Day Two
“Lois,” Perry White yelled from his office door. “Where is Clark?”
“Am I his keeper?” Lois shot back, then promptly felt ashamed. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday when he left to meet someone, I’m guessing a source. But I went by his apartment this morning to give him a ride in and I don’t think he came home at all last night. His bed hadn’t been slept in and he hadn’t gotten his phone messages.”
“Do you know what he was working on?” Perry insisted. Perry’s annoyance at Clark not checking in had turned to worry. Clark was a bit of a flake, disappearing at odd times, sometimes for hours, but he’d always come back or checked in with a story, often a Superman exclusive.
“He said something about Bureau 39,” Lois said.
“I thought the Feds disbanded that bunch of loonies.” Alarms were going off in Perry’s head.
“That’s what I told Clark, but I don’t think he was buying it,” Lois said. She brushed a dark lock of hair away from her face.
“Look, Lois, see if any of your sources might know something,” Perry instructed. “I’m gonna’ call Bill Henderson, let him know Clark left yesterday and we haven’t heard from him since.”
“Aren’t we supposed to wait forty-eight hours before declaring somebody missing?” Jimmy Olsen asked. He’d come up behind Perry as they’d been speaking.
“Clark’s a reporter, Jimmy,” Perry said. “Henderson won’t mind us giving the police a heads up that we’ve got one that’s AWOL and possibly in over his head in something.”
* * *
Clark woke up, finally, shaking his head to clear away the fuzziness he still felt. It only made things worse as his head started pounding. He hurt, every joint, every muscle protesting as he tried to get up off the cold, damp floor. He felt the aching cold against his skin and realized his suit was gone. He was bare foot, wearing only a loose pair of cotton pants with an elastic waistband and a sleeveless cotton shirt that was actually too big for him. He struggled to his feet and looked around.
He tried to remember how he got to where he was, a small stone-lined, windowless cell with a single light fixture set into the ceiling. He couldn’t remember and the last thing he did recall was going into the alley behind Fale’s Jewelers, followed by two policemen. He remembered feeling the pain of Kryptonite exposure, falling to his knees, then nothing except nightmares. He had no idea how long he’d been there. No idea if anyone even knew he was missing.
He felt a sharp pain on the inside of his left arm at the elbow when he flexed his arm. There was white gauze taped to his arm, and under it – he loosened the gauze to look – he saw that a plastic tube had been sutured to a vein. The tube was sealed at the ‘open’ end with rubber or vinyl and was filled with some sort of fluid.*
Something felt warm and metallic against his neck and he reached up to find out what it was. His fingers touched a smooth cylinder of metal that went all the way around his neck. It wasn’t tight, luckily, but he couldn’t feel a clasp or even a seam.
He sat down on the cold floor, pulling his knees to his chest. The nightmares came back to him, unbidden. Rough hands on his body, removing the suit, examining him. Questions. Questions he couldn’t answer, wouldn’t answer. Needles. He remembered the pain of needles. Had they given him drugs? He wasn’t sure what affect drugs would have on him while he was powerless. Everything was disjointed, disconnected, but he thought he’d struggled against the hands. The bruises he felt on his body leant credence to this theory.
He realized he was hungry and thirsty. He hoped someone would figure out he was missing. Perry or Lois. They were smart. They had sources. If he was lucky, they’d find him before it was too late. He put his head down and prayed.
* * *
Inspector William Henderson was a twenty-year veteran of the Metropolis Police Department. He’d come up through the ranks and was now considered one of the top criminal investigators in the department, if not the country.
He also considered Clark Kent a friend, ditto Superman, even though he was only a few years older than Henderson’s eldest son. The boy had promise, Henderson had to give him that. Not many kids his age would have had the guts to berate a uniformed cop for being insensitive. Of course, twenty-six was only a kid from the point of view of someone closer to Henderson’s ‘advanced’ age of forty-three.
He had personally taken Perry White’s call that Kent had gone missing. If it had been anyone else placing the call, if it had been about any other reporter aside from Kent or Lane, he would have reminded the caller that the official waiting period was forty-eight hours. In fact, would have been unlikely he would have even seen the missing person’s report.
Henderson stepped out of the elevator into the lobby that looked over the newsroom of the Daily Planet. It was, he realized, the first time he’d been on this floor. He scanned the half-empty room, realizing most of the staff was out doing their job and would most likely be back later. He stepped down onto the lower level, crossing the room to Perry White’s office.
“Henderson,” Perry called out, beckoning the police officer into his office. “I know I’m probably over-reacting, but when Lois told me Clark was still looking into Bureau 39, and he hadn’t been home at all last night, alarms started goin’ off. Especially since it’s only been a week since he got his memories back after that amnesia episode. I’d hate to think he was wandering around again without a clue.”
“Hopefully, he just got involved in what he was doing and it just slipped his mind to call in,” Henderson said. It was funny that Perry had mentioned Kent’s amnesia. That was one of the things that clued Henderson into the real relationship between Clark Kent and Superman.
Kent had been found buck-naked in a smoldering crater by Henry O, one of the winos who lived on the streets in Suicide Slum. The homeless man had taken pity on the younger man, giving him a pair of pants and a shirt, and taking him to a homeless shelter where one of Henderson’s men recognized him. It was the opinion of the police psychiatrist that Kent’s memory loss was due to a combination of a blow to the head and a need to distance himself from the disaster facing the planet in the form of the Nightfall asteroid. They speculated that Kent had also been mugged, explaining why he’d been found without clothes or ID.
It was only afterwards, after Superman reappeared and took care of the surviving chunks of asteroid that Henderson put things together. He had gone to the alley where Henry had told officers he’d rescued Kent to see if there was any evidence of what had really happened to the young man. What he’d found was evidence that Superman had fallen there after he’d lost radio contact with EPRAD. But it was Kent who’d been found in the crater – dazed and clueless, without a mark on him.
Perry stuck his head out of his office. “Lois, honey, when did Clark leave yesterday?”
“About ten after ten. He was working on something on his computer just before he left. In fact, he didn’t bother to turn it off. And you know how careful Clark’s is about his computer, always does backups, does all that techie stuff,” Lois told them. “So I’m positive he was planning on coming back to finish the story we were finishing up.”
“Lois, exactly what did he say about Bureau 39?” Henderson asked.
“He’d heard they may have found more Kryptonite in Smallville, and then Joe the Nose had a friend of a friend who may have had some information on Trask and his people,” Lois said. “He was supposed to meet them sometime today.”
“But you don’t know where or when?”
Lois shook her head. “He said he wanted to do the story on his own.”
