the L.U.C. Superman had actually appeared at the last minute and shoved the asteroid aside. Nightfall had never hit.

Despite being astounded that all her building suspicions regarding Luthor and her life in the L.U.C. had now been confirmed, Brenda refused to let Lexy see how shocking this news was to her. She wanted Lexy to think she already knew everything he did. She was personally thrilled to hear that Lexy was Luthor’s son. It explained why they looked so much alike and why Lexy was twice as enthusiastic in bed. In fact, she bet their similar appearance was because the older Mr. Luthor had been getting nips and tucks over the years to look more like his son. Of course, since Luthor was Lexy’s father it would make it more difficult to convince him that the old Luthor needed to go. Then again, persuading men to do things was Brenda’s specialty.

Lexy then had told her all about the night he had been shot twice. The first time he had been impersonating his father, and the second shot happened upon returning to the L.U.C. by St. John, because the man had said the wound hadn’t looked fresh enough. When Brenda mentioned that she heard St. John say that Luthor was engaged, Lexy confirmed the news. Lexy had responded that Lois Lane was an absolute angel of a woman, and that he was sure his father would leave Lexy and everyone else in the L.U.C. alone afterwards, because he’d be too busy with his new wife.

Being abandoned in the ark to live out her days seemed only slightly better than being killed off by Luthor and his crew. Brenda hated to crush Lexy’s idolatry of his father, but it was a necessarily step in her ascension to the Lex Tower penthouse. Anyway, after the incident where Luthor had slapped her, Lexy had started to become more critical of his father. She decided he was ready, and she dropped the bomb that Luthor and St. John had planned to kill everyone in the ark.

Lexy didn’t seem as surprised as she thought he would be, informing her that his father had always taught him that “Might was right.” That was when he admitted that he had been watching a video feed of his father’s fiancée that he had found on the computer in the office where he had been shot. He had gotten bored just sitting around studying his father’s business methods and life history, and stumbled across the video while playing around on the computer.

The next time Asabi went to take care of his secret patient, Brenda had Lexy sneak her into his apartment to show her the video. Brenda hadn’t recognized the brunette woman, but she did know her apartment. She guessed the woman in the L.U.C.’s sex room was the imposter, due to the facial bandages when she had first arrived, and wondered when Luthor planned to switch one out for the other.

Lexy informed her that Lois Lane was a reporter for the Daily Planet. Out of all the women Brenda had seen Luthor score with over the years, this reporter seemed an unlikely candidate for him to propose to, unless she had something on Luthor he didn’t want printed. Scrolling through the video archives, Brenda soon realized that the woman had employed the knees-together form of enticement. It was satisfying for Brenda to realize that she had been right from the start about Luthor’s weakness. He took a woman’s ‘no’ as a challenge.

Step one of their joint plan became to convince Luthor that Lexy had fallen in love with his father’s fiancée. This had been all Lexy’s idea, which he implemented without consulting her. Brenda had thought it a strange step, but Lexy said that it was necessary to make sure his father didn’t suspect anything between them. If nothing else proved to Brenda that she was indeed the brains of their operation, this move had. She had thought at the time, Lexy would be lucky if he made it out of the ark alive.

But he had. The morning of Luthor’s wedding, the groom had unexpectedly arrived and whisked Lexy Topside. The downside of this was that Lexy was now Topside, and Brenda was stuck in the hole with his psycho father. She didn’t know how long it would take Lexy to convince authorities of his true identity and rescue the Luckies from a fate worse than Nightfall.

Since Sunday, Brenda had been implementing the final phase of her and Lexy’s plan, hiding out from Luthor and making sure that the authorities didn’t recognize her as Brenda Muldoon, MD. She had cleared her schedule and dedicated the last four days to changing her appearance just enough to slip through the cracks. Now, all she needed was for Lexy to save the day. Failing that, she would take Superman.

Hearing a commotion outside in the corridor, Brenda went to the door to peer out. A small group of men in flak jackets had knocked over the palm plant blocking the secret elevator. She took a deep breath and opened her door. Time for the next stage of their plan.

***

As Brenda stood with a group of Luckies at the check-in table, hastily set up in a parking garage, she saw Inspector Henderson, emerge from Luthor’s wine cellar. He was that nice policeman whom she had met in the corridor and pointed in the direction of the L.U.C.’s map. She didn’t want to draw more attention to herself, but nobody seemed to know the answer to her question.

“Where is he?” Brenda called, walking across the parking garage towards him. “Where’s Lexy? He promised to be waiting Topside for me.”

A uniformed officer at the processing table she was purposely avoiding grabbed her arm to stop her. That was when Brenda saw that behind Henderson were no less than five federal agents or plainclothes policemen leading Lex Luthor, both hand and ankle cuffed, out of the wine cellar. Served him right for holding them all hostage. She didn’t know if the men were guarding him or protecting him from the Luckies, one of whom threw a soda can in his direction.

Luthor’s clothes were unkempt as if the police had dragged him from bed. Brenda glanced over her shoulder at the petite, brunette woman wearing a silky robe; Kimberly, if Brenda’s mind served her right. The woman had exited the wine cellar just minutes before, crying. She was still being examined at the EMT station. Perhaps Luthor had been found in bed.

Inspector Henderson stepped between her and Luthor. “Who?”

“Lexy Luthor!” Brenda’s frayed nerves exploded in anger as she pointed at Luthor. “His son!”

Luthor chuckled as he raised a questioning eyebrow at her change of appearance. An evil smirk tilted up the corner of his lips and erased the serious and deadly scowl that had been there when he had stepped out of the wine cellar. “He wasn’t my son, you idiotic woman, and his name wasn’t ‘Lexy’, but ‘Lex-C’ as in the letter ‘C’. He was my clone.”

The inspector’s mouth formed a circle of surprise. He either didn’t expect Luthor to confess or hadn’t known Lexy was a clone. Then again, neither had Brenda.

“Clone?” Brenda gulped. Lexy had told her that he was Luthor’s son. Either way, if he had been Luthor’s clone or his son, the DNA coursing through his veins probably forced him to lie to her.

“He wasn’t a real boy,” Luthor continued calmly, taunting her.

Brenda heard the past tense now and she knew the truth. “You killed him, didn’t you?” she whispered, her eyes filling up with tears. She willed them away as she tried to pull her way out of the officer’s grip, but he didn’t let go. “You killed him, you monster!” she screamed, silencing the entire room. “Did you bash his head in like you did with your fiancée down in the ark?”

Luthor both blanched and narrowed his eyes into slits. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he denied.

“What woman?” Inspector Henderson said, glancing at some men in business suits who just exited the wine cellar. “Did you find any bodies?”

The men shook their heads.

“Where was this woman? Where did this happen?” Henderson asked her.

“Don’t listen to her,” Luthor interjected. “My clone seduced her before he switched places with me, locking me in my bunker with these people. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Ignoring the billionaire in the room, Brenda said to the policeman, “In the sex room. Luthor wanted me to keep a close eye on the couples hooking up in the L.U.C., so I had hacked into his video feed to watch them. About mid-April, Luthor shut down the sex room and moved her inside. St. John called her Luthor’s fiancée.”

“I never told you to do any such thing,” Luthor growled, low and dark as if he were a wolf stalking his prey. “It must have been the clone who told her to do that.”

Brenda hadn’t forgotten his slap across her face about it. Luthor would pay for ever touching her like that. He would pay for what he did to Lexy.

Henderson got on his radio. “Guys, I need you to check something out. Over.” He pointed at Brenda. “Where was this sex room?”

“At the beginning of the medical office wing. It’s the only door with five locks,” she replied.

Henderson relayed this information into his walkie-talkie.

Brenda stared at Luthor, daring him to deny it. “You wanted me to make sure that at least ten to fifteen percent of the Lucky women were kept aside for you to impregnate. You didn’t want to be New Earth’s alpha male in name only,” she said not only to Luthor, but also for all the other listening ears to hear.

The brunette in the robe burst into sobs. Apparently, he had told her she was the only one. Several of the other Luckies at the check-in table gasped.

“That was your idea,” Luthor returned.

“My idea?” Brenda echoed incredulously.

“You said that the species needed my strong line for its survival,” Luthor said, his expression willing her to tell the truth.

Brenda had no need for the truth. She glanced up to the ceiling as if she would never have said anything of the sort. “Survival of the species requires many DNA strains, Mr. Luthor. That’s basic science. Having ten to fifteen percent of New Earth’s population sired by one man would limit humanity’s chances, not strengthen it.”

“She’s lying!” he spat. He looked at the Inspector to confirm with another male that he believed him. Henderson appeared to be siding with her. “Why would I want to impregnate a bunch of women for the survival of the species when I knew it wasn’t in danger in the first place?”

Yes. Why indeed? “Then why did you ask me to bring you multiple women, sometimes several a night to please you?” Brenda said with mock horror.

“That was my clone who ordered you to do that, not me,” Luthor retorted.

“No, he didn’t, Mr. Luthor, you did. These women thought the world as we knew it had ended. You told me that you wanted at least thirty children born into the L.U.C. before next March. These women thought it was their duty to be the mothers of New Earth. Do you think they would have been so eager to be with you, if they hadn’t?”

Whatever Luthor would have spouted from between his clenched teeth was interrupted by a voice from Henderson’s radio.

The police inspector held his walkie-talkie up to his ear. “Well, then, break down the door,” he ordered.

“She fell in love with that stupid clone of mine,” Luthor informed Henderson. “She thinks that he really loved her in return. That’s why she’s saying that I did those awful things, not him.” He turned to her and said in a patronizing tone, “The clone left all of us to die, locked in that bunker forever. He committed suicide rather than face jail time for his crimes.”

Brenda’s hands began to shake. Lexy committed suicide? Why would he do that?

He had sent for her that morning, complaining of feeling light-headed, dizzy, and weak. This had been before Lex had arrived. She had run a complete physical on him and found nothing out of the ordinary. She had asked if he had made any changes in his diet, but he said that he only started taking a multivitamin tablet he had found in Luthor’s study. She had insisted that he stop by her office to have a blood test, when he instead suggested that they make love. He had been his most tender that morning. She should have guessed that he was telling her good-bye. He must have known he was about to die.

“We heard you coming, and I hid in the closet,” Brenda said softly. “You told Lexy to take out the black tie tux from the closet, and put it on.” That had been the last time she had seen Lexy. He had kissed his fingertips and pressed them to her cheek. Then, he had followed Luthor into the study, but only Luthor returned to the bedroom. Luthor had grabbed the bottle of champagne he had brought with him and headed out of his apartment. Brenda had followed him to the sex room and saw that woman let him in. “Lexy was going to save us. He wanted to tell the authorities that you were holding us captive.” She sniffled, still unable to believe that Lexy was gone for good. He had been the only man who'd ever loved her. “That doesn’t sound like the actions of a stupid man to me, Mr. Luthor. It sounds like a hero.”

“And, yet, when he arrived in my office, what did he do?” Luthor scoffed. “He jumped off my balcony and kissed the pavement below. That doesn’t sound very heroic to me, deary.”

Brenda had told Lexy that the police would arrest her for the thefts of medicine, not to mention the ova, she had made before entering the ark. Lexy had told her not to worry. Luthor’s money would buy the best lawyers. Perhaps Lexy had realized that with Luthor on the run for his Topside crimes, there wouldn’t be any money to save her. Maybe he thought her safer in the ark.

“Actually,” Henderson interrupted. “It was the tests we ran on the clone’s blood that told us that he wasn’t the real Lex Luthor. So, in a way, he did lead us to you.”

Brenda smiled briefly at this slight vindication of Lexy before turning back to Luthor. “What did you say to him?”

“The truth.” Luthor shrugged. “That he was made to have a life span of three months. That he had survived this long was due to the blood he received during surgery after he was shot. I didn’t know he would kill himself, instead of face trial for his actions. Then, again, I didn’t think he’d lock us all in the bunker with no way to escape.”

“Your trial! Moreover, he was shot on your order,” Brenda retorted, stomping her foot. The policeman holding her from killing Luthor tightened his grip. “Kirk Devlin didn’t shoot him; Nigel St. John did, Lexy told me. Just ask Dr. Rogers. Devlin had an acute fear of guns stemming from an early childhood trauma. He would no more pick up a gun than I would.”

“Kirk Devlin?” Henderson asked, glancing between the two of them.

“Another one of Luthor’s victims. St. John told us that he was claustrophobic and delusional, because he thought that Topside hadn’t been destroyed as Luthor had told us it had. St. John shot him as well,” Brenda said.

“Devlin shot me! Shot my clone by mistake,” Luthor yelled. “It was self defense.”

“Lexy told me that St. John shot him and Devlin,” Brenda retorted.

“You…” Luthor said, lunging towards her. His guards kept him from making more than a step.

Henderson glanced back at Luthor and then faced Brenda. “We’ll add it to the list of charges against the man as soon as we verify…”

“Devlin’s body was incinerated,” Brenda explained. “The L.U.C. doesn’t have a cemetery. Dr. Sherridon pronounced him. He probably wrote up a death certificate.”

Henderson nodded, writing something down in his notebook. His radio buzzed and he placed his walkie-talkie to his ear again. “Uh-huh. Thanks,” he said softly after a minute, before returning his gaze to Brenda. “Tell me again what you witnessed Luthor do to the woman in this so-called ‘sex room’.”

“Nothing!” Luthor yelled. “I didn’t do anything to that woman.”

“I saw it on the video feed. He bashed her head in with a champagne bottle,” Brenda said. “After he… he…” She raised her hands to her eyes, not wanting to recall exactly how vicious Luthor had been. She felt a gentle hand on her arm and opened her eyes to see Henderson at her side.

“We’ll get the details later. I’m sorry about Lexy and for your loss,” Henderson said. “Why don’t you get on the bus to the processing center, and we’ll talk more later?”

Brenda took hold of the Inspector’s hand, and lowered her voice, “There’s a copy of the video somewhere down there.” She wasn’t planning to stick around long enough to be interviewed. If she couldn’t escape, they had better offer her a new identity with witness protection, because after this Luthor wasn't going to let her live.

A S.W.A.T. tank pulled up behind the bus in the ever-cramped parking garage. The ramp door lowered down as the police led Luthor to the vehicle.

Luthor tried to pull away from his armed guard, growling at Henderson, “You’re going to believe her lies? The clone brainwashed her. She’s the one who killed that woman, not me. You have no proof it was me! I didn’t kill her; I loved her.”

Henderson waved for them to continue loading him into the tank.

“Lex-C wasn’t going to survive anyway. He had no soul,” Luthor yelled at Brenda. “Like you, he was nothing. A science experiment and a botched one at that. He was more cannibalistic frog than human.”

Brenda knew the truth about Lexy, and no amount of Luthor’s lies would cover it up. Lexy had been all man. “Clone or not, he was twice the lover you ever were.”

“Can I quote you?” exclaimed a tall auburn-haired beauty with a notebook, who had silently been taking notes from the Lucky check-in table.

“Go right ahead,” Brenda said, flipping her newly blonde bob over her shoulder as if she had been doing it for years. She paused as she watched the door of the S.W.A.T. tank close with Luthor fuming inside, an expression of satisfaction broadening across her face. “I was Lexy’s personal nurse after he was shot by Mr. St. John,” she said, before starting towards the bus.

“Wait!” the woman called. She stared at her for a minute as if trying to place her face. She looked down at the list of Luckies the police sergeant at the table was collecting and comparing to a list of missing persons.

Brenda had purposely turned to talk to Inspector Henderson instead of signing in on that list.

“What’s your name, again?” the woman asked.

Placing a smile to her lips, Brenda told her the nickname Lexy had come up when he had accidentally tripped over her last name before correcting himself with her first name. “Mindy with a ‘y’ not an ‘i’.” She gave a friendly wave and stepped onto the bus.

Brenda Muldoon, MD was now gone for good.

***End of Part 193***

****End of Section II – The Investigation****

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Part 194