“Your client isn’t under arrest,” Agent White said. “She’s under protective custody.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Susan said. “Why a famed reporter should be under protective custody at a time when it was convenient for the government to have her out of sight.”
Lois leaned forward. A night’s sleep in government custody hadn’t been enough to overcome the sort of bone wearying exhaustion that being up for days had left. She wanted to know what justification Agent White could possibly make for holding her without charges.
Of course, these days he didn’t actually need much justification. Under the aegis of National Security, he could do a great deal.
“There have been death threats,” Agent White said reluctantly.
“Death threats?” Susan said. “I haven’t heard anything about death threats.”
Agent White sighed. “Contrary to what you may believe, this isn’t the only case we’re working on. We’ve intercepted transmissions from certain extremist groups…”
“Foreign extremist groups?”
“No,” Agent White said. “Domestic groups.”
“So you are surveilling American citizens on American soil?”
“Technically the FBI was doing the surveillance operation,” Agent White said. “They were kind enough to send us the transcripts.”
“Why?” Lois asked, speaking for the first time. “Why would anyone be making death threats against me?”
“The group who is making the threats is a hate group that likes to cloak itself in the trappings of religion. They’ve had racist leanings in the past.”
“I still don’t understand why they’d be making dearth threats.”
“They’ve concluded that your friend is the Anti-Christ, and that you are the whore of Babylon.”
Lois stared at Agent White, shocked.
“There are other groups that don’t particularly like your friend. Fringe groups, radicals…even the average American can see the danger of someone with the sort of power he has. To people who have always hated those with power, it’s even worse.”
Agent White said, “Some have accused you of bestiality.”
“What?”
“By his own admission, your friend isn’t human. Some have interpreted that as…”
“But we haven’t done anything!” Lois protested. “Not that there would be anything wrong with it if we did, but…”
“One thing you learn in politics is that it’s not truth that matters. It’s perception. In the mind of the public, you and your friend are inextricably related. There are going to be suspicions about your relationship no matter what you tell people.”
Lois glanced at Susan, who nodded.
“How creditable are these threats?” Susan asked.
“Honestly?” Agent White shook his head. “The risk is only moderate. At the moment there is just a lot of talk, although I wouldn’t trust one of them not to take a shot at you if they saw you on the street.”
“Then why do you have five agents guarding my client?”
“Perception,” Agent White said. “My superiors are concerned that if anything should happen to Ms. Lane that her friend could become…unmanageable.”
Lois found herself flushing. “What makes anyone think I’m that important to him?”
Agent White just looked at her for a long moment.
“The last thing anyone wants is to make your other client angry. To paraphrase a different comic book character, we don’t think we’d like him when he’s angry.”
“So what are our options then?” Susan asked. “My client is interested in the disposition of his people and of his own status.”
“The passengers have never been mistreated,” Agent White said, “But we’ve upgraded their accommodations as a gesture of goodwill. Their eventual disposition has yet to be decided.”
“When can that happen?”
“We can talk about arranging a meeting,” Agent White said. “Although really you should be speaking to White House council. I don’t speak lawyerese.”
“And Lois?” Susan asked, glancing at Lois.
“That’s not negotiable, at least until we talk with your other client and he’s made aware of the danger she’s in.”
Lois felt herself sagging. “Well, what about getting some access to the Internet, some clean clothes, other media?”
“Well, that’s…” Agent White said. For the first time he looked uncertain.
Susan smiled slightly and Lois felt a sense of relief. If she couldn’t win her freedom, at least Susan would get the best deal possible for Lois.
Given the nature of Lois’s friendship, nobody wanted to push things too far.
**************
“What do you want?”
The voice on the other end of the line was an unpleasant reminder of a past he’d thought he’d left behind.
“I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “I have a life now, a family.”
He listened to the voice on the other end of the line and shuddered. On the surface it was a simple congratulation on the acceptance of his daughter into a new school. The underlying message was clear.
They knew where he lived, and they knew where his daughter was. The implied threat was enough to send a chill down his spine. He knew full well the sort of things these men were capable of.
“What do you want me to do?”
When he’d been young and foolish he’d been filled with anger and hatred. He’d done things of which he wasn’t proud.
If whatever they asked of him was something he couldn’t stomach, he’d call the authorities and seek protection.
He listened for a long moment then said reluctantly, “I can do that.”
It was a small thing they were asking, and that alone made him suspicious. The people he remembered from his youth hadn’t been interested in small things. They’d reveled in big gestures, in creating the maximum amount of pain and damage with the least amount of effort.
If he was careful, no one would even know he had been involved.
Yet the nagging feeling of worry remained. What were they going to do and how many people were going to be hurt?
***********
He’d finally found a rhythm. While rescuers were preparing to receive the next survivor he would fly away and open up another road or he would fly another truckload of rescuers into the site. There were enough of them now that he was having to ferry in truckloads of food and other supplies and sanitation was beginning to become an issue.
It had been four days since he’d last slept and now he was finally beginning to feel tired. He’d found his second wind, but he knew that if he stopped the feeling of exhaustion would return.
The rescues were coming more quickly now. In the beginning he’d focused on the people who were most badly injured. In many cases those were the people who were the most deeply buried. The people remaining were those who were trapped, but conventional rescuers could still reach.
During slow times he released those who looked to be uninjured. Many of those, after receiving water and food had turned and begun to work at digging out their neighbors.
As the ground began to tremble again, Clark was silent, listening. His one fear was that an aftershock would shift rubble and hurt someone he hadn’t yet freed, turning someone who had been relatively healthy into someone who had been hurt.
He frowned after a moment. No one else seemed to notice the rumbling he did.
It was them that he finally recognized the sound. Without explanation he rose into the air and stared out onto the horizon.
Lines of trucks were coming through recently reopened highways, and above them were dozens of helicopters.
It was a welcome sight.
The cavalry had finally arrived.
************
Lois had largely been insulated from the sheer ugliness that sometimes appeared on the web. As a reporter overseas, she had been too busy to do much surfing on the web that wasn’t related to work.
Now with nothing to do other than surf news channels and web sites, Lois was sometimes sickened by what she saw. On the web, people had a sense of anonymity that left them feeling emboldened to say anything at all, no matter how hurtful or rude.
The people making the comments sometimes seemed to have no concept of the value of spelling or punctuation. They simply lashed out, spreading their ugliness as far as they could.
Most people seemed to be cautiously optimistic. There was an underlying well of good will attached to the costume, good will that bought Clark the benefit of the doubt. If he’d chosen a different costume or no costume at all, people would have been much more fearful.
Yet the fringe elements were there. Agent White hadn’t been lying about the speculation about her relationship to Clark.
There were even fan sites springing up, not only of Clark, but also of her. It shocked Lois to see some of the pictures they’d managed to find. It was a little chilling, because whatever these seemingly well meaning people could find someone with ill intent could find just as easily.
Someone had even posted a picture of the front of her apartment building.
It was chilling just how much information people were able to discover about a private citizen on short notice. As a reporter, Lois was enough of a celebrity to lose some of the protections private citizens enjoyed.
Lois sighed and leaned back in her chair. There wasn’t any point in worrying about things she couldn’t change. People were going to think whatever they were going to think. She and Clark knew exactly how far their relationship had gone and it didn’t matter what anyone else thought about it.
It still hurt, some of the things people were saying.
The scandal was starting to heat up as well. What people were saying about her and Clark paled in comparison to what they were saying about the government. Some of the criticism was well warranted in Lois’ opinion, but much of it was not. Some of it was almost paranoid.
Of course, in a world where the government had been concealing the existence of other dimensions and at least one alien, stories about Area 51 suddenly sounded a lot more plausible.
***************
There were dozens of cities and towns that needed his help, but he wouldn’t be much use to them if he didn’t get some sleep. Although he was still strong, his attention was beginning to waver, and given what he was doing a moment’s inattentiveness could get someone killed.
Clark moved quickly across the ocean, skirting those countries that had complained the first time. He didn’t have time to bother with countries that didn’t want him; there were too many people needing help elsewhere.
When he’d first gotten into this it had sounded plausible; with the costume he’d finally be able to do what he needed to do to help people without having to give up his private life.
Now that he’d been through it, he was beginning to see the sheer magnitude of the task he’d set for himself. The sheer amount of human misery was overwhelming, and for every person he saved there were ten he had been too late to save.
If he worked every second of every day he wouldn’t be able to relieve even one percent of the suffering in the world.
Even now as he sliced through the night sky toward Washington D.C. he could hear the screams of grief from the mothers who had lost their sons, the wives who had lost their husbands, and the whimpers of survivors who had been in too much pain to even draw breath to cry out.
In one collapsed home, a rescuer had shouted out as he saw someone through gaps in the stones. Clark had known the woman was dead, but he’d heard a smaller heartbeat underneath, and he’d pulled the remnants of the house out from around the woman.
She’d died on her knees protecting her baby, who had been lying in a red quilt with yellow flowers. The baby, three or four months old had been completely unharmed and sleeping peacefully. He’d been handed from rescuer to rescuer, and the exhaustion on everyone’s faces had lifted for just a moment as they’d looked at him.
It hadn’t been until the doctor had unwrapped her blanket and found the cell phone that Clark had realized that something was wrong.
The cell phone had been handed from one worker to the next, and Clark had seen suspicious hints of moisture in the eyes of several of them.
When the cell phone had been handed to him, he’d finally seen what the others were looking at. All it had been was a simple text message. “Dear baby. If you are still alive always remember that I love you.”
She’d been alive long enough to kneel in the dark, typing out a dying message to the baby she was never going to know. Had he passed her by as being too close to the surface as he’d looked for the more severely injured?
Was he responsible for a child growing up motherless, orphaned as he himself had been twice over?
It hadn’t been until Corporal Kwan had touched him on the shoulder and pointed to the time stamp that he’d felt relieved. The message had been written hours before he’d even arrive. It didn’t mean the mother might not have been alive, but she hadn’t been typing out the message while he was hundreds of yards away digging for someone so badly injured they might not even make it.
He should have released all those he could easily help first and allowed them to help with the others.
All he could hope was that Lois was all right. He wouldn’t have left her alone for so long if he’d had any other choice.
************
It was night again when Lois heard the knock at her window. She’d been given a room on the third floor, presumably to make her less accessible and to make it more difficult for her to escape. She’d been warned away from the windows, which were kept covered with heavy drapes.
She heard the sound of metal grinding for a moment, and then she saw the red boot stepping through the drapes.
She relaxed as she realized that it wasn’t a member of a skinhead group out to kill her for fraternizing from someone who wasn’t even human.
The surge of pleasure she felt at the sight of him surprised her. It wasn’t just relief that they’d finally be able to talk. It was pleasure at seeing him.
She thought back to all the nasty things people had said about the two of them and suddenly it didn’t seem to matter so much. Seeing his exhausted face was enough to make it all seem unimportant.
Rushing forward, she reached out and touched him. His cape was missing again, and his suit looked grimy and in need of laundering. His face was streaked with soot, and yet he looked good to her.
Despite the superficial covering of grime he didn’t smell of anything other than the north Atlantic, a salty clean smell that she was coming to associate with him.
“Have you been back in the ocean?” she asked.
He shrugged and looked embarrassed. “There was a stranded ship on my way back.”
Taking his hand in hers, she pulled him toward a chair. “Sit down. It must have been days since you’ve had any rest.”
He shook his head. “If I sit down, I’m going to go to sleep.”
“Would that be so bad?” Lois asked. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t slept in the same room before; although she wondered what the agents would think when they checked in on her in thirty minutes.
He sighed and allowed himself to be led to the chair.
As he sat, Lois found herself reluctant to release his hand.
“Are you all right?” she asked. There was something about the set of his shoulders, about the look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. There was a sadness and a sort of melancholy that was tempering his natural sense of optimism.
Looking down at his hand held in hers, he looked up at her and said “I am now.”
They were together at least, and Lois felt a sudden surge of optimism. Everything was going to be all right.
