“I’d been telling myself it was all a dream,” Marcus said. “And here she was at my doorstep.”
Lois glanced at Clark. She wasn’t sure where Marcus was going with this, but she found it hard to believe that the dead had been rising in Sunnydale. There had to be a more mundane explanation.
“I was so stunned that I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I think that’s what saved my life.” Marcus stared down at the floor again. “She smiled at me, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
“So what happened?” Clark asked quietly.
Lois was impressed. There was no hint of disbelief in his voice. Clark was more of a professional than she’d imagined.
“She asked me to invite her in,” Marcus said. “That’s when I knew something was wrong.”
“You weren’t blocking the door?” Lois asked.
Marcus shook his head. “It was wide open. All she would have had to do was step inside.”
“And as your wife, she shouldn’t need an invitation to come into her own home,” Clark said.
“It just struck me as wrong, somehow. It wasn’t like her.” Marcus scowled. “I started to wonder if it was really her, or if it was something else wearing her face.”
That struck a chord with Lois for some reason, and she had a flash of memory, as though from a dream. Monstrous figures moving in the darkness, former friends…evil.
“It was a hell of a thing, standing there with the woman I loved on the other side of the door and not being able to speak.” Marcus grimaced. “She asked me again.”
“You didn’t let her in.”
“I’d heard stories from some of the other coroners…warnings never to invite anyone into your house at night. I’d thought they were just paranoid ramblings, but when she started asking and asking, I knew something was wrong.”
Marcus closed his eyes. “All she had to do was step through the door. If it had been my Rachel, she would have come in and if she was really mad, she might have yelled at me a little.”
“But she didn’t.” Lois had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“She started cursing at me, telling me that I had never been a good husband to her…that I was less than a man. She said things….horrible things. The sort of things that you can’t take back.”
Marcus coughed uncomfortably, and he looked away. “I haven’t been able to think of Rachel the same way since…and I’m bitter about it.” He looked back up, and Lois saw that his eyes seemed a little moist. “I loved that woman, and I feel like something precious was stolen from me.”
“What happened then,” Lois said.
“She started crying. I’ve never been able to stand seeing her cry. So I stepped outside the door. That’s when she changed.” Marcus shook his head. “Her face twisted and turned into something monstrous and ugly, and she lunged at me. She was fast, and if I hadn’t fallen backward she would have gotten to me.”
“All night she prowled around the windows, looking in and calling out to me. She cried, she begged…she did everything she could to trick me into coming out. She left just before dawn. “
“You didn’t call the police?” Lois asked.
“What was I going to tell them, that I was being stalked by my dead wife?” Marcus shook his head again. “What if she was there when they showed up? If she was some sort of spirit, guns wouldn’t work on her. If she was some sort of zombie, it was the same thing. Either way, I wasn’t going to endanger some poor cop.”
“I packed as much as I could, and on my way out of town, I drove by the cemetery. It was foolish of me, but I was hoping it had all been a dream. The grave had been disturbed.”
From somewhere, Clark had found a bottle of water. He handed it to Marcus, who opened it and took a deep drink.
“It wasn’t until I tried to sell the house that I found out why most people never left Sunnydale.” He laughed bitterly. “As cheap as I’d bought the house, you’d think someone would have snapped it up. But the prices just kept dropping, even while housing prices in the rest of the country kept going up and up.”
“I ended up owing fifty grand, having to quit school, and having to work for a third the pay.”
“I’d have thought you’d have ended up on the other side of the country,” Lois said. “Instead of just a couple of hours away.”
“I just couldn’t leave. The thought that there might be some part of Rachel trapped in there with hat thing….it torments me. I keep feeling that there is something I should do, some way to give her peace.”
Marcus sighed. “I know there isn’t much here that you can use. People won’t believe any of it. All I can tell you is that if you want to get the story out about the monks, you’d better hurry. They plan on moving the bodies in two days.”
He stood up, and said, “It’s getting late.”
“Thank you,” Lois said, as warmly as she could manage. Something about his story had seemed familiar to her, although she wasn’t sure where she’d heard it.
She ushered both Marcus and Clark out the door. This left her alone with her thoughts.
*************
Her dreams were troubled, filled with monsters, men in armor fighting, people dying. Always in the center, there was a girl. As the times changed, so did her face, but somehow, it was always the same girl. Whether she wore a hoop skirt, a loincloth or dressed in medieval armor, she was always the focus of evil.
Lois woke in a cold sweat, fading memories of monstrous faces disturbing her.
She heard a knock at the door and rose as quickly as she could, which wasn’t very. A glance at the clock showed that she’d only had three hours of sleep.
Grabbing her robe, she wrapped it around herself and headed for the door. She opened it.
On the other side stood Jimmy, looking exhausted. “I did the search you wanted,” he said.
He handed her a thick stack of computer printouts. “This is everything I could find. I’m going to get a little shut eye before heading for the library today.”
“Thank you,” Lois said. She took the stack of papers and closed the door behind her.
*************
By the time Clark was up, Lois had already had a shower and had been studying the news reports for two hours. She hadn’t even had coffee yet, but somehow she was feeling reenergized.
He knocked at the door, and Lois absently said come in.
“After last night, I’d think you wouldn’t be inviting people in,” Clark said. He stepped in the room with a large tray. “Mrs. Cortez made breakfast.”
“Jimmy did that search on freakish feats of strength,” Lois said. “There are a lot of stories here. A fifteen year old girl beats her kidnapper almost to death…a nine year old girl pulls both her parents out of a building…a twenty year old mother pushed a car off her boyfriend after a car accident. Jimmy found more than thirty stories of freakish feats of strength by young girls and women; all dated May 20, 2003.”
“The day Sunnydale collapsed.”
“There were older stories,” Lois said, “But most of them tended to be about a mysterious man saving people from train wrecks, burning cars and boat accidents. They date back for the past eight years, but I don’t think they really apply here.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Clark said.
Lois thought Clark paled a little, but she wasn’t sure.
“I wanted to focus on the ones that happened when Sunnydale collapsed, since they seemed to have the most in common.”
It wouldn’t help with the case of the murdered dead men, but Lois had her own reasons for investigating.
“I made some telephone calls,” Lois said. “Confirming a few of the times. Some of the other times were noted in the articles.”
She’d written a list, which she handed Clark. On each was a time, a state and a synopsis of what had happened.”
He glanced at it, and said, “I don’t see anything in common. The times are all within a two or three hour period, but…”
Lois handed him a second list. “It struck me as curious that the times were so close…and then I had an idea.”
“Time zones,” Clark said. “There are stories here from as far away as China.”
Lois nodded. “And as far as I can tell, all of these girls and women had a sudden surge of unusual strength about ten minutes before Sunnydale collapsed.”
There was one name she’d kept off the list, but it fit the trend perfectly. She’d been in the Congo, where it was nine hours later than California, and as far as she could recall, her change had happened at exactly the same time as the others.
She wasn’t alone.
*****************
Special Agent Thomas Kincaid was a heavyset man, with eyes sunken into his skull. He looked like he hadn’t been getting much more sleep than Lois had, and that wasn’t much.
“There is no conspiracy,” he said. “We’re issuing a general press statement this afternoon.”
“So what do you know about these bodies?” Lois asked the question after glancing at Clark. Although Marcus’s story had been fantastic, he’d seemed certain that the coroner’s office was being coerced. It was the one part of the story she was prepared to believe.
Of course, the changes in her own body were starting to make her wonder just what else was possible.
“They seem to be members of an obscure Serbian religious organization. They are considered terrorists by the United States government, but they have been considered a low priority threat.”
“Why?” Clark asked.
“Imagine the Amish going on a holy war. These people refuse to use modern weapons, and they don’t get involved in politics. They have obscure aims and frankly, nobody knows much about them.”
“Why is anyone interested at all?”
“Members are wanted in the murder and kidnapping of several antiquities dealers and dealers of rare books.”
“So why were they here?”
“We don’t know.” The special agent shook his head. “If they hadn’t somehow managed to get a hundred men and three thousand pounds of metal armor and weapons on U.S. soil, I’d be inclined to dismiss them as just another group of religious nutcases.”
Lois glanced at Clark. “Do you have any idea how they managed that?”
“So far, we are investigating leads relating to a cargo ship from Russia. We suspect that someone may have been bribed to look the other way, although we aren’t sure. They might have been able to slip onto U.S. soil even without collusion.”
“So you don’t take them seriously?”
“The bodies were buried in accordance to their religious customs. Unless this was some sort of interorganizational schism, I doubt that the perpetrators would have bothered to do more than throw them in a mass grave. Our profile of the killers indicate that they are disorganized, and utterly without mercy.”
Lois nodded and made a note on her notepad.
“I don’t suppose you have any agents here who come from Sunnydale,” she asked casually. She wasn’t sure that she believed him about the conspiracy angle, but he had been more open than she’d expected.
He shook his head. “We didn’t have a field office in Sunnydale.”
“What about former police officers?”
He laughed sharply. “Former Sunnydale police officers are notoriously bad police officers.”
“Bad as in violent?” Clark asked.
“Bad as in incompetent.” Kincaid shook his head. “I don’t know what they were doing down there, but anyone with a Sunnydale P.D. job on their resume is going to end up flipping burgers before they get a job within a thousand miles. They just aren’t cut out for it.”
“Almost as though they were purposefully hired for being incompetent?”
“If I was a cynical man, I’d think that,” Kincaid said. “More likely it was just a bad system combined with some sort of nepotistic hiring practices.”
“What else can you tell us about the case?” Lois asked.
“I can tell you it’s an ongoing investigation, and that there is only so much information I am allowed to disclose. That’s not a sign of a cover up, by the way. That’s standard police procedure.”
“So if I ask for details about how the victims were killed, you wouldn’t be able to help me.”
Kincaid said, “Sometimes entire cases turn on what information is disseminated.”
Lois nodded. “I have a source who seems to believe that two FBI agents were out trying to coerce witnesses into keeping quiet about what they’d seen.”
The special agent frowned. “The Bureau is not in the business of conspiracies. I could see Homeland Security wanting to cover up leaks in our defenses.”
Lois pulled out her notepad.
“I saw two government issue crown Victorias with these license numbers outside the morgue they are using to autopsy the bodies.”
Agent Kincaid’s eyes widened, and he said, “When did you see this?”
“Last night at approximately ten,” Lois said. “Why?”
“We’ve had two special agents who have been missing for three days. Their vehicles had these plate numbers.” Agent Kincaid picked up the telephone.
“I’m going to have someone come down and take your statements. Don’t leave anything out. Even the smallest detail might be crucial.”
***********
Lois stretched. She’d been locked in a small room for several hours.
Normally, she would have railed against abuses by the system, but everyone seemed sincere in their worry about the two agents and the coroners. They were polite and professional.
When it finally ended, Lois was escorted back to Special Agent Kincaid’s office.
“You’ve both been very helpful,” Kincaid said. “Feel free to call me if you find out anything else related to this matter. In fact…I insist that you do.”
An agent was at the door to escort them out.
“Would it be all right for me to use the ladies’ room?” Lois asked.
The agent nodded. Lois slipped inside and stared at herself in the mirror for a long moment. She stiffened as she heard the faint sound of a voice coming through one of the vents.
Over the past few days her hearing had sharpened. She doubted that she would have heard anything at all before.
She approached the vent quickly and stood as closely as she was able.
It was Special Agent Kincaid’s voice. Lois could barely make it out.
“I told them the truth. WE haven’t been covering up anything.”
Lois couldn’t make out another voice, and she wondered if he was on the telephone.
“Jesus. They were that close to launching? Are they crazy? We’re downwind…the fallout would have killed millions of people.”
Lois scowled and tried to stand on the tips of her toes. She was normally fairly pleased with her height, but today she would have given a great deal to be just a little taller.
“You military types are always trying to shoot a fly with a bazooka. It couldn’t have been that bad.”
There was silence for a long moment, and then Kincaid said, “Oh. I guess I can see why…”
Lois heard the sounds of footsteps from the hallway outside, but they passed.
“I just want my people back. According to the Lane woman, someone is out there trying to play spin control on all of this. I want to know who that is, because they have two of my agents. I don’t care what you have to do, just get me the list.”
Lois grimaced as she heard the sound of a telephone being slammed down on the receiver.
She finished her ablutions quickly, but although she listened, she didn’t hear anything else.
*******************
“I don’t know who to believe,” Lois said. “Marcus seemed sincere last night, but he had that story about his wife. Agent Kincaid seemed pretty open.”
She couldn’t explain about what she’d overheard from the bathroom. Clark had been close enough to know she hadn’t snuck out, and it was too convenient that she could hear what was happening on the other side of the wall.
She wasn’t about to explain her new found abilities, not to anyone.
“Maybe they weren’t actual FBI agents,” Clark said slowly.
“You think someone would kidnap federal agents for their badges?”
“I’ve seen worse,” Clark said.
Lois had to admit that she had too. She’d been working at the Planet for the past five years, and she’d thought she’d seen every level of human depravity that existed.
She’d been wrong, although whether it was human depravity was still undecided.
Lois shuddered at the though that she might no longer be human. What was happening inside her? She could feel herself changing, and it terrified her.
It wasn’t just the strength and the hearing. Every night she had nightmares, and every morning she woke feeling as though she hadn’t slept at all. Yet she had more energy now than she had in the days when she’d been a six cup of coffee drinker in the morning.
Come to think of it…she hadn’t been drinking coffee at all. The Cortez family didn’t supply it. They’d been too far out of town to get any, and she’d barely noticed.
Lois had fueled her career on coffee, and it was a little disturbing to realize that she’d barely noticed.
She wondered what else was going to change. Lois hoped fervently that she wasn’t going to start spitting up stomach acid to digest her food. Seeing “The Fly” with her sister had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it left her with a host of images she didn’t want to think about.
They reached their destination.
“They put everyone in a stadium?” Lois asked.
“It’s air conditioned, and there are bathrooms equipped to handle thousands of people,” Clark said. “There are several places like this set up in Los Angeles. Of course, the wealthier residents have taken hotel rooms.”
Lois nodded. Together they headed for the entrance. It was time to talk to the citizens of Sunnydale.
***************
It was dark as they left the stadium, and the parking lot was filled with a sea of cars, yet it felt curiously deserted.
This wasn’t the best neighborhood after dark, Lois supposed.
They had enough information for a dozen human interest stories. Lois planned to get working on them as soon as they returned to the Cortez family home. Perry would be expecting a number of stories to be coming over the wire to justify the expense of taking two of his reporters and a photographer out of circulation at home.
Yet every time Lois had asked a question about the dark side of Sunnydale, people had flinches, and they’d quickly changed the subject. The whole evening had been a bust from the perspective of finding out what she really wanted to know.
“Are we supposed to pick up Jimmy?” Lois asked.
“He drove his own car,” Clark said. “He should be…”
Lois could hear Clark’s cell phone ringing from inside his jacket. Clark turned away for a moment as he spoke.
“Jimmy’s at the Emergency Room,” Clark said. “He’s been attacked.”
