The tough girl façade was cracking.
For a moment Lois was at a loss for words. She’d never been one of those reporters who accosted victims’ families while their loved ones were lying in the hospital. She’d always preferred to go after those she saw as guilty.
She glanced at Clark, who was obviously no more comfortable with the situation than she was.
“Thanks for saving me.” Jimmy said from behind them.
Whatever Faith had been going to say died in her throat. She looked slightly embarrassed.
“Sure, kid.”
“I don’t know what I would have done...” Jimmy was laying it on a little thick, Lois thought. It wasn’t guilt, but something similar that caused Faith to open the door wider and step outside.
Inside, Lois caught a glimpse of an African-American man hooked up to a number of machines.
“What do you want?’ Faith asked.
“The same thing we wanted before,” Lois said. ”Answers.”
“I don’t owe you any,” Faith said. “You might not have noticed, but I’m a little busy.”
“Because he’s not healing as fast as the girls.” Lois said. It was a risky move. It wouldn’t take much to alienate Faith; years of experience had given her the ability to gauge people.
Faith was silent for a moment. “Damn. I guess all that confidentiality stuff the Docs keep harping on about is a load.”
“We’re good at what we do,” Lois said. “Eventually we’ll get the answers with or without you. Wouldn’t it be better to have your friends give their side of the story?”
“Why are you bothering with all this?” Faith asked. “It’s not like you’ll ever be able to publish anything about all of this.”
A nurse walked by, and her expression was chilly. Obviously extended conversations in the hallway weren’t approved behavior.
“We might.” Lois said. “If we have concrete proof.”
She felt a moment of guilt at the thought that Faith might be right. She’d spent years building up her credibility as a journalist. Was she really ready to throw it away on a story about monsters and magic?
“What kind of proof can you possibly get? Demonstrate magic and people will call it special effects. Capture a demon, and it’s a man in a mask. Pictures can be faked.”
“Bodies?” Lois hazarded.
“You’ve seen the alien autopsy video. Do you believe it?”
Mutely, Lois shook her head. She didn’t believe in aliens. Demons were hard enough, and even there she was wondering if there weren’t alternate explanations.
Maybe Vampirism was some sort of disease, an infection that like rabies affected its host’s brain.
So called demons could be just undiscovered species, like Big Foot, or perhaps strange genetic offshoots of humanity.
It wasn’t as though she’d actually seen magic. Other than her own transformation, everything else she’d seen could be explained through weird science.
If she couldn’t convince herself, how was she going to convince anyone else?
“We’ll find a way,” she said grimly.
The nurse was glaring at them again, and Faith sighed and gestured for them to follow her. She led them down the hall into a nearby waiting room.
It was deserted.
“I don’t care what you think you know; you don’t enough.”
“Those places you said the world was thin,” Lois asked suddenly. “Are there any other places like that?”
“There are a few other places like that,” Faith said cautiously, glancing at Clark and Jimmy. Clearly she hadn’t expected Lois to share their conversation from earlier.
“How likely is this to happen again?”
Faith shrugged.
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“Do I look like a psychic to you?”
“So this could happen again.”
Faith shrugged again. “Maybe. Probably not.”
“There are stories I can run with this,” Lois said. “Stories that wouldn’t get me thrown into the tabloids. There is a lot of human interest in Sunnydale right now, and pretty young girls are always popular with the television networks.”
She turned to Clark. “Scientist discovers secret to accelerated human healing. What sort of interest would that generate do you think?”
“About as much as a story about a last group of Sunnydale survivors with stab wounds being hospitalized.” Clark said. “Some government agency is sure to come by with some questions about how six underage girls came in with stab wounds.”
Something changed in the room, and Lois felt her hackles rise. There was something about the way that Faith tensed and shifted her stance that was dangerous.
There was a sense of danger about her now that hadn’t been there before, and behind her, Lois could hear Jimmy stepping back.
Lois refused, instead standing very still. Beside her, Clark did the same.
It was important to never show a predator fear, and in the deepest pit of her gut she knew that’s what Faith was.
She could feel a response rising within her. Lois had never dealt well with threats, but now there was more than just anger. There was a feeling of something primitive inside her responding.
If she moved, things would escalate.
“It’d be a mistake,” Faith said after a long moment. “People would get hurt.”
The unspoken promise was that they would be among them. Lois fought down her increasing urge to push back.
“Did the girls suddenly get stronger about ten minutes before Sunnydale died?” Lois asked suddenly.
Faith froze.
“They started healing faster, moving faster…being more agile. More aggressive…”
The sense of danger faded, being replaced by a sense of confusion.
“It’s been happening all over the world,” Lois said. “And it hasn’t always ended well.”
Faith was silent for a long moment. She was staring at Lois speculatively.
“There are people who can explain things better.” Faith said at last. “I can set up a meet. Give me your cell numbers, and I’ll have someone call you.”
So cautious, Lois thought. But in a world where men, or things which had once been men, threw burning bottles into houses, it was probably prudent.
************
“Did you see her?” Jimmy said. The hero worship was out of his voice, replaced by a sense of worry. “I thought for a minute she was going to…”
“Her friend is in the hospital,” Clark said. “Publishing a story would make it fairly easy for his enemies to find him.”
He sound vaguely ashamed, and Lois felt an unwelcome tinge of it herself. She normally didn’t bully victims. The problem was, she wasn’t yet sure into which category Faith fit.
Clark had talked about men coming after Jimmy when he was in the hospital.
“Whatever happened to the guys who came after Jimmy?” Lois asked.
“I turned them over to the police,” Clark said. “I don’t know what happened after that.”
“We need to find out. It might give us a clue into the people who were after us.”
Clark nodded noncommittally. If it had been anyone else, Lois’s words would have been a rebuke. But Clark had proven himself to her, and given how hectic the past few days had been, Lois wasn’t surprised that things were being dropped.
“We need to find out everything we can about Buffy Summers and any of the other people on this list,” Lois said. “Any of their acquaintances too. I want to know if there was anyone named Faith in their circle of friends.”
“It’s back to the library for me, then?” Jimmy asked, sighing.
“For all of us. I don’t know when this meeting Faith agreed to will happen and I want to have the facts straight before we get started.”
The three of them could do the research much quicker than Jimmy alone, and Lois had a feeling that she would need an edge in dealing with Faith’s friends.
They had answers Lois needed desperately. It wasn’t just for the story. She needed them to start making sense of her own life.
*****************
Five hours at the library, with Lois spending part of the time outside on the telephone to various places and agencies were enlightening.
Although people assumed the reporter’s job was always exciting, often it was the grunt work that got things done. In this case, it had been enlightening.
The sun was already setting, and Lois cursed the lost time. It was barely seven, and already another day was gone. They had the teen shelter story, but it was hardly front page news for the Planet, even with the human interest angle.
If Perry thought the story was being overexposed, he might decide to pull them from the case, and rely on stories from the Associated Press.
Being huddled in the back stacks of the library wasn’t the idea place to work, but at least they could speak without getting glared at by the librarians. These same women smiled at the several obviously homeless people who loitered in the library, presumably taking advantage of the air conditioning until the shelters opened again.
Being nice probably cut down on vandalism and public urination. Lois sniffed as yet another homeless person walked by. She could smell an unsavory assortment of aromas on this one, and she was suddenly reminded of Olaf.
She’d broken his arm, and she hadn’t even thought about him in hours. The street prophet had known something more than he had been telling.
Sighing, she turned back to her presentation.
Jimmy said “Buffy Summers was born in Los Angeles in 1981. I wasn’t able to find out much about her until high school, where she apparently went to Hemery High, a school not far from here.”
Lois picked up the narrative. “I spoke with several of her teachers. Apparently she was considered to be bright, but an underachiever. She was popular, and as a freshman she was elected Prom Princess and Fiesta Queen.”
“She had a Juvenile record,” Clark said. “It’s sealed, but apparently she burned down the school gym and was expelled for that. She didn’t serve any time; apparently she was placed into a psychiatric institution for trying to claim that vampires were real and that she had been trying to save everyone from them.”
Before this week, Lois would have dismissed the girl as crazy. It was a warning, and a reason more people didn’t try to reveal the proof.
Talk about Bigfoot or alien abductions and people made fun of you. Talk about vampires and demons, and people locked you away with strange medications.
Lois reminded herself mentally to make sure that whatever evidence she found was incontrovertible.
Straightjackets weren’t in style this year.
A glance at the others showed that they were thinking the same thing.
“Her parents divorced, and her mother opened up a small art gallery in Sunnydale in 1998. I wasn’t able to get a clear picture of high school experience. Those people from Sunnydale I could get hold of wouldn’t talk to me. She didn’t win prom queen though.” Jimmy said.
“She was accused of murder in spring 1998. The Sunnydale PD records went down in the collapse, but she was enrolled again in the next year, so the charges must have been dropped.” Clark glanced down at the stack of papers in front of him.
“Apparently the girl who was killed was a Jamaican National in the country illegally. There were several more suspicious deaths at her school, including her computer teacher, who was murdered after hours at the school, and her teacher, who was apparently torn apart by wild dogs.”
The euphemisms the Sunnydale newspaper had used for causes of death had gotten tiresome after the first hour.
“Mysteriously, her new high school burned down on graduation day. Officials called it a gas leak, but it seems a little coincidental that two schools occupied by the same student are set on fire.”
Lois scowled. The school principal, a Mr. Snyder had made numerous complaints about Buffy to the school board and had expelled her after the murder.
“She was a U.C. Sunnydale student for a semester, and then she dropped out. She dropped off the radar after that.”
“Didn’t you have footage of someone shooting a rocket launcher off inside the Sunnydale mall?”
“It was on You-tube and was pretty grainy. I went over it as closely as I could,” Jimmy said. “But I couldn’t make out whether it was her or not.”
“Somehow she gets hired by the Sunnydale ISD as a school counselor without so much as an Associates degree. How could they hire somebody barely out of high school to counsel their kids?”
“She was good for the health plan?” Jimmy asked.
Lois brightened and smiled at Jimmy. “That may be it. She was voted class protector in high school. Maybe some of the people in the know hired her.”
“Death rates at Sunnydale High school dropped sixty percent during her tenure as a student,” Clark said.
Lois blinked. The death tolls she’d seen in the school yearbook had been at a reduced rate from previous years?
The picture that was forming wasn’t a very pretty one. A young woman, resourceful, alienated from society, and willing to use any means necessary to accomplish her goals, including the destruction of public property, arson, and possibly murder.
And she was surrounded by a cadre of seemingly loyal, superhumanly strong girls who presumably had the same sense of expedience.
This was a dangerous woman. Her profile fit that of a terrorist leader, or a cult leader.
It also fit the profile of a freedom fighter.
Given that there seemed to be real enemies out to get them, Lois couldn’t decide which was more likely.
Either way, she wouldn’t deal any better with having her secrets exposed than Faith had. Yet Lois’s gut was telling her that this was the person who would have the answers she was looking for.
Her gut was telling her something else.
Somewhere in the building, she sensed that something wasn’t right.
