The Waiting
Know thy enemy.
Truer words had never been spoken, thought the dark-clad man as he stood in the shadows watching the building on the other side of the street. He had been standing there for nearly an hour, now, waiting. Watching. Anticipating.
Hyperion Avenue was peaceful and quiet in the dark of night. Inside the brownstone apartment, two shadows moved back and forth behind the curtains.
The man buried his hands deeper in the pockets of this jacket. He saw his breath in the cold air, rising like mist from a lake in the depth of autumn.
Know thy enemy.
And the more you know, the more powerful you become. Why had it taken him so long to figure it out? He had had this power all along and had not used it. Stupid. Galactically so. And he made fun of her for not seeing the obvious when it stared her right in the face?
No matter. Things were about to change.
The man looked at his watch.
All these years—all this wasted time, trying to destroy Superman and thereby destroy a future so dull, so uneventful, so sickeningly peaceful that it made you go out of your mind. He had focused all his energy on killing Clark Kent when the solution to all his problems was really so much simpler.
The key to the destruction of Superman did not lie in killing him—rather, it lay in killing what he treasured above all else. The end of Lois Lane meant the end of Superman and the end of Utopia.
So simple. So brilliant.
The man glanced at his watch once more.
Across the city, a deafening explosion knocked out windows and set off alarms. A smile spread across the man’s face. Seconds later, a streak of red and blue shot up from behind the brownstone on Hyperion Avenue, followed by a loud boom as the sound barrier was broken in the wake of Superman’s departure.
The man’s right hand tightly clasped the butt of the gun in his pocket.
The wait was over.
He crossed the street and walked up the steps to the brownstone apartment.
-fin-
