Stepping out of the café, Lois scanned the street outside. She’d grabbed the keys almost as soon as he’d left, and there shouldn’t have been time for him to get very far.
It was a narrow street filled with closely parked cars. There wasn’t anywhere for her partner to have gone in either direction; there weren’t any alleyways or intersection streets for most of a city block.
Lois scowled as she walked quickly down the street toward the rental. Ditching her was unprofessional, and she was going to let Perry know exactly what she thought of her new partner. She was Lois Lane, and she would be treated with respect.
It felt good to be angry. Anger was a familiar emotion, one she’d had a great deal of experience channeling into positive outcomes.
It had only failed her once. Lois suppressed a shudder, and then stopped as she came to the rental.
Someone had parked barely a foot away from the front bumper, and someone else had parked almost as close from the back. There was no way she was ever going to be able to squeeze out of the parking space as it was. Worse, Perry had already read her the riot act about damaging rentals, after a few unfortunate incidents involving car chases.
People were so rude. It had always irritated her, but the longer she stood and stared at it, the angrier it made her.
She glanced over at the business the car was parked in front of. The beat of loud music played from inside, and there was some sort of cheesy gothic design on the front sign.
The street was deserted though.
Slipping her keys into a front pocket, Lois reached down and grabbed the rear bumper of the car in front of her. Although she’d seen some of what her strength could do, she had never really tested it.
The rear of the car came up, and a moment later, the tires came up as well. It was a strain, but Lois didn’t feel as though she was hurting anything important.
She shoved the car a few inches out in the street. She then moved to the front and shoved that a few inches forward.
Lois Lane had always hated rudeness.
***********
Lois smirked as she stared in the rear view mirror. She’d called to report a car parked out in the middle of the street, and the tow truck had already arrived. It was petty of her, but somehow she felt a little better.
She pulled into drive and headed back for the villa. She was grateful that she’d driven on the way out to the conference, or she would have missed the turn onto the dirt road leading to the Cortez home.
Pulling up next to a seeming fleet of cars, she put the car into park and sat for a moment. The sun had long ago gone down, and Lois could feel the wind turning cooler.
She got out of the car and headed for the back. Their rooms had their own doors, so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their hosts. Another door led to an interior courtyard with a beautiful garden.
Lois needed access to her computer to see what Jimmy had come up with. Maybe then she could start writing up a preliminary story for the Planet.
As she approached her door, she saw the patriarch of the family leaning against the wall. He was lighting a cigar and staring up at the sky.
“Senor Cortez,” she said. Under ordinary circumstances, she would be wary about being alone at nigh with a man she did not know, but since the change, she knew the truth.
He should worry about being alone with her.
“Senorita Lane,” the man said, nodding in her direction. He was a man in his sixties, and gray was just beginning to creep into his moustache.
She hesitated, and then asked, “How does your family know Mr. Kent?”
“He saved the life of my granddaughter,” the older man said. “In my culture, we do not forget such things.”
“How did he…?” Lois frowned. She hadn’t pegged Clark Kent as the physically brave type.
“He was a drifter…he found work with us on the ranch. When Anna went missing, lost in the hills, he found her and brought her back after she’d been bitten by a snake.”
So he had just been part of the rescue effort. It didn’t help much in getting a better picture of who her partner was.
“Anna thought he was an angel come to take her.” The older man chuckled. “She was delirious at the time. It was a miracle that he even found her in the first place. She was miles away from where any of the rest of us thought to look.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cortez.” Lois hesitated. “Do you know anything about Sunnydale?”
The old man spat on the ground. “La Boca del Infierno. The Spanish always had sense enough to avoid that place. Only the gringos were stupid enough to move there.”
“There was something wrong with it?” Lois asked. She’d felt something the first time she’d seen the crater, a sense of slowly fading evil, but she’d dismissed it as jet lag.
“It was a cursed place. My Maria drove an extra thirty minutes just to avoid shopping there.”
The old man extinguished the cigar with a small brass device from his pocket. “I’m going to bed. If you know what’s good for you, you will as well. Things escaped when the city collapsed, and the hills aren’t as safe as they once were.”
Before Lois could ask another question, he slipped around the corner and was gone.
Frowning, Lois found her key and stepped inside her room. A few moments allowed her to connect her laptop to the telephone line.
A few moments later she was inside the US census database. California as a whole was racially diverse. Latinos, Asians, African Americans…it was an ethnic and cultural melting pot, more so than in most parts of the country. Only half the population was Caucasian.
Sunnydale had been almost ninety eight percent Caucasian. Lois frowned. Something definitely wasn’t right here, especially as housing prices in Sunnydale were a third of the price anywhere else in the state. Those prices had kept dropping over a period of several years even as the rest of the state had skyrocketing property prices.
Lois checked her e-mail. Jimmy hadn’t sent her an attachment yet, and all of a sudden she was waiting anxiously. She could tell that she was only hitting the tip of the iceberg with this story, and there was something desperately wrong with that town.
Cursed. It was how she had been feeling about herself since she’d begun changing.
She jerked compulsively as there was a knock at the door.
Her partner stepped into the room, and Lois said, “Where have you been? I looked all over for…”
“They’ve found more than a hundred bodies.” Clark said. “Buried by a gas station just past the edge of the crater.”
He handed her a photo. It was an aerial photo of ambulances gathered to collect bodies, even as police were digging up a mass communal grave.
Lois was already gathering her coat.
***************
Trees flashed by rapidly as Clark made his way expertly through the winding, unlit path. There had been a time when Lois would have been almost blind; it was a moonless night and the only light came from the headlights, which didn’t reach that far in front of them.
Since the change, the darkness didn’t seem as all encompassing. She could see all around them, and for a moment she thought of asking Clark to drive. Apparently, he also had very good night vision, because he never seemed to make a mistake, slowing even before she saw the deer which tried to run out into the road.
For some reason, the bodies were being transported by refrigerated trucks to the San Louis Obispo county morgue instead of further up or down coast. This required a trip through the Los Padres National forest, something that didn’t make sense to Lois, but which Clark explained as being due to overcrowding in the Los Angeles morgues.
“How did you get the aerial photo?” she asked, not looking at her partner. He’d certainly come through professionally, but she was still angry about being ditched.
Clark Kent coughed and said “I have a friend who is a helicopter pilot.”
He was lying. Lois wasn’t sure why, but she filed it away for another time. There would be time enough o teach him the error of his ways.
“How are we going to get the coroner to talk?” she asked.
“I know the Assistant Coroner,” Clark said. He stared at the road and didn’t look at her.
So there were reasons Perry had sent Clark on this assignment. He knew the area, he had connections. Lois was beginning to feel like the third wheel. She hoped she didn’t have to get between the man and his ego.
“So we won’t be using her name in the story.”
It was a shot in the dark, but his slight flinch told her she was correct. Lois pursed her lips. She should have known that a man who looked like her partner would have a checkered past.
Glancing at her, Clark said, “She’s a member of the Cortez family.”
The same family that loved Clark for having saved their little girl.
“They certainly get around.” She said.
Clark shrugged. He tapped the brake sharply and a moment later Lois saw a deer dart out in front of them. This one didn’t stop, and Clark smoothly missed it.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“I had some training driving as a bodyguard for a Nigerian princess,” he said. He glanced at her and smirked. “She taught me to dance.”
Lois had taken the combat driving course before going to the Congo. It hadn’t done her much good, and she wasn’t sure how it would apply now. Before the change she would have hit the deer almost certainly.
Now she wasn’t sure. She doubted that she would have been able to do it as smoothly as Clark Kent had.
“You missed your profession, Smallville,” Lois said uneasily. “You should be at the Indianapolis 500.”
He smiled at her. “Who says I haven’t?”
“What, you’re a world traveler?”
“I’ve been traveling the world for the past five years, and I did some traveling in college.”
“Trust fund baby?” Lois asked.
Clark shook his head. “My parents are farmers in Kansas. I just discovered that it’s possible to go anywhere if you are willing to undergo a little hardship.”
Mr. Cortez had described him as a drifter.
“You never wrote for any major paper?”
“The London Times, the New York Times…I’ve written a few things for the AP. Mostly I did freelance work for smaller papers. I did an article for the Borneo Gazette about the mating habits of…”
Lois gestured irritably. “I’m not interesting in mating habits. I want to know about this case.”
“They’ve found eighty nine bodies so far, most were buried about three feet underground in shallow graves. One of the graves intersected with the Sunnydale pit, and a searcher noticed an arm hanging out. There’s no telling if more bodies are inside the pit, although the searchers don’t seem to think so.”
“I just don’t see how someone could kill eighty nine people without it being noticed.”
“There are a hundred thousand missing person's cases active at any given time,” Clark said. “People like Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy…sometimes they get away with it for years.”
Lois scowled and stared out the window again.
The rest of the trip was silent.
*************
Lois had always hated morgues. They had the usual hospital smell to them, of disinfectants and other chemicals, and underlying that, she’d always thought she could sense an underlying smell of rot.
They were purposefully isolated, and often underground. It was probably easier to insulate the cadavers.
There were refrigerated trucks pulled around the back of the building. Lois could hear the sound of humming coming from the trucks, and the sounds of a gasoline generator somewhere farther behind.
There were too many bodies for the facility, and some of them were going to have to stay in the trucks.
Lois felt nervous. Someone was going to have to check on the generators and the refrigeration equipment fairly regularly, or a mistake could be disastrous.
There was a double set of large metal doors in the back, with a smaller door off to the side. The door clicked open, and an attractive Latino woman gestured for them to come in.
A moment later they were walking quickly down a long hall toward an elevator.
The woman, who was wearing a lab coat, quietly went to the door next to the elevator, and they slipped down the stairs.
“My boss is upstairs,” the woman said finally when they reached the bottom. “He gets curious when he hears the elevator moving.”
She pushed open another set of double doors, and they were inside the morgue.
There were five bodies draped in sheets. On one wall were row upon row of metal drawers, which held bodies. To the right was the door to the freezer.
A large African-American man was scrubbing his hands at a sink.
“This is Marcus, my Diener.” The woman said.
The man looked up at them and nodded curtly before going back to scrubbing himself.
As a Diener, he was the man who actually manhandled the bodies, moving them from place to place and assisting the coroner.
The woman turned and said, “My name is Angela Cortez. I don’t normally make a habit of speaking with the press.”
There would be legal problems if she did speak about ongoing investigations. The implication was that she wanted her name out of the paper.
“We won’t implicate you,” Lois said. “Can you tell me what you’ve found?”
“I’ve only done five autopsies,” Angela said, “but I’ve had a preliminary look at thirty other bodies. My boss is upstairs doing other autopsies, and I suspect he won’t find anything different.”
Lois didn’t say anything, and Angela stepped over to the nearest body. Pulling the cover carefully aside, she showed the decaying face of a mustachioed man.
Putting one hand to her nose because of the smell, Lois leaned forward. The man had a tattoo on his head. She couldn’t make out the design due to the discoloration of his face.
“If they’d been buried any more shallowly, we’d be looking at bones. As it is, the estimated time of death is approximately two to three years ago.”
“You can’t pin the time down any more closely,” Lois asked.
“These are preliminary results.” The woman said.
“All the bodies were killed at the same time?” Clark asked.
The woman nodded. “All the ones I’ve examined so far, anyway. What I’ve seen of my bosses results show the same thing.”
“How did they die?”
“Blunt force trauma, mostly. Broken bones, crushed skulls, occasional puncture wounds that weren’t made by anything sharp. Some of them had limbs torn completely off.”
Lois frowned. “Somebody stabbed them with something blunt?”
“I found this in the back of one man’s eye socket.” Angelica turned to a nearby drawer and pulled out a clearly labeled evidence bag.
Inside was a single, broken red fingernail.
“Someone dropped that in while they were burying the bodies?” Clark asked.
Angelica shook her head. “It was buried in the back of the eye socket.”
Lois stared at the coroner for a long moment, feeling nauseous. She could remember the feeling of bone shattering under her hands, and it took her a moment to realize the full implications.
The coroner began to drone on about blunt force trauma, about crushed skulls, about impact points and pre-mortem injuries.
This was something Lois was capable of doing. As she hadn’t, it meant that she wasn’t the only person to have changed.
She didn’t wonder why Clark had the same look of sick realization on his face as she did.
