PPREVIOUSLY...
He took a deep breath before opening the cabin door and stepping inside.
He froze when he saw the state of the cabin. It looked as if the place had been torn apart.
“Mayson!” he called, dashing towards the bathroom when he didn’t see her in the bed. Surely she hadn’t been so upset that she had done this herself. Or had she? “Mayson!”
She wasn’t in the bathroom. He spun around, only then seeing a foot sticking out on the floor on the far side of the bed.
“Mayson!” he yelled, racing over to where she was sprawled, naked, across the floor.**
AND NOW...
* * * * * * * * *
Chapter Thirty-Three
* * * * * * * * *
**Clark dropped to his knees, quickly activating his superhearing. She was breathing. She had a pulse. Grabbing a blanket from the bed, he gently wrapped it around her body as he used his x-ray vision to check for injuries.
She groaned.
He closed his eyes, gathering her gently against him. “Mayson,” he whispered.
Her eyes fluttered slightly before opening. “What...” Her voice cracked.
“Shh... Don’t try to talk,” Clark said, lifting her body to settle her on the much more comfortable surface of the bed.
“Water,” she whispered.
He nodded, reaching for the pitcher of water on the night stand. He poured her a glass and then carefully helped her move into a seated position. Her hands trembled slightly on the glass, but she finally managed to grasp it securely enough to take a drink.
Finally, she lowered the glass, allowing her body to relax against him.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
“Men in gas masks burst in here, talking about how we were part of the chosen few.” She gave her head a shake. “I didn’t understand it, but... When they tried to grab me, I fought them off. Or at least I tried. They were looking for you, too. Then there was this gas... I don’t remember anything else. I don’t know why they didn’t take me. Maybe when they didn’t find you...”
Clark let out a breath as he tightened his arms around her, burying his face in her hair. He’d been so concerned about Lane that he’d forgotten that his and Mayson’s file were in the pile of accepted candidates for Larry Smiley’s new dawn.
“Thank you for coming back, Clark” she whispered against him.**
“So I take it you decided that then wasn’t the time to break up with her?” Lois asked.
“How could I? I got her to the hospital, and sat in the waiting room for hours. Apparently, the gas had already pretty much left her system by the time we reached the hospital. She had a bad concussion, but...”
“You spent the night obsessing about everything you’d done wrong when it came to Mayson.”
“Well...” Clark said with a slightly sheepish shrug of his shoulders.
“Clark, sometimes you are so predictable.”
**Clark awoke the next morning to the sound of his name, spoken softly by a woman.
“Lane,” he whispered, opening his eyes.
“Clark?”
Mayson. Right. He blinked a couple of times, clearing the cobwebs from his mind. He was still sitting on a chair next to Mayson’s bed. The look she was giving him told him that she deep in thought about something.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking, Clark. This isn’t working, is it?”
“What are you talking about?” Damn. He was such a emotional coward when it came to the women in his life. He knew exactly what she was talking about. He should at least have the guts to acknowledge it. Still, he remained silent, making her spell it out.
“Our relationship. It’s not going anywhere is it?”
“Anywhere?”
“I know you like me, Clark. We have a good time together. But other than that... I don’t think you even see me as a girlfriend... let alone anything else.”
Clark looked down at his hands.
She reached out to gently play with his hair. “I guess what I’m saying is that I deserve better.”
That finally got his attention. “You do, Mayson.”
She nodded. “And I’m going to find it. So... I guess I’m saying that it’s over.” There was a tremor in her voice on the final words.
He looked down, unable to meet her eyes. She wasn’t doing this because of how she felt; she was doing it because she’d finally figured out how he felt. Or maybe she’d known all along. But until now, she’d held out hope that his feelings would change. “I’m sorry, Mayson,” he said softly.
“So am I,” she responded tearfully.**
“So that’s how your relationship with Mayson ended?” Lois asked.
He nodded. “I wish I had been honest with her from the beginning. She just made it too easy for me to just... let things be.” He let out a breath. “So what about you? What happened to you after I left?”
**Lois sat down on the floor next to the payphone and buried her head in her hands. She knew Dan was upset that she wasn’t returning to the cabin, but she couldn’t do anything about that. She’d had Jimmy call his cell phone and he’d passed on that Dan hadn’t exactly sounded pleased.
But she couldn’t deal with Dan now - any more than she’d been able to deal with Kent earlier. That small amount of electricity from the lightning strike must have scrambled her brain or something. The noise, the weird sensation of images fading in and out. She just wanted to sit there, eyes closed, until the noise in her head calmed.
“Lois, darlin’, are you all right?”
Lois cringed. “You don’t have to shout, Perry. I’m not deaf.”
“I’m not...” He immediately ended his thought, choosing instead to crouch down beside her. “Are you okay?”
“It’s just... I guess I’ve got a headache.”
“Okay, well, the cab’s here to give you a ride home. I’ll have Jimmy go with you.”
“I can get home by myself,” Lois said, rising to her feet. “I don’t need a babysitter.” She opened her eyes and instantly closed them again when she found herself staring at Perry’s skull. No flesh. No face. Only skull. No. She was most certainly not opening her eyes again until this weird headache ended.
“Lois, are you sure you’re okay?”
“She almost got hit by lightning, Chief.”
Lois put her hands over her ears. Why did everyone insist on shouting? She focused inward, trying to ignore the outside world. She imagined she could hear the beating of her heart, the blood pumping though her veins. Finally, the sounds around her dimmed. She opened her eyes and found that she was standing in an open lot. No buildings. No people. But she could still hear Jimmy and Perry talking. What the hell was going on?
She snapped her eyes shut.
“I think she should go to the hospital,” Alice said, informing Lois that she had joined the conversation.
“No! No hospitals.” Lois wasn’t sure if she was yelling or whispering. “It’s just a headache. I need to go home and lie down.”
“Okay, honey,” Perry said gently.
She felt hands on her arms and, keeping her eyes closed, she allowed them to lead her through the building and out to where she could hear a waiting car revving its engines as if it were in some sort of competition to become a Learjet. Her hands went back over her ears as she allowed the people with her to get her settled in the car.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to a hospital?” Perry yelled.
“I’m sure. I just need to lie down.”
The jet engines seemed to block out most other sounds as the car drove through the streets. She didn’t watch. She didn’t dare. She didn’t want to see any more of those weird things that weren’t really there, that were messing with her mind and her senses.
“We’re there, Lois.”
Jimmy’s voice blasted in her ear, causing her to whimper. She lowered her head into her hands again, trying to block out the sound.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t be taking her to the hospital?” the cabby asked.
“No! No! No hospital.”
Jimmy sighed so loudly that it sounded like a hurricane in a wind barrel.
“Jimmy, would you quit that?” Lois said. “Just... help me get home.”
She felt Jimmy pulling on her arm. She risked a quick look. When everything looked normal, she sighed, opening her eyes just enough to crawl out of the car.
She put one foot in front of another until, after what felt like forever, she found herself standing in front of the door to her apartment.
“Where are your keys?”
Startled by Jimmy’s yell, it took her a moment to translate the meaning of his words. Keys. Closing her eyes, she rested her forehead against the door. “They’re in my purse... back at the cabin.” No. This couldn’t be happening. All she wanted now was a dark, quiet place to curl up and get some rest until this pounding headache went away. She felt tears begin to accumulate in the corners of her eyes. It was all too much, too overwhelming. Turning, she allowed her body to slide down the wall until she was seated on the floor. She dropped her head into her hands, her will to keep going being overcome by this final hurdle. So close and yet so far.
Startled by the sound of the elevator opening, she automatically looked in the appropriate direction - and then quickly looked away. Her landlord, Mr. Tracewski, was coming down the hall, jiggling his keys... Well, his keys and everything else since he was in his underwear. And what was worse, Jimmy seemed to have taken off all of his clothes as well. Or at least, everything except a pair of very holey briefs.**
“So what are you saying?” Clark asked. “Were my powers transferred to you?”
Lois nodded. “Although, I certainly didn’t know that at the time.”
“But... how? I mean, I redirected the lightning strike in our reality and it didn’t transfer my powers to you. So why would they in this one? Or maybe...”
“What?”
“Well, when I redirected the lightning as Superman, I was able to fly. This time, because you didn’t know I could fly, I sort of just let my feet... dangle, I guess. As a result, I must have redirected a small amount of the current to you. Of course, when I realized you were okay, I had no reason to expect the consequences.”
“You mean the fact that some of your powers were transferred to me?”
Clark nodded. “And I didn’t feel any differently so...”
“All I knew was that I felt a little... unsteady. But I attributed that to being around you. And then afterwards... I had no idea what was happening to me.”
**’What the hell is going on here?’ Lois wondered silently to herself, afraid to look in the direction of the nearly naked men.
“The young man say you forget keys,” Mr. Tracewski said.
Lois slowly rose to her feet allowing Mr. Tracewski to open the door to her apartment. When he moved away, and Jimmy stepped forward to take her arm, she shied away from him. “I can take it from here, Jimmy,” she said, refusing to look in his direction as she stepped into her apartment.
“But the chief said...”
“I’m fine, Jimmy. Thanks for getting me home. But I’m just going to take some aspirin and go to bed. So... thanks. Your job is done.” With that, she closed the door, letting out a breath of relief. She had no idea why Jimmy had removed his clothes, but seeing that much of the kid was definitely more than she could stomach.**
“You know, I’m starting to wonder if maybe you’ve always harbored some secret desire to see Jimmy naked,” Clark said with a laugh.
“Bite your tongue!” Lois responded. “Anyway, the next morning...”
**Lois woke after a restless night to the sound of an anvil pounding, quite obviously tearing up the street right outside her apartment. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked carefully around, letting out a breath of relief when she realized that everything looked pretty much normal - except... everything seemed to be in the wrong places. The pictures on the wall were too low.
She sat up in bed and then yelped when her head hit something. Hard - although she couldn’t really say it had hurt. She looked up and then gasped when she realized she’d hit her head on the ceiling. With a crash, she dropped back to the bed.
What the hell?
It wasn’t possible, but... She had been floating. She’d swear that she’d been floating!
Someone started pounding with the anvil again, reminding Lois what had woken her up. She jumped from bed and rushed to her window, throwing it open, prepared to yell at the construction workers outside. But... there was no one outside.
The anvil hammered again.
Or... wait! That sound wasn’t an anvil, tearing up the street. Someone was pounding on her apartment door.**
“So who was at the door?”
“Just Jimmy... checking up on me. Apparently, Perry sent him to make sure I was okay when I didn’t come into work.”
“Why didn’t you go into work? Didn’t your alarm clock wake you up?”
“Oh, right. Well, I must have reached over and hit the snooze button because...”
“...you pulverized your alarm clock.” It wasn’t a question.
She shrugged. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but... yeah. I guess that’s what happened. Anyway, when Jimmy came by, he also brought the stuff Dan had dropped off at the Daily Planet. From the sound of it, when Jimmy suggested that Dan bring it by my place, he got the impression that Dan wasn’t very happy with me - which is certainly understandable. Anyway, I got rid of Jimmy as quickly as possible. For some reason, every time I looked at him, his clothes would disappear.”
Clark laughed.
“Yeah, well it wasn’t funny at the time. After I got rid of Jimmy, I typed up my story about Smiley. I should have done it the night before, but...” She shrugged. “I have to tell you, I got a little bit freaked out when my keyboard started to smoke. But I did learn a few tricks along the way...”
**Lois’ vision flicked again and the computer screen in front of her disappeared. She’d come to the conclusion quite some time ago that whatever was going on with her was no ordinary headache. She had somehow gained some... unusual powers.
The ability to hear sounds a long way away had been easy enough to learn to control. All she’d had to do was to concentrate on a single sound and the others faded away. Not that she hadn’t been caught off guard on a few occasions - like when a jet had flown directly over her apartment and she immediately dove to the floor, convinced that she was about to have company.
Still, if that power was controllable, maybe the others were, too.
She stared at the spot where her keyboard had been. She let out a breath of relief when it suddenly reappeared. Okay, next step. Taking a deep breath, she focused on a spot past the keyboard, as if said item wasn’t even there - and gasped when it suddenly vanished. Reaching out, she touched the keyboard, confirming for herself that it was physically still there.
Yes. She was still in control. She tried the same technique with a few other items and found that soon she could make items appear and disappear at will.
Okay, so time to see if she could recreate the floating thing that had happened to her when she’d first woken up. She closed her eyes and held her breath as she thought ‘float.’ Opening her eyes again, she growled in frustration. It hadn’t been a dream. It hadn’t. She had been floating. So why couldn’t she recreate it now? She closed her eyes and tried again, this time picturing herself rising above the chair. When she looked again, she still wasn’t floating.
Well, that wasn’t working. So what else? Well, her typing speed had certainly topped the charts. So... could she move that fast in other areas? She walked into the kitchen - to where a number of mugs she had crushed this morning were located - and began cleaning up the mess, moving slowly at first but then with ever increasing speed until the world around her seemed to slow down completely and, mere seconds later, she had everything cleaned up.
She stared in disbelief. Wow. Okay, well that could certainly come in handy in completing household chores. She began walking out of the kitchen when she hit her head on an open door of one of the cabinets she’d forgotten to close.
It hadn’t hurt - surprisingly - but she turned and glared at it for a moment anyway, as if to tell it not to be so careless in the future, and then jumped back in shock when it suddenly caught on fire.
No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. She rushed over to the cabinet, grabbing a tea towel to swat at the flames. When the towel caught on fire, she tossed it into the sink and turned her attention back to the door. She had to put it out. Automatically she blew on the flames, in hopes of extinguishing them and was shocked when not only did she managed to put out the blaze, but a small layer of frost covered not only the door, but also her entire kitchen cabinets.
Okay, so this was new. Some sort of heat vision when she glared at things. And some sort of freezing breath when she blew. Lost in thought, she turned back towards the table, absentmindedly reaching for her coffee. Her hand missed the cup, spilling the hot liquid.
She automatically jumped out of the way only to discover... She was floating about a foot off the floor. She dropped about six inches before she caught herself. Holding her breath, she hovered there for a long moment. Okay, now what? She could float. Obviously. But... she’d also managed to move a few feet back from the table.
“Oh my god,” Lois whispered. “I can fly.”**
“Did you tell anyone you had these powers?” Clark asked.
Lois shrugged. “I started thinking and I remembered that lightning strike - the one you said didn’t hit us. That was when things had changed. So I decided...”
**Lois knocked very gently on the door. She’d had too many bad experiences with this unusual strength not to be very, very gentle.
When Kent answered, for some reason her vision flickered and she found herself staring at a wide expanse of male chest - a very tantalizing male chest. And unlike when she’d seen her landlord and Jimmy without clothes, this experience had a very different effect on her. She blinked and Kent was again clothed. She fought her immediate impulse to make his clothing disappear again. She was here for a reason - to find out if he, too, had acquired these strange powers.
She had a moment of indecision. After all, until she knew what had happened to her, she could hardly go around telling everyone about it. Could she trust Kent to keep it quiet? She really wasn’t sure. For all she knew, she’d become the subject of his very next front page story.
But he had been the only other person on that platform at the time. Was he having the same... experiences as her?
“Lane?” Kent asked when he saw who was standing outside his door.
“We need to talk,” Lois said, walking past him into the apartment.
“I agree,” Kent said.
Hope rose in her chest. Maybe he wanted to talk to her about his special powers, too. That would certainly be a relief. So instead of just blurting out the truth, she should let him take the lead, find out what he knew. “You first,” she said.
“That kiss at Smiley’s resort,” Kent began.
Huh? Why did he want to talk about that? On the other hand, maybe he was trying to remind her of the connection that seemed to exist between them so that she wouldn’t run out and write the story. It was where she would have started, after all. “What about it?”
Kent let out a breath, gesturing her further into the apartment. They were both settled on the couch before he continued. “It’s just... I think we need to talk about it.”
She silently gestured him to continue.
Seeming encouraged by her acquiescence, he took a deep breath and continued. “Look, Lane, before we can go on, I think we have to go back.”
“Back?” she said, confused.
“There is obviously something between us, but until we deal with what happened in the past... what you think I did in the past, I just see us having these... hit and run encounters. I know you never wanted to talk about it before, but... as I told you at the time, it wasn’t me.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but at a gesture from him, closed it again. Where was he going with this? Because suddenly, she wasn’t quite as certain that they were going in the same direction.
“I wasn’t in Metropolis at the time.”
She looked at him in confusion, trying to sort out in her mind what he was talking about. The past. Before they’d first met. The incident that had nearly destroyed her life.
Suddenly, everything fell into place. No. No, she didn’t want to talk about this. She wasn’t prepared to deal with it - or everything that had happened as a result. Not while she was struggling to deal with these new powers.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It does to me,” Kent said, scooting closer. “I was working for the Borneo Gazette covering a story about rival factions at the time. So you see...” he said. “I couldn’t have been here. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t responsible for any of it.”
She studied him for a long moment. Maybe he just needed a little push in the appropriate direction. “Well, not unless you can fly,” she said.
“What?”
“Unless you can...” She made a wavy motion with her hands. “...you know... fly.”**
TO BE CONTINUED...
