Scrubbing at the blood on her hands, Lois stared at herself in the grimy bathroom mirror. In the harsh neon glare of the bathroom light she looked pale and washed out. The bruises on her face were already fading and the swelling was slowly going down.
She closed her eyes for a moment and flinched as a flash of memory came over her. The sensation of her hands crunching bone was something that was going to haunt her nightmares for a long time.
Lois Lane had been sure she was going to die tonight. In a way, she almost wished she had.
Of all the risks she’d taken, this one shouldn’t have been any different.than the others. Somehow it had.
She never would have gotten out alive if it hadn’t been for the voice.
“Are you ready to be strong?” The voice had rung out in her ear even though no one had spoken the words. Somehow, they’d compelled her, drawn her in, given her strength that she never would have imagined her having.
That strength had kept her alive, but it had come with a price.
She was going to have to live with what she had done for the rest of her life.
***********
Lois felt as though she was walking through a dream. She’d double checked her makeup and the swelling of her right eye was barely noticeable. The bruises had already faded with an unnatural speed.
She looked professional as always, and she held herself erect. There was no reason that anyone else had to know about her own personal hell. They already avoided her. The people at the office only tolerated her because she got results.
Risks had carried her to three Merriweather awards, and her current story might get her nominated for a Pulitzer. For someone who was only twenty six, it was an impressive resume.
Risk had carried her to the top, and it was only now that Lois found herself wondering if it had all been worth it.
The story she had in her hands might win her a Pulitzer, and the thought of it should have filled her with joy. Instead, all she felt was numb.
Her hands still shook when she wasn’t paying attention.
She walked through the Bullpen, wondering when everything had gotten so quiet. The place was almost deserted, although she could hear the television blaring from the conference room.
She stepped through the door, to find a crowd of people who had their eyes glued to the television.
The picture of a massive crater, dwarfed by the tiny trucks and vehicles parked by the rim was stark, as were pictures of refugees huddled in busses.
She saw Perry White, her editor get up silently and slide around the periphery of the room. He stepped outside the conference room and said in a low voice, “Where have you been honey? I’ve been worried about you.”
He stared at her, and Lois had a sense that she wasn’t fooling him with all the makeup.
“I’ve got the gunrunning story. I just got back from the airport.”
“From the Congo?”
“I flew through London.”
She hadn’t bothered to try to sleep, knowing that it would be useless. Instead, she’d used her time productively, writing story after story that would be the end of these men.
What they did to people was a crime.
“I have the proof to nail them to the wall. I’m going to have the story that’s going to…”
plane “Give me what you have. The rest you’ll have to finish up on the plane,” Perry said. “I almost sent the new hire out on the Sunnydale story by himself.”
“Sunnydale?”
“The crater back there. It was a town in California with a population of thirty eight thousand. Nobody seems to know what happened.”
“Terrorists?” Lois asked. The only thing she could think of that would do that kind of damage was a meteor impact, or an underground nuclear detonation. The Meteor strike would have been observed.
Perry shrugged. “Keep your traveling clothes together, and I’ll have you on a flight with your new partner.”
“Partner?” Lois scowled. She’d tried having partners in the past, but it had never worked. She’d always ended up driving them away.
In the end it had become clear to her that she worked better alone. No one else was willing to take the risks she did.
“He’s just the man we need for this.” There was a strange certainty in Perry’s voice that worried Lois.
Perry gestured, and a handsome man smoothly rose from his seat and smiled at her.
Lois fought to keep from scowling again. She hated handsome men. They were full of themselves and they generally weren’t all that bright either.
“Clark Kent, I’d like you to meet Lois Lane.”
*************
“Let’s get things straight before we go any further,” Lois said as he packed the last of the suitcases in the back of the taxi, making it look effortless. With her newfound strength, which seemingly hadn’t gone away, Lois could have matched that feat, but she was still impressed.
“You like to be top banana,” Clark said, interrupting her. “You call the shots, and I look and learn.”
Lois frowned. “You’ve been talking to people at the office?”
“I watch people,” he said. “Sometimes I can be a pretty good judge of character.”
“Well, I also don’t like being interrupted. I’m the top banana, and I’m the lead reporter on this. You are the new man here, the low man on the totem pole. Where did you say you were from again?”
“I didn’t.” Clark opened the door for her, and gestured for her to get in. The cabbie inside looked bored.
“Let me guess. You come from one of the red states in the middle of the country. You are a country boy, and you still think it’s polite to rise when a woman enters the room.”
Clark nodded. “I can square dance too.” He slipped into the taxi beside her. Closing the door, he leaned forward and said “The Airport please.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“A small town named Smallville.”
Lois smirked and looked away for a moment. The handsome man was nothing more than a good looking farmer.
She could work with him, if he was as naïve as he pretended to be.
Now all she had to worry about was this collapsed city, and the source of her mysterious new strength.
And she’d have to come to terms with her own guilt. Luckily, Lois Lane could achieve anything if she set her mind to it.
She was asleep a moment after she found her seat on the plane.
Startled, Lois jerked awake. She had fading memories of dreams of men with demonic looking faces, of fighting, blood and death.
She’d had enough of that in real life to be surprised that it followed in her dreams.
It took her a moment to realize that she was laying with her head on her partner’s shoulder. She glanced up at him, only to see that he was looking down at her with amusement.
Pulling herself quickly to an upright position, she said, “How far are we from Las Angeles? “
“You’ve been asleep for almost nine hours,” Clark said. “We had a layover and the stewardess thought you were drunk.”
Lois stared at him, wondering if he was teasing her. It was hard to tell given his bland expression. She had a feeling that he’d practiced fading into the woodwork. It was a good skill for an undercover reporter.
“We’ve got about thirty minutes before we land.” Clark said. “The good news is that we’ve got a vehicle. The bad news is that there aren’t any places to stay within a two hundred mile radius.”
Lois frowned.
“Thirty five thousand people or so have flooded every hotel, motel, bed and breakfast and private home willing to rent in the area.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Clark looked embarrassed. “I have friends in the area, an we’ll stay with them.”
“Of course you do.” Lois said.
“They live about an hour out from the crater.” Clark said. “It’ll be fun.”
***************
Lois stared at the small collection of Spanish style houses covered in red tile roofs. They were clustered together among the rolling hills, but the weather was hot and the countryside was brown. There had been a drought here, she remembered.
Smiling widely, Clark Kent was embraced by the large family. They were well dressed Latin-Americans, who seemed genuinely fond of Clark. They spoke to him in rapid Spanish, and he replied to them in the same language.
The children didn’t seem to have any concept of boundaries, and Lois found herself involuntarily pulling away as they attempted to hug her as well.
She was soon pulled to her room, an airy room with an old fashioned ceiling fan and an old fashioned bed.
Dropping her suitcases to the hardwood floors, Lois winced at the heavy thump they’d made. She was carrying several of them, and she’d forgotten how heavy they were. Luckily, Clark hadn’t seemed to notice.
There were lovely Spanish rugs on the floor and pictures of laughing children covered the walls, which were painted brightly in reds and pinks.
The window opened out into a view of the hills and it was large enough that she could have crawled out of it. She would only have a little drop. She wondered how they managed without bars on the windows, or any of the other little protections that she had come to be used to in Metropolis.
Small town people were too trusting. Here they were accepting her into their home, a woman they knew nothing about.
For all they knew, she could be an ax-murderer.
She closed her eyes at the sudden image of blood on her hands.
**************
The motor homes and RV’s had already proliferated into a sort of shanty town at the edge of the crater. None of the vehicles belonged to the former residents. Instead, they’d all been rented out by news networks. Satellite dishes sprouted from the roofs of the vehicles, and helicopters flew over the rim of the crater.
The crater was vast. More than five miles in diameter, and several hundred feet deep, it was already the focus of a massive rescue operation. Deep in the crater, men were combing the rubble for any sighs of survivors, or failing that, any evidence of what had happened here.
“There is no evidence that this is the result of a terrorist attack, but we are investigating all possibilities.” Carl Braithwait was a mid level FEMA employee who looked more like a heavyset accountant. In all likelihood that was exactly what he had once been.
He was sweating at the podium, and to the gathered crowd of reporters, it was like chum in the water.
“So there is no sign that this was the result of an underground nuclear detonation?” One reporter asked quickly.
“Radiation readings are normal at every place in the crater we have measured so far. The size of the detonation needed to create a crater this size would leave evidence that we just don’t see.”
“What’s the working theory then?” Another reporter stood up and asked the question.
“We believe that the town of Sunnydale was built on top of an unstable system of caverns that eventually collapsed in on itself.”
“Who warned the citizens of Sunnydale to evacuate the city,” Lois asked. “And if they had several days warning, why wasn’t anyone else informed of the dangers?”
“You’ll have to ask the citizens themselves why they all decided to leave at the same time. As far as we can tell, there was no government involvement in the evacuation at all. This came as a surprise to us as much as to anyone.”
Lois scowled as the next woman stood up to ask her question. There was something rotten here, and she knew it.
A young man in a black t-shirt and with several piercing stood up and said, “What about the weirdness that was the city before the collapse? Is anyone ready to talk about the truth about the city of Sunnydale?”
“I’m here to focus on the crisis at hand. We are doing everything we can to rescue any possible survivors, and trying to find a solution as to the relocation of the people who lived here. This is an insurance crisis as well as a humanitarian one.”
Neatly sidestepping the question. “Have there been any survivors found?” Lois asked.
Braithwait shook his head. Before he could ask anyone else, she followed with another question. “How many bodies have you found?”
“At last count, thirty seven,” he said. “Seventeen were seniors trapped in a nursing home. It is a national chain and there will be an investigation.”
“Is there fear of looting?” The reporter who asked this was particularly stupid looking.
“It takes special equipment just to get down into the crater.” Braitwait wiped his head. “And whatever treasures might be left are buried under tons of rock and rubble. Worrying about looters is a low priority at the moment.”
As he spoke, Lois pulled out her cell phone and quickly sent a text message to Jimmy.
“Research Sunnydale. Full background, esp. weirdness. Lois.”
A moment later there was a reply.
“Already on it. Information tonight.”
The rest of the press conference was a bust.
**************
“There aren’t any survivors,” Clark said stubbornly.
“I covered the earthquake in Mexico and they were still finding people weeks later.”
Shaking his head, Clark said “I looked….there’s nothing that could have survived all that. It’s a waste of time.”
“Tell that to the families of the dead.” Lois said.
At least a list of the dead was going to be released. How long it would be was an open question. With so many people displaced, there wasn’t any good way to contact relatives beforehand.
Lois grabbed one of Clark’s fries, already regretting her choice of a salad and tuna sandwich. She was ravenous, more than could be accounted for by what she’d eaten.
It felt as though she could eat her meal and his too, and Clark Kent ate like a teenager.
“How do you eat like that,” she asked. Full cream in his coffee, fatty hamburger, double order of fries, milkshake, pie. Kent was a fat man in a fit man’s body, and she envied him.
He pushed the basket of fries in her direction, and she smiled at him gratefully before shoveling most of them onto her empty salad plate.
“Jimmy is going to investigate the town, so our next step is to find people who were in town the day it fell.”
Clark got a sudden far off look in his eyes. He turned to her and said, “I’ll get started on that. I’ll do some leg work and meet you back at the villa.”
Tossing her the keys to the rental, and throwing some money down on the table, Clark stood up and quickly left the building.
He didn’t even have a vehicle.
Edited post header to include part no.
