Exhausted, Lois stared out the window as they finally made the turn that led into the Cortez ranch.
She wasn’t used to the driving. In Metropolis, she could get practically anywhere within an hour, unless there were major accidents. In Los Angeles, it could take three hours just to get from one interviewee to the next.
More likely, her exhaustion was from emotional stress. Seeing what she’d done to Olaf had forced memories forward that she had been trying to suppress.
Clark pulled into the driveway, and Lois could see that the family had been busy while they were gone. The windows were boarded up, even the ones which hadn’t been firebombed and she could see small slits cut in the wood.
She could see movement in some of them, although most of the lights were obviously off. Remembering the crates filled with crossbows, Lois shuddered.
Stepping out of the car, she stared at the surrounding hills. It all looked so peaceful now, but she wasn’t ever going to feel fully safe here ever again. She wasn’t sure she was ever going to feel safe anywhere.
As soon as she got to her room and slipped out of her clothes, she dropped into a deep sleep.
***********
The silence was unnerving.
Lois could still hear screaming in her mind. When she finally stood, she didn’t look down. She knew what was there, and even the glimpses she had out the corner of her eye were going to be the fodder for nightmares in the years to come.
She’d grown used to the sounds of moaning and coughing from the other cells. Now, however, everyone was silent.
The woman in the cell across from her was staring at her, white faced. The look of horror on her face head to reflect the feelings Lois was supposed to have, but all she felt was numb.
She didn’t feel anything, and she wondered when it was going to start to hurt. She’d run through the snow barefoot one year as a child, and had been surprised to find that it wasn’t painful at all.
It wasn’t until she’d come back into the warmth that the pain had come. She’d been numb, and painless, and the agony had hit her all at once.
Her hands were shaking. Looking down at them, Lois grimaced. There was blood on them and she wiped them absently against the side of her dress.
It wouldn’t come off. She wiped harder and harder, and it still wouldn’t come off.
Finally, Lois had to look at what she had done. She’d known the jailer. He was a big man named N’tombe who had been notorious for using the girls before they were sold. He was laying on the floor close to the door now, his eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. Flies were already starting to gather on what was left of his face.
Hands shaking, Lois bent down slowly, fumbling for his keys. She had to free the others, and they had to get out before others came. No matter what freakish strength she’d found, men with bullets would make short work of her.
Some of them had tried already, had hit their compatriots. Close quarter work was dangerous for groups that weren’t trained for it. She couldn’t tell how she knew this, but she did.
The keys weren’t in his pockets. Lois grimaced and rolled him over. There was a squelching sound that she tried not to think about, and she found the keys underneath him.
They were matted and encrusted, but they would work.
Lois staggered toward the first cell, and she tried to ignore how the girl recoiled from her.
The door was open, first one, then the next, then the next. The other girls hadn’t seen what she’d done, but they recoiled from the blood that covered her and from the look on her face. It wasn’t the hopelessness that they would have seen on their own faces.
It was something darker and more imperturbable.
Finally the last of the doors were open, and the girls were streaming out of the building. As long as the buyers didn’t come up the main road, they’d be able to make their way to the nearest village soon enough. There was an army garrison there, and they would come to investigate.
Lois had to be gone before that happened.
She found a bathroom that had been used by the guards. It was as filthy as the rest of the place, but at least it had a sink and a mirror. In the neon light of the bathroom, she looked pale and washed out.
Over and over she scrubbed her hands, but somehow the blood was always there. No matter how hard she rubbed, it wouldn’t go away.
Lois glanced up at the mirror. The bruises and swelling on her face, legacies of the last few days were already disappearing, almost before her eyes.
It was then that she felt herself begin to change. Her skin rippled and her eyes began to turn golden.
There was something inside her, and she began to claw at her face to get it out.
******************
A dark figure leaned over her bed, and Lois lashed out, feeling her fist connect flesh. The figure flew backward several feet and landed in a heap on the floor.
Lois struggled out of her blankets, then realized that the figure was familiar.
“Oh my God, Clark, are you all right?”
She switched the lamp on, and she saw her partner slowly rising to his feet. He was rubbing his jaw and smiling.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s some right hook you have.”
“I grew up around boxers,” Lois said absently. Clark wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even bruised. “What were you doing in my room?”
“I could hear you moaning in here. It sounded like you were having a nightmare.”
“I think this case is getting to me,” Lois said. She stepped toward Clark and in the dim light cast by the lamp tried to examine his jaw.
When she’d hit the men in the Congo that hard, they hadn’t gotten up again. Ever.
“Are you sure you are all right?” she asked quickly.
“When I was doing bodyguard work for the Nigerians, I was taught to roll with a punch,” Clark said.
It was a weak excuse, but at the moment Lois couldn’t think of anything else it could be. She didn’t have the same feelings around Clark that she’d had around Angelica and her minions.
If her stomach twitched, it was for another reason.
The light behind her popped and died, and Lois found herself flinching. She grimaced as the room was plunged into darkness, lit only by the light from an arrow slit in her boarded up window and the light from under the doorway that led to the hallway outside.
“Are YOU all right,” Clark asked.
“I’ll be fine. I’m surprised that you haven’t been having nightmares.”
She expected a quick denial, but instead Clark was silent. Most men would have felt insecure and would have been quick to put up a macho front.
“I dream about the city collapsing.” Clark said slowly. “I wish I could have helped.”
“Well, even if you’d been here there wouldn’t have been anything you could do.” Lois laid a hand on his arm. “The way you help is by finding out what happened and making sure it doesn’t ever happen again.”
“You aren’t what I was told you would be,” he said.
“Oh?” Lois asked. It was a dangerous admission. She knew what sort of rumors were floating around about her at the Planet. She was hell on partners and almost impossible to work with. She was so focused on the story that she had no time for a personal life. She was an ice queen. None of them were good.
“I was warned that you would be sarcastic, driven, so focused on the story that you’d leave everybody else in your dust.”
Lois nodded. Those were some of the least damaging things people said about her.
“I can’t help but feel like something is wrong,” Clark said. “You are a lot quieter than people said you would be, and I haven’t heard you make a joke since you got here. You don’t smile, and you look more and more exhausted every day.”
“I don’t see what business it is of yours,” Lois said, stung. “Whether I smile or not.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you smiling,” Clark said. “When you do, it lights up the entire room.”
“Well, there’s been plenty of light,” Lois said. “Not now, obviously, but…”
“Did something happen in the Congo?”
The words were out there, and Lois felt as though the wind had been knocked out of her. She’d been running from the truth for days, and it kept being thrown back at her.
He was looking at her, and Lois knew he was expecting an answer.
“I saw some things there,” Lois said. “Things that have given me a few nightmares. The things they were doing to those girls…”
“You came across the bodies of the gunrunners, didn’t you?”
Lois had a sudden flash of memory. Piling up the bodies, the flash of a gun in her hand. Setting the fire. She’d done a good job of covering her tracks.
“They were burned beyond recognition,” she said. She hesitated. “I can still smell it sometimes.”
“I’ve come across some things that still haunt me,” Clark said. “People that didn’t get out of burning cars, disaster victims, victims of war. It helps to talk about it.”
“I’m not ready yet,” Lois said.
In all likelihood, she never would be.
Impulsively, she leaned forward and hugged Clark. He melted into the embrace almost immediately. There was no hesitancy, no reluctance.
This was a man who had been touched often growing up. He was comfortable with it in a way Lois doubted she ever would be.
She tried to imagine having a childhood like that and failed.
Envy wasn’t something Lois felt often, but she felt it now. Having people to talk to at the end of the day, people who were able to take simple, uncomplicated joy in just touching each other. It must have been a great childhood.
“I’ve got a feeling you’d make a great friend, Clark Kent.” Lois said.
“Why don’t we find out?” Clark said.
They talked for half the night.
***********
He didn’t have a bruise on his face. Clark still had the same perfect complexion he’d always had, even though she was sure she’d punched him in the jaw. There wasn’t the slightest hint that he’d ever been hit.
Lois glanced down at the brightly lit kitchen table. Luckily, this was one of the rooms that hadn’t been firebombed. They were still providing breakfast, although Lois noted that they still didn’t drink coffee.
“So we’re going to see Anne Steele this morning," Jimmy said. He grinned at Lois’s scowl.
She should have been exhausted, but she felt curiously revitalized. Clark’s stories about a Norman Rockwellesque life in Kansas and about some of the exotic things he’d seen on his travels had been strangely soothing.
It was good to know that somewhere out there were places untouched by darkness. Even before going to the Congo, she’d been becoming more cynical and less trusting.
Spending all her time with politicians and criminals hadn’t been good for her.
It was odd. Despite her suspicions that something was off about Clark, she believed his stories. She believed him.
Not that it would keep her from finding out his secret, in time. It’s just that if he was really the good man he presented himself as being, she wouldn’t share them with anyone.
She’d spend her entire life hating secrets, always wishing she was on the other side of the closed door. But now that she had some of her own, she was starting to realize why people reacted so violently, why they went to such lengths to protect them.
It just meant she was going to have to work harder to discover the truth.
