TOC Part Three"Kenneth!"
He closed his eyes briefly. "Hi, Emma."
"It's... good to hear your voice."
"Y-yours, too," he struggled, pinching the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb. "What can I do for you?"
"Well..." He had caught her unawares, and he knew it. She hadn't expected him to be so forward - she was used to beating around the bush. Now she didn't know what to say. He could feel her hesitation. He could almost taste it. "What are you up to?"
"Right now?" He tried to sound blase, not wanting to appear either rude or interested. It was late - he was tired. "Getting ready for bed." He glanced at the remote control in his hand, his eyes darkening at the lie. "Why?"
"Oh." The disappointment in her voice rang through the phone line, echoing hollowly inside his head. "I... I just... oh, gosh, it's not important, but..."
"Yes?"
"Well, we know each other pretty well, now - I mean, we work together, and we're pretty good friends... right?"
"Sure we are." He gritted his teeth in selfish annoyance. //Get to the point...//
"I was wondering... I don't know, maybe I thought that some evening after work, we could... grab a bite to eat together? There's that new restaurant in Lewisham that I've been dying to try... The Granary?"
"Um..."
"As friends, I mean. Purely professional." She laughed nervously. "Oh, I knew it was a stupid idea... it's just that you're always so nice and kind to everybody, and I thought... well, I guess I thought wrong. I'm sorry to bother you at home, I know you're probably busy..."
"No!" His head was spinning now - round in circles. God, he *hated* women. How could she hold such power over him when he barely knew her? "I mean... no. Don't apologise. I - uh - that... that would be g- okay. Sure."
"Really?" She sounded absurdly pleased, and he winced. Some tiny part of him was watching what he was doing, warning him of the consequences - of what would surely happen if he took this woman up on her offer.
He berated it to keep quiet. Emma was one of his colleagues - an old hand at the Independent, a high-driven career woman... but one who asked what people were thinking, one who didn't let her job dominate her life, one who enjoyed human-interest stories. She was effervescent and... safe. So unlike... Anyway, there was nothing to lose here. There was no chance of...
"Sure." He forced himself to keep his tone light. "I'll... uh... I suppose tomorrow works?"
"Tomorrow does work." Her answer was quick. "Tomorrow works brilliantly! Shall we say... eight?"
"Um... okay," he mumbled, fighting a rising wave of panic. The last time he had picked a woman up for a date... "Shall I meet you there?"
"Great!" Her voice was pathetically eager. "See you soon!"
"Right." He clenched his eyes shut, wishing for solace. For peace. For the carefree attitude that was so hard to find. "See you soon."
The dial tone buzzed in his brain, shutting out all other thoughts, and as he replaced the receiver gently, he was struck by the thought that he was alone again.
~&~
An hour later, not one person would have recognised Lois Luthor as she walked slowly along the sidewalk of downtown Metropolis.
She was struck by the sudden, ridiculous thought that it was terrifyingly easy to kill somebody. It had taken no time - no time at all - and it was so *simple*... so perfect that there was no way anybody could have anything more than the slightest twitch of doubt in their minds about her health. *He*... couldn't think anything other than that. Heck, it was probably a relief to him. Save his poison for another day. People would joke about it - maybe rib each other about the fact that with all his money, he couldn't stop his wife from being killed.
<I'll kill you...>She swallowed, patting her baseball cap to make sure that none of the chin-length strands of hair were showing. It was probably a little uneven, she knew - she hadn't had a mirror, and the knife, though quite sharp, was still too blunt to make an elegant job of slashing through her thick hair, but she had done the best she could.
At the time of her marriage, it had been to the middle of her neck when completely straight. She had liked it like that... but he hadn't. More feminine, he had thought, to have hair stretching halfway down your back. That was his excuse, anyway. Sometimes she wondered if it were just another easy method of silencing her - pulling her hair, twisting it around her neck in a solid, deadly coil. Cutting off her air supply so she couldn't scream. He had nearly strangled her to death with her own hair.
Now she was free. Free. Her first taste of liberty had been cutting and dying her hair, one-handed in the Ladies of a bar which no other woman would have dreamt of going into. She'd never thought of herself as a blond and she had been straightening the heck out of her curls since she'd been a teenager - he'd never seen her with her hair curly. Back to nature, and what a blessing it was.
The red sweater she had been wearing as she left was perfectly adequate once she ripped a hole in the arm of it. Also her baseball cap, which she had bought to stuff her hair into, as an extra precaution. Her jeans... Calvin Klein jeans... well, they would have to do. Still a pretty good disguise. He would not tolerate her wearing jeans, they were altogether too common and they made her too pretty, too young.
She hadn't dared to use a taxi, hadn't dared to exhaust any more of her funds until she knew her situation, so she had walked. Just... walked. For what felt like miles.
She glanced around her, for the first time absorbing her surroundings, and started in surprise. Where the... what... where *was* she? Was she even in Metropolis any more?
She glanced across the street, wildly searching for any sign of familiarity. She had been on autopilot - *stupid*! Stupid, stupid woman! Just like always, not thinking about what she was doing, not considering the consequences...
A large, yellow-and-black taxi with the blocky word 'METRO' stamped on the side in bold black letters immediately affronted itself into her line of vision.
Right. Still in Metropolis. Pretty far away from where she had started out, obviously.
She blew her breath out slowly as she came to the first intersection, debating as to where she should go. Getting out of town was a top priority, that she knew, but...
She wasn't used to making decisions for herself anymore. She turned right, then left, then right again, stumbling across the crosswalk to slump against a shop window at the other side. Her head was going round in circles, her stomach plunging. She clamped her hand to her sweaty forehead, desperately trying to think.
//*Think*...//
Her hand!
She swung it abruptly away from her forehead, glaring at it as if it were a dog about to bite her. Of course! She should have known. She had turned *right*. That was *bad*. Years beforehand, Bill Henderson had told her that when people were running away, trying to be clever and confuse their followers about which direction they were going in by trawling through various intersections, they were usually only going in the direction of their dominant hand.
She was *right*-handed. This would be the first place any detective, hired to find her, would look. She was being *stupid*!
She crossed over the road again and turned left, this time, looking down at her hand with a pleased expression. It had been ages since she had actually thought about what she was doing - a week ago and she would have continued on that way, not caring about whether her husband...
//Husband...//
The name whirled around in her brain, madly, as she stared at the proof, stationed conspicuously on the third finger of her left hand. The hand that still bore the mark of her desperation to get away from him. Her injured hand.
<Priceless...>She tugged them off swiftly; appalled to have anything that had once belonged to him touching her skin. Cradling it in her hand, she glared at them, twinkling up at her so innocently. Clenching her fist, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut as the edge of the rings bit into her palm.
The last tie. The last connection.
She opened her fist, looking at them again. The pure, shocking rage that had gripped her at the sight, moments before had ebbed now, and all she was left with was a detached, clinical sense of contempt.
For the rings. For the man who had given them to her.
<Love, honour and cherish...>She took three steps, debating what to do with them.
"Ouch, dammit..."
Rubbing her aching foot, she glared at the object that she had walked into, darkly reflecting that...
A garbage can.
A *garbage can*.
She looked slowly at the entity, then back down to the ring in her hand. Several times. The thought, struggling to reach the top of her brain, broke through all at once, with a splash, and she was standing before the bin almost before she knew she had moved.
Such an easy way. A quick, easy way to finally rid herself of the last things tying her to him.
<I'll always be with you...>She opened her hand, slowly tipping them sideways, making them slide back and fro in her palm.
She couldn't do it. She was weak. She was... it was like he...
<Useless...>They would buy her food. Wouldn't they? She could sell them, if things got too bad. She could *pawn* them, for goodness sake! It would be foolish to throw them away. Like money down a rat hole. Stupid, when she had so little to begin with. The rings were huge, and expensive; especially her engagement one. It would buy her so many things, if she sold it wisely. A chunk of rock that she could live on for months; maybe even years, if she was careful.
She clenched her fist, breathing hard.
"Hey lady, you okay?"
She looked around, wide-eyed, to spot a youth with psychedelic red hair and bulbous pimples in an apron with a sweeping brush in his hand, surveying her curiously. A sign in the window of a restaurant bearing the same logo as his apron caught her eye - "Help Needed, Apply Within".
"Yes," she began, and choked as something became suddenly, terribly apparent to her. "No!"
She clapped a hand to her mouth, and retched. Alarmed, he caught her by the elbow, hurrying her into a side-alley, where she was copiously, disgustingly, slowly sick into a dumpster. Twice.
He waited as the last retches ceased, and magnanimously produced a large handkerchief.
She nodded, leaning her head back against the dumpster and closing her eyes.
"Thanks," she said, and cringed at the weakness in her voice. "For the hanky, I mean. I'll wash it and... mail it to you, or something..."
"Don't worry about it," he said nobly, "I have plenty."
A few minutes passed in silence. Not caring how dirty the alleyway was, Lois slid to the ground, rested her arms on her raised knees and buried her head in them, trying desperately not to faint.
"Hey... you got pretty sick there," he said, accurately if a little obviously. "You feeling OK now?"
Lois nodded, rubbing the back of her hand across her mouth in a vain attempt to rid it of the sour taste. "Yeah, it usually goes away in a few minutes."
"I'm sorry?" His young face was a mixture of concern and confusion.
"The nausea." She smiled at him weakly. "I'm pregnant." She felt a tiny thrill, sharing that - a spark of excitement igniting as she said the words out loud - as if by giving the words form and exposing them to light, she had physically forced it into being.
She surveyed him, as he digested the words. She didn't know what strange twist of fate had ensured that this kid should be the first person who she told about her pregnancy, but somehow it seemed right.
He opened his mouth, and promptly closed it again. And again. And again.
"Oh," he said, finally, then blushed to the very roots of his ginger hair. He glanced at her hand, then frowned. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"
Lois felt a tendril of panic twist in her still-churning stomach. Could he tell that she was running away from someone? That she was disguised? Oh god, what if this kid called Lex?
Her voice was unnaturally high when she answered. "No, of course not. Why would you think I was in some kind of trouble?"
"It's just that I noticed..." he mumbled bashfully, gesturing towards her left hand.
She glanced at it herself, noting with surprise the bare, independent look about it, the doughy texture of the skin around which her rings had been.
"You're not married?"
She considered the question.
<I now pronounce you...>"No." It flowed out of her, truer than any lie she had ever told.
He held his two hands up. "Hey... it's none of my business."
Another pause, in which she started thinking about getting to her feet. It might help. Maybe. Too soon, though. The ground was too unpredictable. You never knew when it might suddenly rear up on you.
"Whoa!"
She looked at him, heavily curious to know what he was exclaiming at, to find that his gaze pointed northward.
She looked down, and gasped, clenching her fist immediately.
The fist that had gone limp as she lay there. The fist where the rings had been before she had had the sudden attack of nausea. The fist out of which a half-a-million-dollar diamond was now peeping.
<Do you have any idea how much I paid for that? How much I spent on you? And now you're asking for *more*?>"Damn," she whispered reflexively, squeezing her eyes shut.
She leant her head against the dumpster, and opened them wearily. He was staring at her with an expression of amazement - awe, even. She looked into his eyes, and had the strangest sensation of unrealism - almost as if dollar signs would pop into them at any second. Then the look was gone, replaced by something hard and suspicious.
"I thought you weren't married? Where did you get those?" he asked, his tone aggressive. She almost burst out in hysterical laughter. Great! Just great. It was over before it had begun.
The urge died in her throat as she looked at him. No. No. She'd come too far and worked too hard to blow it now.
"I'm on my way to pawn them," she said, cool as you please, looking him straight in the eye.
"You're going to *pawn* your wedding rings?"
She raised an eyebrow at him. "Thought in the great scheme of things, if it came to a choice between owning a diamond ring and not starving to death, the last one would be more important."
His eyes bugged slightly, and she felt victorious. She'd read him right. He had no real authority in him, no command. He was faking it, as was she.
"How in the world does a woman go from owning a rock like that to being in danger of starving to death?"
She sighed, feeling the vestiges of impatience stir inside her, savouring the feeling, the freedom. She could snap at people all she liked now. "Long, sordid story."
He looked at her sharply. "I've got time."
"Have you? How nice for you," she bit sarcastically, jumping to her feet. A moment later, she regretted the action as the world swung around her. She put a hand on the cool steel of the dumpster to steady herself. "Unfortunately, I'm fast running out of it, so if you don't mind I'll just..."
"You're really in trouble, huh." His expression was very serious.
She rolled her eyes at him, set off for the street again. She desperately needed to get out of there, away from this stainless kid before she doomed them both.
He trotted after her. "I'd like to help." It came tentatively.
She looked at him suspiciously. "Why?" she demanded. "Why? I'm just a woman who staggered in off the street and got sick in your dumpster. Why would you want to help me?"
"Hey, lady, my Mom taught me better than to just look past someone in trouble," he said tetchily. "I'm just trying to do my civic duty, or whatever they're calling it this week. I appreciate that you're under pressure and broke, but that's no excuse to..."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" she apologised, flushing at his speech. The kid was just trying to help, and here she was jerking him around over it.
He looked at her warily. "Apology accepted."
She sighed. "I guess... it's just hard to believe that there are still good guys left in the world."
"I'm a good guy." His eyes were very earnest. "I'll help you. However I can. What do you want?" He made a sudden convulsive movement with his shoulder - as if shrugging off a lingering doubt about her.
<Come over here, Lois. We have some things to discuss.>She flinched, and his arm immediately flew up from his side, but he evidently abandoned his original intention, because a few moments later, she felt the lightest touch on the tender, exposed inside of her wrist.
"Hey. You okay?" he whispered.
She swallowed roughly. "Fine. Just fine." She looked around her for a moment, before shaking her head viciously and stamping her foot. "No, dammit, no, I'm not fine!! I'm not fine!! I'm standing here, pregnant, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, with a total of..." She slipped her hand inside her jean pocket and drew a bill out, "...twenty dollars in the world, standing here in an alleyway, talking to some strange kid who doesn't even know my name, and you know what? You know what?" She grabbed him by the arm and shook him. "I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do or where I'm going to go." Her voice was deathly quiet all of a sudden.
"So that's the first thing we have to figure out." His voice was amazingly calm, considering the fact that a pregnant stranger had just yelled at him and was now hanging onto the lapels of his apron for dear life.
She released him abruptly, suddenly feeling sick again. She drew a hand tiredly across her forehead. "Oh, it doesn't matter. No matter where I go, where I run, he'll find me. Eventually." She clenched her fists. "He always does," and a second later, "Ouch, dammit!"
"What? What's wrong??"
She looked at him, then slowly opened her clenched left fist. He gasped when he saw the blood, a sickly brown where it had flowed and dried, and breaking freshly out of the tender, minutes old film which had formed over the cut.
"We have to get that cleaned up," he pronounced gravely. At her sceptical look, he added, "Hey, you don't want to get an infection," defensively. Inwardly, she smiled. He sounded like the kind of kid who had been reared on those little tissues, soaked in disinfectant that came in the tiny blue paper satchels. She could almost imagine him sticking a band-aid with green and yellow dinosaurs over the wound.
In the course of the next half hour, she learned his name was Charlie, that he had a girlfriend named Amber, that he had turned eighteen the month before last, and that someday, he and his garage-band friends hoped to sign a record deal. He played the drums, was partial to the Guns n' Roses but still appreciated the classics - Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles.
She'd always thought teenage boys were sullen and withdrawn. Not Charlie. He kept up a steady stream of conversation, which meant, thankfully, that he didn't seem to expect much of a response from her. She still felt slightly queasy, and her nerves were stretched to near breaking point.
He fixed her a grilled cheese sandwich and poured her a tall glass of milk, which she forced herself to drink although she would have preferred it with a healthy dose of chocolate syrup. After she had something in her stomach, she felt better. At least physically.
But as she looked around the empty diner, the terrifying doubts started to pull at her again. She stared out the window, wondering what was supposed to happen next. What exactly did a newly-murdered, beloved-wife do? And where, precisely, did she go? As far as she knew, there was no road map out of hell.
<You'll never escape...>She released a deep sigh, then blushed when she realized that it had been louder than she'd planned.
He looked at her, silently enquiring. She twisted her mouth. "I have to get out of here, Charlie," she whispered.
"Hey." His voice was concerned, and even in the midst of her desperation, some tiny part of her smiled as he tugged on the sleeve of her sweater rather than put his arm around her. "It'll be okay. Nobody else saw. You can get out of town as easy as pie..."
She looked at him sadly. "I can't afford an airplane ticket. And even if I could, it would be traceable. Not that I have anywhere to go anyway."
He frowned. "You don't have any family? No friends?"
She looked down. "Too dangerous. For them and me. And my friends have long since... no. No friends I can go to."
He tried again. "Nobody who would take you in, even if only for a day or two? Come on, think about it. Nobody is *that* alone. Surely there must be somebody who lives in the middle of nowhere that can help you out?"
Nowhere. Nowheresville. Just like the dollar signs in his eyes before, if she had been in a comedy short, a light bulb would have exploded above her head.
He had noticed her face. "There." His voice was almost pathetically eager. "You *do* know somebody, don't you?"
She nodded cautiously. "I do. Or... at least, I *hope* I do."
"So... you have someone to stay with?"
"Once I can figure out a way to hike halfway across the country on five dollars... then I'll be all right. I think."
He frowned again. "You could take the bus."
She laughed. "The bus? Have you seen the kind of people that ride on those things? And what if I get sick?"
"Greyhound buses have bathrooms, you know."
"Joy. Do I have any other options?"
"You could always hitchhike."
She threw up her hands. "Perfect!"
He took her elbow, a determined expression crossing his face. "Come on." he insisted.
"Where are we going?"
"To the nearest bus station. We're going to find some kind of a map and draw up a travel plan for you."
"You don't have to do that," she protested weakly.
"Sure I do. I won't feel right till I see you safely on your way."
"It's not safe."
"Sure it is. I don't know you. You don't know me. I'm just a guy helping a lady out." She wondered at his simple, unquestioning manner.
"What about your job?" She pointed at his large, conspicuous, and official-looking apron as they crossed in front of the shop.
He ripped it off and balled it up. "Forget that. Lou never gets back from lunch before three. He'll never even know I was gone."
For the first time in what felt like years, Lois smiled.
~&~
~*"Superman! Help, Superman!"
Somebody was calling him - he could hear her, but he couldn't see her. The thick fog smothered any attempt at X-ray vision, the holes he tore in it through flying filling up as quickly as they had come.
"Please help! God - my husband - my baby - help! Help me, Superman!"
There! Columns of flame leapt up out of the mist and he levelled his body at it, desperately praying to reach it.
//Come on, come *on*...//
He was with her at last. She was sobbing so intensely that her breath came in great hiccups and he could barely understand the spluttered sentences she gasped at him.
"Bobby... he ran back in to save Carter, but the stairs collapsed..."
He didn't need to know any more. Gathering his cape tight around him, he dashed into the inferno, desperately trying to scan through the smoke to locate the father and child.
//Find them... find them, dammit!//
Somewhere a baby screamed, and he made a bolt in that direction, desperately, stupidly batting at the thick smoke with his hands. Finally, he stood in front of them - the father was nearly unconscious with smoke inhalation, still hanging onto the baby for dear life.
"Stay calm," he tried to instruct, "I'll get you out."
He took the child from the father and tucked his arm around him, motioning towards one of the upstairs rooms, which hadn't yet been affected by the blaze.
"Come on... over here... I'll help you out of the window if you'll just..."
But he was way beyond the point of reason, and slumped to the ground. Gritting his teeth, Superman managed to hoist the man onto his shoulder while still cradling the baby in his other arm. He made an open break for the window, swinging out of it just before the house collapsed.
Landing quickly, he gave Carter back to his mother and hurried over to the ambulance, where the paramedics had a stretcher waiting. The team got to work and within seconds, the man was lying comfortably.
He hurried over to the nurse by the stretcher, who was frantically feeling the man's wrist. "Is there a pulse?" he asked desperately.
The young woman looked up, her face a mask of sorrow. Slowly she shook her head.
He was dead. The baby's father, the woman's husband, was dead.
A strangled gasp sounded behind him and he turned and watched as the life drained out of the young widow's face.
"It's all your fault," she gasped. "You... if you had just been here three minutes earlier... you killed him."
"I'm so... I can't..."
He reached his hand out desperately, needing to sympathise with her, to express the depths of his sorrow, and winced as she recoiled.
"Get away from me!" she screamed. "Murderer!"
Her words struck him directly in the chest and he staggered back, physically rejecting the word. Her image swelled until it was all around him, her face waxen white, and screaming... screaming so loudly... and suddenly it wasn't her face at all, but another woman's, dark-haired this time, screaming the same word at him...
"Murderer!"
"No!" he screamed, reaching out and shaking her. "Noooooooo!"
Her eyes grew wide, her body limp. Suddenly her head flopped back, and he dropped her, terrified. The young nurse who had confirmed the man's death rushed over and put her fingers on her neck. A second later, she looked up at him, her eyes wide, and slowly shook her head.
He was falling, falling, down a deep well, her image multiplying and flipping so that no matter where he looked, she was there. He knew that there was going to be an end to his fall that would be infinitely more painful than the falling itself, but some idea told him that it was a long way off. A distant noise greeted his ears, and he wondered faintly who was screaming.*~
~&~
Three seconds later, a man called Kenneth Clarkson sat upright in bed, flailing his arms wildly as echoes reverberated around his head.
The bottom came swiftly, then, clumping him so hard over his head that he felt dizzy. Gathering his sheets around him, he lay shivering there, feeling the loneliness, the isolation. It was cold. He looked up, expecting to see a circle of light somewhere up ahead, but the room was black and unmerciful.
It took a while for it to sink in that he wasn't at the bottom of a well, but lying there, awake in his apartment, at three in the morning, crying.
~&~
To be continued...
