Chapter 12
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After his sleepless night, Clark was glad that a steady rain kept him indoors the day after Gillian’s birthday. He had a small pile of various farming tools that needed repair, some in the way of welding, so he set his sights on accomplishing that task. Mindless work, it gave him time to think about everything that had occurred the past few weeks. Or more accurately, the last few days.
He’d asked Gillian if she would leave San Pablo if he asked her to, a question posed without any deep thought to her possible answer unless it was "no". But knowing that she would, that he held the power to affect her life so profoundly, was exhilarating. She cared for him enough to respect his wishes, and that pleased him beyond measure.
And yet it also terrified him. In asking such a question, implied was an intention to be part of that leaving. He’d told her she should go back. To finish school. To take the next step. But what was that next step? And where did he fit in? Certainly he would not stay in San Pablo without her.
That sudden realization halted his actions as he let his mind wrap around that fact. He wouldn’t stay in San Pablo if Gillian left. She was the reason he was still there. He’d only stayed as long as he had, remaining behind even after the homes and buildings had been rebuilt, because he couldn’t imagine leaving her behind.
But as every day drew them closer together, it also showed him that his stay in this time out of time was drawing to an end. No longer did he have the excuse of altruism or self-preservation. In fact, his selfish desire to be with her was costing the world its superhero.
When he’d decided to become Superman, he’d made a commitment to use his abilities to help the world. The entire world, not just one small portion of it. Since that day he’d decided to stay in San Pablo, he’d fought with his guilt. While the people he’d come to know certainly deserved all the help he could give, he’d had to force himself to forget about the thousands he’d ignored by indulging his own need to lick his emotional wounds. Although he’d learned hard the lesson that helping meant so much more than swooping in for the initial rescue, his abilities were best suited to do just that. If he remained hidden in the Colombian countryside, he was wasting the gifts he had been given.
Yes, the guerillas and paramilitaries still posed a significant danger to the villagers, a fact made all the more clear by André’s abduction. But Gillian had been right. Unless he planned to settle there forever, it was a danger he could not eradicate. His work in San Pablo was done. He’d helped to rebuild the town. The people once again stood on their own feet. Now theirs were problems that he alone could not solve for them.
For weeks he’d pushed aside the gnawing realization that he would soon have to leave San Pablo. As hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t ignore the fact that it wasn’t his home. It wasn’t where he was meant to be. It wasn’t what he was meant to be.
Six months he’d run from his past and avoided his future. Making plans, whether hers, his, or theirs, meant facing that unknown. The black, pictureless future was calling to be colored in, unwilling to wait silently any longer.
And now with growing confidence, he realized that it no longer hurt. Allowing his mind to wander forward, past the next day and the next week and even the next month wasn’t terrifying. He felt much like he imagined a man imprisoned for life might feel after being granted unexpected parole. The future held hope once again.
His heart had been broken, nearly destroyed. But his feelings for Gillian proved that still it beat on.
She made him feel whole. With her, he was who he wanted to be. The entire person, neither superhero nor ordinary man mutually exclusive but combined into one complete being. A man whose sum was bigger than his parts.
With a puzzled frown, he wondered at the wretched state in which he’d arrived in San Pablo. Had he actually expected himself to remain tied forever to a love that had been unreciprocated? At the time, it had certainly felt like it. But for six months, he’d worked to put Lois and his feelings for her behind him. Now, finally, he started to feel a flicker of hope that he might actually be able to do it. To let her go.
But despite the growing pull of the future, he couldn’t imagine what it would look like. For a year he’d imagined his life with Lois, and then for six months he’d not imagined a life at all. How did he go about building one from the ground up?
With a smile, he heard Gillian’s voice admonishing him with practical advice. You build it one brick at a time, never looking too far beyond a batch or two of cured adobe.
He imagined the first step was to decide where to live. Did he want to return to Metropolis? He loved the city, its pulse and vibrancy. But it was thick with memories. Around every corner was a reminder of his old life. His future, whatever it held, shouldn't be saddled with leftover pain and regrets.
Perhaps better would be a fresh start...
Even lost in his thoughts, Clark felt the shaking immediately, but it took a few minutes for his brain to register that what he was feeling was an earthquake. In fact, the rattling of his meager four drinking glasses on their open shelf did the most to convince him that it was more than simply his shack shuddering against the force of a particularly strong gust.
Instantly he put down the small hand scythe he’d been tightening. As he tried to take a few steps toward the door, he stumbled against the constant motion of the cement floor beneath his feet. Rather than fight it, he floated several inches off the ground and out the door.
Other villagers obviously felt the quake as they streamed out of various buildings, panic and dread etched on their fearful faces. They’d lived through this before, too few months earlier. Would they be as lucky this time to walk away with only a destroyed village?
Rain cascaded in sheets, adding to the chaos that filled the street. It seemed Mother Nature was having a temper tantrum, unleashing tears and rage upon the unsuspecting inhabitants of her world.
Just as suddenly as it started, the shaking stopped. Everyone stood motionless, as if the switch that had turned off the earth’s motion had stilled all the creatures upon it as well. After a minute, slowly, a collective breath was released, and in slow motion the villagers began moving, inspecting and searching for the aftermath.
But within an hour it became clear that none of the newly constructed building had sustained any damage. This quake had been far less violent and had lasted a mere fraction as long as the one six months earlier. Seismologists would have labeled it an aftershock and predicted that more would surely follow in the months and years to come.
But before Clark could pat himself on the back for helping to improve the stability of San Pablo, Jeff came running with a new worry.
“The bus from Silvia. It should have arrived over an hour ago,” he explained. “I know it’s not unusual for buses around here to be late, but given the situation...”
Clark didn’t need to hear any more. Gillian was on that bus. Waiting only long enough to help hitch up Henriqué’s wagon, he left the two men with the agreement that they would drive toward Silvia while he went on ahead. Flying low he kept to the curving twist and turns of the road as it clung to the hillside, his ears and eyes alert as he looked for signs of the missing bus.
Not three miles from San Pablo he heard the shouts, coming from around the next bend. He zipped ahead, pulling up short when he saw the small cluster of mud-covered people huddled on the edge of the road and peering down into the gulley below.
As he neared the group, he took one look at the scene and a cold fear swept through him. Instead of a stalled bus or a one tilting to its side because of a flat tire, there was no bus at all.
Even more menacing was the thick bed of mud that coated everything around them and the face of the hill above. The shaking from the quake mixed with the rain had apparently loosened the earth at higher elevations, sending it in a brown avalanche hurtling toward the road. Little stood in its path to act as a natural brake, in fact, what did was mowed over and added to the lethal mix bearing down on the unsuspecting bus. Mud mixed with massive rocks and huge logs, branches and other parts of trees had tumbled down the steep face of the hill. Like something had stampeded over it, trampling every bit of color away, all that was left was the dark brown muck, remnants of a river that had neither flowed nor cleaned but destroyed. A mudslide.
They’d had no hope of avoiding it, of course. Winding mountain roads didn’t have shoulders or spare lanes for swerving, and antiquated buses loaded with far more people than they were meant to transport were afforded neither speed nor maneuverability. Caught on the front edge of the hundred-yard swath made by the mudslide, if the driver had just managed to stop the bus some fifty feet sooner, they may have escaped completely unscathed. Most likely he’d applied the brakes and had slid right into the path of destruction.
But someone on that doomed bus must have had luck to spare. Instead of careening the thousand feet or more down into the chasm below, it had been stopped by the massive trunk of a tree ancient enough to have a root system that could withstand the rushing anger of the flowing mud.
The bus lay on its side, wheels resting against the hill in the unnatural vertical sense rather than horizontally. Wedged on the shelf created by the thick trunk, the front tilted lower than the back, the entire mass resting on a fulcrum created by the tree that had stopped it. The problem, as Clark could clearly see from his vantage point, was that any major shift of weight inside the precariously placed vehicle would upset the miraculous balance it had achieved.
On its way down the steep slope, the bus must have bounced on its top at least once, for the roof caved in the very center, turning the entire vehicle into a giant V. On either side of the vertex, the bus flared out dramatically so that both front and back looked much as if the whole thing were placed back on its wheels, it could continue its journey, albeit with its middle third scraping the road beneath it. That or it could be folded up like some James Bond contraption and stuffed into a briefcase.
Since the door of the bus opened upward, those traveling on the forward side of the crushed roof had been able to scramble out and up the hill to the road. By the time he arrived, already a human chain of sorts had been established, and two men Clark didn’t recognize worked to assist people out of the rear-most window, the only opening still large enough to allow a full grown human to squeeze through. Oddly, under different circumstances, the entire scene would have caused him to laugh, the bus looking as though it were giving birth one person at a time.
Trying to decide if it would be best to simply lift the entire tangled mess back onto the road or to peel back the steel side in a massive cesarean section, allowing the rest of the passengers to escape en masse, Clark scanned the group congregating at the edge of the road. Within seconds he knew that Gillian was not among those released from the bus’s innards, and he felt a flicker of panic.
She had to have been on that exact bus, as only one made the market day run from Silvia back down into the valley. His heart pounding, he tried to guess the possibility of her having remained behind. But he dismissed it instantly as unlikely since she’d told neither him nor Jeff of such a plan, and she wouldn’t worry them by staying away over night without notice. If she wasn’t with the rest of the passengers, she was still inside.
Eyeing the crushed roof, he prayed fervently that her seat had been near the back where the bus had sustained the least damage. Of course, if it had been, she’d have been removed by that point and standing up on the road with the others. His anxiety reached a new level. What if she were pinned under the jagged, bent metal? Trapped, bleeding or broken? He felt his breathing become labored as he floated down to the two men who were helping an elderly man gain his footing on the steep hill.
Forcing himself to remain calm, Clark rationalized that she was simply waiting for her turn to come out the rear window. Or even more likely, helping someone who’d sustained an injury. Now that he was there, he’d have her and everyone else out in no time.
This was the first real emergency he’d attended in months, and suddenly he felt the overwhelming urge to change into the suit. He needed the protection it offered, the emotional barrier it allowed him to erect between himself and those he rescued. But since he’d long ago stopped wearing it under his clothes, the blue and red spandex remained folded neatly in the trunk back in his shack.
Besides, he realized as he hovered over the wreckage trying to determine the best course of action, even though he could have retrieved it within seconds, it was far too late for it to do any good. No wall could be constructed that would protect his heart now.
His carefully attained calm quickly disappeared when he peered through the rear window-turned-escape-hatch and viewed the damage inside the bus. While the seats nearest to him remained secured and undamaged, the ones near the center were bent and almost unrecognizable. And there, tottering just above the destroyed section, was the honey-colored head he both prayed and dreaded to see.
“Gillian!” he called, unable to see her face or eyes to know if she was all right.
“Sam? Is that you?” Turning her head slightly, she glanced upward.
She seemed unharmed, her voice strong, and releasing the breath he’d been holding, he squelched the urge to yell at her, sure that she’d volunteered to remain behind. First thing was to get her out before the bus lost its grip and plunged the rest of the way into the gulley. Later he’d give her more than a piece of his mind about her propensity to court death so rashly. At least she was the only passenger left inside, so once she was out, it would all be over.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, extending his arm into the window. “Can you reach me?”
She shook her head slightly, returning her gaze to the spot beneath her. “It’s Antonio. I can’t lift him...” she gasped. “He’s slipping.”
Horrified, he followed her gaze downward and saw the problem. On its side as it was, the bus’s windows became gaping holes opening over a vast expanse of air. Several panes had been broken, and apparently not everyone had escaped the hazard they now presented. Out of reach from the upper most side of the bus, Gillian poised above one such opening, crouched on the upturned edge of the seat as if performing some extreme gymnastic feat. She leaned down, her arm extended toward the window, and he could tell that something pulled her taught.
Instantly, he zipped under the bus to see the small boy dangling from the underside of the wreckage. In less than a second, he had Antonio cradled snuggly in his arms, and he called up to Gillian to let go. Looking down from her perch and through the broken glass, she gave him a wide smile of relief and released her iron grip, leaving behind red finger marks that later became dark bruises around the boy’s skinny wrist.
Clark flew Antonio to the road above where his grateful mother alternated between hugging her son and trying to hug Clark. Intent on returning to retrieve Gillian, he extricated himself as graciously as he could from her enthusiastic displays of thanks.
Gillian being the only one left in the bus, he determined there was no point in peeling back its side. Besides, any violent action might send the whole thing crashing down the side of the ravine. Nor was there any reason to carry the destroyed vehicle back to the road. It would never run again, and there were no scrap yards in the wilds of the Andes. If it didn’t eventually finish its decent to the bottom of the valley, the bus would remain wedged against the tree as a monument to the forces of nature, vines and saplings turning it into a home for curious creatures brave enough to near the manmade contraption.
Since Gillian was thin enough by far to fit through the window as the others had done, it seemed the quickest way to get her out. But he was too big to fit both of his shoulders through the window, and as he peered down at her, he wondered if he’d even be able to reach her.
“Gillian,” he called out. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Just getting kind of lonely in here. Man, now I know why I hate buses.”
“Let’s get you out of there, then.”
Leaning his arm and shoulder into the bus as far as he could, he reached down, ready to grasp her arm. “I think you’re going to have to stand up or I can’t reach you.”
Following his instructions, she stretched upward to meet his limited reach. With her movements, the bus tottered slightly, and she rocked back in reaction, trying to regain her balance.
As if in slow motion, she leaned first to her left, then right, her arms outstretched. But there was nothing solid to grab onto, and the sparse couple of inches allowed by the seat’s narrow side gave her feet little purchase.
“Sam, I can’t – ”
Before he could rip back the metal hindering his ability to reach down and scoop her out of that hellish bus, her foot slipped off her makeshift balance beam. As she fell, she lifted her eyes to his, a plea for help etched in the pale gray before it turned to panic and then resignation.
“Gillian!” he screamed just before she disappeared through the window.
to be continued...
