Lois hated hospitals almost as much as she hated morgues. They both had the same universal disinfectant smell, and sometimes they had the same underlying smell of rot. Unlike the morgue, however, hospitals were filled with people in pain.
She’d been forced to sit in too many waiting rooms as a child, forced to wait on her father to finish with one patient or another to ever want to step foot in another hospital.
This one didn’t impress her. The walls were fading and poorly maintained, the equipment looked heavily used, and the whole plac3e looked like it needed to be renovated.
Clark spoke quietly to the woman at the information desk, and she smiled.
As busy as she had been, Lois had almost forgotten how handsome Clark was. It wasn’t something she would have expected. There was a certain arrogance most handsome men had that never let anyone forget that they knew just how good looking they were.
Clark was much more humble than that. He was quietly competent, and he didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He’d managed to work with her all this time without any problems.
Of course, she hadn’t been herself. She’d been subdued and distracted, and she hadn’t really been up to her full “Mad dog Lane” persona.
Maybe she was just spooked by this case. Fingernails in eyeballs, disappearing cities, murdered monks…it was all a little much to take in at once.
Clark smiled at the woman again and said, “He’s on the second floor.”
He led her to a set of elevators nearby, and a moment later they were alone.
Lois found herself staring straight forward. “You aren’t what I expected, Smallville.”
“You aren’t either,” he said. “People kept talking about Mad Dog Lane, and how I’d have to keep up or eat your dust.”
She glanced at him. “If you couldn’t keep up, that’s exactly what you’d be doing.”
His lips quirked and she found herself smiling in return. She was more comfortable with Clark than she had been with anyone in a long time. He was quiet, sure, but she suspected that was because he was responding to her need for a little space.
She couldn’t have tolerated a clingy, talkative partner, not with everything she was going through.
“Do you think Jimmy is going to be all right?” she asked, staring back at the elevator door again.
“He’s not in intensive care,” Clark said as the door opened. “I take that as a good sign.”
Lois nodded, and followed him down yet another drab hall tiled in 1950’s style linoleum. They passed several rooms, and in one Lois could hear someone coughing convulsively. She grimaced. She’d done a story on hospital infections in the past, and she didn’t like the odds of catching a drug resistant strain of something nasty.
Clark knocked politely at the door, and then pushed it open.
Jimmy was lying on the bed, his face pale and his eyes slightly glazed. The left side of his face was a massive bruise.
Lois slipped by Clark and sat on the chair by the bed. There was an electronic monitor by the side of the bed that kept track of pulse, respiration, and blood pressure.
“What happened?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
Jimmy glanced over at Lois and said, “I’m feeling fine.” He struggled to focus on her. “I think they have me on some pain medications.”
“You were attacked? By who?”
“I was coming out of the library and these two thugs grabbed me and tried to drag me down the alley.” Jimmy grinned and stared off into space.
“Jimmy?” Lois asked.
“There was this girl in leather pants…”
“Try to focus on what happened after they grabbed you,” Lois said, irritated. Jimmy was a little too focused on women for her taste, even if he reminded her of a younger brother some time.
“I am!” Jimmy said. “These guys were really strong. I couldn’t budge them at all.”
“So you fought them off,” Lois said, trying to prompt him.
Jimmy shook his head slightly, and then winced. “No. It was this girl in leather pants. She said something to them…I can’t remember what it was, but it was pretty clever.”
“She had a gun?” Clark asked. “A Taser maybe, pepper spray?”
“She had a stick.” Jimmy said. “I’ve never seen anybody move like that in my life. She was really fast….and she looked great in leather pants.”
“I’m sure her pants were really nice, Jimmy.” Lois said irritably. “But did you happen to get a name, or see which way the guys went?”
“One of them threw me into a fall face first, and that was all I could remember.” Jimmy hesitated. “I’m told that a girl brought me into the hospital though. Maybe they’d know who she was.”
Clark stood and said, “I’ll go see if I can ask the admitting nurse if she has any idea who brought him in.”
Lois nodded slightly.
Jimmy gestured toward his bag, which was visible in the open closet. “Take my bag. I don’t trust that somebody won’t steal it. I got copies of all the articles,” he said.
Lois grabbed the bag and pulled out several file folders. One was thinner than the other. She opened it. Inside was the picture of an older man. It was an old daguerreotype, a photo from the eighteen hundreds.
“Richard Wilkins,” the caption said. “1898.”
She flipped to the next picture. It was a picture of the same man, but clearer. The caption said “Mayor Richard Wilkins the second, 1938.”
The third picture was from a newspaper at a ribbon cutting ceremony. It was of the same man, but the caption said “Mayor Richard Wilkins the third.” The date of the paper was 1997.
There wasn’t anything else in the folder, but what Lois had seen was enough. Three men who looked exactly the same had lived in the same town for a hundred years without ever seeming to age.
She glanced over at Jimmy, who was already dozing off. Lois went back to her seat and began going through the newspaper articles.
It only seemed like a short period, but she soon heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. They seemed lighter than Clark’s, and more quickly paced together. They were uncertain, hesitant, like the stride of someone who wasn’t sure whether they were where they needed to be.
Lois stood and headed for the door.
A woman was leaning against the wall outside. She was wearing a black denim jacket, black tank top and black leather pants. She was a little shorter than Lois, but more muscular.
“How’s the kid?” she asked. Her voice was a little deep for a woman’s, husky, with a pronounced Boston accent.
Lois guessed that the girl wasn’t that much older than Jimmy was. She was somewhere in her early twenties.
“He’s sleeping now,” Lois said. “Are you the girl in the leather pants he keeps going on about?”
A slight smile from the woman, “Maybe.”
“Thanks for helping him,” Lois said. “He’s a friend.”
“No big,” she said, looking down at the floor. She seemed embarrassed by the compliment. “I just did what anybody would do.”
“Not everybody,” Lois said. “I guess you must be pretty good in a fight.”
“I know a few things.” The woman didn’t look at Lois.
“You have a name?” Lois asked.
“Why?” The woman’s reply was suspicious.
“I think Jimmy would love to be able to put a name to a pair of pants.” Lois said.
“Faith,” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What about you?”
“Lois Lane,” Lois said. “I’m a reporter.”
“You the one who’s been asking all the questions about Sunny-D?”
“You know about that?” Lois asked mildly, even as her mind raced.
“I’ve got friends down at the shelter.” Faith hesitated. “What are you going to do with what you find out?”
“Write a story.” Lois said. “Maybe several. Expose the people who caused all this.”
Faith smirked. “No you won’t. Not unless you want to work for the National Enquirer. Nobody ever believes this kind of sh…stuff.”
“So tell me,” Lois said. “If you don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell anybody. What harm can it do?”
“You aren’t ready for the truth.”
“Try me,” Lois said flatly.
Faith shrugged. “It’s your funeral. Most people don’t want to know, not really. They live in this safe little bubble where nothing bad can happen to them. They don’t want to believe in a world where the monsters are real.”
“That’s why nobody will talk about it?” Lois asked.
Faith nodded. “As long as they don’t talk about it, it’s not real. That bubble is there for a reason. People are happier feeling safe. It’s pretty crappy realizing that there are things out there that are ready to get you.”
“Things?” Lois asked.
“Every nightmare you ever had. Monsters are real.” Faith said she reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette. She froze at Lois’s look, and then put it back into her pocket.
“Where did they come from?” Lois asked quietly. The hallway seemed to dim a little, and she realized just how isolated this ward actually was. Most of the rooms were empty, and the coughing patient from before was silent.
“Some people say they were always here,” Faith said. “I’m not sure I believe that.”
“So Sunnydale?”
“There are places where the world wears thin, where it’s easier to cross the divide from here and…someplace else.” Faith sighed. “Most times these places are pretty small and don’t last very long.”
“Not Sunnydale though,” Lois said.
“Sunnydale had a place like that. It was big, thin, and it led to someplace pretty nasty. It just about radiated evil, and that was like a beacon to the sorts of things that people don’t want to think about.”
“So why would anybody move here?” Lois asked.
Faith sighed. “You ask too many questions.”
“You promised to tell me a story,” Lois said. “So spill it.”
“Someone made a deal with the devil. Well, a deal with demons anyway.” Faith shook her head and looked pensive. “He made a deal…in return for a hundred years of staying young and a chance to turn into something more powerful at the end of that time, he built a city right on that spot of concentrated evil.”
“The mayor, Richard Wilkins,” Lois said.
Faith looked surprised. “You HAVE done your homework.”
“So he got immortality for a while…what did they get out of it?”
“A twenty four hour a day all you can eat buffet.” Faith shrugged. “I’m guessing the local Chumash Indian tribes were pretty canny and hard to catch. White guys in suburbia are pretty slow by comparison.”
“So the whole place was designed to be a…what?”
“A feeding ground.” Faith said. “It was a playground for the monsters, and the mayor did everything he could to keep it that way.”
“Including corrupting the police.” Lois said.
Faith nodded. “The ones who weren’t on the payroll were the worst people they could find. They actively looked for Barney Fifes.”
Lois frowned. “Who?”
“Andy Griffith?” Faith looked disgusted. “I guess you sat home all day reading maps when you were a kid.”
Lois shrugged uncomfortably.
“So what happened?”
“The mayor blew his chance and croaked. The people he’d hired stayed in office, and it was business as usual.”
“Covering up the biggest story since….anytime?” Lois shook her head. “People talk about government conspiracies all the time, but it’s impossible. Somebody is always going to talk.”
“Who would believe them?” Faith asked. “Dick…he had a hundred years to set everything up. He had help from things that weren’t natural. And he told people what they wanted to believe.”
“They just needed somebody to blow the whistle.” Lois said stubbornly. “Maybe put it in the paper put it on CNN. If it’s on television people will believe it.”
“Not to sound paranoid, but what are the chances that you’d get that far? You’d end up in a padded room somewhere.”
Lois shook her head stubbornly. “People have to be warned. If there are things out there…”
Faith said, “There are things out there. But people don’t want to know about it. They want to sleep in bed at night and feel safe.”
“I think you don’t give people enough credit.” Lois said. “People can handle the truth.”
Faith sighed. “Let me ask you a question. After all this…all the research you’ve done, everything you’ve heard from people…do you believe it?”
“Yes,” Lois said.
“Deep down?”
Lois hesitated, and then said, “No.” Deep down she kept hoping it was all a dream and that it would all go away. Despite everything she’d seen as a reporter, she’d had that bubble, that security blanket. She’d known that there was evil in the world, but somehow, it never seemed to affect her, even when she had guns in her face. She’d felt invulnerable.
She missed that feeling.
There had to be a reasonable explanation to everything. Terrorists, some sort of genetic engineering.
Wasn’t it more likely that she’d been given some sort of virus that was changing her, maybe a test run for something worse? It made more sense than magic and monsters and deals with the devil.
“So that’s where you come in. You keep people safe.”
Faith’s face brightened, and slowly she smiled. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
A beeping sound from inside her jacket caused Faith to start. She reached inside her pocket and pulled out a cell phone.”
“Yeah,” she said. She listened to what was said on the other end, and Lois was disgusted to realize that even with her new hearing, she wasn’t able to catch the other side of the conversation.
“I’ll be right there,” she said.
She closed the phone and looked at Lois. “Give the kid my regards.”
The younger girl hesitated, and then stared at Lois for a moment. “Did you ever do any fighting?”
“Brown Belt in Tai Kwon Do.” Lois said.
“That must be it,” Faith said. “You move like a fighter.”
Lois shrugged. She didn’t think she moved any differently than anyone else, really. It was meant as a compliment, so she’d accept it as one.
“Watch yourself,” Faith said. “It wasn’t just the people that came here to L.A. before everything went down.”
Lois heard Clark coming down the hallway. She glanced back at them, and then stiffened.
“Before what went down?”
Faith was already gone.
