As Lois stepped cautiously back, she saw a familiar face peering around the edge of the door.
She relaxed for a moment. Hilda was a video editor with CNN and when Lois was out of town she often checked up on Lois’s apartment as she lived two floors down with a her significant other. Even with the security measures in place with the apartment, it was important to have someone to check up on the place.
As Hilda backed away, Lois scowled. The room inside was dark and things were tossed on the floor. No one had even made a token gesture at trying to conceal what they had done; her couch cushions had been slashed and the stuffing pulled out. Her computer was gone.
What had been a beautiful apartment with an amazing nighttime view of Washington was now a wreck.
“What happened?” she asked Hilda, glancing down the hall before picking up her backs.
“Federal Agents came by the office and confiscated your computer at work. I tried telling them you hadn’t even been back in three months, but they wouldn’t listen. They confiscated all the footage from the plane too.”
Lois stepped inside and wearily closed the door behind her. “They didn’t say what it was all about?”
Hilda shook her head. The young woman looked worried. “They said they had a Federal Warrant.”
Scowling, Lois said, “I didn’t do anything in Iraq that wasn’t approved by the military, and I just got into town.”
“They wanted everything we had on the plane landing. I overheard some of the bosses saying that they’d hit the other networks too.”
Lois walked slowly around the room before heading back to her bedroom. She winced at what she saw there.
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me sleep on your couch?”
Hilda nodded. “Jake is out of town at a medical conference.”
“Why were you here in the first place?” Lois asked. “I thought you only checked my place on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“I wanted to warn you. I think they are going to want to confiscate your laptop and the footage in your cameras.”
Lois smirked. “Obstructing justice? I hadn’t realized you had a wild side.”
“My uncle works for the ACLU,” Hilda said. “I think you can make a case…”
Lois nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”
The thought that someone had probably tapped her telephone occurred to her. If they’d heard her ask for a place to stay, she’d know soon enough.”
Moving toward her kitchenette, Lois sighed. The drawers were open and silverware was spilled across the floor. It was almost as though someone was angry and was intentionally working to make her life harder than it had to be.
It took a moment to find what she needed in the middle of all the mess. A specialty post office container, correct postage…Lois pulled the wallet from her purse and dropped it into the container. There was a mail slot on the first floor. Mailing the package to herself would keep it out of her hands for a period of several days. The last thing she wanted at this point was to be caught with it on her person.
She sighed and headed to her bedroom for a change of clothes. It was going to be a long night.
***********
Clark tried not to look nervous as the clerk handed over the money. He hadn’t realized that he would have to wait several minutes while the convenience store safe released the money bit by bit.
For security, he bought three more winning tickets. A couple of hundred dollars wasn’t going to last him long, not if he was going to buy a set of clothes and find a place to stay.
He’d have to find a place to hide during the day. Not only was someone more likely to see his face in the light of day, but he couldn’t simply fly from place to place. He’d be confined to walking, unless he found a cab.
Using a cab would not only leave a trail, it would require him to use even more of the limited funds he already had. It made him uneasy to cheat at the lottery this way; he had a feeling that his parents would have thought it was wrong. He just didn’t see any other way to make the money that wouldn’t hurt even more people.
He could use his abilities to find gold easily enough, but who would he sell it to? With no identification, even pawn shops wouldn’t take it. The same would apply of diamonds or buried treasure from shipwrecks.
Without an identity he couldn’t buy a car, own a home, or even sell what little property he had.
Sighing, Clark bought a fourth ticket. When the last of the money was handed to him, he headed out of the convenience store.
The sun had already been up for an hour. Luckily he’d found a convenience store closer to the Wal-Mart. He knew exactly what he was going to buy, but he had to hurry. He had no idea how long it would be before the average police officer was given his description. It depended on whether his problem the night before was treated as a simple counterfeiting case, or if the government of this world was as paranoid and authoritarian as they seemed.
He stiffened as he heard the sound of a police cruiser nearby. Stepping into an alley, he checked quickly to ensure that no one was looking, and then he allowed himself to fly quickly through the alley. He grimaced at the dust which was rising from his passage, but he didn’t see that there was much else he could do. He wouldn’t feel better until he was in civilian clothes.
**********
Lois woke groggily. Morning light was filling the window, and her back ached from the unaccustomed position she’d been sleeping in on Hilda’s couch. It was funny; she’d slept on the ground many times and had less pain than one night back at home in Metropolis. She’d assume that it was old age, but at twenty six she should still be too young to have much pain.
Of course, she was still bruised from where the bullet had hit her body armor. It left her feeling stiff and old.
The bullet wounds she’d been hospitalized for in the past sometimes ached when the weather was bad too. One had left a small scar on her hip, and the other had struck her thigh. Taking risks sometimes meant paying a heavy price, although Lois liked to think that she was better at dodging since then.
She blinked as she realized that Hilda was sitting at a desk, staring intently at her laptop. Her mouth felt disgusting and her eyes felt crusted over with sleep. Of course, Hilda hadn’t been running on fumes after almost fifty hours without sleep either.
Lois never had been able to sleep on international flights.
“Come look at this,” Hilda said, gesturing toward her without looking up.
Reluctantly Lois pushed herself out of bed, wincing as she realized that her bruises had bruises and her body was protesting. She could use a few days to recover, and if the day were more normal she’d have insisted on it.
With everything that was going on though, she couldn’t afford the time.
She walked unsteadily over toward Hilda, who still hadn’t looked at her.
“What does this look like to you?”
Lois stared at the screen, which had a video capture from her report the night before.
“It looks like a man is hanging from the plane,” she said. “It’s got to be an optical illusion.”
Hilda clicked, and several other screen captures showed, one of which occurred when the plane was passing in from of a search light from the top of the Air traffic control tower.
Lois leaned forward, staring. There WAS someone hanging from the plane.
There had been no reports of a body found on the tarmac, so whoever it had been must have somehow gotten away. That this made him some sort of combination of Steven Seagal and Rambo couldn’t avert the evidence on the video.
Action heroes were apparently real.
*************
Money didn’t go as far in this time as it had in Clark’s own, despite the claims on the Wal-Mart signs. At least he had a pair of black jeans and a long sleeved black twill work shirt and jacket. With a black baseball cap to help conceal his face in case he was seen by cameras, he felt a great deal better. He could be a construction worker or a line man.
Still, in Washington D.C., the best way to blend in was to wear a business suit. Now that he had these clothes, he had the beginnings of a means to get what he needed. It was only a matter of finding a Taxi and hitting a few more convenience stores.
In the meantime, Clark checked the edition of the newspaper that had come out with the morning edition. The landing of the airplane was banner headline, and as he quickly scanned the story, he noticed that the passengers had been arrested and held by members of the Department of Homeland security. There was no information on where they were being held.
However, the passengers who’d had heart attacks had been air lifted to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
That would be enough to start. Given his abilities, he’d be able to find out more when he reached there.
Glancing around, Clark stepped down a set of stairs toward the subway. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of old urine and body odors. He suspected it would have been noticeable even without his special abilities.
As he waited for the train, he kept glancing toward the sack he held in his hand. He’d managed to find a Superman comic, although the store hadn’t sold very many of them. He’d noticed far more T-shirts and even some sort of movies on discs.
It was a little scary that they all had the same symbol he’d found on his baby blankets. A simple shield surrounding an S shape. It had piqued his curiosity, along with the comments in the bar from the man who’d talked about a reporter who could fly and was super strong.
Stepping into the train and sitting down, Clark pulled the comic book from its plastic packaging. The prices shocked him. In Metropolis you could buy entire novels for the cost of a single comic book here.
The costume was garish. Although the cape seemed like a nice touch, Clark couldn’t understand how anyone would wear their underwear on the outside of their outfit. It seemed like some sort of strange kinkiness for a kid’s comic book.
Clark slowly opened the book, almost dreading what he would find there.
***********
The sick passengers were being held at the Walter Reed Army medical center, and the government wasn’t allowing any press in to see them. Lois wasn’t going to let that stop her. She had spent too much time tracking down leads in places where she’d be shot at to worry about breaking into an Army hospital.
She even had an excuse to be there. Private Chalmers, the man she’d helped rescue in Iraq was being airlifted in today. She’d promised to come and see him. If she should happen to wander on her way to or back from that visit, she couldn’t be blamed.
A shower and more coffee had done wonders for her, and Lois now felt ready to face the world. After the events of the night before, there was nothing that was going to surprise her.
Nothing at all.
