“Your colleague…do you know how we can reach him?” Lois asked.
“He’s at a conference in Las Vegas. I have no doubt that he’ll be out of contact until tomorrow morning at the very least.” Professor Carrick smiled slightly. “He likes to gamble and once he sits down at the tables you couldn’t get him up for anything short of the apocalypse.”
Lois glanced at Clark, who nodded slightly.
“Do you know which hotel he is staying at?”
“Bally’s,” the older man said. He pulled his gloves off and turned to the washbasin “If you leave a message with the desk I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you in the morning, assuming he doesn’t forget and rush off to the conference first.”
“Do you have a picture?”
Stepping across to the computer, the older man typed in a web address. A moment later a picture with a profile appeared on the page.
Lois studied the picture carefully, even as she heard the printer running.
He was a heavyset man in his late fifties; with heavy jowls and drooping eyelids. He looked like an angry man, and he reminded her a little of her first editor. This was a face she’d remember.
No need to take chances, however. Lois took the printed picture, folded it and slipped it into her pocket.
“Thank you professor Carrick,” Lois said. “You wouldn’t believe how helpful you’ve been.”
The older man smiled at her. “I’ve always got time for a former student, especially when they bring me gifts.”
He glanced back at the bird lying on the table.
“We have things to do,” Lois said. “But I look forward to reading about your findings.”
Professor Carrick would provide concrete, scientific evidence that something strange was going on. It was a small step, but Lois hoped that the government didn’t realize the danger until the media picked up his findings.
Ornithologists didn’t usually worry the government, and by the time they realized the leak, it would be too late.
*************
Aloft again, Clark felt himself finally beginning to relax. Things were finally beginning to fall into place. They had a goal, something concrete they could do instead of just reacting to everything.
Feeling helpless was the one thing Clark couldn’t abide. It had happened the night when he was ten, when he’d been too slow and too weak to stop what had happened to his parents. It had happened over and over again throughout his childhood in foster care, where he’d had little to no control over the direction his life was going to go.
It happened every time he’d decided to not help for fear of what being seen as a freak would do to his personal life.
It was one of the things that had spoiled his relationship with Lana. He’d come to resent her continual pressure to never use his abilities, to never admit that he was anything other than the normal person he appeared to be.
Yet he couldn’t blame her entirely. He’d made the decision to hide, to cover his ears and ignore the horror that he heard every night he was in a big city.
Being able to hear everything in a thirty mile radius was more of a curse than a blessing. In a city the size of Metropolis…or Washington D.C. for that matter, there was a continual din. While he was able to ignore the usual sounds, part of him had always listened for the other kind of sounds.
The sounds of people assaulting one another, of murders, or arguments and death, part of him was always listening for these. In Metropolis, it was an every night occurrence.
Being a reporter had helped, a little. It had satisfied his need to help and to make a difference in the world, but he’d been left with the nagging sense that he had more to offer.
Being a reporter was in many ways like being a police officer. Most days, you only came along after the harm had occurred. It was rare to get to prevent a crime.
He had the power to stop them as they were happening. The small, secretive rescues he’d done over the years had only whetted his appetite for more.
Now at least he had something concrete he could do instead of simply running and hiding.
It made him appreciate the small woman he was holding all the more. She didn’t seem to look down on him for not being quite human. She didn’t ask him to stand by and listen to people being hurt or even killed out of some desire to protect her reputation and his secret.
She treated him as an equal, not as some kind of adornment. With Lana he had felt a little like a trophy boyfriend, a sort of expected adjunct to her life. He’d gone to the expected parties, made small talk with her friends. He’d done the expected thing because Lana was all he’d had.
Lois had risked everything for what she believed in. Even without knowing what he could do she’d risked her job and her freedom to help him and the people on the plane.
Best of all, she didn’t seem to idolize him. From what he’d been able to gather, most of the fictional Lois Lanes had idolized Superman while ignoring Clark Kent.
It was going to be painful to let her go.
************
Lois closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift, enjoying the sensation of being held.
Watching the lights below pass by, isolated seas of stars in the darkness was soothing, and as she felt herself relaxing, she began to wonder what it would be like to be able to do this all the time.
There were no guarantees that he was going to be able to get back home. If there was some man-made reason for the rifts to occur, it was going to be too dangerous to let them happen again just to allow the passage of a couple of hundred people.
The project was going to have to be shut down in one form or another, and Clark was going to have to deal with that. Chances were that even of the government changed its mind and became suddenly reasonable, it was going to be almost impossible to predict when the rifts were likely to occur.
Lois allowed herself to imagine what would happen if Clark was forced to stay.
They’d have to put pressure on the United States government to give citizenship to the refugees. After all, most of all of them were American citizens, even if it wasn’t quite this America from which they had citizenship.
As long as the whole thing remained a secret, the government was going to be able to keep the passengers locked away.
Even if he was able to go back, he’d never be able to gather all the passengers together in time without help. For all they knew the passengers had been separated into different complexes and getting them all together would be a tactical nightmare.
In that case going public would once again be their only recourse. If she could convince the public of one impossible fact, that Superman was real, other impossible facts would be easier to swallow.
Lois frowned, her mind going over a hundred different possibilities. She wasn’t a publicist, but it wouldn’t hurt to hire one. A lawsuit on behalf of the people who had been incarcerated also wouldn’t hurt.
High profile demonstrations of power would prove to the world that these weren’t just terrorists or cultists. With the power of a Superman, a group wouldn’t need bombs or planes or any equipment at all.
Clark had the potential to be a weapon of mass destruction all by himself.
Lois opened her eyes as she felt Clark stiffening beside her.
There was a glow on the horizon, but it wasn’t the electric glow of city lights that was becoming almost normal for her.
They were moving so fast that it was already sliding by to the side, but Lois could see that they were already slowing.
“What’s going on?” she asked, leaning her head in close to his.
“A sugar refinery is burning,” he said. “There are people inside.”
“So set me down.” Lois said.
He looked at her for a long moment and seemed to come to a decision. A moment later they were flashing forward and Lois found herself a hundred yards away from the wide expanse of parking lot.
She could hear ambulances already on the way, and as her feet touched the ground she felt the sudden chill as Clark let her go.
He was a blur as he disappeared, and even as he vanished one of the silos exploded. Lois flinched and winced as the world seemed to go white for a moment.
She could see the growing crowd of evacuees outside the plant. Some were standing and others were lying on the ground, obviously injured.
Despite herself, Lois found herself moving forward. She’d taken an elementary first aid course before going to Iraq the first time. She knew the basics and with any luck the ambulances would be there soon enough that they wouldn’t need her.
Stepping forward into the crowd, Lois saw the stunned, haggard look on most of the faces in the crowd. These people were in shock.
“Does anyone have medical experience?” she called out.
When they turned to look at her she repeated the question again. Slowly they began to look at their neighbors, who were shaking their heads.
“I had CPR training,” one woman said.
With that another man stepped out from the back of the crowd and then another, and another. They seemed almost grateful to have someone in charge, especially as Lois began to point out individuals and telling them what to do.
“Does anyone have medical kits in their cars, latex gloves, hand sanitizer, blankets, and bottles of water, anything we can use? If you do bring them here,” Lois said, pointing to an unused area. “We’re going to have to make do with what we have.”
No one seemed to notice the bodies which were appearing behind them until Lois pointed them out.
She flinched at the sound of another explosion, but she was pleased to see that one section of the fire seemed to be spontaneously dying out.
“We can’t move these people,” Lois said, “But we can make them as comfortable as possible. We need to keep them warm.”
She began to assign tasks to people. Distributing supplies, performing CPR, loosening tight articles of clothing before swelling inevitably began. It was a never ending litany of tasks, and to the crowd’s credit, no one argued.
Lois stepped in when she needed to, taking over for someone doing chest compressions or for someone else doing resuscitative breathing.
Someone somewhere had come up with a supply of CPR masks and latex gloves. Lois had to keep reminding people to change gloves and wash with hand sanitizer when moving from one patient to the other.
Without their skins, these people were going to be vulnerable to infection.
Even those who were walking were coughing. Many of them would suffer from scarring to their lungs from the fire and heat.
After her parents had died, Lois had become something of an expert on fire.
Lois was desperately doing chest compressions on one man who had stopped breathing. She was exhausted and when she felt the hand on her shoulder, she looked up.
The paramedic smiled at her and said, “We’ll take it from here.”
Lois had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. She fell back and found herself sitting on the ground. Her hands were shaking, and whether it was from the adrenaline or from simple exhaustion she didn’t know.
Looking up, Lois realized that she was surrounded by flashing lights. They’d called in every ambulance in the area and more would probably be arriving soon.
“Are you hurt, Ma’am?”
Another paramedic reached down for her and she took his hand, slowly standing. “I’m not part of all of this. I’m just helping out. Let me show you where the worst of them are.”
There were thirty people critically injured and two who Lois believed to be dead. Most of the rest of the crowd had injuries that would have to be attended to, but they would have to wait.
The worst were on the outskirts of the group, having been the ones Clark had rescued. They’d been exposed to the most fire and particulate matter, and Lois doubted that some of them were going to live. She felt a pressure on her chest at the thought of the people she hadn’t been able to save, but she could only imagine how much worse it would have been for Clark.
The paramedic left her, shouting for two of his comrades as one of the men on the ground began coughing up blood.
The world seemed to spin around her, but Lois forced herself to remain standing. She’d already learned that you didn’t fall apart during a crisis.
The time to do that was later, when you had time to grieve.
“Lois!”
The familiar voice shocked Lois. One of her CNN coworkers was striding toward her, camera outstretched.
Obviously the news of her dismissal hadn’t made the rounds yet.
She hesitated for only a moment. Her face was already on live television and if the Feds were out to find her in Georgia they wouldn’t be looking for her in Nevada.
She put on her best smile and stepped forward to give the interview of a lifetime as behind her firefighters were already moving forward to put out a fire that seemed to be extinguishing itself piece by piece.
Pilar was going to be furious, and Agent Randal was probably on his way already. Imagining their reactions almost made the risk worth it.
“It’s a miracle that anyone survived at all,” she began. “In what some survivors have taken to calling hell, over thirty people have been critically injured and two have died in a
sugar refinery explosion in Augusta, Georgia.”
*********
Clark felt numb. He’d avoided more serious accidents in the past, preferring to stop things unobtrusively before they started, but this was something he’d never experienced.
The bodies were the worst. Had he arrived in time? If he’d hesitated a couple of seconds less would some of these people have lived instead of dying?
Even touching some of them was causing damage, although with most of them he could protect them from the heat at least somewhat. There wasn’t anything he could do about the fumes, however, other than move them.
Finding the victims was the first priority and only then did he focus on the factory itself.
The fires burned, and when he froze them with his breath, it often wasn’t long before they exploded again. It was like fighting the hydra; for every fire he put out two more started.
Worse, the whole place was corrupted with sugar sludge. Vats had exploded, leaving doors and walls caked with the substance. Highly flammable and sticky, they were making it harder to put fires out and keep them out.
He remained even when the fire crews arrived, aware that even more casualties could result as the crews tried to search desperately for bodies that were not there.
All he knew of the outside world was flashes as he moved back and forth. He saw Lois performing CPR and he felt a moment of admiration for her. She could have simply stood in the shadows and watched; no one had asked her to do anything more than that.
Instead she was in the middle of it, doing everything she could to help.
He felt ashamed.
His entire life had been about hiding, about pretending he was normal and doing only as much as he could without risking himself.
Lois was a federal fugitive and it wouldn’t be long before police and others were on the scene, yet she was stepping forward, risking everything to help people she didn’t even know.
It was only when the last of the fires was out that he finally allowed himself to leave. Flying behind the factory and circling around, he soon found Lois in the middle of a crowd of media.
Seeing him, she excused herself and a moment later they were in the air again.
************
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“We’re sticking to the plan,” Clark said. His voice was grim. “We’ll find a hotel in Vegas and talk to our man in the morning, assuming we can’t find him tonight.”
“Are you all right?” Lois asked.
Clark was silent for a long moment staring out in front of him. “It wasn’t enough,” he said.
“Some of those people are going to live because of you,” she said.
“I should have flown them directly to the hospital,” he said. “Gotten them directly into the emergency room. Instead I did what I always do and hid in the shadows.”
Lois bit her lip for a moment and then came to a decision.
“We need to make a detour,” she said.
“Where?” he asked.
“Illinois.”
“What’s in Illinois?” Clark asked, glancing at her.
“A place to stay,” Lois said, “And something you need.”
He nodded and they began to turn.
The nice thing about Clark was that he treated her as an equal partner. He was willing to fly halfway across the country on her word alone.
He had no idea what was coming.
