As Clark descended into the atmosphere he was glad he’d thought to keep his trajectory well south of Russia and China until the last moments. Setting off World War Three wasn’t how he wanted to start all of this off.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly what Lois had outlined either. She’d envisioned him doing high profile things to get noticed, so that the press would listen when he told his story. This wasn’t high profile at all, but he didn’t see that he had a choice.
It was the right thing to do.
He’d listened to traffic control long enough to know that the plane Lois was being held on was going to be in the air for at least six hours, assuming they didn’t have to divert or have any other sort of unexpected delays. He had that long to take care of everything before returning so he could learn where they were taking her.
He felt the contents shift in the container above him as he began to move in for a dive and he grimaced. He’d have to be careful that the ride wasn’t too bumpy.
Whatever happened, this was what he’d been meant to do.
********
Dr. Ledderman’s face was pale as evidence began to mount. Most of it was things Lois had heard before…DNA matches, retinal scans, hundreds of artifacts from the other world including one set of home movies showing the unfamiliar skyline of Gotham City found in the baggage compartment.
There wasn’t anything in the skyline that screamed alien, no bat signal in the sky, no overdrawn gothic architecture. It could have been any city in the eastern United States, although according to the experts it wasn’t.
They had the Eurypterid which was even uglier than it had looked on the Internet. Dr. Ledderman swore softly to himself as he leaned forward to look at it.
“I assume you are having this verified.”
“We’re having everything verified,” Agent White said.
“How in the hell have you managed to keep this a secret?”
‘As far as the rest of the world is concerned, this is just a series of unrelated weird stories.” Agent White said. “For the moment we’d like to keep it that way.”
“That would make everything easy,” Lois said. “Sweep it all under the rug and hope it goes away. What are you going to do with my sister and the others?”
“They are being moved to more comfortable accommodations,” Agent White said. “Unfortunately they are now being quarantined.”
“I’ve already been in contact with both my sister and a lot of other people,” Lois said. “If they have something, I’ve already spread it all over the country.”
“What if the disease is on our side?” Dr. Ledderman said quietly. “Something they don’t have a defense against?”
Lois settled back into her seat. “You’ve already had a lot of people exposed to them.”
Agent White shook his head. “When we couldn’t find any weapons on the plane, we assumed the people on the plane WERE the weapon. We’ve had most of them under quarantine conditions already.”
“I didn’t exactly have to wear a decontamination suit to visit my sister.”
“We’d about decided that they were clean during your visit. We’re tightening restrictions again.”
“Of course,” Lois said.
People come from another universe, the biggest story possibly in the history of the world and all they could think was to keep it a secret.
**************
Everything was gone. The valley had been wiped clean and the bodies coming down the river were fouling the water. Old Thaung was already sick, and it wouldn’t be long before it spread to the others.
Nanda felt numb. A week ago he’d had everything. He’d had a family that loved him, a girl who had promised to wait for him, and he’d been preparing to become an adult. If his siblings teased him about his western style t-shirts with western logos, it was only good natured fun.
Now he’d been wearing the same ragged shirt for almost a week. Despite the wind he was sitting here, outside the monastery because he couldn’t stand to listen to the crying of the smallest children. They were crying because of hunger; his pain was deeper.
If it hadn’t been for the thick stone of the monastery no one would have survived; as it was, they were a sad group. The adults were still in shock and the younger children didn’t understand.
He saw three dark masses floating on the surface of the water. More bodies from upriver, no doubt. When they’d first begun appearing the townspeople had tried to fish them out for proper burial. Now there were so many that people had just given up.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He glanced up at the smooth round face of Monk Pao. The older man had always been kind to him, and he’d once considered vows. Now with a sister and mother to take care of, those ambitions were lost.
“It is not good to focus too much on that which cannot be changed,” Monk Pao said.
“Nobody is coming, are they?” Nanda said.
“It is difficult, with the roads washed out,” the monk said calmly. “We are not being singled out. I have spoken with my brothers in other parts and none of them have received aid.”
Monk Pao had a ham radio, as did several other monks in the area. Nanda suspected that he was part of the resistance against the government, but no one would ever confront him about it.
Sometimes it was better not to ask questions.
“What would you have me do?” he asked finally, looking up at the monk.
The monk was staring up in the sky, and his hand tightened on Nanda’s shoulder. Finally he murmured something Nando couldn’t understand.
It took Nando a moment to understand that he was seeing a man in a blue and red costume flying, carrying a large metal box.
“I heard you folks could use some help,” the man said in heavily accented Burmese. “Where can I put this?”
Nando slowly looked down at his own shirt, with its familiar red and yellow logo, and then looked up at the chest of the flying man.
The man met his eyes and smiled and for the first time in days Nando felt a surge of excitement.
He ran inside the shadowed gloom of the monastery, shouting for everyone who could still move.
As he returned at the head of a group of despondent adults, he overheard the man in the costume ask the priest, “I don’t suppose you could tell me where these things are going to do the most good.”
The priest spoke quietly even as Nando rushed forward to grab the first box of rice and other provisions.
For the first time he felt a surge of hope. In a world where Superman was real, anything was possible.
*************
“I don’t know what the hell is happening.” The pilot’s voice was strained. “We’ve lost engines one and two and engines three and four are just completely gone. How the hell are we even staying up?”
The copilot’s voice was just as strained. “Controls aren’t responding.”
“Where did the city go? Traffic Control this is flight 1013. We’ve lost visual contact with…”
“There’s nothing down there.” The co-pilot’s voice was horrified. “It’s all gone.”
“We just got turned around,” the pilot snapped. “A whole city doesn’t just vanish.”
Lois glanced at Dr. Ledderman as he listened to the black box recording through the inevitable confrontation with the U.S. Air force to its ultimate conclusion as the plane came in for a landing.
In the silence following the end of the tape, Agent White said, “That plane couldn’t have flown the distance it did.”
“Why not?” Lois asked.
He clicked the remote, and the screen suddenly changed to a view of the interior of a massive airplane hanger. The airplane inside was the familiar 1013 plane that Lois had seen landing. Pieces and parts had already been removed and placed on the pavement.
Half the wing was missing.
“Why did you take the wing off?” Lois asked.
“We didn’t.” Agent White pressed a button and the scene shifted.
“Something cut the wing in half. The cut is more precise than anything we can replicate; the nearest we can guess is that it was done with a laser. We’ve had teams looking for the rest of the wing, but we haven’t had any luck.”
Lois took a deep breath and said, “Maybe it’s on the other side.”
“What?” Agent White asked, his face gone still.
“Maybe they left the wing behind when they came here.” Lois purposefully didn’t look at either of the two men as she spoke.
The missing wing had been on the side faced away from her and her camera. She wondered if Clark had even noticed it was gone. At the time he likely would have been distracted by the fact that the city was missing and that he had a planeload of screaming passengers above him.
The screaming had been more than audible on the black box tape.
“So how did the plane even land?” Dr. Ledderman asked. He glanced first at Agent White, and then at Lois. “There’s something both of you know that you aren’t telling me.”
Agent White clicked his remote again.
The cockpit camera footage of Clark flying beneath the plane was much more convincing than she would have thought.
**********
It wasn’t going to be nearly enough. As Clark returned for the sixth and final container he realized that he’d need at least four times as many containers to even make a dent in the devastation. That would require infrastructure and the help of organized charities.
He’d managed to focus on areas that were washed out and difficult to get to. With no government presence, the people were free to take the aid they needed. There were hundreds of thousands however who needed help in parts of the country where there were soldiers.
Although Clark was bulletproof, he didn’t see how he’d be able to stop the soldiers from taking the goods as soon as he left. He’d seen that sort of bullying before, in his travels in Africa on his own world, and it wasn’t the sort of thing one man, no matter how powerful could stop.
Dawn was breaking, and he could see that a crowd had gathered around the loading dock. The numbers of people had grown with every trip; apparently some of the volunteers had called friends and family after he’d returned for the second container.
Those people had called others, and now even at six in the morning there was a crowd of three hundred people.
There was also a news van with the inscription “KSBY action news 6.” A youngish looking reporter stood interviewing the crowd.
Although he didn’t know her, he recognized the type. Young, just getting her foot in the door, and assigned to every dog show and minor local piece they could find. They wouldn’t have assigned an experienced reporter to an impromptu gathering of Superman groupies.
Seeing someone pointing up at him, he deliberately slowed his descent until the reporter got the idea and looked up.
She gaped, and it took her a moment to find her composure. She gestured wildly toward her cameraman, and they followed his descent to the ground.
Rushing forward, she said, “Anita Mendoza, action news. Is this some sort of publicity stunt for a new Superman movie?”
Clark hovered four foot off the ground and shook his head. His mind raced. He hadn’t planned on having a press conference so soon, and he’d hoped that Lois would be there to coach him. It seemed like the sort of thing she’d be good at.
As the reporter craned her head, obviously trying to see the concealed wires or other mechanism he was using, Clark remained quiet.
“This is a new street magic act,” she ventured, obviously uncomfortable with his silence.
“The people of Myanmar need help,” he said. “And I intend to give it to them.”
He landed and turned toward the last shipping container. There would be time for an interview later, when he was better prepared.
“So why the Superman outfit?” she asked, “If this isn’t some sort of publicity stunt.”
“People know what it means,” Clark said.
Reaching the storage container he leaned down and grabbed the bottom end. From the smirk on the young reporter’s face he could tell that she was waiting for the joke to fall through.
She probably expected him to stop and say something else or make some sort of excuse, despite what she’d been told by the people in the crowd all around them.
When the metal began to groan and the container began to rise, the blood ran from her face. He shifted the container and the crowd around them took a collective step back. The reporter remained where she was.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“An accident,” he said. “I flew a plane load of people through a rift from my world to this one. Now that I’m here, I’m going to do everything I can to help.”
He shifted the weight of the container again and moved until it was directly over him. He then levitated four feet into the air.
The reporter was braver than he would have expected, stepping into the shadow of the storage container.
“Are you talking about flight 1013 that appeared in Washington D.C.?”
“The United States government is holding almost two hundred people who have committed no crime other than being refugees from another country,” he said.
“There’s got to be more to the story,” she said.
“I’ve given a full interview to Lois Lane,” Clark said.
“The C.N.N. reporter?”
He smirked a little. “It seemed appropriate.”
“Do you have anything else to say?” she asked as he began to rise.
He paused and then said, “The situation in Myanmar is worse than what they are telling you. I’ve been there and I’ve seen the bodies. I offer my help to any charity that wants it to transport the help these people need. People are dying as we speak.”
“How will they get in contact with you? She asked.
“I’ll be around.”
*********
Every telephone line was flooded, and the word from the technical support staff was that the servers had just crashed from being flooded.
At least now Pilar no longer had to field all the requests for information from everyone. She stared at the board of blinking lights.
The story of six unknown missile launches from the United States toward mainland China had been major news for approximately twenty minutes. She’d had a feeling of satisfaction for the first time since the Feds had broken into her house ransacking it and looking for Lois Lane.
“I’ve given the full interview to Lois Lane.”
On the big screen the picture was six feet high, repeated across five different monitors. For the first time Pilar began to hate the way her station played the same news over and over again.
Everyone was expecting C.N.N. to have the story and all Pilar could do was watch helplessly as it all collapsed around her.
An aide gestured to her, and she moved quickly to a monitor to the side. MSNBC had a crew of reporters on the ground in Myanmar, and they were showing a man in a blue and red suit landing while carrying a giant storage container.
Myanmar troops were firing at him.
Her cell phone rang.
It took her a moment to realize that it was her personal telephone, not the company phone in her ear. Opening it, she checked the number and groaned. Upper management wanted to speak with her.
Perhaps firing Lois hadn’t been as easy a decision as it had seemed at the time.
On one screen she could see a Fox media expert pointing to the video clip of flight 1013 landing and pointing at the shadow hanging from beneath the plane. How they’d gotten permission to even use the footage she didn’t know, but that wasn’t her main concern at the moment.
Her main concern was keeping her job.
