Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related By special request: the Killchie Quiz ;)

Lois took a step forward, keeping her eyes riveted on Lex. "I'm warning you. Put the gun down. I don't want to have to shoot you, Lex, but I will."

Lex chuckled and gave Lois a look that she imagined he thought was disarming, but was mostly condescending. "Lois, put your weapon down before you hurt yourself. You know I'm right, and you know that you aren't going to shoot me." He smiled at her. "Admit it, Lois, even with all that has gone on recently, you are still in love with me. Say goodbye to the SuperFraud."

A single shot echoed obscenely throughout the elegant office.

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Even though she knew she had acted appropriately, that there had been no other choice, Lois couldn't help but react to what she'd had to do. A single tear rolled down her cheek. It was the only gesture of remorse she'd allow herself. It was for the memory of the man she once thought Lex Luthor had been.

Gretchen looked in horror into the eyes of Lex Luthor as
the life slowly slipped from him. When he'd reached her,
she'd been unable to stop her finger from continuing what
it had already started - depressing the trigger. The bullet
had embedded itself in Luthor's chest.

She dropped the gun and reached out to catch him as he
collapsed in her arms.

"CJ! Watch out!"

Lois's words registered too late. He'd been so busy avoiding Luthor's blows that he hadn't seen what Luthor was doing. He felt his back nudge something solid, and he realised that Luthor had pinned him against the wall, next to one of the tall windows.

As if in slow motion, he saw Luthor leap in the air, right leg outstretched as he jump kicked at CJ.

It was instinct, not rational thought, that made CJ move to the side and, momentarily forgetting his injury, reach out with both hands. He grasped Luthor's ankle and jerked, hoping to pull Luthor off balance.

It worked.

Too well.

As though Luthor was a hammer being tossed, he rotated through the air, smashing through glass and out into empty air beyond.

CJ couldn't let go in time and he was pulled over the sill behind him.

"Lois, he's slipping," Clark whispered, "and I'm getting weaker by the second." His voice cracked and Lois's gaze flew to the white-knuckled hand that Clark held so tightly. The beautiful, poisonous glow of the ring on Lex's finger seemed to pulse and expand, casting a sickly green reflection on the hands of both men.

"Oh, god, Clark, of course you are," Lois breathed. "As long as he's wearing that ring, you'll never regain your strength. If you don't get away from it, you could die."

"Yeah," Clark managed a weak smile, "kind of ironic, isn't it?"

Lois looked at Lex again. He was staring at the ring with dawning comprehension. He began to struggle, vainly trying to bring his body closer to the building, to get a toehold on the slick surface only inches away.

"Don't move, Lex," Clark said sharply. "It makes it harder to - ah, no! - Lex!"

Lex's movement had caused Clark's hand to slide, and the ring now dug into his palm. A piercing pain, stronger than all the rest, shot sharply through his entire body. He jerked upward reflexively in a last desperate attempt to bring Lex closer, but it was not enough. Lex slipped from his grasp soundlessly, dropping and disappearing into the dark long before he reached the concrete 1300 feet below.

Lex took another step back, lost his balance, and toppled from the tenth-story window.

Directly below, a computer-controlled truck pulling a tank of live piranhas was slowly driving along. Lex landed in the tank with a huge splash! The sudden addition to the load's weight, of course, caused the truck to lose its balance, and before the automatic driver could compensate for the changes, the truck turned over and burst into flames. The tank, naturally, also tipped over, spilling gallons of water, fish, and a half-eaten Lex.

Coincidentally, at a nearby construction site, the driver of a steamroller passed out. The steamroller went out of control and rolled out onto the main road, where it flattened Luthor's remains.

Lex stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around his hands, then
reached for the door. The handle still felt hot, even through a
couple of layers of leather. He ignored it, tugging at the door.
It didn't open easily - warped already by the heat, he realised,
and had to pause for a coughing fit to pass.

The door opened suddenly, and the corridor was visible. Or... he
had to presume that it was the corridor. All that Lex could see
was a towering wall of flickering red and yellow.

And then an enormous ball of flame, attracted by the sudden
availability of oxygen, rushed towards him with a loud roar.

Lex screamed in agony as the flames rolled over him, making him
stagger backwards and fall to the floor. And then he screamed
again, the heat and pain excruciating.

He was on fire! The pain... the pain...

They... would... pay...

"What? You've lost your powers, and you can't possibly swim to shore - the nearest land is forty miles away!" Superman shouted back at him.

"Let me go - alien!" Luthor spat, aiming a brutal kick at Clark's groin. This time he connected, and it was clear that his Super-strength hadn't entirely diminished. Groaning, Clark's grip loosened, and Luthor fell.

Trying to catch his breath and focus, Clark stared downwards just as Luthor hit the water. He hadn't fallen from so great a height.... Clark swooped down and prepared to scoop his enemy from a watery grave, when a streak of grey-white emerged from beneath the surface with a violent splash.

He sensed rapidly that she was entirely serious in her intentions, and a quick flash of alarm and regret passed through him. He wasn't ready to die yet. He had plans; he had a vast and powerful empire to build. He had people to corrupt and governments to topple. The fun had barely started.

Yet if he had to die, this was at least a novel ending. Gunned down by a blonde-haired bimbo with one of his own weapons. How ironic.

"Any last requests" she asked.

He smiled; he had the perfect answer, and the perfect epitaph.

"Help, Superman?" he suggested sardonically.

A bright flash filled the prison cell with light, and Lex Luthor was no more.

"Not today, Batman," Lex said, and slipped from his jacket once they had gotten close to ground level. A chemical fire was burning out of control, and though Batman was fast, he was not fast enough to save Lex a second time.

Lex hit the ground running and dove into the burning warehouse. Extruded tendrils of plastic that had once been school chairs began to drip down from their perch on the upper tier and bleed through the storage pallets like lava. Each drip of the plastic made an eerie whistling sound as it flowed to the floor.

Even as the toxic fumes choked Lex, he laughed madly as he darted between the fluid stalactites. The upper tier, weakened by the extreme heat, collapsed. A waterfall of incendiary plastic rained down on Lex and his crazed laughter turned into shrieks of agony as the fire liquefied even his bones.

He forced himself closer and his eyes were caught by strange markings on the ice-packed rock behind the corpse. As he began to grow some inkling of what they were his eyes dropped to Luthor's hands and he winced.

Luthor hadn't died immediately. Not in the crash above, nor down here below. He had suffered terrible injuries, but he had been alive.
Perhaps for days. Clark's eyes drifted back, almost against his will, to the hollowed out grooves in the bloody, ice-covered rock.

Clark sighed. Would people never learn? He exchanged a long-suffering
look with the officers, then turned ... just in time to see Lex run in
front of a bus. Neither he nor the bus driver had a chance to prevent the
inevitable, and Lex disappeared underneath the wheels with a sickening thud.

Next to him, Clark sensed more than saw Lois start to wobble, and he
extended a steady arm. She grabbed it, gratefully, and looked across the
street, wide-eyed. "Oh, my...."

As he stepped off the curb, however, Lex failed to notice the stolen car that was swerving all over the road, nor did he see the two familiar-looking men bickering as they tried
to figure out how to drive it. If he had looked up, he would have realized that the drivers looked exactly like the President of the United States and his Secret Service Agent ... and judging by the long line of police cars chasing them -- and the small frogs they were snacking on -- they must have just recently escaped from custody.

The loud blast of the car horn came too late, and Lex never knew what hit him. But one thing was for certain ...

Lex Luthor had finally gotten *exactly* what he deserved.

The last piece of the Nightfall Asteroid fell majestically through the atmosphere. The surface was molten, incandescent with the heat of its passage, and the turbulence it created around it was awesome in its power and fury. Jonathan and Martha's plane, circling in a holding pattern above Metropolis Airport, was tossed aside like a child's toy; the passengers barely had time to scream in terror before it hit the ground and exploded.

The very centre of the meteorite smashed into Clark's apartment building. Two of the intertwined bodies in number 344 were pulverised instantly; the third, although indestructible, was driven deep into the earth by the force of the impact. Mercifully, Superman's memory was once again erased by the collision, and as he wandered the corridors of Lex's bunker over the next few days, he had no inkling of the terrible loss he had sustained. Locked away from the life-giving rays of Earth's yellow sun, his powers waned and died without his ever recalling that he had them; his own death followed shortly thereafter.

*****

Lex himself happened to be hunting in the Everglades when the asteroid hit Metropolis. His reprieve was short-lived, however: he was bitten by an alligator the next day, and both parties died an agonising death from the bite. But Nigel had invited Jimmy along for the trip, and the two of them lived happily ever after.

The bunker had been hit by a chunk of melted debris.

It was buried.

He was buried.

Buried alive.

"No..."

He wasn't even aware that he was gibbering the denial, over and over as he frantically switched between monitors, hoping for a different view.

"No..."

He raised a fist and smashed it against the screens.

"No..."

He turned and began another, futile assault on the locked door. A door that would never open, buried as it was beneath debris.

"No..."

"No..."

His breath rose on a howl as he scrabbled uselessly at the metal and pounded on its surface.

"Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!"

He thumped.

He hammered.

He screamed.

He cursed.

And, at last, his breath grew harsh in his throat and his words became a babble of terror and his voice the low, indeterminate growling of a trapped animal, as his fingers shredded themselves against the impervious plate of steel.

*********

Up on the surface, a small, shivering form approached the heavy metal door. The dog was more skin and bone than living animal, cadaverous as a living skeleton. It dropped to its haunches, staring sunken eyed and listless at the strange mound of debris, pricking nervous ears at the faint sounds of hammering coming from within.

Meat?

It craved meat.

It sniffed the air, half-heartedly. But there was no food smell coming from behind the metal plate.

It listened.

It waited.

After a time, it got bored. It scratched in an apathetic manner at one ragged, sore-covered ear before staggering painfully to its feet. It wandered over to the source of the sound and, cocking one leg, directed a thin, yellow stream of urine at the metal, before giving the resulting puddle a desultory sniff.

Then it trotted off into the ashes of the world, its nose twitching at the stench that permeated the soot-covered darkness.

“I don’t know!” he yelled. “I only know... That thing you’re holding. If I tell you what to do with it, will you take your foot off me?”

“Maybe.”

He sighed. “It’s a transporter. You have to type in the password and it’ll take you there.”

“And the password is...?”

“Please take your foot off!”

“Not till you tell me!”

“Okay, okay!” he screamed. “It’s PRONTO, okay?”

She took her foot away. And, in the same movement, she gave him a hard kick, sending him rolling across the room. Unfortunately, Clark had left the French windows open when he’d come in a short time earlier. Lex rolled straight through, falling to the ground below with a satisfying SPLAT.

“Oops.” Lois thought about feeling guilty - she hadn’t intended to kill him, after all - but after a moment she shrugged. “Who cares?”

"Lois!" Jimmy called, running towards them from the
direction of the elevators. "Have you heard?"

He gasped for breath, and Lois and Clark were forced to
wait in suspense until he started again.

"Lex Luthor is dead!"

Clark's arm tightened around Lois's shoulders, and she was
glad of the support. "Dead?"

Jimmy nodded. "The radio just announced it. Apparently
there was some sort of explosion at the police station. He
had been alone in the interrogation room while the cop went
to fetch more coffee, and the room blew up."

"Are they certain he's dead?" Clark asked. "He could have
staged an escape."

"They're assuming it's him, at the moment. They're
comparing records as we speak. Perry wants you down at the
police station ASAP."

"What is going on?" Luthor demanded, angrily. Water gushing from the ceiling answered him. "Oh, the fire alarm." He laughed. "Nice thought, but it won't do you any good. This is a fallout shelter. That alarm isn't connected to the surface. It only serves as a warning to anyone else in the compound, and, at the moment, that would be precisely... no one."

I ignored him, once again feigning utter exhaustion with hardly any real strain on my acting abilities. The water from the sprinklers washed over me, a long overdue shower. I drank some in. It was cool and refreshing.

"Well then," Lois said, "as long as we're alone, would you mind explaining one more thing to me? I haven't quite been able to make sense of it."

"Certainly, my dear. I'll be happy to satisfy that curiosity of yours any way I can."

"Why have you been sending me information about Intergang operations? If you want power, why sabotage the organization? Surely not just to get in my good graces."

"So I could take over, of course. With my help, you shut down two of Mindy's projects and have been poking at a third. The board was already nervous from that whole fiasco with Bill and his son. Some of them weren't too happy about their new leader, either, the circumstances of her ascent aside. With her careful plans falling around her faster than she could possibly hope to pick them up, it's only a matter of time before they decide to -- How shall I put this...? -- /fire/ her. That will throw the entire organization into utter chaos. Chaos which offers unparalleled opportunities to someone who has already earned a reputation for handling certain... difficult individuals."

That last phrase referred to me, obviously. Although he had said "individuals," plural. Did I count twice? Once as Superman and once as Clark? Or was he talking about someone else? Mindy? Luthor himself, perhaps? Given that everyone thought him dead, it seemed possible, if more than a little strange. I just hoped he didn't mean Lois.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. I looked up, startled. I'd almost forgotten about the approaching footsteps.

"I don't like traitors," Mindy said, pouting at the still form of Luthor's stolen body. "Oh, don't put that away yet," she added, turning to her bodyguard. "We have a couple more little...inconveniences. Be a dear and take care of them both for me, will you?"

Jerome danced back a few paces, giving himself room and
then swung out with all he had.

The iron thudded into Alexander's upper chest with a dull
thump, rocking him back. He staggered, pain filling his
eyes - Loisetta flinched, having heard the unmistakable
sound of bone breaking - and then his hands clutched at his
chest. He moaned and fell back another few paces. Loisetta
saw the open space gape suddenly behind her husband and the
inevitable reached out to grasp them all like a black hand.
To her surprise, even then, she cried out behind the gag. A
wordless plea that went unanswered.

Alexander stumbled backwards and then his face changed.
Pain, surprise, anger and bewilderment all flashing into
shock as he realized there was only empty air at his back.
His arms pinwheeled frantically, his eyes locked on hers
for an instant - an instant that lasted a lifetime - and
incredibly she found love there. Insane, twisted love, but
love nonetheless. Then his gaze broke away, shifted to
Jerome. What was in his eyes became pleading. But there was
no time. Jerome's hasty move for him was in vain. Alexander
vanished with a shrill cry as he tumbled down the steep
stairs.

Then there was silence. A moment of stillness. It was
broken only by the rough, labored breathing of Jerome as he
stood staring at the empty space where but a moment
previously his enemy and nemesis had stood. Slowly with the
vague motions of a sleepwalker, as though he moved through
a dream, Loisetta watched him cross slowly to stand at the
top of the stairs. For a moment that stretched into
eternity he looked down into the hall below. The iron in
his hand fell to the floor with a clatter and there was
grief in his eyes Loisetta saw as he turned blindly for
her.