The convenience store wasn’t any chain that he recognized, but it was open at this hour of the night, and it would have what he needed. He’d buy a newspaper and a map of the United States so that he could see just how jarring the changes from world to world had been.
The teenager behind the counter looked up at him will dull eyes then returned to listening to whatever music was coming from his headphones. Clark could hear it, and to his ears it barely qualified as music.
He glanced around the store until he found the newspaper and the map. As he approached the counter he noticed a large display under glass.
Different garishly colored tickets in different denominations sat beneath the glass, all promising big winners.
Glancing down at the glass, Clark felt a moment of guilt. It was somewhat better than stealing, and he didn’t see any other way to get the money he needed to blend in and get everyone home.
“Can I get a scratch off?” he asked. Setting the map and newspaper aside, he pointed to a seven dollar ticket, a five dollar ticket and a two dollar ticket.
Altogether he would win a little more than a hundred dollars…enough surely to get a pair of pants and a shirt, and certainly enough to buy more tickets if he needed them.
The clerk handed him back the scratch off tickets and a single dollar bill.
Clark quickly used his thumbnail to scratch the numbers off, winners as he’d already seen.
He handed the tickets back to the clerk who shook his head. “They shut the computers off at eleven. You can still buy tickets but you can’t collect on them until tomorrow morning at 7 A.M.”
Clark stared at the clerk for a moment, and then gritted his teeth. “Is there any place nearby that’ll sell clothes that early?”
“There’s a Wal-Mart three miles down the road. You can’t miss it.”
Clark handed the clerk his last dollar and took the newspaper.
Stuffing the tickets into his front pocket, he stepped out into the darkness.
****************
“Just take a look at it,” Lois said.
Bill Bryerson was an old friend, formerly a member of the Treasury Department and now in the private sector.
“I already have,” he said. “These bills are made with government paper, and they have 1990’s era anti-counterfeiting measures. If they’d chosen to put the correct pictures on the bills, they’d have been very difficult to detect.”
“I don’t understand why they would pick Grover Cleveland,” Lois said.
“Grover Cleveland’s picture was actually on twenty dollar bills made between 1918 and 1928. Why they chose to put it on ten dollar bills I don’t know.”
“So someone in the government would have to be involved with this?” Lois asked.
“It’s a pretty sophisticated hoax,” Bill admitted. “The driver’s license is good work, the bills are excellent…it’s hard to understand why anyone would go to this much trouble and then ruin it all by sticking an obviously fake name and address on everything.”
“Maybe it’s a challenge,” Lois said. “They are taunting us with what they can do. A new sort of terrorist threat- that they can be anywhere or anyone and we wouldn’t know. Maybe they want to damage our economy without going to too much trouble.”
“They aren’t going to damage the economy with one wallet,” Bill said.
Lois suspected they had a great deal more than one wallet. This was just a warning shot, something to give to the press and stir the country up.
It left her in a quandary. She couldn’t return the wallet to the military without implicating herself, but she couldn’t report on it for the same reasons, not without some sort of broader picture to back it up.
She took the plastic zip lock bag holding the wallet and its contents from Bill and slipped it into her purse.
“When are you going to tell me what this is all about,” he asked.
She grinned at him and said, “You’ll see it on the news when I’m ready.”
Sooner or later she’d get the real story. On the surface, it might seem like nothing. Someone could have made a mistake and misplaced a plane from Ecuador, and the wallet could be a practical joke someone with money was playing.
The fallen wreckage could actually be from a spy satellite, as the agent had claimed, with the claims about a launch being fraudulent or mistaken.
Lois had never been a conspiracy theorist. The sort of theories spun by most conspiracy nuts required a government that was far too competent, far too knowledgeable and far too good at keeping secrets to exist in the real world. She’d worked too long in the military and with government agencies to believe any of it.
No large group of people was able to keep a secret indefinitely. The federal government had leaks in it, leaks that were an ambitious reporter’s bread and butter.
What made all of this creditable was the very lack of resources held by the government. Homeland Security’s resources were spread thin, and they wouldn’t be spending so much time on all this if they didn’t believe there was something to it.
Lois frowned. She’d take the wallet to Agent White and see what he had to say about it. If it was important, she didn’t want to hinder an investigation which might be important for national security. Agent White was an old friend of her fathers’ and he was unlikely to arrest her off hand.
She might get something out of him as well.
Somewhere, someone was going to crack, even if it was just an orderly in a hospital holding the arrested passengers.
Lois frowned and made a mental note to follow that lead up as well. Not everyone would have signed non-disclosure forms, and if she had to talk to janitors and orderlies who might have overheard something, that’s what she would have to do.
As she stepped out into the chilly but still humid darkness, she realized just how late it was. Perhaps it could all wait for the morning. She’d been running on a caffeine high, but from experience she knew that she’d reach her limits soon enough.
She’d do better work in the morning.
***********
The roof of the Wal-Mart was huge. More than three times the size of the largest Costmart Clark had ever seen, the Wal-Mart was amazing. The store itself covered almost seven acres of land…almost a quarter million square feet, and the parking lot covered acres more.
He hadn’t bothered going in. Anyone looking like him with no money would attract attention. But from here, with X-ray vision he already knew exactly where he would go and what he would buy when he finally got his money.
It was amazing, the sheer variety of what they had to sell. They even had atlases, and from a poor angle it looked like he was right.
There was no Gotham, no Metropolis, no Keystone City or Central City. Where Smallville should have been was a town called Wichita.
The paper itself was filled with story after story of terrible things happening. War, terror, death. His world had had them too, but there hadn’t been this feeling of overwhelming despair in people. The people of this world had given up freedom in the name of security, and Clark couldn’t quite understand why.
There were references he still didn’t understand. What exactly was 9-11? The paper made reference to some sort of attacks, but there never seemed to be any real details.
Who was Superman? There wasn’t anything about him in the paper at all, not that Clark would have expected him to be. He certainly wasn’t in the comic section. Most of the comic strips were familiar at least, although for some reason they seemed to be reprinting old Peanuts strips.
What had happened to turn this world so dark? Places like New York had always been unfriendly, but there was a certain fear in the eyes of policemen that hadn’t been there in his world.
Worst of all was an almost insignificant detail that Clark had almost missed.
According to the header of the paper, it was no longer 1993. It was 2008. He’d been transported fifteen years into the future, transported not only across worlds, but across time as well.
He was responsible for the lives of the two hundred people or so who had been on that plane. Every one of them was as displaced as Clark, but they didn’t have the options he had. There would be no flying off into the sunset if everything went wrong.
He had an uneasy feeling that the passengers on that flight might just disappear if it was inconvenient for the government to admit they existed. The thought of innocent people being held in some foreign prison and subjected to humiliation and worse for information they did not possess bothered Clark deeply.
Leaning against the comparative warmth of a heating unit, Clark stared blindly into space. He didn’t know how he arrived in this place, and he had no idea how to get back. Yet he had people who were depending on him to do just that.
Feeling helpless was one of the things Clark hated most. He’d felt that way with Lana from time to time, but this was different.
He could probably find the passengers, and he might even load them onto the plane. He’d have a hard time leaving US airspace without some sort of confrontation. Carrying the plane, he would not be able to stop missiles from obliterating the people above him.
Clark was many things…reporter, linguist, occasional good Samaritan. One thing he was not was a mechanic. Even if the plane hadn’t been completely taken apart looking for bombs or drugs or whatever the government was looking for, he couldn’t repair the engines.
His mind raced for what seemed like hours. At last, exhausted, he pulled the papers over himself and huddled by the heating unit, lulled by the roar of its engines. Although the cold of the wind didn’t bother him, he wanted to make himself as invisible as possible to helicopters flying overhead or worse yet spy satellites.
It made his stomach clench to think of what might be staring down at him.
As he fell asleep, he began to dream of fire and terror and death, his eyelids flickering with the knowledge that it was all going to be his fault.
***************
Wearily, Lois dropped her luggage to the floor outside her door. The security guard in the lobby was new and hadn’t recognized her, and she’d had to go through the whole rigmarole of identifying herself. It was to be expected when you didn’t return home for months at a time.
Living in a high rise apartment building was expensive, but Lois appreciated the added security. With her being gone for months at a time, and with the sort of enemies she occasionally made, it was worth every penny to be able to go to sleep at night with some feeling of safety.
Slipping the key in the lock, Lois wondered how long it would be before she’d be able to find out which hospital the sick passengers had been sent to. That would give her what she needed to find someone to leak information.
Those were tabloid techniques, but they worked.
All of it assumed that her meeting with Agent White didn’t yield anything substantive.
It wasn’t until Lois was pushing the door open that she realized that something was wrong. She typically kept her apartment spotless while she was away. It made for less embarrassment at the thought that the maintenance people might have to come inside and see her place as being an unholy mess.
The fact that the door met resistance as she was pushing it open, as though it was pushing something fallen to the floor told her all she needed to know.
Someone was inside.
