From the Ruinsby Alisha Knight*.*.*.
A/N:
Hi!
(or maybe
would be more appropriate as I seem to have turned back into a lurker, and boy how quickly I'd forgotten how scary this is!)
This is another story told from first person perspective, which seems to be very popular at the moment, but I swear when I started writing this *no-one* was writing in first person! I’m not known for following the crowd.
I don’t want to give any of the plot away, so if you want to know what this story’s about you’ll have to read it. Also, for the same reason, I don’t like giving warnings, so I’m not going to.
I’d like to thank Carol and alcyone for BRing this part.
Feedback would be very much appreciated, but if you do have anything negative to say, could you please make it a constructive criticism as I can be a very sensitive soul!
Standard disclaimers apply.
*.*.*.
Part One*.*.*.
I knew that I had made a mistake the second I felt the gun barrel poking into my back. Everything concerning the story had been going so well, I suppose I should have known something was about to go badly wrong. That was probably the reason Perry sporadically tried to pair me up with a partner, so that someone would think to check the water level before I jumped in.
I felt the man’s foul breath on my ear before he hissed at me to walk forward without looking back at them. Deciding it would be stupid to let them know that I already knew who they were and that for the time being my best chance of survival was to go along with them, I started walking. My assailants led me through dark alley ways to the deserted docks, where more men were waiting beside a rusting old car but this bunch had their faces covered. Obviously they had been busy that night and I wasn’t at the top of their ‘to do’ list. I bandied words with them, bluffing that the police were right behind me and about to arrest their hairy butts but apparently they didn’t believe me because soon I had been tied up and gagged, although I managed to get in a few good kicks and punches. I was glad to realise that I wasn’t as easy a target as they had anticipated but nevertheless there were a lot more of them than there was of me and they managed to overpower me.
Once I had been immobilised, they bundled me up and crammed into the car’s tiny trunk. I listened for the start of the engine, which considering the state of the vehicle was likely to be noisy and unreliable but it never came. The car moved, though and it wasn’t until I heard it splash heavily into the water that I realised what had happened. That they had simply pushed it over the edge without bothering the worn-out engine. I panicked and decided that now was the time. A year had passed and I had coped well enough without resorting to this but now I was going to have to if I wanted to live. Except I couldn’t because I was gagged. Typical. Just my luck. Not that it was guaranteed to work anyway, in fact in his position I would have just left me here to drown but it was my last option, my only chance of survival. And it was no longer open to me. I wasn’t about to go down without a fight, however and so I resorted pummelling my bound fists against the metal above me, hoping it was enough to make some sound and I tried to make as much incoherent noise as I could through my gag, ignoring the water that was flooding in through the seals in an effort to dim my ever-rising panic.
I didn’t feel any relief as the top opened and the dim lights lit up my bound and thoroughly drenched form. He obviously hadn’t realised who he was rescuing until he had opened the trunk, because as soon as he saw it was me the look of that concern had briefly been displayed on his face disappeared and was replaced with bitter anger and hatred. I tensed, waiting for him to slam the trunk shut again and push the car back into the river, but instead he reached in and hauled me out, unceremoniously dumping me on my unsteady feet, which somehow miraculously managed to hold me upright. Roughly he removed the ropes from my wrists and ankles, then finally he tore off my gag. He glanced at my body, probably with his x-ray vision because he then told me flatly, “You’re not hurt.”
I opened my mouth to reply but I couldn’t form any words. I was trying to think of the last thing he had said to me. I wasn’t paying attention at the time; it was probably something friendly and cheerful like: “Goodnight Lois, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I could still see him, though, cheerily waving at me as he stepped into the elevator at the end of the day. I may not have been listening but I was certainly very interested in Clark’s comings and goings that day. That day had been a year ago, almost exactly. I looked down at my feet; I could no longer look directly at him. “Thank you,” I mumbled.
“You don’t need to thank me,” the words could have been friendly, he probably had said them in a friendly manner to hundreds of grateful people but spoken to me they were bitter and hateful. “It’s my job.”
I still couldn’t meet his eyes and so I stared intently at the red rope burns around my wrists instead, hating myself for wishing they had cut deeper into my flesh in some form of well-deserved penance. “I would have understood if you had made an exception in my case.”
Almost surprised by the silence that followed, I finally looked up at his face. He looked away, ashamed, as he realised that I could tell what he was thinking. If he had known it was me in that car, he might not have bothered rescuing me. I think that realisation hurt us both, although possibly him more. He felt things more deeply than I did.
He looked like he wanted to reply, I watched his face change expressions as he thought, but like me he had no words to say.
“I have to go,” his voice was emotionless as he flew away from me as fast as he could, leaving my dripping clothes flapping against my body in his wake. I wondered whether someone actually needed him or if he just couldn’t bear to be around me any longer. I shivered with the cold, although my wet clothes weren’t the problem, the cold went deeper than that. I wrapped my arms around my body in an attempt to warm up and trudged automatically through the dark streets towards the police station, hoping that I knew whoever was on duty. I had all the evidence I needed on the car thieves at home, there had been no need to me to follow them that night but I was going to need police assistance right away as they had stolen my purse and house keys as well.
*.*.*.
My article had been run on the front page again but I was still too preoccupied with my rescue from Superman to be happy about it. I was numb. He had saved me, *spoken* to me. With regret.
Perry passed by my desk and glanced at me curiously. I knew he felt as guilty as I did about printing that article but somehow he had got over it in a way I hadn’t. In a way I was suspecting I never would and in a way that I certainly never should.
“You two friends again?” he asked. I shook my head, knowing who he was referring to, as if he could read my mind. Not that it was so hard to work out what was preoccupying me. Superman had made it into my article. He had to because he had saved my life. Perry looked away as he raised his voice to call across the newsroom, “Myerson! Centennial Park, now! Superman’s giving a press conference!”
He’d given lots of press conferences since my article first hit the streets and at the beginning Perry had still sent me out to cover them. He soon stopped after we both realised that Clark was never going to acknowledge that I existed at all, let alone that I was there in the crowd, desperately calling his name in a vain attempt to ask him a question. It was humiliating as some of the less respectable magazines and programmes had picked up on it, had taunted me with it. As if they could make me feel worse about my betrayal with their slanderous articles. Maybe Perry was hoping he could start to send me out to cover Superman again but I knew it would never happen. I was lucky I still had a job at all. It was Superman’s city, not Lois Lane’s. Who would want a reporter who couldn’t get him to answer her questions in a session that had been held specifically for reporters to ask Superman questions?
“Lois, go home. You had quite an ordeal last night, your mind isn’t here.”
“I was only tied up and nearly drowned in a car trunk. I’ve had worse.” Which was sad, but true.
“I know, honey, but I wasn’t talking about that part,” Perry told me in a calming voice. He knew I hadn’t been myself recently and that actually being rescued by Superman must have made it worse for me. It should have done but it hadn’t. It had actually made me feel a little better. Maybe Superman had needed to save me last night, but Clark Kent hadn’t needed to speak to me at all. Perhaps, even if it was on my deathbed, just maybe, he might one day forgive me for ruining his life.
*.*.*.
It was there as I entered my apartment. I found my gaze drawn to it almost immediately, nestled against my three Kerths, slightly hiding behind them: my Pulitzer. My constant reminder of my betrayal. I couldn’t remember much about the actual ceremony, I think I was drunk throughout the entire thing. When I eventually got home I threw it in the trash and continued my binge in a fruitless effort to numb my pain and send me into a peaceful oblivion.
Oddly enough, it had been my mother who had taken away all my alcohol and sobered me up the next morning. Maybe she had just stolen the bottles so she didn’t need to buy any for herself. She’d also retrieved the prize from the trash and put it with my other awards. I had bitterly complained, I didn’t want it, it had come at a price I realised too late I didn’t want to pay but she never backed down. The only member of my family who thought I had done the wrong thing was Lucy; my parents were overjoyed at my success and my story. We had compromised by hiding it behind the clear glass of my Kerths, so my parents could feel proud and so I could never forget what I had done to the best man I had ever met. Not that I ever could.
I remember it so clearly, even now. After Trask and his men had burst into the Planet’s newsroom, Perry had hidden me and Clark away in his office. I don’t know what Clark was doing, sitting on a chair throwing paper into the waste paper basket, waiting for the situation to sort itself out but I went into action. Any good investigative reporter has tape recorders hidden away somewhere easy to hand in case of emergencies, unfortunately at that time mine were hidden in my desk and handbag, which were currently being searched through by a group of thugs. However, I assumed old habits died hard and it didn’t take me long to find a rather old and dusty tape recorder hidden away in Perry’s desk. Clark gave me a look, I suppose it was supposed to be reprimanding but I wasn’t going to sit there whistling while my privacy was invaded. I had secreted it away by the time Perry returned to speak to us and told us that we had to take a lie detector test. I wish I had figured out at that point why the idea scared Clark so much, but I thought he was just being Clark, i.e. strange. I was interviewed first and I managed to hide the recorder in the room without them noticing that I was taping them. I didn’t learn anything interesting from them but I discovered that Clark was full of surprises. First of all, his ‘yes’ in response to Trask’s ‘are you Superman?’ question wasn’t a lie. At first I agreed with them that Clark didn’t have a pulse, and with it registering as a lie the second time it seemed the most likely reason. I mean, Clark being Superman? I was laughing when I played the tape back the first time.
Then, Clark admitted to having met Superman. This surprised me, as Clark had been absent every time I had seen Superman. It didn’t sound like they had anything to do with each other but I was left with the impression that it had been more than Superman just flying overhead. The final nail in the coffin was the negative beeping I heard from the polygraph when Clark told Trask that he couldn’t contact Superman. The men had missed it, they had other things to deal with but I didn’t. Clark could contact Superman. The thought stayed with me.
I kept an eye on Clark for the rest of the investigation. In other circumstances I probably would have focused on Clark sleeping with Cat, but it was his relationship with Superman that I was interested in. Clark was a man and not a bad looking one at that. It was only inevitable that he would have fallen into Cat’s bed at some point during his career at the Planet. Other things that happened in pursuit of the Trask story fuelled my interest in what Clark was hiding but the thing that ended up not leaving me alone was my own, thoughtless sentence, uttered in the high that can only come from the knowledge that I’d just cheated death - “If Clark's alive, that means Superman’s alive!”
The truth in that sentence didn’t hit me until later that day, after the excitement of the event had died down, when Clark had gazed longingly at the empty warehouse. It all made perfect sense, even if it made a sense that I didn’t like.
That evening, after Clark had left the Planet I turned on the news. Satisfied that Superman was dealing with the aftermath of a Japanese earthquake, something that would keep him busy for a while, I had rushed out and caught a cab to his hotel room. I had no problem breaking into it and it had been the work of moments to discover a spare suit and bizarre globe of another planet hidden in his possessions. There had even been footprints on the wall and ceiling. I took some photographs, satisfied that with my recording and other little things my subconscious had picked up since Clark had started at the Planet that I had enough evidence to prove my theory. I hurried home where I wrote the article in a creative rush, desperate to get it out before I could let my conscience get a word in edgeways. I even found speculation on the internet that Superman had been working under cover for years and I discovered with only minor digging that a good percentage of those events happened in a place Clark had visited and then left in a hurry. I imagined that at the other places he was either passing through or using a false name. Some events were very close together and he obviously wanted to avoid detection. He shouldn’t have come to Metropolis and flaunted his secret identity in my face if he had wanted to remain anonymous.
Perry had been apprehensive to say the least when I showed him what I had discovered, but he also couldn’t turn away the biggest story since Superman first showed up. And as I told him myself, Kent was new, we had no obligation to an old friend standing in the way of printing the truth. So on the front page of the next edition of the Daily Planet he published my article that proved that Superman was really Clark Kent.
I never saw him come into work the next morning. Reactions to my appearance had been mixed, he may not have been there long but Clark had already made more friends in the office than I had, and yet at the same time I was the reporter who had discovered Superman’s true identity. So I was met with an overwhelming feeling of ambivalence. It hadn’t bothered me in the least. I was pleased with my work, with the evidence of it on every television channel. *My* story was the main topic of conversation for pretty much the whole world. I had nothing to feel bad about. Until I saw him.
He came out of Perry’s office, I had no idea how long he had been in there. His shoulders were hunched and he refused to look anywhere but at his feet as he made his way across to his desk. No-one spoke to him, but there were many furtive glances in his direction. The day before he would have spoken to half a dozen people on that small trip, but now he had been ostracised by his celebrity and he knew it. He made no attempt to pretend that everything was still the same. He paused as he reached his destination, he seemed almost frozen on the spot. Then he looked at me.
It felt like forever when our eyes met. He seemed to pour all his emotions from his soul into mine through that connection. Utter betrayal. The total horror of a lifetime's phobia coming to pass through my hands. The bleakness that was all he saw of his future. The absolute hatred that threatened to overwhelm him. I felt my whole body seize up and I swear that my heart stopped beating as the flood of all he felt invaded my mind and I finally sensed the consequences of my actions. He gave me the desolate and heartbroken glare of a man destroyed.
It was that look that Clark shot me as he cleared out his desk that started my spiral into a guilt-ridden depression. I had ruined Clark Kent in the pursuit of a story. I had never really known him, neither of us had, but both Perry and I had been close to growing fond of the green reporter. Not that I would have admitted that to anyone, let alone him. Ever since then I had been haunted by that look in his eyes, it was always there. Superman was all Superman ever had been: happy, kind, friendly, gracious, gentlemanly and virtuous but his smiles never reached his eyes. Clark Kent had vanished, living as a recluse somewhere in Metropolis. Occasionally he had been spotted in his ‘mortal’ guise and I got the impression that it sometimes took up to five minutes for people to realise that the bespectacled man in the street was Superman, but as soon as he was recognised he was mobbed, more so than as Superman. He didn’t have the same aura of power and authority when he wasn’t wearing his spandex suit and so was more approachable.
My career also suffered. Not because of my work, my article had made me famous and I could have got everything I’d ever wanted from reporting. My career suffered because I lost my spark. I stopped caring about myself and my work. I did enough to earn my place at the Planet and put food on my table but that was it. I threw myself into my bigger investigations to try and forget the pain I had caused and every time I found myself in a deadly position I prayed that I could get myself out of trouble without calling for Superman, doubting that he’d save me. I doubted it even more now that he had.
*.*.*.
The street was empty. I felt a little uncomfortable as I sat alone at the table, like a literal sitting target. I remembered my first trips to the cafe, when it was the burnt-down eyesore in the sunny Southside. It had never been an upmarket area of the city but it had been pleasant and safe enough, with a thriving business district. Now the empty cafe that I was sat outside once again looked out of place, like a diamond that had been dropped into a puddle of mud.
I pushed my plate away, wishing that the portion had been smaller. It felt like a slight that I was unable to finish it, but I had no wish to start shopping for a new wardrobe. The main door to the cafe opened and my uncle strolled out, another plate in his hand.
“Chocolate torte in raspberry sauce,” he announced, placing it on the table in front of me.
“Oh, Uncle Mike, no--” I complained, then caught a second look at the delicious looking cake my uncle had presented me with. “Well, I guess I *could* just move into my gym for a month...”
Mike smiled as he pulled out the opposite chair to sit with me. “You never could resist chocolate, Lois.”
“Certainly not combined with your baking,” I replied with a grin as I tucked into the cake. A lot of my clothes were a little old-fashioned, so what if I needed to update it to a slightly larger size? “Why couldn’t I have inherited your cooking talents?”
“It’s certainly a relaxing hobby,” his voice was tinted with regret. Uncle Mike had been a Marine in his youth. He used to turn up whenever he had leave to spend a few days with us. He never got married and my father was the only family he had. After his retirement he bought the cafe and decided to try and make a living from his fabulous cooking skills. When I felt lonely I used to go to his cafe, he was always pleased to see me and I would feel guilty for not visiting more often. Neither of us really had anyone else in the city to talk to, certainly no family, unless Lucy was around. We were never close but we were there and we both knew that if we needed help, the other would be at hand. Which was part of the reason I was visiting him. And not at all to try and work out what was happening to the Southside.
I swallowed a mouthful of torte. “Do you know what happened?” I asked, indicating the deserted businesses and burnt apartment buildings around us.
“Well, the neighbourhood's in transition. Gettin' more... eclectic. Kinda like Saigon without the jets.”
I shook my head in amazement. “This is crazy. Six months ago this was the hottest street in town.” A gang of youths in a car roared past the cafe, hollering and jeering like the group of morons they almost certainly were. “Just a wild stab, but... could they have something to do with it?”
I heard an explosion and jumped as both Uncle Mike and I stared in horror at the flames that began to lick away at the inside of his cafe. I rushed inside to try and stop the fire, but even with the fire extinguisher it was hopeless. Outside Mike was on his cell phone, obviously contacting the fire department although they were already too late to make a great difference. Movement out the back caught my eye and I raced into the side alley, colliding with a youth who was running in the opposite direction. The kid put up a good fight but his moves all came from aggression and with a few well-trained martial art moves, I soon had him at my mercy.
Uncle Mike ran over to join me with a length of rope and we soon had him tied up with some amazingly intricate knots created by Mike, waiting for him to be brought to justice. We may have been unable to save the cafe, which still burnt merrily behind us but the arsonist wasn’t going to get away with destroying my uncle’s livelihood.
“Little punk burnt me out...”
“Can't prove that, man,” the punk responded with conviction. “Can't prove nothin'. Nobody saw a thing!”
“We saw enough,” I assured him as I pulled out my cell phone. “I'm calling the police.”
“Take your shoes off and get comfortable. Last time I called, they took two hours.” Uncle Mike’s teeth were clenched as he spoke, never taking his eyes off our captive in case he managed to slip out of his bonds or something.
My call was answered. “Yes, I'm reporting an arson, my name is Lois Lane, I --” I stared at the phone in disbelief. I knew the police weren’t exactly fond of me but I still couldn’t quite believe it. “He put me on hold.”
“Lois Lane?” The punk’s question forced my attention back to him. He laughed and it wasn’t a happy sort of sound. “*You're* Lois Lane?”
“I'm sorry, have we met?”
“No, we ain't met. It's just funny to me 'cause... you're dead. I mean, I know you're walkin' around but trust me, lady, go pick out a nice grave. And from what I hear, pick it out fast.”
*.*.*.
The kid’s words didn’t get to me but all the same I had no interest in accompanying my uncle to the police station. From what he told me, it didn’t sound like there would have been any point, anyway. The few policemen who were there weren’t interested in the arson and due to the lack of ‘real’ witnesses, it looked like his case against the so-called ‘Baby Rage’ wasn’t going to get very far.
Something was going on in Southside and if my uncle was going to stand a chance of rebuilding, he was going to need my help to sort it out. I wasn’t going to waste my time following the procedures and going to the person who happened to be manning the desk at the time. I had sources in the department, reliable people who were higher up the food chain. That was where *I* was going to come in.
To Be Continued...
