From part 36:
“Everybody down on the floor!” the man in the gray suit yelled. He jerked his head at one of the uniformed men who had not moved out to the perimeters of the room with the others.
The armed man – a soldier? - called out, “Sit down on the floor - hands where we can see ‘em. Toss your cell phones toward the center of the room.” He gestured with his gun at the open floor space in front of the dais. “Do what we say and you won’t get hurt.”---
The Girl Next Door, part 37:
Lois, still scanning as well as she could among the still-milling crowd, allowed Perry to pull her down onto the floor with Jimmy and several other people she recognized from other departments at the Daily Planet, as well as another dozen or so people she’d never seen before in her life. Across the room, she saw Alice White at the far edge of a group of people, helping an older woman to sit on the floor before sinking down beside her.
This was an unexpected situation, but it probably wasn’t the place for the debut of Kinetic. Logistics of changing into her disguise in the middle of a crowd aside, Lois shouldn’t need to call any attention to herself; it was just a matter of time before Superman heard about this and came to the rescue. She didn’t even have the suit with her, anyway; she certainly couldn’t wear it under this particular outfit.
In some ways, it certainly seemed easier to maintain a secret second identity as a superhero if you were male.
Maybe she could speed things up, however. Clark should be on his way back by now.
<Clark?> She knew she and Clark could communicate via telepathy when they were happy, but he’d also managed to reach her those few other times. When they’d been in the conference room together after he’d told her his suspicions about someone testing him, for instance. And she’d definitely felt *something* when he’d been struck ill by… whatever it was at the bank robbery. It seemed to work, then, with other strong emotions. Such as fear…
Or anger. And she was certainly angry right now.
Whoever these guys were, they had no right to come storming in here, brandishing guns and terrorizing all these people.
Around the room, men and women were sitting down on the floor, some more slowly than others. The room wasn’t silent; there were multiple voices raised in protest, and a woman in an electric blue dress was weeping noisily. Across the room, in the group where Alice White was sitting, a youngish man with thinning hair shouted, “Who are you? Who are these guys? You can’t come in here and –“
Without looking in the direction of the shouter, the man in the gray suit raised his gun and shot into the air. Punctuated by screams from throughout the room, a fluorescent tube in one of the lighting fixtures exploded with a noise almost as loud as the gun had been. There were further cries of alarm from the people sitting under it as the glass fragments pelted them; many of them flung themselves flat on the floor in reaction.
The man in the gray suit shouted, “Shut up!” and raised his gun in the air again. There was a sudden, abrupt silence broken only by the now-quiet sobs of the woman in the blue dress.
In that sudden silence, the telltale sounds of a cell phone being dialed were startlingly loud. Instantly and without warning, the man in the gray suit whirled and shot into the group behind him. There was a sudden surge of alarmed cries and screams of fright which were cut off abruptly when the man shot into the ceiling again. In the sudden silence, a gurgling groan of pain tapered into a wet cough and then into silence.
Into that silence, the man in the gray suit asked icily, “Anybody else want to try that?” He jerked his head at the armed man standing closest to the group behind him. “Get the phone.” He looked around at the other men with him. “Get all the phones.”
Some of the uniformed men began to move into the groups of people huddled on the floor. “Purses and bags, too,” the man in the gray suit added.
More cell phones were tossed into the open area as those guests who had ignored the first demand began to heed the second. Lois calmly slipped her own phone out of the evening bag she carried and into the pocket of the bolero, then tossed the bag out into the open space.
A young man in a military uniform moved into the group where the wounded man lay, stepping between the people huddled on the floor, who scrambled to move away from him. As the terrified men and women parted, Lois could see the person – a man - who had been shot. He was lying on his back on the floor next to a woman who was frantically patting at him; Lois recognized him as one of the event organizers. He had been handing out the tote bags at the door. As the soldier stooped and picked up the discarded cell phone, the woman looked up and said softly but clearly, “Please, can we get help for him…?”
Before the soldier could reply, the man in the gray suit pointed his gun directly at her. “Shut up!” he growled. She ceased speaking, staring back at him as tears ran silently down her face. The soldier moved out of the middle of the group and tossed the cell phone into the center of the floor with the others. Then he hesitated, looking at the man in the gray suit, who had moved up onto the dais with several of the other men and was rotating slowly in place, scanning over the huddled groups of people.
The soldier, a young Hispanic man, seemed to come to a decision. He removed the small pack he wore slung across his back by a strap that went over one shoulder and across his chest. Without speaking, he tossed the pack lightly into the group where the wounded man lay, and Lois could see the red cross on the pack – a first aid kit, then - as it landed at the woman’s feet. She looked at it, tears still streaming down her face, and then back at the armed man. He inclined his head slightly and gestured at the pack, then at the wounded man, then placed one finger across his lips in the universal gesture to indicate silence. She nodded and reached for the pack.
Lois’s attention was drawn again to the man in the gray suit when he snapped, “Juarez!”
Another of the soldiers, one of those standing watchfully on the dais with their guns cradled in their arms, moved forward.
“Where’s our weapon?” the man in the gray suit demanded.
Without replying, Juarez moved to the table and set down his gun. He removed his pack, slung across his back like the medic’s had been, and placed it on the head table. He unzipped the pack and removed a small box, set it on the table, picked up his gun again, and stepped back.
The man in the gray suit smiled coldly and nodded.
Apparently, this dull metallic gray box, then - no larger than a baseball - was a weapon. A bomb, maybe? Lois zeroed in it, and –
Nothing. She couldn’t see into it.
This wasn’t good. If she couldn’t see into it, the box had to be made of – or at least lined with – lead. She was almost sure that bombs didn’t need to be inside lead boxes. That led to a more ominous conclusion – the box was intended to block something. To either block something out – something like Superman’s vision – or to block something in.
Or both.
Lead was used to block radiation, wasn’t it?
Abruptly, she remembered Clark’s illness after the bank robbery. She’d discovered that several of his symptoms had mimicked radiation poisoning.
What if…
A chill flashed over her, raising goosebumps. What if the… thing, the substance, or whatever it was that had made Clark sick, was inside that box?
What if…
What if the goal wasn’t to block Superman’s seeing in, but to block something, like radiation, from getting out?
What if these men *wanted* Superman to come save the day?
She had to keep Clark away from here, at least until she figured out what these men wanted.
He hadn’t replied to her first telepathic call. Hopefully, he was still too far away, and too busy, to hear her. That was good; if he was too far away to hear her, he was too far away to hear about this situation. And if he didn’t hear about it, he wouldn’t come flying in here - and he would stay safe.
But she needed to find a way to stop these men before anyone else got hurt, including Superman.
She glanced at the dais; the man in gray was in a hushed discussion with the men nearest him. She tuned in briefly.
“You keep your men on the perimeter, and keep these people down and quiet. Howard, you and your men know what to do? I’ll want backup here with me, too. We don’t know its exact ETA, so stay alert…”
Standard leader-of-the-unit directions at this point. Was he talking about the arrival of reinforcements?
She and the others in this room might not be able to wait this out, then. She needed to find a way to summon help.
She felt the secret weight of her cell phone in the bolero’s pocket. She thanked fate that she’d silenced and set it to vibrate earlier in the evening, in deference to the speeches that had been planned. Clark hadn’t answered her attempt to contact him; she was going to have to resort to a more old fashioned means of summoning help.
And she needed to keep trying to reach Clark, to warn him to stay away.
She tried again. <*Clark!*>
No answer.
The next person on her list was Bill Henderson. She’d have to use her phone to contact him, of course, and then she’d try Clark again.
The group she was sitting with included several large men whose nametags announced they were from the Oregon Herald in Portland. She was sitting in a small huddle with Perry, Jimmy, and one of the newest sportswriters – the man who was supposed to have introduced his sister to Jimmy, she recalled. Strange how the most mundane thoughts came to mind in tense situations like this.
She glanced around; none of the armed men was paying any attention to her particular group. Perry, Jimmy, and the sportswriter – what was his name? Alan? Andy? No, Adam – sat with their backs to her, watching the men on the dais.
She shifted closer to Perry, squeezing in between him and Jimmy. Her move put her squarely behind a very large, very fat man who sat awkwardly with his legs splayed out in front of him, wheezing slightly. Her slight form was almost completely hidden from the view of the man in gray by the much larger men around her. Shifting further toward Perry, she put her back toward the men with the guns.
She leaned forward against Perry, hoping it looked like she was seeking comfort. As he reflexively put his arms around her, she ducked her head down against his chest and removed her cell phone from her jacket pocket. Holding it low, she silently dialed emergency and brought the phone up to her ear. When the dispatcher answered, she began giving him the vital information in a soft whisper.
Suddenly, she heard Jimmy whisper, “Perry!” urgently. In the same moment, she felt Perry tighten his arms around her, cradling her against him and rocking. He had one hand curved around the back of her head like Clark held her, and he was murmuring in a voice just loud enough to be overheard, “It’s okay, darlin’. Just do what they say and we’ll be all right…”
In this position, with her head buried against him, her ear, hand, and cell phone were hidden by her hair and the loose fold of his suit coat. Hastily, she whispered, “I have to go!” and hit end, slipping the phone up her sleeve just before she felt Perry jerk as one of the armed men prodded him in the back.
“Here, now – everybody’s hands where we can see ‘em,” the man said. Lois lifted her head, trying to project fear, twisting her hands nervously in her lap for added effect. And to keep the cell phone hidden up her sleeve. It must have worked, because the man paused and said more softly, “Ma’am, just stay still and quiet, okay? We won’t hurt you; it isn’t you we’re – he’s – after.”
She nodded, looking down as if in fear, and he moved on.
She looked up at Perry and Jimmy, and mouthed “thank you” at them. Keeping her fisted hands in her lap, she gave them a discreet thumbs-up.
They all turned as the man in the gray suit banged on the podium. There was a sudden low murmur of whispers and the rustle of clothing as people shifted around to face him. With a smile that reminded Lois of a snake about to strike, the man spoke. “Now that I have your attention…” He paused for effect. “I want Superman.”
“Who are you?”
It was a question Lois would have asked, but an older, distinguished-looking man in a classic tuxedo had got it in first. Lois recognized him as the editor in chief of the San Francisco Gazette; he and Perry had been chatting earlier in the evening.
The man in the gray suit moved to the side of the podium, resting his right arm casually across the front corner of it. The gun, in his right hand, pointed toward the floor. Tucking his other hand in the pocket of his suit jacket, he looked like a college professor about to start his lecture. A crazed college professor with a strange glint in his eye and a gun in his hand.
“My name is Jason Trask,” he said. “I represent the US government.”
A murmur of voices arose, broken again by the editor of the San Francisco Gazette. “What agency? What do you want with Superman?”
At the mention of the superhero, Trask’s manner changed abruptly. Straightening up to his full height, all traces of casualness gone, he pointed his gun directly at his questioner and barked, “Bureau 39. We’re charged with protecting the American people from an alien threat.”
The San Francisco Gazette editor, to his credit, held his ground, facing Trask with his head high. The only signs of his fear were his deathly pale face and the spasmodic clenching and unclenching of his fists. The two men stared at each other for long seconds, before Trask dropped the gun back to his side and began pacing agitatedly on the dais, spewing the usual ‘alien threat’ propaganda. There was a collective sort of sigh from the room as the San Francisco Gazette editor sank back against the woman sitting beside him.
Was this man, Trask, the one behind the Superman tests?
Neither Lois nor Clark had ever considered that Superman’s testers might belong to the military. But if these men were legitimate, the military – at least this covert agency Trask claimed to belong to - probably had unlimited resources, including ‘expendable’ men who could commit a relatively minor crime – mugging, bank robbery - on cue. Such men were probably rewarded with the equivalent of combat pay, and reduced or no jail time. No doubt there would be ‘technicalities’ that would result in a mistrial, or dismissal of charges.
And if this man – these men – were behind the Superman tests, then they’d apparently found something that could hurt Superman. She was almost positive that whatever it was that had hurt Clark that day was in that box on the table on the dais. And whatever it was had removed most of Clark’s powers for the remainder of that day. What would it do to him if he was exposed to it again?
She shuddered to think - if Clark hadn’t heard about that tunnel collapse before the convention…
She could never be thankful that such a tragedy had occurred, but she could be thankful that Clark had gone to help the victims and that by a sheer twist of fate he wasn’t escorting her tonight, as they’d originally planned. He wasn’t in immediate danger, and if she could keep him away…
Was there any way to warn him, though? She had no doubt that he would come when he heard that they’d all been taken hostage. She was equally sure that this situation would be on LNN shortly, if it wasn’t already. And she couldn’t have him zooming in to save the day until she knew exactly what weapon these men held. And more importantly, how to neutralize it.
<Clark?>
Her attention was drawn back to Trask as he laughed suddenly – a triumphant laugh that had her looking up frantically, wondering if Clark had arrived without her hearing him. There was no sign of the superhero, but before she could even draw a breath of relief, Trask moved to the table on the dais and picked up the small gray metal box.
“This is Bureau 39’s means of removing the alien threat, people!” He held up the box, which was slightly smaller than his hand, and then set it back on the table. He opened it and took out a chunk of glowing green rock roughly size of a golf ball, holding it up so that everyone could see it.
In the same instant that Trask opened the box, Lois felt a wave of… *ill*… unlike anything she could ever remember feeling before. She gasped softly, trying not to alert anyone to her distress, but unable to prevent herself from wrapping her arms around her middle.
Was this what Clark had felt? The room was tipping, and her stomach felt like it wanted to turn inside out, and there was a sharp pain building behind her eyes. <*Clark*?> Over her eyes.
She dimly heard someone say, “Put that thing back and shut that box, Jase! Geez, man!”
“Yeah,” someone else said. The voices seemed tinny and far away. “Anything that glows like that’s gotta be radioactive, Jason! Close it up ‘til we need it. I ain’t takin’ no chances it might mess up my innards, ya know?”
And the draining feeling of *ill* was gone again in the next instant, as she looked blearily at Trask in time to see him drop the rock casually back into the box and close the lid. Mixed with her relief was fear; was this green rock what Clark had been exposed to? Had it caused his temporary loss of powers?
And had it affected hers? She felt shaky, cold and sweaty, and her heart was pounding. But was that just the shock of the encounter? Or… She deliberately extended her hearing, expecting to pick up nothing.
<<…need to surround the building…>>
Oh!
Lifting her head slightly, she extended her sight, looking at the wall… through the wall… and saw men in black t-shirts holding radios, and heavily armed men in the protective gear of SWAT teams.
Okay. Good. Her powers were still there, it seemed. Some of them, anyway. She couldn’t exactly test the strength or flying, but her special vision and hearing were working.
And it looked like the emergency dispatcher had heard her whispered message.
She straightened up from her instinctively hunched posture to see Perry looking at her in concern. Very softly, he whispered, “Are you all right, darlin’?”
She nodded. “Yeah,” she breathed, “Just…” She scrambled for an explanation. “…just worried, and… and sick with how casually he shot that man…”
Perry’s mouth was a grim line as he nodded. “We need help,” he said, still whispering. “But how can… anyone help us?”
She knew he meant, how could Superman save them. No one but her – and Clark – knew that the rock actually did affect Superman, but Trask’s rabid belief and his men’s obvious fear of the green glowing rock were undoubtedly helping to convince their captives to believe in its power.
She tuned back in to Trask, who was pacing on the dais again. “You people don’t seem to understand the threat here. There’s this… *thing* in our midst. It’s just waiting to take us over, take over our world and enslave us all!”
Without really thinking about it, she opened her mouth to defend Superman, but before she could say a word, someone else beat her to it.
“Superman is not evil! He’s good! He’s helped a lot of people! How can you –“ The speaker, a young woman, was climbing to her feet.
“See? You’re already infected!” Trask interrupted her, and in the same moment, he lifted his gun and shot her. Without a sound, the woman went down, as the room erupted in shouts and screams and cries of alarm.
“Damn it, Jase, what’d you do that for?” one of the men in black demanded.
“Shut up!” Trask barked at him.
He shot into the ceiling again, and in the abrupt silence, he barked, “Anybody else?”
Lois kept her mouth shut, hands fisted, and suddenly realized that Perry had a hand clamped tightly around her upper arm, hard enough to bruise if she hadn’t been invulnerable.
He knew her so well!
But she didn’t need Perry to stop her. While she burned to argue, to protest as that poor woman had, the thought of what could happen held her back. That could have been her. If she’d been the first to speak up – if she’d been the one who was shot, and then exposed as invulnerable… She had a very good idea of what this madman would do. He’d probably expose her to the green rock again, and then kill her.
And she had to protect Clark! She couldn’t – wouldn’t – allow these men to harm him.
She looked back at the group where both the woman and the man Trask had shot earlier lay. As she watched, the soldier who’d tossed his first aid pack to the man’s companion moved closer to the group.
The young medic hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. Glancing at the dais, he moved slowly into the group. Again, people moved out of his way. Stooping to pick up the first aid pack, he straightened long enough to beckon to another young soldier standing on the far side of the same group. He pointed toward where the wounded woman lay, gestured again for silence, and then knelt on the floor at the wounded man’s side.
The second young man nodded and moved carefully into the group, who parted in front of him. As he removed his pack and knelt by the wounded woman, Lois saw that it, too, had a red cross on it.
Trask either didn’t notice the two medics or didn’t care. He had resumed his pacing, and his agitation seemed to be growing. He was sweating profusely, and some of his men seemed to be growing uneasy with his constant motion. Several of them had moved closer to the dais; she wasn’t sure what they were expecting, but the tension level seemed to have risen.
This maniac had to be stopped, but it looked like she might be on her own this time. And she had no idea how to resolve this without revealing herself or risking the lives of her friends and the people around her.
She still had her powers. Unless the green rock’s effects weren’t immediate? Clark had been able to fly after encountering it, after all. For a little while, anyway. She looked up at the ceiling, and then… yes, she could see through it. Good. She released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
It had to have been this rock that had affected Clark. There couldn’t possibly be *two* entirely different individuals or groups, with *two* entirely different, effective means of harming Superman, could there? That was entirely *too* coincidental, even for someone who believed in coincidences – which she did not. No, it had to be one and the same group. So this Trask guy was the person she and Clark had been seeking.
Now all she had to do was find a way to stop him. She looked carefully through the outer walls of the ballroom again. The SWAT team – from the number of men, it might be more than one team - were still moving around, and there was a command station being set up across the street. The street had apparently been blocked at both ends; there was no moving traffic on it, anyway.
Maybe she could cause some sort of diversion that would allow the SWAT teams to enter…
But what?
---
To be continued
Author's Notes: None, today, because the ones that apply to this segment would amount to spoilers.
