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The One Chosen
Author: BkWurm1
Characters: Moira & Chloe Sullivan
Timeline: Day of the first meteor shower.
Summary: This is the story of Moira Sullivan and her soon to be four-year-old daughter Chloe as they are driving through Smallville on that fateful autumn afternoon. Perhaps the question that haunted Chloe years later had actually been answered right at the beginning. Clark found Johnathan and Martha Kent…but who found Clark?
“…as great as this power is, it does come with a lot of consequences…”
“Does that mean you're never gonna use your abilities again?”
“It means I'm more confused now than ever. Out of the entire catalog of meteor abilities, why was I the one chosen to be in charge of such an amazing gift?”
Smallville, Oct 7th, 1989.
Almost home.
No, not home. Home was a cozy two bedroom in Metropolis with Gabe and Chloe where the toilet always ran and the elevator never worked, but the moment Moira’s tires left the smooth tar of the impeccably maintained state highway and met the old crackled pavement of the county road leading out of Smallville, the familiar hum sent a pleasant punch of anticipation to her solar plexus. Funny how some feelings never changed. She hadn’t lived in the old white house in Granville since right after college, but some places always stayed tangled up in your heart.
Of course, her mom still lived there. A couple years ago, after Dad’s accident, Aunt Marion moved in, taking over the front bedroom Moira had shared with her little sister Ella. The move had been as much for Aunt Marion’s benefit as it was Mom’s. Poor Aunt Marion, it was getting harder and harder for her to remember the little things. Cousin Tandy repeated a family legend about some crazy great, great, aunt kept locked in a pantry and blamed heredity but Mom often mentioned Marion and her childhood paint chip snacking habits. Moira had her own suspicions based on Marion’s permanent flower child status. For Marion, the world was spiraling back to the Summer of Love but for the rest of the planet, life was all about change.
Moira Sullivan glanced over at the passenger seat where her daughter was slowly waking from her long nap. A familiar warm glow lodged beneath her heart. Her baby was getting so big.
Moira had collected her Bachelor of Arts degree and moved away from home before Ella even graduated high school, but Ella had been the first one to get married and the first one to give Mom and Dad a grandchild. Chloe showed up about a year and a half after her cousin Lois screamed her way into the world. Dad had been so proud of his two new girls. She wished she could tell him how much Chloe reminded her of him. She was so grateful he’d been able to see as much of Chloe as he had before he’d died. Ella and Sam had lived too far away for him to see Lois very often and he never even had the chance to meet Lucy.
Lucy was a very pretty baby, but colicky from the start and still so very demanding now. Dad’s death had hit Ella hard; it had hit them all hard, but Ella had never stopped being his little girl. Between losing Dad, a tough pregnancy and an equally tough time after, she never really returned to the bubbly girl Moira had watched grow up. She sometimes wondered if Lucy got extra attention to make up for the wonderful grandfather she never got the chance to know. Her second birthday had been celebrated months ago, but she was still firmly the baby of the family.
News that Sam was being stationed back in Metropolis had brought relief. She worried about her younger sister. Ella always sounded tired when they talked on the phone. Life was rough for the wife of a career soldier, with army politics, the constant moves and the isolation from friends and family. She couldn’t be getting much help with the girls from Sam, especially now that he was on the short list to make General. The three-hour road trip back home had been planned to give Ella a chance to catch her breath as well as give them a chance to catch up and show off the girls to mom and Aunt Marion.
Like the poet said…best laid plans of mice and men… and this time Moira felt like she’d been the one caught in the trap. She shook her head. No point in dwelling on that now.
Her attention shifted to back to Chloe. With eyes still half closed, her daughter stretched her little arms over her head and arched her back in that totally committed, muscle shuddering way only little children really do. She yawned and scratched at her scalp, tugging at the hair near the base of her French braid. Moira winced but held her tongue. Despite this morning’s craziness, the braid remained in relatively good shape and she’d like to get Chloe to Mom’s without her looking like something adopted by wolves.
When Chloe noticed she was being watched, she stopped fussing with her hair and smiled her sunny smile. Not a trace of this morning’s upset remained, but then Chloe was like that, bouncing back to her normal calm and cheerful self quicker than it took to percolate a pot of coffee. Still in the process of waking up, she reached for the precious library book she’d checked out with her very own library card and cuddled it to her chest like a stuffed teddy bear.
They’d be in Granville in less than twenty minutes and past experience taught Moira that Chloe would spend every remaining minute reading and asking questions. She really was so much like Dad. Three years old and she was already obsessed with books.
Three and a half, Mommy!
Moira smirked and turned her attention back to the empty highway in front of them. Even in the privacy of her mind, her daughter’s strong voice insisted on being heard. Truthfully, Chloe was nearer to four than three with a birthday coming up later in the month. Four was perilously close to five, and just like that, she would be off to school.
Moira sighed. She was being hypocritical, complaining, even silently to herself, about Ella babying Lucy. It left an ache, knowing your baby wasn’t a baby anymore. Chloe wouldn’t even let her call her baby without a show of righteous toddler indignation. Maybe it was time to think about a brother or sister for Chloe, though how she would keep up with Chloe and another child she couldn’t imagine. Ella certainly found her two tough to manage.
Lois was the flipside to Lucy’s clinginess. Five going on forty, as Gabe put it last time she stayed with them for the weekend. Loud, independent, bossy and secretly so lonely it broke Moira’s heart. Too often, her self-sufficient ways meant being ignored unless she caused trouble. Hopefully as Lucy got older, Ella would be able to give Lois the attention she needed, lord knows it wasn’t going to come from her father, not with his schedule and definitely not when the army was always going to be his first priority. She and Gabe had always talked about having another child but what if that meant not being able to give Chloe the kind of attention she needed?
She was probably overreacting. She and Ella managed to grow up sharing Mom and Dad’s attention just fine. Having siblings was the normal way of life, not the other way around. And didn’t Chloe and Lois always get along well together? Lois ate up the attention and Chloe liked her cousin’s company. Lois, being Lois, thought she should be in charge but Chloe was no pushover. If Chloe wasn’t interested in Lois’s plans, she’d do her own thing or convince Lois to switch her plans. Lord knows Chloe could be very single minded.
Gabe was a lost cause, but Moira constantly reminded herself not to let the wavy blond hair and big, innocent, green eyes fool her. Chloe’s angelic looks hid a stubborn streak and a curiosity that bordered on devilish. She wasn’t a bad child, there wasn’t a mean bone in her little body, but oh, when she wanted to know something, she wanted to know it now!
Chloe rubbed the last bit of sleep from her eyes and then opened her book and turned the pages, studying the words and pictures.
All parents probably thought it, but Chloe was special. She craved knowledge the way most kids craved candy and most of the time her daughter’s thirsty intellect made her proud, but her fearless pursuit of answers sometimes caused problems. She was forever wandering off, impatient to discover what, and why, and how. That impatient intellect kept Moira from returning to work once Chloe was old enough for pre-school. Not only did her daughter have a habit of wandering off (and a Houdini like ability to get out of closed spaces – the gym day care refused to watch her anymore) but also a knack for pulling trouble out of a hat.
This morning Chloe started with a vanishing act at Aunt Ella and Uncle Sam’s new house on the army base. It was mortifying that before Sam officially took command he had to call out the MP’s. When they turned up nothing, the Colonel enlisted a full company of new recruits to extend the search. The entire base was under lockdown for four hours. Of all people, it had been little Lois to find her cousin in the backyard in a crawl space beneath the garden shed. Actually, since no one bothered to tell the five year old what was going on, she joined her cousin beneath the shed and stayed for hours to listen to the wild story Chloe spun speculating on what each of the line of ants she’d followed in there were doing underground in their colony.
Around noon, Lois wandered in through the sliding patio door, brushing dirt off her blue sweatshirt and matching corduroys, asking for a glass of water. No one really paid attention to her until she tried to bring a glass outside “cause Chloe was probably thirsty too.”
Chloe still took coaxing out, but a question about if she had to go potty did the trick. She wiggled out and scampered straight into the house. Things got a little tense when Sam returned home and grounded Lois for not immediately reporting back on Chloe’s location and a little more tense when Chloe stamped her feet and used her favorite new word, “Unfair!”
Both girls said they never heard anyone calling. Moira tended to believe them. One glance out the window at the barren lot and the padlocked shed had been enough to foolishly rule out the backyard. She blamed herself. Samuel Lane was a lovely man but Col Sam Lane was, well, she was as fond of the star spangled red, white, and blue as anyone but she wondered as a woman if all military men were that ridged in their thinking. Chloe was definitely an out of the box kind of child.
Chaos ensued. While Lois begged her dad to still let her go see her Granville Granny, Chloe plucked a daisy from a vase on the kitchen table, tucked it under her barrette and began alternately shouting “Flower Power!” and “Fight The Power!”
The first one was clearly Aunt Marion’s influence but it took Moira a moment to recognize the origin of the other slogan Chloe used in her one toddler sit in. The teen next door blasted the new type of music every time his parents left the apartment.
Laughter, even tinged with hysteria, had not endeared her to her brother-in-law. By the time she had Chloe under control, Lois was confined to her quarters, Lucy was lying on her back, waving her fists, kicking her feet and crying hysterically and Ella looked exhausted. The end result, Ella and her girls stayed home leaving Moira and Chloe to make the long drive out to Granville alone.
When she drove off base, she felt as exhausted as Ella looked and it had taken most of the drive to repair her strung out nerves. She glanced through the windshield at the cloudless blue sky.
Thank goodness they had beautiful weather. She didn’t think she could handle one more surprise to her day. They’d get to Granville, let Mom and Marion fuss over Chloe, have dinner, maybe that picnic her mother had suggested. She’d call Gabe and tell him she wasn’t up to driving back tonight like planned, and tomorrow maybe she wouldn’t feel like a guitar string tweaked too tight.
“Mommy, what does a-l-i-e-n spell?” Chloe asked, pointing to a caption beneath a cartoon spaceship with a green, three-eyed, creature waving its tentacles. Chloe was a precocious reader but her vocabulary was still limited.
“Alien, sweetheart. That means someone who comes from a place far away.”
“Like us when we go see Granma?”
“No, much, much farther away.”
Chloe glanced down at the picture in her book. “Like ‘nother planet?”
“Yes, but we don’t actually know if anyone lives on other planets, honey.”
Chloe scrunched up her forehead and chewed on the side of her lip. She silently studied the images in her book for a minute, turning pages and examining pictures of solar systems, types of stars and the shapes of galaxies. Then she announced. “I think they do.”
“It’s a nice thought.”
“Can our car fly?”
“What?” By now, Chloe’s odd questions shouldn’t surprise her, but flying cars? She shook her head. “No, honey. Our car is just a car. It stays on the ground.”
“But it looks like the flying car in the picture.”
Moira glanced at the blue spaceship Chloe pointed at in her book and laughed. The front ribbon of lights beneath an aerodynamic shaped body did look remarkably like their new car. She felt a little more of this morning’s tension fade away.
“That’s a picture of a spaceship, though they don’t normally look like a 1989 Mercury Sable.” Before Chloe could ask, she added, “A spaceship is kind of like an airplane but made to travel outside the earth’s atmosphere.”
At Chloe’s confusion, she simplified her explanation. “To travel up where the stars and other planets are.”
“Oh.” Chloe fingered the page for a moment and then looked up. “What’s a right spaceship look like?”
“In books and movies they can look like anything. Big, small, long, short, round, square. Years ago, the real ones looked like funny, club houses sitting on top of huge rockets. . Now they strap a squat airplane to the side of the huge rockets.”
Chloe frowned at the less than satisfying answer.
“You know sweetie, I think it’s a case of you’ll know it when you see it, but until then, I wouldn’t worry about the mysteries of outer space. There are lots of hidden secrets to uncover right here on the planet.”
Chloe snapped her book shut and hugged it to her chest. Excitement made her eyes sparkle. She bounced up and down in her seat as much as her lap belt would allow.
“Like what the ants do in the ground!”
Moira stifled a sigh; she didn’t want to suppress Chloe’s avid curiosity, but she also did not want a repeat of this morning. She’d explained over and over about not wandering off, but she wasn’t going to rely on the hundredth lecture to do the trick. Time to squash the budding entomologist.
“Lots of people have already studied what ants do under the ground. And other insects,” she added for good measure. “I can get you a book about them from the library if you like.”
Chloe frowned and stopped wiggling around. “Oh. Ok.”
Moira focused on the road in front of her and repressed her smile. That should keep Chloe from chasing butterflies half way around the world. For Chloe, the excitement came from the finding out. She much preferred to learn than to be taught, so while Chloe’s curiosity would prompt her to read more about the secret life of bugs, knowing the mysteries were already solved would shift her fierce attention elsewhere.
Chloe turned to stare out the window; the side mirror reflected back her thinking face though just the tilt of her head and the tap of her finger on the cover of her book (a habit she copied from her father) would have given that away. Since Chloe was in a contemplative mood, Moira took advantage of the silence and turned on the radio. She tried adjusting the dial to pick up the local station but nothing but static was coming in.
“Mommy, what’s that?” Chloe asked.
“Static, the radio’s not picking up a signal.”
“No, what’s that!” Chloe pointed at her side window.
Moira glanced over. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell what you are looking at, baby.” She cringed waiting for Chloe to have a mini meltdown about being called a baby, but surprisingly, she paid no attention to the pet name. Instead, Chloe twisted partly around in her seat and pointed out the back.
“The lines, Mommy, the lines in the sky.”
Moira looked in the center rearview mirror. She could make out the diagonal trail left by the vapor of an airplane buzzing low to the ground. She blinked and noticed another streak in the sky above where downtown Smallville nestled. In the space of another heartbeat, another line formed. It couldn’t be the contrail of a plane; the lines appeared too fast, the trail was too dark to be vapor and the path too steep.
“Oh, look at all of them!” Chloe cried out more in wonder than in fear, but Moira felt the fear her daughter lacked.
It was as if something evil clawed at the sky. Nearly a dozen dark tears raked sharply through the pure blue of the afternoon sky. Balls of black, hurtling toward the ground. Although they were miles from town, Moira felt the rattle of impact coming up through the wheels of her car. Where the lines met the earth, angry orange blooms of fire rolled back up into the sky.
My, god, what was she seeing? Bombs? A missile strike? Why would anyone want send missiles to Nowheresville Kansas? There were rumors about old warheads buried beneath the cornfields, could they have been accidently launched? No; the angles were wrong and there were too many and the missiles would rise into the sky, not flame down from it, right?
“Mommy, watch out!”
The steering wheel yanked away from her hands as the front wheels caught the loose gravel lining the edge of the road. They caught and pulled them up over the grassy ridge and down into the steep, yet thankfully dry, drainage ditch. She hit the brakes, but they were moving too fast and the rear of the car fishtailed to the right, the back end climbing up the edge. She fought with the wheel; Chloe’s screams bounced off the windows. If the car twisted too much in either direction they were going to flip. Moira turned into the slide, rapidly yanking the steering wheel the other way when they swerved too hard in the opposite direction. Finally, her correction held and they came to a shuddering stop.
She shut off the engine and quickly released her seatbelt and reached for Chloe. “Baby, are you ok? Tell me you are ok.”
Chloe’s green eyes had never looked so large; she was clutching her space book to her chest and clinging to the shoulder strap of the seatbelt that that was too large to work normally. She nodded her head.
“I’m ok.” An awed look crossed her little features. “Did we crash?”
She didn’t wait for an answer before she unbuckled her seatbelt and stood up on the seat and craned her neck, trying to see out of the car.
“What was in the sky, Mommy?”
For a second, Moira had forgotten the phenomenon that had so thoroughly distracted her. She followed Chloe’s line of sight but realized they were too low in the ditch to see out and she was having a hard time filtering out the rapid pounding of her heart from the low vibrating impacts of the strikes.
“Stay in the car Chloe.”
Her hands trembling, she pushed her door open. The steep incline of the hill stopped her from opening it up all the way, but it was enough to slip outside. Grateful she was still wearing the tennis shoes she’d changed into during the earlier search for Chloe, she chose her footing and scrabbled up to the road.
More grey streaks now crossed over lines left from the earlier projectiles. At the scene of the strikes, balls of fire and smoke billowed up to the heavens. More disturbing, the black contrails that raced across the sky seemed to be getting closer to where she stood. She took a step back, slipped on the loose rocks and then found her footing again. Maybe it was just her imagination. Why would anyone target a country road surrounded by nothing but wheat and cornfields?
The sound of fast moving footfalls scrambling up the side of the hill made her spin around.
“Look, look, I figured out what’s falling!” Chloe held her space book open to a page diagraming the life cycle of a comet.
Moira half slid part way down the incline. She grabbed Chloe by her thin shoulders. “I told you to stay in the car!”
“But mommy, the c-o-m-e-t!”
“It can’t be a comet,” she snapped and tried to drag her daughter back to the car.
“It has a long tail!” Chloe insisted stubbornly and dug her heels into the ground. Moira took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Give her the answers and she’ll start listening again.
“It could be a meteor, chunks of rock falling from space.” She was reaching for answers out of thin air but that actually could be it. A meteor shower was hitting the town, though she hadn’t heard of any shower containing this many big strikes. Then again, all she knew about meteors came from her freshman college geology class.
“Mommy, look!”
Moira’s eyes followed the direction Chloe was pointing. She hadn’t been imagining it; the meteors really were getting closer. Frozen, she watched in horror as meteor strikes rained down in ever advancing explosions parallel to the county highway. She could hear them now, a hissing, burning roar pressing against the sound barrier.
“Oh, my god!”
In the distance, she made out some doomed souls in a red pick-up truck desperately trying to outrace death. Beside her, Chloe whimpered and looked up at her with watering eyes that understood too much. A fireball screamed in over their heads, splintering the old familiar corn themed billboard welcoming visitors to Smallville. Shrieking in on its tail was an even larger threat.
They were out of time.
Attached Files
I'm definitely curious to see where this goes and how Clark fits into it. I assume he must, because you've posted it in the Chlark section. Fantastic work, Mel, and I can't wait for more! 
), so we're more than happy to wait for the next installment. 
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