As the doors to the emergency room bay slammed open, doctors and nurses glanced up at the familiar sight of a body being wheeled in on a stretcher by paramedics on the run.
It wasn’t that the patient was lying on his stomach that was unusual. It was what he was wearing. The blue tights and red trunks were as familiar to most of them as their own clothes.
Only the cape and boots were missing.
Superman had brought dozens of victims to this hospital over the last few months. It was thought that he had a special love for Colorado because he worked there more often than he did anywhere else.
Although he was most often seen in Denver and Colorado Springs, he’d been to this location more than once, most often bringing in victims who couldn’t have made it to the hospital on their own.
The people of Pueblo owed him a debt of gratitude, one they’d thought they could never repay.
The doctors sprang into action.
***********
“The fragments in his back are poisoning him,” Lois said. “They interfere with his special abilities and cause him pain. If he’s exposed to them long enough he thinks they can kill him.”
The doctor stared at her. “How is it that you know all of this?”
“I work for the Superman Foundation,” Lois said. She pulled her employee’s ID out of her wallet. “And I’ve worked with the closest thing he’s had to a personal physician.”
“Do you have a number?” the man asked. “We’ve just sent him in for x-rays and some of the things we are seeing disturb us.”
Lois nodded and jotted down the number for him.
“We need to get the fragments out of him and away from him, or at least covered with lead.”
“Are they a danger for my staff?”
“I don’t think so short term, Lois said. “There are people who have handled similar material for years before they started showing signs of tumors.”
The doctor scowled and wrote something quickly down on the sheet.
“Doesn’t a nurse usually do this part?”
The doctor nodded. “It’s a slow night.”
Lois could see several nurses and doctors staring at her in the distance. Looking back at them, the doctor said, “Actually, I wanted to do this. He’s done a lot for the people of this city, and we’re going to do everything we can to keep him alive.”
He gestured toward a nurse and said, “He’ll be getting the rest of his history. Answer as best you can.”
“The Superman Foundation will pay his medical bills.” Lois said. Clark didn’t have health insurance as Superman, or if he did she didn’t know about it.
“They are already scheduled to put a new wing in next year,” the doctor said, smiling. “If there is a possibility of getting him through this, we’re the ones to do it.”
*************
Escaping wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies.
Lisa was glad she hadn’t drunk the tea Lana had provided. It had burned her lips, and so she’d only pretended to drink it under her watchful eye.
Pouring it into the potted plant by the window had already produced streaks of yellow where the plant had once been green.
Lisa was strong enough now to move around, and she’d explored the lodge as quietly as she could. If she could find a telephone she’d be able to call Joshua or her great Uncle Mike, or even in a pinch her grandparents.
Hopefully they’d be able to explain to her that what she’d seen on TV was all a big mistake, that she didn’t have to have this feeling like her stomach was weighted down with a lead balloon.
She hadn’t felt hungry and she hadn’t eaten any of what Lana had prepared either.
The place was locked up tight as a drum. The windows were all barred and the outside doors were all locked. The place didn’t seem to have a telephone, and power seemed to be provided by a generator off in the distance.
Now that Lisa was getting used to her new impaired hearing she could hear the distant roar of the engine.
There wasn’t anyone else in the place.
It occurred to Lisa that her best chance was to wait until Lana went out to fill the generator and make her break for it then. Lana was pretty frail and weak for an older person, and if Lisa could sneak up on her she could push past her and run before she pulled out whatever it was that had caused her to become sick and unconscious.
She wasn’t sure what the range of it was, but if it was anything like the red poison it was relatively short. She’d be able to get away and make her way through the trees. If she followed the road she’d eventually find something. Worst came to worst she could choose her direction by always going down.
It worried her that Lana might not be as frail as she seemed. She was five or six inches taller than Lisa and outweighed her by possibly twenty pounds. She was a full grown adult. Lisa had a mental image of those clawlike hands wrapping around her neck and never letting go.
Sneaking up behind her was going to be a problem as well. Lisa had already figured out the most likely egress for going to the generator house, and it was going to be tricky to sneak up on Lana just as she was opening the door.
The safest thing would be to find a telephone and call the police. However, Lisa didn’t actually know where she was even if there was a telephone to be found, and the thought of what Lana might do in retaliation was frightening.
As Lisa heard the sounds of Lana’s footsteps she froze and dived back toward the couch. The weaker Lana thought she was the better off she’d be, no matter what she decided to do.
Lisa stared sullenly at the television, which flickered in the growing darkness. To add insult to injury, she was only able to get three channels, and all of them were somewhat grainy.
Funny that…the news report telling about her parents’ death had been as clear as a bell.
“You didn’t eat your dinner,” Lana said, leaning over her.
Lisa shook her head slightly and said, “I wasn’t hungry.”
“At least you drank your tea.” There was a slight sound of smugness in Lana’s voice, and Lisa knew she’d been right not to drink it.
She caressed Lisa’s forehead and Lisa fought not to flinch. Instead she looked away from Lana and allowed tears to rise to her eyes.
People thought girls were weak; even other girls thought it sometimes. The girliest thing of all was to cry, and so Lisa allowed herself that.
Lana pulled her into a hug and Lisa was struck by just how skinny the woman was. Her hand touched the heavy bag at Lana’s side, and her fingers started to tingle unpleasantly near the flap of the bag.
Lana kept the poison in the bag. It was probably what she’d used to hurt Lisa before.
Lisa pulled her hand away from the bag unobtrusively.
Getting the bag away from Lana would be her first priority, although if she had a chance to run, she’d take it.
***************
Bruno woke to stare up at a familiar, but unwelcome face.
“I have a question for you,” she said quietly. “What do you call somebody who betrays the person they work for?”
He didn’t answer. All he could do was stare up at her in horror.
“Someone who gave you a roof over your head, food, who took you in?”
This wasn’t part of the plan. The look in her eye was something familiar, something that had scared her before on another face. He’d never seen it on this face however.
“You took my little girl someplace,” Lois Lane said. Quietly she pulled the call button for the nurses station out of his reach and said, “You are going to tell me where that is.”
“I didn’t…” he began, only to stiffen as he felt her fingernails digging into his hands.
“There’s something you need to know about mothers,” she said. “Normally they are nice people, pretty much like anyone else. But when you take their child…well…they’ll do just about anything.”
She stepped away from him and he felt a momentary sense of relief until he realized that she was using a chair to block the door.
The rolling table beside his bed she pulled slightly away from him and she started pulling things out of her purse. A curling iron, scissors, nail file, something that may have been an eyelash trimmer, but looked like something that came out of a medieval torture chamber and finally an innocuous looking thing that looked a little like a pink electric razor.
He strained to see what it said on the side and he realized that he could read it.
It said Epilady.
“It’s nice that we’re all alone in this part of the hospital,” Lois said. “Everybody else is on the other end helping to treat some bigwig that got hurt when a limousine out in the parking lot exploded.”
Her face was neutral although Bruno found himself frowning. There had been another limousine out in the parking lot?
“It was your limousine that hurt him,” Lois said. “I hope that you didn’t plan for that. Adding murder to charges of kidnapping would be pretty bad.”
Bruno tried to jerk away, only to realize that somehow she’d strapped his arms to the rails by the side of the bed.
“If my daughter dies…you know they have lethal injection in this state,” Lois said. “But I suspect you wouldn’t get to spend years in prison waiting for appeal after appeal.”
She leaned close. “How well do you think police are going to guard a guy who helped kill Superman and a little girl? How hard would it be for someone to slip inside and do something…well…terrible to you?”
Bruno shook his head. She was bluffing. She had to be. No one had proof that he was involved at all, and no jury would convict him without evidence. If he told where the girl was, though, he’d be incriminating himself.
Lois sighed. “I’d hoped not to have to do this.”
He opened his mouth to yell, although it was hard to get a breath, probably because of his ribs. Before he could, Lois stuck something in his mouth and tied it into a gag.
She picked up the Epilady and a moment later he felt the sheets at the base of the bed move.
“Wow,” Lois said. “You’ve got really hairy legs.”
A moment later he began to scream.
***************
Lois stepped out of the hospital room, checking both ways to make sure no one had noticed anything.
Bruno had folded quickly. She’d barely ripped the hair out of half his calf before he’d given her all the information she needed.
The fact that some women had been voluntarily using the Epilady on themselves for years hadn’t seemed to impress Bruno. Of course, as long as his hairs had been, it had probably hurt a good bit.
Although she wasn’t proud of what she’d done, Lois would do a great deal more to get Lisa back. Lana had made a bad mistake in underestimating her.
Underestimating a mother’s love was a stupid mistake.
Lois strode quickly down the hall towards the section where they were working on Clark. It had taken longer than she had hoped and they were still in surgery.
She saw the doctor who spoken to her before.
“How is he?”
She felt a curious sensation in the pit of her stomach, as though the rest of her life was riding on what he had to say next.
“About halfway through the surgery, some of the lesser injuries started spontaneously healing on their own, after the fragments had been pulled from them. There were a few fragments that we had to go deeper for, and it was touch and go for a while as to whether we were going to be able to get them.”
Lois nodded. If he was healing spontaneously, that was a good sign.
“We couldn’t use anesthesia,” the doctor said. “We had no idea how his system would react to it.”
“He was awake?” Lois asked.
“For part of it,” the doctor admitted grimly. “He’s out now. We just send him through to get x-rays to see if we got it all. Since we broke a couple of scalpels toward the end, I’m betting the answer is yes.”
Lois reached out and hugged the man impulsively. “You don’t know how much it means to everybody that you’ve saved him.”
The doctor said, “Actually, I think I do. He needs to get a real physician, though. The things we found out about his physiology tonight are amazing, but they won’t be enough to save his life the next time something like this happens.”
“Is he well enough to receive visitors?”
“He’s been out of surgery for less than fifteen minutes,” the doctor said. “With anyone else, I’d say it was out of the question. But his wounds have all healed over. Don’t stay long though. He needs his rest.”
*************
He looked pale and drawn, smaller than the man she’d come to know both in the costume and without.
He was normally such a dynamic, imposing personality that sometimes it seemed as though his personality made him taller.
“I haven’t been fair to you,” Lois said softly. “Except for that first day you’ve always been good to me.”
He lay on the bed, terribly still. It was the lack of animation in his features that bothered her as much as anything. When he was awake he was the first person you noticed when he entered a room. He had charisma, a sort of dynamism that was more than just physical beauty, although he had that as well.
“I’ve been alone for a long time,” Lois said. “Being responsible for someone else makes you grow up in a hurry, and it was just easier to focus everything I had on Lisa.”
She touched his hand, which seemed cold and still. If it wasn’t for the slow rise and fall of his chest she’d have thought he was dead.
“I always believed that a woman doesn’t need a man to be happy, and I think that’s true.” Lois stared down at him, “But since I’ve been around you I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
Grasping his hand in hers, she said, “I’m going to save our daughter. When we get back, I think I’d like to give being a family a try.”
Almost imperceptibly she felt his hand tighten in hers, and she felt a moment of hope.
