Clark stroked the lapel of his suit jacket, pleased to finally be back into something reasonably formal. Part of being a reporter was getting people to listen, and for some reason people didn’t take someone in jeans and a t-shirt seriously.
“Thanks for picking up my dry cleaning,” Clark said.
Lois glanced at him with approval and said, “I owed you, and it’ll probably be easier to fit in wearing something like that.”
It was off the rack, but wearing it was like assuming a new identity. Slipping the jacket on was a little like getting some of himself back, and he felt oddly more confident than he had in a while.
“Where are we going?”
“I have a…friend who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
Clark looked at her and said, “We’ve just gone to a great deal of trouble to stay out of the government’s hands.”
Lois stared out the window. “He telecommutes a lot…works out of his apartment.”
“You don’t think he’d turn us in?”
“We had…a relationship,” she said. “We’re still friends.”
“So what do you think he’ll be able to do for us?”
“He should be able to tap into the NEXRAD system. It’s a network of one hundred fifty eight high resolution Doppler weather radars…if anybody has weather records, he should have access to them.”
“And you think he’ll help us?”
Lois smirked. “He’ll do whatever I tell him to.”
Clark had a sneaking feeling that he also fit in that category. Of course, given his history with Lana, that wasn’t much of a surprise.
************
The ride up the elevator with Clark was a little uncomfortable. Lois hadn’t seen Myron in more than a year, and they’d left on lukewarm terms. Myron had been solid and stable, but a little boring.
There was only so much Lois could hear about the weather before she wanted to scream.
Yet it shouldn’t feel odd. Clark wasn’t even her partner, really, and Myron was simply an ex-boyfriend. This was simply a business deal all the way around.
Myron’s high rise apartment complex was nicer than hers, with new carpet and the smell of fresh paint. Lois gestured toward Clark to step to the side as she rang his doorbell.
She could see the shadow crossing the peephole a moment before she could hear the locks disengaging.
The door opened abruptly.
“Lois!” Myron said. “What are you doing here?”
Myron looked startled to see Lois. His fingers tightened on the door, and for a moment Lois wondered if he had another woman inside the apartment with him.
She dismissed the thought. Myron was a small man with a high forehead. He was slender and a little taller than Lois herself. This meant he was short compared to most men. He was also finicky and a perfectionist. He was a man who didn’t have any confidence, outside his chosen field, and not the sort of man to have a woman in his apartment at any hour.
He’d be delighted to see her.
“I need your help,” Lois said.
Clark stepped into view behind her, and Myron stiffened.
“What do you want?”
“This is my….partner,” Lois said. “We’re working on a story about unusual weather phenomenon.”
“We’re looking for unusual patterns and weird stories,” Clark said. He smiled and said, “I suppose you hear a little bit of everything.”
Lois tried not to grimace in annoyance. Myron didn’t know Clark, and he had no reason to help him.
Myron’s lips tightened. “If you’re asking about the weather patterns a few days ago, we’re launching a full investigation. We have people going over all the computer models to see why there were so many glitches.”
Lois frowned. She’d expected Myron to have to do some research, check with his colleagues. Having the information already available seemed a little anticlimactic.
At her expression, Myron sighed. “This thing has been a black eye for the Agency. Nobody expects us to be right all the time, but to have this many storms coming out of nowhere? We’ve been pulling out hair out for days.”
“I can tell,” Lois murmured, and then grimaced. The last thing she needed was to be making jokes at Myron’s expense.
“This is what I do, Lois. I tried telling you about it often enough at dinner. Maybe if your eyes hadn’t glazed over every time, you’d realize that I’m good at what I do.”
“If we didn’t think you were the man to talk to, we wouldn’t be here,” Clark said, smiling disarmingly. He glanced around the stylishly decorated apartment and said, “You wouldn’t be in the position you were in if you weren’t good.”
Somehow he’d seemed to shrink into himself while dealing with Myron, almost as though he was instinctively slumping so that he didn’t tower over the other man. Lois had expected Myron to bristle at the presence of a larger, more attractive man, but instead he almost seemed to preen.
Clark was an experienced interviewer, good at getting people to drop their guard. Lois could see it now as he spoke to Myron.
She’d have to watch out for it herself. She’d already allowed herself to sleep in the same room with him, and she barely even knew him. It would be easy to get wrapped up in him and the drama of attempting to rescue his people.
She couldn’t afford the distraction.
“You’ll have to be a little more specific about which storms you are looking for,” Myron said. “And where.”
“Everywhere,” Lois said. “We’re looking for weird thunderstorms.”
Myron snorted and he said, “There are more than forty thousand thunderstorms a day around the world. You’ll have to be a little more exact about what you mean by weird.”
“Storms where no storms should be,” Clark said. “Storms where strange things happen…where things occur that can’t be explained.”
Myron brightened. “What about a rain of frogs?”
Seeming a little nervous, he headed for his desk by the wide picture window. His computer was already on. He turned the laptop toward them so that they couldn’t see the screen. He sat down at his desk and began typing a series of commands, glancing suspiciously up at the both of them.
“You don’t trust me, Myron?” Lois asked.
“My passwords are a matter of national security,” he said stiffly. “Plus, if you had them, what would you need me for?”
He turned to the computer and began to click with his mouse. “Why didn’t you call me back after the last time we were together?”
“I was in Iraq,” Lois said.
The truth was that she’d never been interested in Myron as anything more than a convenient date. Although he’d been mildly amusing the first couple of times they’d gone out, he’d quickly run out of anything to say that wasn’t work related. He’d become increasingly clingy and needy.
She hadn’t been able to get to Iraq fast enough.
“I could have taken care of your fish.”
“Hilda lives in the same building,” Lois said. “It’s an hour out of your way.”
“Still….” He paused. “Ah…here it is….”
He turned the laptop toward them and then clicked a button with his mouse.
A video clip began to play.
Stepping outside of what looked to be a cabin, the camera holder focused on the brewing black clouds above them and the rain falling.
Something was falling, and at first it looked like hailstones. The camera followed one stone down until it landed on the ground. It was a tiny yellow frog which was soon surrounded by hundreds of other frogs, all of which scrambled over each other to avoid being hit by their fellows.
“This sort of thing happens all the time, “Myron said. “It happened in Serbia in June 2005 and in Mexico in 1997.”
“Then why are you showing this to us?”
“Nobody recognizes the species of frog.” Myron said. “It’s completely new, although it has some relatives in Asia.”
“Where was this?”
“Yellowstone.”
Lois pulled out a small map of the United States that she’d bought at the gas station while Clark was changing into his clothes.
She’d already noted the spots where they knew strange storms had appeared...Delaware, which Clark said was the location of Metropolis was, Northern California, almost in Oregon...she added a mark in Wyoming.
“What do you have there?” Myron asked.
“We’ve been tracking strange storms,” Lois said. “One off the coast of France, these other two.”
“That’s not a lot to make a pattern with,” Myron said. “Let’s take a look…”
He turned the computer away from them again and hunched over it. A moment later, he said, “Which date?”
Lois gave it to him, adding in the time of the Delaware occurrence. They didn’t actually know when the other events had happened, only the times when the pigeons and scorpion had been found.
“Oh.” Myron said.
“What do you mean, oh?” Lois demanded.
“There were a whole slew of storms that night that nobody predicted. It was a bit of a scandal. They just seemed to pop up out of nowhere.”
“Any chance that you could show us which ones were like that?”
Myron worked at the computer for a moment, and then said, “The anomalous storms are displayed in red.”
Lois expected to see a half dozen to a dozen storms. Surely if there were more, they’d have already heard about it.
“We’ve been scrambling to try to explain it,” Myron said. “None of the models predicted any of these storms.”
Across the United States Lois could see almost fifty storms of various sizes pulsing in a dull red.
*********
Leaning forward, Clark said, “Do you see a pattern to that?”
According to the map, the storms were fewer and more widely spread the farther west Clark looked. They were more densely packed on the east coast of the United States, and more densely packed still off the edge of the map into the Atlantic Ocean.
“Is there any way to see what was happening closer to Europe?” Lois asked.
Myron touched his screen and the view widened.
It was now apparent that the storms were appearing even more and more tightly packed the father east Clark looked, until they combined into one massive super cell off the coast of France.
“Can we see it in time lapse?” Lois asked.
Myron scowled and clicked a series of buttons.
It took Clark a moment to do the calculations in his head. The first storms appeared off the coast of France almost four hours before he’s arrived in Delaware. The storms had spread rapidly, faster than any storm front should have been able to go. They’d covered the United States in a little more than three hours.
But none of the storms remained for more than an hour. Even as the effect was propagating, expanding and diffusing to the west, it was vanishing towards its beginning.
“It almost looks like a wave,” Lois said.
“It’s a statistical anomaly,” Myron said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“How do you know?” Lois asked irritably.
Whatever affection had been between Myron and Lois had apparently long since faded. Clark felt a small pang of jealousy. Myron was a fussy little man, but he’d gotten to take Lois out on dates honestly. He’d been able to ask her out to dinner, to dance, to a movie, all secure in his place in the world. He hadn’t been encumbered by endless responsibilities. He hadn’t been out to save the world.
He’d just been able to spend a little time with a beautiful woman.
Just because it had apparently soured didn’t mean that Clark wasn’t jealous of the memories.
“It’s my job.”
Clark blinked. Myron was speaking, but for the first time Clark noticed that Myron’s eye was twitching.
“Are you feeling all right?” Clark asked.
He’d assumed the man’s twitchiness was simply the result of his being high strung and finicky.
Instead, he could hear the man’s heart rate increasing even as he spoke.
Clark glanced out the window and sighed.
“You called the Feds, didn’t you?”
“I’m an employee of the Federal government,” Myron said. “I have an obligation to help bring fugitives to justice.”
Lois looked at him with a disgusted look. “I thought we were friends.”
“Friends would have taken my calls.” Myron said. “And besides…I can’t afford to lose this job. It’s all I have.”
Lois scowled at him and said, “Maybe if you’d had a spine I might have called back!”
“We’ve got to go,” Clark said, placing one hand on Lois’s shoulder. “Now.”
“Agent Randal said you wouldn’t be harmed,” Myron said. “He said they just wanted him…”
Clark headed for the door and a moment later they were out in the hall.
“They are coming up the elevator,” Clark said. “Let’s take the stairs.”
“How do you know that?” Lois asked as she followed him onto the stairwell.
As the door clicked behind them they could hear the sound of the elevator pinging and the sounds of feet rushing down the hall.
Clark turned to move down the stairs then stopped. He looked back up at Lois and then shook his head, pointing downward.
There were agents making their way up the stairs.
He gestured up and Lois turned and began moving as silently as she could up the stairs. Fortunately Myron had chosen to live as near the roof as he could afford, which left them only three flights from the top.
“It’s locked,” Lois hissed. “And what are we going to do if we get outside anyway? I can’t climb buildings.”
“Don’t worry,” Clark said. He shoved slightly against the door and it clanked open. “It was just stuck.”
She looked at him strangely, but moved obediently out into the night air. Clark closed the door behind them then stared at it for a moment, welding it shut with his special vision and keeping his body between Lois and the glowing metal.
“It won’t be long before they look up here,” Lois said. “Even if we could block the door, they’ll just get a helicopter with a sniper.”
She jumped as a booming sound came from the door as something was rammed into it from the other side.
“Do you even have a plan?” Lois asked.
“You could always pretend I took you hostage,” Clark said.
“Thy have video of me hugging you outside my office,” Lois said disgustedly. “It wouldn’t work.”
“Do you trust me?” Clark asked, stepping closer to Lois.
“If you hold a gun to my head, Agent Randal is likely to shoot both of us and claim we attacked him.”
“I’m not going to hold a gun to your head,” Clark said, stepping closer to Lois.
She must have seen something in his eyes because she took first one step backward and then another. A moment later she backed into the railing. She looked behind her and stiffened as she realized just how high in the air she actually was.
Clark could hear the sounds of helicopters approaching. He didn’t have much time to make a decision.
He could leave her behind and pretend to climb down the side of the building and then vanish.
Somehow the thought of leaving her with Agent Randal wasn’t even an option. He could allow himself to be captured, but he wasn’t quite ready to do that.
That left one other option.
“Take my hand,” he said.
Slowly she reached out for him, and he took her hand in his.
“I was telling you the truth when I said I wasn’t Superman,” He said. “It just wasn’t the whole truth.”
He pulled her toward her, and before she could scream they were both airborne.
