Angelica droned on and on about the causes of death. Blunt force trauma, the occasional piercing wounds, limbs ripped off. The litany of death went on and on, and Lois found herself becoming more and more nauseous.
“Were they wearing anything that would give some clue to their identities?” she asked, interrupting. Anything would be better than listing all the possible ways a human being could be killed by someone else with their bare hands.
“They were wearing custom made armor,” Angelica said. “Helmets, mail shirts, armored gloves…the full regalia.”
“Movie props?” Clark asked.
Angelica shook her head. “Well made and useable. No recognizable armorer’s mark. They were armed with swords, maces, and crossbows…all medieval weapons without a single modern pistol or rifle among them.”
“Could they have done this to each other?” Lois asked, hoping for an alternative explanation. “Some of these wounds could have been made by a hammer or mace…”
“The heads of the weapons are too large for the impact areas. I haven’t seen any of the maces with a small enough head to have done the sort of damage we’ve seen, although some of the crushed skulls might have been.”
“Anything else?” Lois asked.
Angelica nodded. “I haven’t done the autopsy on this last fellow here, and Marcus just pulled his armor off before you got here.”
She pulled back the sheet to reveal a desiccated corpse wearing some sort of strange cotton undergarment.
“Do you recognize this?” Lois asked.
Both Clark and Angelica shook their heads.
Marcus, the morgue attendant spoke up for the first time. “It’s a Vestis Angelica.”
“What?”
“I took a class at UC Sunnydale,” the man said, sounding embarassed. “A Vestis Angelica is a monastic garment that laymen wore shortly before their death, that they might have the benefit of monks’ prayers.”
“So these men thought they were going to die soon.” Lois glanced at Clark, knowing he was wondering the same thing as she was. Was this some sort of suicide cult?
“I think it was a custom in Europe back in the middle ages. Today it’s mostly continued in Italy and Spain. I don’t recognize the religious order these things are dedicated to. If you get much past the Dominicans or the Franciscans, I’m lost.”
Lois leaned forward. There was a small design on the undergarment that looked like the same design on the tattoos.
“Are all the tattoos the same?” Clark asked.
“All the ones we’ve seen so far anyway.” Angelica said quietly.
“Were you in Sunnydale when it…?” Lois asked, staring at the man. They needed interviews with survivors, but from what she was hearing from Perry, the survivors were uncharacteristically silent, even to the television reporters.
The day a Californian didn’t want to be on television was the day something was wrong.
“I had the sense to get out three years ago,” he said. “It meant transferring schools, but it was worth it.”
“What can you tell me about Sunnydale?” Lois asked.
The man scowled and turned away to wash his hands again. This time he seemed to do it compulsively.
“I worked at the coroner’s office in Sunnydale for a month before I got out. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Why?” Lois asked.
“Check the death statistics,” he said. His face was closed, and she could tell she wasn’t going to get more out of him without extensive prying.
Lois stiffened, and she noticed that Clark did as well. She could hear the sounds of stealthy movements in the hallway outside.
Angelica and Marcus didn’t appear to have heard anything.
Lois gestured toward the door, and Angelica’s eyes widened. If her boss found her in the morgue with two reporters, her career could be over.
Angelica gestured toward the vault, and Lois nodded, as did Clark. They hustled toward the refrigerated vault, the door closing behind them just as Lois heard a muffled voice on the other side of the door. She couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to go on and on and on.
It was bitingly, freezing cold, and Lois wasn’t dressed for it. She began shivering, and Clark pulled off his suit jacket and gave it to her.
Lois would have protested, but she was too cold to care. She was wearing a skirt, and her legs were starting to feel numb. Luckily, his jacket covered her to the knees, and it was amazingly warm and comfortable as it enveloped her.
Clark looked at her, and a moment later. Lois thought the cold seemed to recede a little, and the jacket seemed to feel warmer. She huddled against a wall, and Clark huddled close to her.
Lois ignored the bodies laid out on the shelves behind her. There wasn’t anything she wanted to see.
A moment later she jerked as the door to the vault opened.
“I’m sorry,” Angelica said. “You have to get out of here. He’s bringing some observer’s down for the next autopsy.”
Lois nodded, and the two of them stepped out into the autopsy room.
Slipping her heels off, she and Clark dashed down the hall. She heard the sound of the elevator door opening, along with the chime that usually accompanied it.
She sprinted down the hall, with Clark right behind her. They both slipped through the door to the stairs a moment before the elevator opened. Clark had the door in his hand, and he held it slightly open, so the noise of the door closing wouldn’t alert whoever was coming out of the elevator.
Three men in black suits followed a heavyset man in a green operating gown.
Clark allowed the door to click shut only after the men were halfway down the hall.
**********
The identical Crown Victorias with government plates parked in front of the building were only conformation of what Lois already expected.
“FBI?” she asked Clark quietly.
He nodded, staring intently over his glasses into the car. Even with her improved night sight, Lois couldn’t make out anything incriminating, and even she wasn’t about to break into an FBI vehicle.
Clark glanced behind him and said, “Let’s get out of here before they get back.”
Lois nodded, and they quickly headed for the rental car. They’d parked it a moderate distance away in accordance to Angela’s wishes.
“Do you really think they were a suicide cult?” Lois asked.
“Or they knew that something out there might kill them.” Clark said grimly. He looked at Lois for a moment and said, “I’m getting the feeling that we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg here.”
“Jimmy should have the information for us. I’ll check it online when I get back.”
As Clark slipped the vehicle into drive, Lois wondered if she should have insisted on driving. At home, she never would have let anyone else drive, but Clark was familiar with the area, and she was always so tired. She hadn’t felt rested, no matter how much she slept.
She realized she was still wearing Clark’s jacket, but she felt warm and comfortable. A few minutes into the trip she began to drift off.
******************
She was surrounded by rock walls, the only light coming from a cave entrance. Three men stood before her, and when she tried to move she discovered that she was somehow chained down.
They spoke in a language she didn’t understand, and she screamed as darkness began to rise from the walls and the floor. It woke, and began to pour toward her, an inexorable tide of evil.
It flowed over her, and a moment later she was choking on it.
*******************
Lois jerked awake, dismayed to realize that she was sweating profusely. Clark had turned the heater on full blast, and inside his coat she’d been too warm.
She could still taste the darkness, smell it. Instinctively she knew that it tainted everything it touched.
It would explain why she’d done what she’d did.
The car pulled to a stop, and Lois stepped out quickly. She was exhausted and looking for something to blame on her own bad choices.
She’d made the choice to kill, and now she was going to have to live with it for the rest of her life.
Mysterious strength or no, there had been nothing forcing her to make the choices she had, other than the circumstances.
There was an unfamiliar car in the Cortez parking lot, and Lois wondered who might be coming here at this hour of the night.
She headed for the front entrance way instead of the back, and Lois was surprised to see a familiar face.
“Jimmy?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was originally assigned to your seat on the plane,” he said. “After the things I found out about Sunnydale…and didn’t, the Chief wanted me to come down here and see if I could find out anything more concrete.”
“What’s going on?” Lois asked.
She gestured for him to come inside, and he did.
Several of the Cortez family were watching from a common living area, and for some reason, the moment Jimmy stepped over the threshold, they visibly relaxed.
“The records online have been tampered with,” Jimmy said. “But there’s a lot of evidence from home web sites that disagrees with the official record. I’m going to look at copies of the paper they have in Las Angeles to see if I can find out anything.”
Lois led Jimmy through the courtyard and toward her room. She gestured for Clark to come in as well.
As soon as the door closed, Jimmy said, “There’s a massive conspiracy around this place, and I have proof.”
Jimmy had brought a small suitcase and a larger computer bag with him. He dropped the suitcase on the floor, and pulled a thick file folder out of the bag. He opened it on the table and glanced through it, flipping through several pages.
“I was investigating Sunnydale like I was asked, and I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Everything seemed pretty standard for a California town of thirty eight thousand people and change.”
Lois sat slowly on the bed, certain that there was more to the story.
“There were a few anomalies…Sunnydale had a college campus, an airport, a train and bus station…too much for a town of that size. Someone had to have some heavy political clout over the years to attract all of that business.”
“Well, it’s a county seat…” Lois said slowly.
Jimmy shook his head. “I found personal blogs and web pages from people who had been living in Sunnydale at the time, and what they say is a lot different than the official line. Some of it is pretty far out there…accusing the government of conspiracies, talking about the supernatural…”
“Well, the internet isn’t exactly the most reliable source for information.” Lois said.
Giving her a sour look, Jimmy grabbed a sheet from the folder. Glancing at it, he said, “In June 1999, someone bombed one of the Sunnydale High schools, completely destroying it during the graduation ceremony. In the process, more than forty people were killed. Survivors talked about giant snakes and monsters attacking.”
Lois glanced at Clark. That should have been national news, the sort of news that ran for months as CNN and MSNBC tried to decide who was to blame. Although she had been in her first year as a reporter, she should have heard about that. She hadn’t heard a word.
“Earlier that year, a group of vigilantes attempted to burn several people at the stake, accusing them of witchcraft.”
Jimmy shifted uneasily in his seat and pulled another folder from the computer bag. He glanced at several papers inside.
“In December 1999, the entire town of Sunnydale came down with laryngitis, all at the same time. Yet somehow, the CDC denies any knowledge of this, and no one was sent to investigate.”
“I heard something about that,” Lois said. “Wasn’t it dismissed as a hoax?”
Jimmy hesitated and said, “What the reports that did come out didn’t mention were that there are reports of gangs of men in straitjackets being followed by ‘floating men’ through the middle of town, as well as several murders where victims had their hearts surgically removed.”
Lois saw Clark flinch at the mention of floating men. She resolved to ask him about it later.
He continued. “In February 2001, someone murdered thirty people on a train car entering Sunnydale. Yet it never made the news.”
“That should have been national news,” Lois said. “And nobody reported on it?”
Jimmy shrugged helplessly. “In November 2001, there are reports that people in Sunnydale were singing and dancing maniacally in the streets.”
Clark said, “I’ve heard reports of that happening back in the middle ages. It’s been attributed to ergot poisoning, and hallucinogenic molds.”
“On their web pages and blogs, these people were talking about classmates and neighbors dying every day, and yet very few people seemed to ever leave.”
“Is there any evidence of that?” Lois asked.
“As far as I can tell, the death rate in Sunnydale was more than thirty times higher than Washington D.C. on its worst year. They disguised this by attributing the deaths to barbeque accidents, animal attacks and gang violence.”
Jimmy shook his head. “I’m going to the library tomorrow. For some reason, all issues of the Sunnydale newspaper dating after 1992 are not available online, but I understand that the L.A. Country library has copies. I’m going to try to get all the corroborating evidence I can.”
“Is that all you’ve got?” Lois asked.
“So far,” Jimmy said. He looked tired.
Clark stood and told Jimmy, “You’ll be rooming with me.”
He grabbed Jimmy’s bags and headed out the door. Jimmy glanced at the clock on the mantle, and stood as well.
As he was leaving, Lois stood up and spoke. “What were you planning on doing tonight?”
“Well, it’s kind of late. I was hoping to find a room, maybe meet one of the senoritas…”
“This is work, not a single’s bar. We don’t exactly have time to go surfing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind a little time at the beach.” Jimmy said. “Maybe after all this is over we can all delay the flight back a few days and go windsurfing or something.”
Lois rolled her eyes at Jimmy. “You’re living in fantasyland if you think we’re getting a free vacation out of this.”
Jimmy shrugged. “It never hurts to try.”
“I need you to do something for me,” Lois said quietly. “Try to find any stories out there that you can about feats of superhuman strength.”
She briefly described what they’d discovered at the coroners.
“So I should focus on female feats of strength?”
“If you find things about males, I’ll take those too,” Lois said. “But I’m mostly interested in finding out who this woman was.”
“I’m sure you are just the first in a long line of people,” Jimmy said. He smiled wanly. “I think I’m going to be a little more polite to the girls I date from now on.”
Lois patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sure most girls don’t want to stick a finger in your eye or rip your arms off. If they do…you really ought to be nicer.”
A moment later, he was gone.
***********
Lois sat on her bed, her eyes burning. She’d been going through the folder Jimmy had provided, and it wasn’t painting a pretty picture. If anything, Jimmy had understated the problem.
In 1992, Sunnydale had a population of 38,500. By 2002, the population had dropped to 32,900, and there was no indication that people were leaving Sunnydale in great numbers.
If someone had built a nuclear plant in the middle of a toxic waste dump, the people of Sunnydale would have been safer living there.
There was a knock at the door, Lois could hear a quiet murmuring from the other side of it, and one of the voices sounded like Clark’s.
She glanced at the old fashioned clock on the mantle. It was almost two in the morning.
Grabbing a robe, she headed for the door.
There wasn’t a peephole, so she opened the door cautiously. Years of living in Metropolis had taught her that it was batter to be safe than sorry.
Clark stood impatiently on the other side of the door with Marcus, the Diener.
“Is everything all right?” Lois asked.
Marcus stepped forward until his toe was over the threshold. “We had a visit from two FBI men tonight. They are going to try to cover everything up.”
Lois opened the door and let the two men in.
“I did enough of that in Sunnydale. I can’t do it anymore.”
Lois gestured toward the chair. “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Sunnydale?”
Marcus sat on the chair, which seemed to groan a little under his weight. He leaned forward and closed his eyes for a long moment.
“It’s not easy to talk about, Sunnydale. It looked so good in the brochures. The houses there cost a third of what a similar house cost in L.A. We’d just gotten married, and it seemed like the perfect place to raise a family.”
“I transferred to U.C. Sunnydale, and I got my first job as a Diener. For some reason, the county paid its morgue attendants better than any other place I’ve ever heard of. My wife was going to school and it seemed perfect. We were going to live the American dream.”
Marcus shook his head and chuckled bitterly. “We should have known there was a reason the houses were so cheap, why handling bodies paid so much, but at the time we weren’t asking any questions. It was a beautiful town, and it was a beautiful house, and everything seemed perfect.”
“Things changed?”
“There were rumors,” Marcus admitted. “Morgue attendants and coroners disappeared. Some were murdered. Sunnydale had three different city morgues, and most of them were filled nearly to capacity.”
He shifted uneasily. “It wasn’t until the night of the train massacre that things started to change.”
“There really was a train massacre?”
Marcus nodded grimly. “Forty two men women and children. Even split among the other morgues, it was a horribly busy night, because we still had out usual load of dead people on top of the victims.”
“How were they killed?” Lois asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Marcus said. “Legally, I guess I can’t. People from the mayor’s office came down to talk to us about it. We weren’t going to talk to the press, especially out of towners. There was an article in the local paper, but I don’t think it ever got picked up.”
“What happened next?”
“They wheeled a Jane Doe in. They’d already photographed the body, and I was sent in to set it up for the coroner to take a look. When I pulled the sheet away and saw that it was my Rachel…”
He stared at the floor and didn’t speak for a long moment.
“Well, that was it for me. I don’t remember much of the next couple of days. I went through the funeral in a haze.”
Clark nodded sympathetically.
“It wasn’t until that night that I realized just how wrong things were.” Marcus looked up, looking Lois directly in the eye. “That was the night Rachel came back.”
