2001
Smallville, Kansas
Martha Clark Kent stood on the front porch of the farm house, watching her husband of forty years with their grandson.
Five-year-old CJ didn’t seem to mind the cold as his grandfather hurried him through the snow to the road where the school bus would pick him up for kindergarten. It was still dark out, stars like sparks in the black dome of the sky. CJ stopped at the mailbox and looked up at the stars.
Martha’s heart squeezed in her chest. CJ was so much like his father it was painful. Of course, it was logical for CJ to be a lot like Clark. CJ wasn’t actually Clark’s son, but his clone, an identical genetic copy. But that wasn’t something Jonathan and Martha could tell anyone, any more than they could tell anyone that CJ, like Clark before him, was a refugee from the planet Krypton.
The school bus drove up and stopped and CJ climbed aboard, the first pickup. As usual, CJ waved goodbye. “Bye bye, Grandpa.” He’d stopped giving his grandfather good-bye hugs after the first week of school when the boy realized that Grandpa wouldn’t hug him back. How do you explain to a five year-old that hugs reminded his grandfather too much of his dead son.
The bus drove off toward town and Jonathan turned to head back to the barn, to his chores. She knew he wasn’t being fair to the boy and she tried to compensate for his lack of warmth. But even after five years the hurt, the guilt over his adopted son’s death laid like ice around Jonathan’s heart.
Martha also knew that CJ was not having as easy a time at school as the boy let on. Clark had experienced a few problems in school, mostly caused by busybodies who didn’t think it was right for good, upstanding citizens to adopt a child they thought was illegitimate. In CJ’s case, it was probably even worse. Not only was he illegitimate, but his father had died before he was born.
Martha knew it wasn’t easy for CJ when the folks around Smallville who remembered his father as a boy, gave him funny looks, trying to make sure Jonathan and Martha didn’t notice when they shook their heads or said things about how his father had hurt them and how it was a shame they got stuck raising their grandkid.
Luckily, kindergarten was easy for him and he liked his teacher, Miss Standish. Martha had made sure he knew how to read and he knew his numbers, even though, like Clark before him, the sevens got him confused.
And although he had to go to bed before there was anything on TV the other kids watched, he liked helping Jonathan in the morning with the animals, collecting the eggs from the chicken coop before breakfast, making sure the cows were happy, looking after Betsy the goat. And even though the old rooster would chase him, she knew it didn’t hurt too bad when he got pecked at. Being Kryptonian had advantages. But still, Clark had been a happy child. CJ was more muted, more wary, almost as though he remembered things.
Martha puttered around the house while Jonathan did his chores. It was the last day of school before the winter break – it wasn’t called Christmas break any more – and Jimmy and Lucy with their two kids, and Perry White would be arriving Sunday to spend Christmas with them. It was a holiday tradition for the families, one year in Metropolis, the next year in Smallville. If Perry’s family objected to him spending time in Smallville instead of with his own family, he never mentioned it.
Martha went up to the attic and brought down the boxes of Christmas decorations. After supper she, CJ, and Jonathan would put a Christmas movie on and decorate the house, except for the tree. Jonathan and CJ would go pick out a tree sometime tomorrow, just as Jonathan had done with Clark, years before.
Metropolis, New Troy
Lucy Lane Olsen packed her two kids into the back of her late model Chevy and headed off to Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary to drop five-year-old Lois off at kindergarten and three year old Johnny off to preschool before heading off to work. She worked in research for the Daily Planet, where her husband Jimmy worked as a photojournalist, or at least he was working until the first of the year, when he was to start with Time-Life in their European section.
Lucy and the kids would stay in Metropolis until the end of the school year, then move to Paris to be with Jimmy. Lucy was looking forward to Paris. Even after six years, Metropolis and the Daily Planet held too many memories of her late sister and her sister’s dead partner.
In the back seat, Lois was talking non-stop to her little brother who was already an expert on tuning her out. Lois had a comment on everything she saw. The little girl had an uncanny resemblance to her namesake Lois Lane, the award-winning journalist. The same curiosity, the same knack for words, the same biting intellect, although in a form more suitable to a kindergartener.
Lucy sometimes wondered about her foster daughter. Lucy knew the names on Lois’s birth certificate were false. Jimmy was not the girl’s natural father since the child was born on New Krypton, a doomed, now dead, world. When Lois hit puberty, she would start to gain her powers, powers like CJ would develop in Smallville, powers like Superman had before he died. Powers enough to save or destroy the world.
Lucy still wondered how she had missed it, missed figuring out that Superman had been raised on Earth, that he was really Clark Kent from Smallville and when Clark had died, Superman had died with him. She wondered if Lois had figured it out before she died. Had she died not knowing the two men she had loved were one?
“Be good you two,” Lucy warned her children, letting them out of the car. She watched as they both disappeared into the building. Time to go to work, get home, then get ready for the company Christmas party. Sunday they would head for Smallville for a country Christmas. With any luck, Lois wouldn’t send CJ into tears this year. Lois knew exactly which buttons to push on the poor boy.
Smallville
Martha waited by the mailbox for the school bus to drop CJ off. The bus didn’t come. She waited a while longer before heading back inside the house to call the bus barn.
CJ hadn’t boarded the bus after school. No one at school had seen him leave. A call to Miss Standish told her he’d been upset about some of the older kids teasing him.
“Jonathan!” Martha screamed for her husband. Jonathan hurried into the house.
“What is it, Martha? Where’s CJ?”
“He didn’t get on the bus for home after school. The school doesn’t know where he is. Miss Standish said he was upset when class let out.”
“You call the sheriff, I’ll get in the truck, drive into town, see if I can find him,” Jonathan told her.
“Jonathan, he’s only a baby,” she said, starting to cry with worry.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him,” Jonathan tried to assure her, but his heart wasn’t in it. CJ was only five, and Smallville wasn’t the small community it was when Clark was a little boy.
Ever since the death of the two New Kryptonian invaders, Smallville had been the sightseeing target of every UFO cult and anti-alien group in the U.S., if not the world. Luckily, no one had linked the arrival of the super-powered invaders in Smallville to Clark Kent or his parents, or Superman for that matter, and as the years passed, Jonathan Kent held out the hope that no one ever would.
But CJ hadn’t gotten on the bus after school. CJ hadn’t come home.
0 0 0
Sheriff Rachel Harris listened to Martha Kent’s terror stricken report with a sinking heart. It was cold, it was dark, and it was snowing again. None of which boded well for a small boy gone missing. She called her deputies in, Tom Wilson, Andy Butler, Bill Saunders, and filled them in, gave them their marching orders – check the school, then fan out, searching every store, every alley, any place a small child could hide, or be hidden. She reminded them to check garages, refrigerators that were sitting where a child could get to it.
Despite all the warnings about old refrigerators and freezers being left outside unlocked with their doors still on, a four year old had died just last summer over in the next town, trapped in an old freezer the owners were thinking about having hauled away. And although she was pretty sure that CJ was smarter than that, small children were unpredictable. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone, another child even, could have forced him to do something stupid.
The fact that CJ hadn’t come to the sheriff’s office after he’d missed the school bus also didn’t bode well either. Rachel had gone out of her way to make her office a safe place for the kids in town, especially CJ Kent. They all knew she kept cookies and soda for them and they could come to her if they were scared.
CJ had come in on his own twice already this school year after he’d gotten too scared of some of the older kids to get on the bus home. She’d called Martha to let her know where her grandson was, then drove him home in the sheriff’s wagon, letting him turn on the lights and siren for fun. She had a talk with the father of the kids who had threatened CJ and that seemed to have solved the problem, at least CJ hadn’t come in on his own after that. She made a note to check in on those kids, maybe they were up to their old tricks again.
CJ was a good kid. A lot like his father: kind, thoughtful, good. He didn’t need any more grief in his life.
Jonathan Kent walked into her office. He looked like he’d aged ten years. “Have you got anything yet?” he asked.
“My guys are checking the school, then working outward from there. It’s too early to say anything more,” Rachel said.
“What about that Amber Alert thing?”
“We don’t know yet that he was abducted, Mister Kent,” she said. “But if we find he was seen with somebody, a stranger, I will call an Amber Alert on him.”
Jonathan was looking at her desk, at the collections of photos on the wall above her cluttered office area. Rachel’s eyes flowed his gaze.
One of the photos was of Clark Kent the night he won some prestigious award for journalism. He was just twenty-eight and just been acclaimed best of the best in his field. He was handsome, intelligent, sweet, and the photographer had caught all of it. Martha and Jonathan gave her the photo when she’d commented on how good Clark looked in the picture. A recent photo of CJ was tucked into the corner of the frame.
“You miss him too, don’t you Rachel?” Jonathan asked.
“Clark was a good friend,” she said. Her mind ticked over to the matter at hand. “Normally the first people we look at in cases like this is the family. CJ made it to school, but didn’t get on the bus afterwards, so I don’t expect to find his body in your barn. But I do have to ask this. Would CJ have had any reason to run away? Have you or Missus Kent had any problems recently that he might have overheard, may have though he was to blame for?”
Jonathan shook his head. “We’re expecting company from Metropolis to arrive Sunday for Christmas. He was pretty excited about that. He helped pick out the presents for the Olsen kids. But he doesn’t tell us everything that happens at school either, and he’s come home upset a couple times this past week. He’s a lot like Clark was that way.”
“From what I’ve seen, he’s a lot like Clark in a lot of ways,” she said. “Tom should still be close to the school. Why don’t you team up with him? I’m going to call up the reserves. The more feet we get on the ground here, the faster we’ll find something.”
