She faced Superman and all but ordered him to do this her way.
“You know you can’t let Clark’s parents die! And I’m sure Nigel has Kryptonite or he wouldn’t let you know where he was! If you show up without my body it’ll be a bloodbath and you’ll be dead!”
He crossed his arms and glared at her. “What makes you think this nutty scheme of yours will have a different outcome?”
If she could have punched him into agreement she would have done it. “Because – because they won’t expect it! They’re looking for Clark, not you! And they’re expecting me to be dead! There is no way on God’s green earth that Clark would ever hurt me, much less kill me – even for his parents – and they’re too stupid to see that. This is the best chance we have.”
“It’s dangerous, Lois! You could easily end up dead for real.”
“I can fake it. All I need is some makeup and a little Yi Chi meditation and control and I’ll be a corpse with a kick. We walk in – or, rather, you walk in carrying me like I’m dead, we get close to them, you throw me on Mazik so I can put him down and you take out Nigel and Clark and I will write it up for the Planet.”
“Why don’t I just zoom in there faster than either of them can react and take them out?”
“Because Nigel St. John is sneaky and dirty and underhanded. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had some kind of dead-man switch that would kill Clark’s parents before you could stop it. I know you’re fast, but unless you know exactly what he’s got set up, you might not be fast enough. This way is better because we’re taking the initiative away from him. He won’t expect that.”
He shook his head at her. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is simple! That’s why it’ll work.”
“Really? Do we have a plan ‘B’ if something goes wrong?”
“We don’t need one. Look, give me three minutes to make myself look pale and dead and we’ll go.”
“Uh-huh. You can make yourself look dead.”
She all but sprinted to her bathroom. “I took some theater in college, Superman. I thought it would help me when I went undercover and it has. Didn’t ever go on stage, but I learned how to make people up and change their appearance. It’ll hold up unless someone rubs a finger across my face.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger, Lois.”
“Tough tacos, Big Blue.” She paused and turned to face him, ignoring the tiny grin on his lips. “Just – please do this my way. I know it’s a risk, but the only other thing I can think of is for you to freeze me with your cold breath and I think that’s even worse. This way, there are two of us against two of them, and we’ll take them down together.” She resumed putting on the makeup. “Besides, I owe Clark big time.”
She saw a puzzled superhero in her mirror. “Why do you owe Clark?”
She didn’t stop the makeup this time. The clock was ticking and she needed to focus and not cry. “Because – because I’m a horrible person and I’ve been a complete jackass to him for months. I’m terrified that we’ll get involved and that he’ll hurt me even if he doesn’t want to and I care about him too much to lose him to a breakup so I’ve been pushing him away for months and I – I wish now that I hadn’t.”
Superman didn’t speak. He just crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame and slowly nodded as if digesting her revelation.
“Look,” she said, “I know I’ve acted like a love-sick puppy around you at times, but I’ve grown up quite a bit over the last few months. You and I could never be more than friends for more reasons than I have time to list. But it’s different between Clark and me. I could love him so easily it scares me. And I don’t want him to go through this without doing something about it.”
She watched his mouth set itself in a hard line. Then he nodded. “Okay. We’ll do this your way.”
“Good.” She put away her makeup and turned to face him. “See? Now I look like a fresh corpse. And we could have saved some time if you’d just done what I told you to do right away.”
The ghost of a smile played over his mouth again. “Of course, Lois. How silly of me to object to you putting your life at risk.”
“Smart-aleck. Come on, we’ve got to go. Take me to 448 South Howard. You know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, listen. When you throw me at Mazik, you’re going to have to take out Nigel as fast as you can. His reflexes are like lightning, and if you give him any chance at all he’ll use the Kryptonite on you.”
“I know. I have a little surprise for him, too.”
“Really? What surprise?”
He nodded. “A non-super-powered surprise. He won’t be expecting it from me.”
She didn’t bother asking again what that surprise was. “Good. Pick me up like you’re carrying my body.”
She felt herself lifted from the floor. “Now watch. And don’t try to talk to me because I won’t hear you. I’m going to go for that Yi Chi light trance that will make me look dead.”
“How will I bring you out of it?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll snap out of it when your throw me at Mazik.”
She hoped.
*****
He lifted her and held her across his arms. It was the closest they’d been to each other for weeks, and he couldn’t help enjoying the contact.
But the enjoyment didn’t last. Her face went slack and her body lost tension, and it startled him so much that he listened for her heartbeat to make sure she hadn’t actually died in his arms.
There it was, down to about eighteen beats a minute, but steady. And she was breathing, too, just very slow and shallow. If she wasn’t examined too closely, she’d convince them.
As he lifted into the air and slipped out the window, a little voice in his head kept screaming, “Bad idea! Bad idea! Horrible idea!”
Oh, yeah, he replied, you have a better one?
The voice shut up.
He landed in front of the decrepit house on South Howard with two minutes to spare. A blast of super-breath opened the front door, and a quick scan showed both Nigel and Jace in the basement. An old book, probably the diary Jace had mentioned, was in Jace’s coat pocket, wrapped in a reusable plastic bag. A lead-lined temporary room to one side probably held his parents, and a shelf behind Jace was home to an ornate bottle, probably some expensive liquor held in reserve as a toast to their joint success.
He also saw a small pistol in Nigel’s right hand and a small lead box in his left.
This was going to be tricky.
There was what looked like a waist-high table built with concrete blocks and a wooden panel laid flat on top between the bottom of the stairs and the far corner of the room where the two men were standing. He knew they’d heard him enter, and as he walked toward the stairs he watched their faces through the floor. Nigel was determined and alert, but also seemed to be fighting a smile, probably anticipating seeing Lois dead. Jace was almost manic, bouncing on his toes and grinning like a possum.
He hoped they were in for a very unpleasant surprise.
As he came into their sight, Jace actually giggled. “You did it. You really did it! Nigel didn’t think you would but you did! Wow! What did you do to her? How’d you whack her?”
Nigel cleared his throat. “Superman, please put Ms. Lane’s body over here.”
He stopped about ten feet from them. “Why? Are you going to make this her funeral pyre?”
“Does it truly matter? Please, place her on this structure.”
He walked slowly toward the makeshift altar. “You both know that you won’t get away with this.”
Jace rubbed his hands together. “That’s what all the good guys say. And yet, here we are, the four of us – oh, I’m sorry, the three of us.”
He was almost there. “I don’t make threats, Mazik.”
Nigel lifted the lead box. “Be that as it may, please do as—”
It had to be now.
He tossed Lois at Jace’s face and saw her eyes snap open. She twisted in mid-air and hit him in the face with her elbow and they both went down in a heap with Jace trying to ward off the blows Lois was raining down on him.
He lunged at Nigel.
Nigel was ready for him.
The box snapped open and the green poison hit him like a club. His momentum carried him into Nigel’s body and made him drop the box, but it didn’t close and Nigel didn’t fall.
Superman thumped to the floor chest-first. Nigel stumbled away and lifted his pistol and fired twice, but not at Superman. Someone cried out in pain.
Despite his own torment, Superman reached around to his back – under his cape – and pulled out a Taser and shot Nigel with it.
As the electricity surged through his body, Nigel’s teeth clamped shut and he stood in place grunting as loudly as he could. When Superman released the trigger, Nigel fell to the floor in a limp heap of expensive clothing and dropped his pistol. Superman crawled to the lead box and managed to close it.
As soon as the box snapped shut, his pain was gone. He climbed to his feet and put the box on the other side of the room from Nigel, then walked over, grabbed the man’s pistol away from his fumbling fingers, and tucked it into his waistband. Nigel’s eyes glared hate up at him and Superman smirked back at him. “Sorry, old man. Worse luck next time.”
Then he looked across the room.
Mazik was lying on his stomach, his face turned to one side, with a bloody nose and open eyes staring at nothing. A small hole in his forehead told the story.
Jace Mazik was dead, killed by Nigel St. John.
Lois groaned and tried to straighten out. Superman strode to her side and bent down to help her up, but she cried out as he put his hand on her elbow. “No! Don’t pull – I’m hit.”
She lifted her hand away from her abdomen. It was covered with blood.
Her blood.
A lot of her blood.
He didn’t think he’d ever flown that fast with a passenger.
*****
Clark sat in the emergency room waiting area, staring at but not seeing a wildlife documentary playing on the TV. He’d already had word that his parents were generally okay, but his father was being kept overnight for observation and his mother refused to leave his side. The nurses had shooed him out of the room to allow the older Kents to get some sleep, and they had even brought in a cot for Martha to use. Very much against regulations, one nurse explained as she set up the cot. Totally not allowed, another one added as she unfolded the sheets for Martha.
Jace Mazik was in the morgue, waiting for transport to the coroner’s office. Nigel St. John had taken advantage of Clark’s preoccupation with freeing his parents and getting Lois to the hospital. He’d pulled out the Taser’s leads, grabbed the bottle of bourbon from the shelf and the lead box from the floor, and wiggled out through one of the basement windows.
He’d been found three blocks away, dead. The theory Bill Henderson came up with was that the bourbon was for a celebratory toast after killing Superman, but that someone – almost surely Jace – had poisoned it. Preliminary tests had found that it was the same poison used to kill Jace’s father four years before. Nigel must have taken a drink to settle his nerves, or perhaps to celebrate his escape, and had accidentally killed himself.
Henderson had come to the waiting room and given the lead box to Clark, saying that it wasn’t evidence and looked like someone’s private property. He’d also avoided making eye contact with Clark as he did so. Instead of brooding over just how much Bill Henderson knew or suspected, Clark had taken the box out of the atmosphere and thrown it into a decaying cometary orbit. In a few days it would vaporize in the sun’s outer atmosphere with no sign that it had ever existed.
Henderson had also stayed for a few minutes, had asked Clark how Lois’ surgery was going, had expressed his relief that Clark’s parents were well, and then had given Clark his card with his home phone number written in ink on the back along with an admonition to call if he needed anything.
It was over.
Now all Clark had to do was wait for word on Lois.
He’d called in the story under their joint byline. Perry and Jimmy and Eduardo and Sharon McClure had all dropped by to check on both of them. Sharon had offered to stay with him, but Clark felt like he needed to be alone to process all that had happened. The police had all the information he could give them.
Except the diary and its contents.
He’d lifted the diary from Jace’s pocket after he’d come back to free his parents and found Nigel missing. Why Nigel hadn’t taken it would forever remain a mystery, unless he feared being caught while searching for it. Or perhaps Nigel hadn’t known where Jace had hidden it. Maybe Nigel didn’t think he needed it.
Whatever the reason, Clark now held the book in his hands and wondered how much of it he should actually believe.
This Tempus character was a real doozy, assuming he was a real person. If not for the uncanny accuracy of the assertions in the book – at least, up to the incident of the cloned gangsters at Georgie Hairdo’s club, after which the narrative diverged significantly from the recent past – and the fact that Tempus had known Clark’s dual identity, he wouldn’t believe a word of it.
Yet he had to. Somehow he and Lois had inspired – or would inspire – people in the future to build a Utopian society with Superman’s ideals driving its development. H. G. Wells had visited that future and come back with Tempus, then somehow dropped him off in Smallville in 1866 and had him committed to an insane asylum. If Tempus had told his story to the authorities then and there, putting him away would have been a slam dunk.
Now he had to figure out what to do with the information.
There was no mention in the book about Lois getting shot, or about her dying young. But maybe time wasn’t fixed like a mural, but fluid like a wind-blown Zen garden. A random act or a seemingly insignificant choice could have repercussions throughout history.
A nurse had come out once already to tell him that Lois was doing well, that they’d removed the bullet, and were about to begin repairing the internal damage. She had seemed optimistic, but surgical nurses always seemed to give patients’ loved ones the best-case scenario.
He put the diary back in its plastic cover and slipped it inside his sweater. It would keep until later.
*****
Lois slowly became aware of her surroundings.
The first thing she heard was a big, burly guy near her bed who kept yelling, “Breathe! You have to breathe, okay? You want to go home, don’t you?”
She moved her mouth and realized that there was a plastic tube in it. She tried to push it out with her tongue, but it didn’t budge. And when she tried to speak, nothing came out.
The burly guy stood and grabbed her hand before it got to her face. “Easy, ma’am. Don’t try to talk. You have a breathing tube in your throat. The doctor will be here soon to take it out.”
She blinked and the guy disappeared. Must have been a long blink, she mused.
Then a short, freckled, perky redheaded girl leaned over her. “Ms. Lane? You’re awake! Good. If you have any pain, blink twice, okay? Blink twice for pain and once if you don’t feel any.”
Lois blinked once and thought that her eyes were all but paralyzed. It seemed to take minutes for them to open again, but the little redhead was still there, bright-eyed and smiling down at her.
“Good! The doctor will be in here – oh, here he is now. Doctor Richards, Ms. Lane is awake and responsive.”
A tall, slender black man loomed over her. “Excellent,” he intoned. “Do you think you’re ready to breathe on your own now? Blink twice for yes and once for no.”
Lois blinked twice and thought that her eyes moved a little faster that time. And she thought she could hear the clicks and beeps of other medical machines in the background.
“Okay, Ms. Lane,” the doctor said, “we’re going to take the tube out. You’ll feel some discomfort for a moment. You’ll probably be thirsty, but all we can give you for now is a damp cloth to chew. In a little while we’ll give you some ice chips. Are you ready?”
Lois blinked twice more.
“Okay, nurse, let’s do this. You steady the patient and I’ll pull. One, two, three!”
The little redhead held Lois’ head, the doctor put his hands on the tube and counted to three, and the tube slipped out. Lois thought she’d choked on a sword and started coughing. The nurse turned her head to one side and held a small basin under her mouth.
Before she could ask what the basin was for, the nurse took it away and gave her the wet cloth. “Here you go. Don’t try to talk for a few minutes. Your throat is really dry and we don’t want you to cough any more than you have to.”
Lois lifted her hand and tried to draw a question mark in the air.
The nurse frowned slightly. “You don’t remember why you’re here?”
Lois started to blink, then her memories cascaded back.
Nigel and Jace.
Clark’s parents in danger.
Kryptonite.
Had she self-induced a Yi Chi trance?
Had she been shot?
It was all jumbled up in her head.
She felt her eyes bulge. She croaked, “Clark!” before her throat closed up again and she began coughing.
This time it didn’t stop.
And this time her belly hurt like fire and acid.
She heard Doctor Richards yell for a gurney. She felt herself being lifted onto it. She felt time slow down as her vision clouded again.
She hoped Clark would understand if she di—
*****
“No, Mr. Kent. We took out the breathing tube and she said your name and started coughing and then started bleeding internally again. We think the coughing pulled her internal stiches loose. Doctor Richards is working on her now and he’s the best trauma surgeon we have. If anyone can pull her through this, he can.”
He fell back into his chair and dropped his face into his hands. “I – I can’t lose her. I just can’t!”
The nurse sat down beside him. “Mr. Kent, I assure you that we’re doing all we can. Everything that can be done for her is being done.”
He felt her arm reach across his shoulders and her other hand touch his wrist. “Do you want me to call anyone for you?”
He shook his head.
“How about if I pray with you?”
He lifted his eyes to her. “Pray?”
She nodded. “Sometimes the Lord does things we don’t understand. Sometimes He allows things we don’t think He should allow. And sometimes things happen because He wants us to remember who He is.” She patted his wrist. “Do you mind if I pray? Or would you rather I call the chaplain?”
“I – I don’t know.”
She smiled softly. “Let me give it a shot.”
He nodded. “Do I – should I kneel or something?”
“Not unless you want to. I was going to sit here and talk.”
He nodded again. And as small as she was compared to him, he felt as if she were enveloping him with her embrace.
“Father,” she said, “this man is hurting bad. You know it. Please, please give him grace to see this through. Give him what he needs to face whatever You have in store for him. We know that bad things happen to people all the time, and we don’t think they deserve them. But You know what’s really going on. You know what’s best. You know how You’re going to use this to make things better down the road, even if we don’t have any idea how that might happen. Father, please take care of this man’s lady. Please bring her back to him healthy and sound. Please mend her body and their hearts. And let them remember You in the times of Your blessing. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Clark lifted damp eyes to her. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I – thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Kent. Now I need to get back in there and help. You just hang on, okay? I think things are going to turn out for the best.”
He nodded weakly. “Is that a promise?”
Her face crinkled and he thought she was about to cry. “I can’t promise anything, Mr. Kent, except that life comes with pain built-in. The most important thing is how we react to it.” She stood beside him. “We’re doing our best. So is Ms. Lane. Now you have to do your best.”
She took a deep breath, then strode purposefully through the automatic doors leading to Lois’ operating room.
Clark watched her go, his mind still in turmoil but his heart strangely calmer. Whatever happened, he’d bear it, as long as Lois was there with him. With her in his life he could face anything.
He sighed, resigning himself to his future. So much for Superman leaving town now.
