There was a deafening crack that made her wince, her hands coming up to instinctively cover her ears.
Her flashlight hit the floor, rolling sideways away from her, even though she’d thought that the floor had been even in this room.
Then, all of a sudden, she felt like she couldn’t quite keep her balance.
She tried to move forward, but she stepped on a rock and it slid out from under her foot.
The awful cracking sound had stopped but now her ears were ringing with an equally deafening echo that seemed to be drowning out her other senses.
Clark’s arms came around her tightly then, and for the briefest second, she felt like she might be able to catch her balance again.
But even with Clark’s support, she just couldn’t seem to get her feet under her.
A strong breeze suddenly tossed her hair behind her.
Over Clark’s shoulder, she saw the sparse light from the flashlight she’d dropped moving impossibly upward, the space around her growing dimmer.
And that’s when she realized they were falling.*****
The sound of sliding rock finally subsided.
Her ears still echoed with it.
It was pitch black all around her.
And she was completely pinned down.
Rocks—
boulders, really, the size of her head and bigger—were around and beneath her, digging into her legs, her shoulders, her back. She could feel Clark on top of her, his arms still around her, one cushioning the back of her head. He’d probably saved her from a concussion at the very least, maybe saved her life.
And he wasn’t moving.
Cold dread filled her chest.
“Clark!?”
The air was thick with dust and it filled her lungs, choking her as she tried to call out his name again.
She felt Clark inhale deeply and relief rushed through her, as thick as the dust.
By the time she stopped coughing, it seemed like the air had cleared somewhat.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
“Am
I ok?!” she exclaimed, coughing again. “You have a ceiling on your back! Are
you ok?
“Uh, I’m—Yeah, I’m fine. I think the rocks kind of made a pocket around us as they fell. I just can’t really move. But I think we must have gotten lucky,” he explained hesitantly.
“I’ll say! So much for the curse. If a mummy wanted me dead, this should have done it.”
“Um, yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded odd. “Are you injured anywhere?”
She did a check, flexing her muscles, and realized that while she wasn’t injured, the entire length of her body
was firmly pressed up against Clark, his arms around her.
Fighting the overwhelming feeling that came with that sudden perception, she inhaled again, only to find that it really didn’t help that particular sensation. She suddenly felt slightly short of breath, even though there wasn’t nearly as much dust in the air as there had been.
All at once, noise trickled in. Voices were yelling above them but off to one side.
She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Clark turned his head to the left and yelled back, “We’re alright! But we’re, ah–we’re stuck!”
A rock shifted somewhere above them, and a puff of dust permeated the little pocket of space they were scrunched into.
Holding her breath, and hoping that the worst of it would settle, she tried not to cough.
Feeling Clark inhale deeply again, she wondered how he could get any oxygen at all when the air was so thick.
She felt him tilt his head, listening, and tried to nudge him, before realizing that she really, really couldn’t move. She settled for tapping her finger against his chest.
“What are they saying?”
“They’re going to start digging us out.”
“Oh, great. I can’t wait to get out of this,” she said, lightly shifting against him and immediately stopping as her body rubbed against his.
He hadn’t replied to her, though.
“What?” she asked with a growing sense of disquiet.
“It’s going to take them a while.”
“How long can it take to kick rocks out of the way?”
“Well, they have to be careful not to shift the rocks so much that they fall and our pocket here collapses.”
That made her feel a little more nervous.
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
“I’m not sure. It depends on how many men help, and how the rocks fell, and how much is on top of us and—”
“Clark,” she interrupted.
“Maybe five or six hours?”
“FIVE or SIX HOURS?! You’re KIDDING!” she asked incredulously, her voice sharp and raised.
A little cluster of pebbles loosened from somewhere and rained down on them, and Clark, his hand still under her head, shifted to tuck her face in against his chest, protecting her from the little shower of sharp debris.
Above them, rocks groaned as they slid against each other.
“Maybe just don’t raise your voice,” he suggested lightly, releasing her head back down.
“Yeah,” she said, so quiet that she was sure he couldn’t have heard her.
But her heart was racing so quickly she was sure even the workers yelling above them could hear it.
She’d been in bad situations before, and she didn’t usually mind tight spaces, but being slowly compressed and suffocated until who knows how much ancient rubble collapsed on them wasn’t a way she’d ever imagined going out.
Or maybe it was just her proximity to her partner, intimately pressed along every inch of the entire front of her body, a situation she couldn’t remember them having been in since, ironically, that honeymoon suite at the Lexor Hotel in Metropolis.
Either way, her heart was racing as fast as she wished she could bolt out of this tomb.
“Lois?” Clark interrupted her competing spiraling thoughts. “It’s going to be ok.”
She realized that his other arm was beneath her when it tightened around her briefly.
“I’ll believe you in five or six hours,” she quipped, but even she heard her voice waver. And if she heard it, Clark, who seemed to pick up on almost everything lately, surely heard it, too.
His arm tightened around her again.
“We’ll be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Another smattering of dust dropped over them from above.
“I think several tons of limestone are ready to take you up on that challenge,” she said on a shaky breath.
Clark was quiet for a moment.
“Look, if we’re here for hours and you’re too afraid, or if the rocks shift and everything starts to collapse, just call for Superman.”
There was something in his voice, a cost, that was battling with the certainty he offered. It caught her ear curiously, but even so, she scoffed, doubting the hero’s hearing. “Really? Even half a world away?”
“From
anywhere,” Clark said quietly, but with a forceful confidence. “I’m sure he would never let you get hurt. If he had to fly around the world or through the earth itself, he would still get to you.”
Clark was very likely right. Superman did seem to save her even when she couldn’t believe he would.
It reassured her.
But something about it also made her a little uneasy.
She wasn’t overly keen on thinking about the spandex-clad hero with her warm-blooded partner stretched out on top of her, his arms wound around her in a tight and unmoveable embrace.
She swallowed. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Either way, I promise you’re safe.”
“Thanks, Clark,” she said, resisting the urge to bury her face in his chest the way she had when she’d tripped yesterday. Instead, she gave his chest a friendly pat with her trapped hand. “Now I just have to keep myself from going crazy by laying perfectly still for six hours.”
“I’ll bet you can’t name all the play pieces in Monopoly.”
“What?” she asked, surprised at the non-sequitur.
“The board game. I’ll bet you can’t name all the little silver player pieces.”
She laughed in spite of herself, quickly closing her mouth to smother the sound.
“What are the stakes?” she asked. After laughing more loudly than she’d intended, she’d meant to lower her voice to a boulder-friendly decibel. But for some reason, it had come out breathy and light and low instead, which gave it a distinctly sensual sound.
Clark shifted infinitesimally above her and another tiny trickle of sand cascaded down, as if trying to cover them further than the rocks already had.
She buried her head in his neck again, and she felt the worry take hold anew.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered above her, his hand cradling her head comfortingly closer to him again.
When the sand shower finally stopped, they both relaxed, at least, as much as they could in their utterly compromising, vulnerable, and immobile positions, with what must be a half an ancient temple on top of them.
Clark exhaled slowly, and then said in a silly voice, “I’ll bet you a dollar.”
“A dollar?” She’d lost the thread of the conversation in the midst of the fresh threat of avalanche.
“A dollar if you can name every Monopoly piece.”
“Can
you name them all?” she threw back, still thinking about the danger above them.
“Of course I can,” he said, laughter tinging his voice.
She felt her competitive drive come on line, which was probably what he’d intended.
“An iron.”
“One,” he congratulated.
“Top hat. Wheel barrow.”
“Two and three,” he ticked off.
“Um, a dog…?”
“Are you asking or guessing?”
“There’s a dog!” she whispered fiercely.
She felt him chuckle above her.
And subsequently felt the low rumble move all the way through her body.
She mentally chastised her toes as they started to curl.
This was going to be a long five hours.
***
“Do you have any idea how far they’re getting?” she asked, what felt like days later.
She felt him twist his head around and upward.
“I can’t really see much,” he apologized. “But it does sound like there are a lot of people moving around.”
“How long do you think it’s been?”
“Maybe an hour?”
“Ugghhhh, this is going to take forever,” she complained. “Are you out of trivia?”
“Well…” he equivocated.
“Well?”
“It’s just that I don’t know if you’d be very interested in most of the rest of it.”
“You mean you think I won’t know it,” she challenged.
“That wasn’t what I said.”
But she could tell he was smiling.
“Try me,” she insisted.
“Top exports of Guam?”
She made a face.
Even though she knew he couldn’t see her expression in the utter blackness, he went on.
“Order of rulers in the Tudor Dynasty? Periodic table by atomic number? The first hundred decimal places of pi?”
“You do
not really have all of that in your head.” she said, surprised.
“I have a pretty good memory.” She felt him shrug.
“The first hundred numbers of pi? That’s more than just a ‘good memory’,” she argued.
“I have a photographic memory,” he admitted.
“You’re kidding! You never told me that.”
“It’s not really something to brag about.”
“Maybe not, but in a year and a half of being partners, that sure would have come in handy!”
“You always seemed like you had a plan.”
Maybe it was the darkness that allowed her to focus on the nuances of his voice, but she thought he actually sounded a little hurt.
“I guess it really has been a year and a half that we’ve been partnered.”
“It has,” he confirmed, though his voice sounded unsure about where she was taking this.
“You’re not half bad, you know,” she joked.
“You’re brilliant,” he replied without hesitating.
She was suddenly glad that he couldn’t see her face, because in the darkness she didn’t bother to hide it when the open surprise morphed into a sappy smile and a flash of hot tears appeared in her eye at such a naked compliment.
She swallowed down the emotion so that her voice didn’t betray her the way her face surely was right now.
“Maybe it’s time to reassess a little,” she suggested lightly.
“What do you mean?” He sounded worried.
“I mean that maybe when we get back to Metropolis, we can start talking about ways to make this a more equal partnership.”
“Lois–” Her name was just a rush of air.
“I don’t mean giving up first place on the byline,” she cautioned wryly.
“But you’re–You’re top banana–You said–You’ve
always said–”
“I know what I said. I said that to every bottom-of-their-class, more-arrogance-than-brains nepotism hire that Perry had to bring on and saddled me with year after year. I said that before I—well, before I knew you.” She took a breath, and her voice softened unexpectedly. “Now I know you.”
“Now you know me,” he echoed.
She couldn’t catch his tone or fully understand the meaning behind it, but it sounded solemn enough. And maybe a little self-deprecating? But something else, too.
“Well, don’t I?” she asked, immediately jumping to the worry that she’d made herself unnecessarily vulnerable.
“You may not know every single thing about me, but…yes, Lois. You know me. Maybe better than anyone else.”
There was a beat of silence as she wrestled with the depth the admission she’d just been handed.
“So I know that you’re a reliable partner,” she concluded.
“That means a lot, Lois.”
The honest emotion made her suddenly uncomfortable.
“Well, don’t forget that I’m making the offer under a couple of tons of rubble,” she said, her anxieties about the peril of their situation bubbling up again. “So it’s only fifty-fifty that I’ll have to make good on it.”
“We
will get out of here,” Clark promised her again.
And it helped hearing him say it.
***
The pitch black darkness was oppressive.
It didn’t help that the rocks surrounding them were even
more oppressive; as in, they could shift at any moment and press her and Clark into smithereens.
As if in response, a rock above them groaned loudly from whatever the dig team must be doing to unearth them, and she felt it echo through the rocks around them.
It also didn’t help that she couldn’t move more than a few inches in the tiny pocket of air they were stuck in.
Speaking of which, did they need to worry about running out of air?
Her eyes flicked upward, but of course she couldn’t see.
Panic pressed into her chest, which already felt tight from Clark’s weight, even though she could tell he’d done what he could to shift off of her.
But surely the dust and sand had to come from somewhere? If the sand could move through gaps in the rock, air could move through even more easily.
…Unless all that sand that was still trickling down on them was moving in to block all of the airways.
She felt her pulse spike.
“Lois?”
“Huh?”
“Are you ok?” he asked tentatively.
“Sure.”
“Okay.”
But the blackness was absolute.
It was inescapable.
There was nothing
but the darkness.
And it was pressing down on her like the tons of rocks above them.
“Lois.”
Clark’s voice wasn’t casual anymore.
It felt like the pitch blackness was even pressing down on her throat.
“Hmm?” she got out.
“You have to try to stay calm.”
“Who’s not calm?”
“I can feel your pulse racing.”
That made sense. He’d tipped his head to rest on her shoulder a while back.
But she still didn’t admit to it.
“Do you want to call for Superman?” he asked. “He can have us out of here in a second.”
She considered it.
She was feeling sort of desperate to get out of here, the panic rising high in her throat.
But she didn’t want to pull him away from someone else that might really need him. They weren’t technically in an emergency right now, just a pretty tight spot. But an expert team was already working on freeing them. All she had to do was wait.
And another part of her just didn’t want to test whether he would show up. Clark had been so sure that he’d respond to her call. And he probably would; he always had before. But what if he didn’t?
“Not yet,” she finally replied. But her breath was short, and she was sweating, the stagnant heat finally zapping her strength and energy and ability to think clearly.
“What did your parents do to soothe you when you were little?”
“Nothing,” she stammered, nonplussed by his question.
“I know your mind is racing as fast as your pulse, but try to think.”
“It's not that I can’t remember. They didn’t do anything. My mom told me to stop crying or she’d give me something to cry about. I think I was four when my dad started telling me that Lanes didn’t cry.”
“Oh, Lois,” he said softly. Then, “What about Lucy?”
“Lucy was too little to do any comforting.”
“No, how did you comfort Lucy when she was upset? I can’t imagine you telling your little sister Lanes didn’t cry.”
“No, of course not. No. I–I sang to her. When she was little, I sang to her.”
“I’m not sure my singing voice would make anyone feel better. I think even the rocks would rebel,” he chuckled.
But the rocks rebelling made her think that if they really wanted to silence Clark, they easily could. And her breath hitched in her chest, panic swelling.
“What was the song you sang at the Metro Club?” he asked quickly.
“What?”
“When Johnny put you onstage.”
“I don’t–I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. You wore a silver dress. You sang an old standard. What was it?”
Her mind started to engage. “I– um, it was 'I’ve Got a Crush on You'.”
“Sing it to me.”
“I don’t– I don’t think I should–”
“Just quietly,” he said, making his own voice light and gentle. “How did the verse go? I’ve got a crush…?”
But if she sang, if she spoke at all, wasn’t that risking the rocks rebelling, of shifting and crushing them and the darkness taking her under—
“Come on, Lois. Sing to me. I’ve got a crush…”
She swallowed and quietly said, “I've got a crush on you.”
“What comes next?”
“Sweetie pie,” she said softly in the rhythm of the song.
“Keep going,” he urged her.
“All the day and night-time, hear me sigh,” she went on in a low voice, this time catching some of the melody.
“Good. What’s next?”
She turned her head, and Clark leaned in closer to her. They were cheek to cheek as she very quietly sang, “I never had the least notion, that I could fall with so much emotion…”
And she felt her pulse slow.
It took a little mental energy to pull lyrics a year gone from her memory, and, already tired from the panic and zapped by the heat, her brain didn’t have time to both do that and spiral.
As she went into the chorus, she realized that she’d been about to hyperventilate but Clark had successfully distracted her.
She let her cheek rub against his.
Maybe it was okay to indulge, just a little, when they were in such danger, and their time together could be so short? Bearing away from further thoughts of their mortality, she oh-so-quietly sang through the rest of the song in his ear.
“'Cause I've got a crush, my baby, on you…”
***
The sounds from above were still echoing down to them, but it sounded more like a wash of white noise punctuated by staccato pings of smaller rocks dropping onto one another. It was hard to make out individual sounds to be able to tell what was going on.
They’d been chatting sporadically. After she’d had her bout of claustrophobia, Clark had launched into a conversation of football statistics–all incorrect, and all that she knew he
knew but was misquoting just so that she’d catch and correct them–and then pressed her for details of Jimmy’s latest dating mishap, which she’d gotten nearly all the way through before she decided that life was already too short, and in their current predicament, Jimmy’s sophomoric romantic exploits weren’t what she wanted to spend her time thinking about. He’d chuckled. But she could tell that he was still worried.
But her mind had come back to her, the fear not at the forefront anymore.
It did help thinking that Superman could rescue them if things got really out of hand. But more than that, it was comforting that Clark was so solidly there with her. What helped
less was the never-ending reminder that he
was, since they were pressed so tightly together. In the whiplash of realising that she hadn’t lost her balance, but rather lost the ground under her, she hadn’t thought twice about clinging to Clark when he’d somehow wrapped himself around her in what felt like mid-air.
And now she was torn between the awkwardness of having someone who didn’t usually lie on top of her lying on top of her, and the absolutely intoxicating fulfillment of wanting to be closer to Clark again. She’d been stealing little snatches of casual touch from him since they’d arrived–not really struggling when he’d caught her outside the tomb, sitting back to back playing games, holding his hand on the way out of the pitch-black passage–and now she was getting exactly what she’d wanted. But, in true Lois Lane fashion, she was only getting what she wanted while on the brink of death.
Typical.
And speaking of that mortal precipice, what on earth had happened, anyway?
Dr. Weeks had warned them that some of the chambers might have had damaged floors from the floods.
But, no, she’d heard a noise
before the floor had collapsed.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, either, that she’d chased the mummy right into his lair before the cave-in.
It had to have been a trap.
“We should talk through who we think did this,” she said.
“You don’t think it was an accident?”
“Do you?”
He sighed. “It would be pretty unlikely. I think that might have been dynamite that we heard before the floor collapsed.”
“Dynamite!”
That was disturbing, but it would make sense. Still, it wasn’t something she usually had to face in Metropolis.
“Who do you think knew we were in here?”
“Dr. Weeks, Zaid, and the other men must have realized that we’d wandered off. But no one else would have known we’d left the group.”
“Wouldn’t Dr. Weeks have come after us if he’d realized?” she asked. “He hates us wandering around down here. Or at least, he says he does.”
“How could he have known where we went? He could have been searching for us by the time the floor caved in, but not caught up to us, yet.”
“I think our footprints would have left a pretty obvious trail into the passageway with the broom.”
“And you still think there could be another entrance, right?”
“Right,” she said, frustrated. There were too many slippery loose ends in this investigation. And speaking of slippery…“I didn’t see Carnahan after lunch.”
“We didn’t see Bashir, either, and he’s never been on our list of suspects.”
“Maybe he should be,” she said.
“Dr. Bashir? I don’t think so,” said Clark.
“He’s got all the experience with artifacts. Maybe he’s the one carving all of these creepy statues.”
“The mummy that we were chasing was taller than you. Bashir is shorter than you; that couldn’t have been him.”
She thought for a moment, sifting through suspicions. “He could be in on it with Carnahan? Maybe Carnahan was playing the mummy.”
“Carnahan couldn’t have run that fast with his limp.”
“How do we know he’s not faking it?”
“He could be,” agreed Clark. “But I still don’t think it’s Bashir. Just because he knows about ancient art doesn’t mean that he can make it. The only person we know of that can carve at all is Gamal.”
“Yeah, but Gamal is gone.”
“Wahid is gone, too,” Clark pointed out. “Weren’t they friends? They sat together at dinner. Maybe this is about something else entirely, something that they were doing, and the Project is just collateral damage.”
She chewed that over. “No, this is about the Project. I can feel it. But you made a good point: how are they choosing who they abduct?”
“So maybe it
does matter that Wahid and Gamal are friends.”
“Wahid and Gamal weren’t their only victims.”
“Us?” he asked.
“Well,
me,” she clarified. “That third statue was finished, it was dried, and it was me. I wasn’t friends with either of them, and they were planning to take me next.”
“Maybe they were planning to take you last…” Clark said contemplatively.
“Huh?”
“Well, what if they were planning to take you this morning? They probably knew the excavation team would have a hard time entering the tomb. What if the mummy only came out this morning to lure you in?”
“Like bait?”
“You ran after it last time. Maybe they thought they could catch you if you ran after it again.”
“Only you ran after me,” she said, jumping on his train. Then the brakes slammed. “But you ran after me last time, too.”
“But I didn't go in,” he pointed out. “I stopped you, too. Maybe they were banking on the fact that I wouldn’t go in after you if you could outrun me.”
“They don’t know you at all, then,” she said, her voice coming out softer than she’d intended. She cleared her throat. “So you think they planned to grab me when I ran in, but then when you followed me they couldn’t take both of us, so they had to pivot and take Gamal? So was he just a crime of opportunity?”
“Maybe,” Clark said. “His statue didn’t look as dry as yours. They must have made yours first.”
“But I’m not even a part of the Project! I’m not contributing to the work. Why take me?”
“You’re a household name back home. You work for a famous newspaper. Maybe they thought it would cause enough bad press to shut things down.”
“Or maybe I was getting too close to something.”
“Or maybe you didn’t scare easily enough.”
She scared plenty
easy, she thought, thinking of the man resting above her, his arms still around her.
“Alright, so Carnahan is still our top suspect?”
“I think so,” Clark said, sounding like he was still thinking. “When we first met him, though, he was so worried about the Project. He was practically begging us for help.”
There were many moments during their partnership where she thought that Clark was naive, and whenever she told him so, she rolled her eyes heavenward, making a show of asking for patience as her junior partner learned the big city ways. But there were moments, like this one, where he stood up for someone just because they’d asked him for his help, and his yearning to help them in spite of any duplicity was so innocent and endearing that she wanted to kiss him.
“People lie, Clark.”
She heard him sigh in disappointment in the darkness, and felt a pang of empathy for him that she’d never admit to.
Oh, yes, people lied.
***
“So whose tomb is this?” she asked after a while, once she was sick of listening to the vague echo of movement above them.
“Ramesses II,” Clark replied.
“And who was he?”
“You really didn’t read any of Jimmy’s research before you came, did you?”
“Why would I, when my very reliable partner has a photographic memory?”
“You didn’t know that then.”
“But I do now, so, who was this guy?”
He chuckled. “He was a pharaoh. He lived during the turn of the century.”
“Which century?”
“1300 BC.”
“And what makes him so special that he gets his own temple like this?”
“Tomb,” he corrected automatically. “And, well, lots of the pharaohs had tombs. Ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaohs were the link between the people and the ancient gods, and by extension they were sort of like gods themselves. But Ramesses II isn’t actually buried here.”
“Well, then, who is?”
“His children.”
“Oh, well, that’s kind of sweet, actually, that he wanted them all together. How many kids were in his family?”
“Some research suggests around a hundred.”
“A hundred! That’s crazy. Can you imagine having a hundred kids?”
“I can’t.”
That wistful twinge was there in his voice again. It was like the darkness was amplifying her ability to read him.
“Still,” she said, trying to boost his spirit from whatever melancholy hit, “must have been kind of nice to be considered a god.”
“Maybe,” Clark agreed.
But the melancholy in his voice had lingered.
