Disclaimer: Lois, Clark, and pretty much every other character here don't belong to me.
Author's Note: This is a challenge respons to the MIssion: Find Clark Kent challenge.
“He’s missing,” Perry White said.
Sitting in his living room, he stared at the other people gathered together. They were a special group, hand-picked because of their ability to see things other people didn’t see. They were visibly uneasy at being together in the same room. They each held a secret and none of them except Perry had realized that it had been shared by so many other people.
Inspector Henderson cleared his throat. “I’ve put a Bolo out on Kent. Anybody sees him, they’ll pick him up.”
As a police detective who worked closely with Lane and Kent, he was used to seeing through disguises. He’d been playing poker with Perry back when he’d still been a rookie and Perry had been a beat reporter.
An older lady gingerly raised her hand. “Are we even sure he wants to be found? Perhaps it would be best to leave him to his own devices.”
Ms. Margaret Smith had been the first person to see a man in plain clothes stop a bus with his hand. She’d given her interview to Ralph before the debut of Superman. Afterwards, Perry had gone to speak to her in person. The fact that Ralph still seemingly hadn’t made the connection made him think even less of the man’s investigative skills than he already had.
“The meteors are still up there,” Perry said, gently. “So something must have happened to him.”
“My nephew is in the Teamsters union,” the older lady said, frowning slightly. “He’s got enough influence to have every trucker in the state keeping an eye out for someone of that description.”
She’d joined the small group after seeing Clark Kent’s picture in the paper with Lois Lane. Despite her advanced age there was nothing wrong with her mind.
“Are we even sure that he’s in the city?” Bobby Bigmouth took a bite of his hoagie and chewed for a moment before swallowing. “I’ve had my ear to the ground and nobody has heard anything.”
Bobby had a gift for putting together small tidbits of information into something bigger. It was what made him valuable as a snitch. Perry had offered him a job as a reporter once, but Bobby had refused. The people he dealt with would have stopped talking to him if he’d been directly working for the paper.
“The boys at the observatory tracked something heading back in our direction,” Perry said. “They weren’t able to get a good look at it, but it seemed to be the right size, and it was accelerating on its way back to us.”
An older black man sat staring at the table. He looked up, “I’m not even sure why I’m here,” he said. “But I got friends, and we’ll be looking for him.”
Cyrus was a homeless man who had seen Clark Kent step into an alley and fly into the sky. He’d seen the billboards too and despite being schizophrenic, he’d made the connection.
He’d talked about it during one of his less lucid episodes and Bobby had brought the matter to his attention.
Now Perry had arranged for him to have a place to stay and to have his medications delivered to him and he was doing better.
“People don’t see us, sleeping in the shadows,” Cyrus continued, “But we see everything, and we help each other.”
Perry nodded. “That might be a good motto for our entire group. We’ve got a secret to keep and a world to save. Let’s see if we can do both at the same time.”
With the help of the homeless, the underworld, the truckers and the police the call would go out. Every street corner would be searched and they would find their man.
They’d find him, clean him up and send him back out again, because that’s what they did. Yet despite the manhunt, no one would know their secret if any of them could help it. For some reason, Clark Kent wanted to live like a normal man, and they’d let him live that lie for as long as they could.
Barnum had once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time.”
Some people you could never fool, but as long as they loved you, it didn’t matter.
“Let’s get to work,” Perry said.
