Tweet
“Clark, can you hear me? Clark,” Emil Hamilton said as he carefully lifted one of the Kryptonian’s eyelids and shone a penlight in his eyes to check his eye movement and pupillary response, praying that that the action wouldn’t cause Clark to lash out and inadvertently cave his skull in upon wakening.
But the Kryptonian’s gaze remained fixed, his pupil not contracting even the slightest bit at the glare of the penlight’s beam as the doctor repeated his inquiry, asking, “Can you hear me, Clark?”
Letting Clark’s eyelid close and shutting off his penlight, Emil rose from where he was crouched in front of the Kryptonian’s unconscious body, which rested against the metal support of Lois’ table. Lana had flown him here to Belle Reve to evaluate Clark’s condition after the young man had failed to check in after his departure more than an hour ago. He walked over to the terminal that controlled the machinery that Clark and Lois were connected to and began to type when Chloe entered the lab.
“The ambulance will be here soon,” Chloe reported as she walked over to Emil.
“Stuart’s lost a lot of blood, but luckily he’s still alive, and I’m sure Mercer the Merciless will be fine,” the blonde continued, her tone of voice indicating that she didn’t really care about Tess. Glancing over at her Kryptonian friend, she asked, “How’s Clark?”
“Somehow this machine synched their brainwaves,” Emil replied, his gaze fixed on the terminal’s display as he continued typing. “Clark’s literally locked into Lois’ memories, but I believe there’s a way that I can pull them out.”
“Don’t close the curtain just yet,” Chloe hurriedly interjected. Seeing the confusion on Emil’s face as he looked up from the terminal, she added, “I took a peek into Lois’ therapy files that Tess hacked into. I think that every time she saw her therapist, it actually unlocked more of her memories of the future.”
“Chloe, these memories are physically damaging,” Emil protested as he looked past the blonde to see the rather perturbed expression on Lana’s face as she sat next to Clark, holding her unconscious boyfriend’s hand. “Do you really wanna put their lives in danger?”
“Emil, if you pull Clark out now, it will put a lot of other people’s lives at stake,” Chloe asserted. “When that assassin came back from the future, she told Clark’s double that he would destroy the world. Now Clark has to find out how to save it.”
“Even if Clark could glean some information on the future from Lois’ memories, this isn’t my decision or yours to make,” Emil replied, shaking his head before looking off to his left.
Following the doctor’s gaze to Lana, Chloe walked over to her friend. Crouching in front of the other girl, she gently asked, “Lana?”
The dark-haired girl didn’t reply for a moment, choosing to gaze at Clark as she held his left hand. Then she looked up at Chloe, who said, “Lana, we need to know what Zod does in the future, and to do that Clark has to stay inside Lois’ mind for a while.”
Lana was silent for a moment before she reluctantly acquiesced. “All right.”
She then gave Chloe a severe look as she added a caveat: “But if Clark’s vital signs start slipping, we’re pulling him out.”
As Chloe nodded her agreement with that stipulation, Clark’s face began twitching in unconscious agitation as he experienced more of Lois’ previously repressed memories…
The red sun was beginning to rise the morning after the rescue at the mansion when Clark, Lana, Roy, Chloe, Oliver, John, and Lois arrived at Watchtower. As the seven of them walked inside, Chloe went to a small desk situated near the entrance. Retrieving a roll of gauze, she tossed it to Lois, who used it to wrap her injured left hand.
Clark grabbed a large black duffel bag from a closet and headed to the bathroom while John, Lana, and Roy retrieved weapons from various cabinets arranged at points around the room.
Walking over to a large metal cabinet in a corner of the room, Oliver entered a four-digit code on the attached electronic keypad, and the cabinet’s metal door slid up out of the way to reveal a green-tinted compound bow inside, along with several quivers of arrows with kryptonite arrowheads.
Taking the bow from its hiding place, Oliver murmured, “Honey, I’m home,” as he reacquainted himself with the familiar heft of the weapon.
Shucking her leather jacket as she headed up the wrought-iron staircase to the room’s second floor, Chloe flipped the main switch on the breaker box, turning the lights on in the room and activating the computer equipment. “Welcome to Watchtower.”
“Okay, Chloe, remember when we were ten and I kicked you out of my clubhouse for spilling soda and you said you’d just build a cooler one?” Lois commented as she gaped at all the equipment. From where she stood, it looked like her cousin could hack into the Death Star if she wanted to. “You win.”
Chloe tossed her jacket on a nearby chair as she reached the bottom of the wrought-iron spiral staircase, then unwrapped the dark scarf from around her neck and cast it aside as she went to the main computer workstation at her desk. After typing in a few commands on the keyboard, she brought up a video feed of the streets of Metropolis on Watchtower’s large main monitor.
“So this is what happens when there’s no Blur,” Lois murmured as Chloe clicked through various camera feeds that displayed scenes of devastation and leveled buildings across the span of Metropolis, including one where smoke rose from the burning wreckage of jets that had been brought down in the city’s waterfront.
“That’s why we need every hero we can get,” Clark commented, and Lois turned to see him standing next to Oliver, who was dressed in the green-and-black leather outfit that he’d worn as Green Arrow. By contrast, Clark wore blue jeans and jacket over a blue T-shirt. The jacket was partially open, allowing Lois to see what looked like the top portion of a white pentagular “S”-shield like the one on the tattered shirt on a pole that Knor-El had pointed out to her after she arrived in this nightmare of a future.
That puzzled her a bit. If the “S”-symbol belonged to the Blur like Knor-El had indicated, why was Clark wearing it? Was it his way of showing support for what the Blur stood for, in defiance of Zod and his army?
Or was there another reason, she wondered, remembering what the others had implied about the yellow sun making Clark more powerful. Could it be…
“For the woman who has everything,” Oliver said, distracting Lois from her previous train of thought as he handed her a long-bladed knife with a sheath that looked like it had been crudely hammered out of metal. “It’s a meteor rock knife. I’ve encased it in lead so that the enemy won’t know you’re packing till it’s too late.”
Briefly unsheathing the knife to look at its green crystalline blade, Lois briefly smiled at him as she replied, “Even in the future, you still know how to charm a girl.”
“Last firewall’s down,” Chloe interrupted from where she was typing at her desk. “I’m in the command center for Zod’s tower. The virus is almost ready.”
A moment later she said, “Take that, Master Control” as she hit a key, and the window with the words FIREWALL DISABLED on the main monitor was replaced by a larger one displaying the solar tower, with a smaller window overlaying it that read VIRUS INITIALIZED.
“There. In just a few minutes we should see our yellow sun rise and shine again,” Chloe said with a touch of satisfaction.
“The Kandorians’ll notice this place pretty soon, now that it’s lit up like a Christmas tree,” noted Roy, who wore a leather outfit similar to Oliver’s, only the younger man’s costume was dyed dark blue and purple instead of green and black. “We should go.”
“He’s right,” Clark confirmed. “John and I will meet up with Dinah’s team and go after Zod at LuthorCorp.”
With the unique talents of Dinah Lance, Bart Allen, and Andrea Rojas backing he and the Martian up, he hoped they could distract Zod long enough for Chloe’s computer virus to shut the solar tower down and change the balance of power in their favor.
“The rest of you go to the paper and get the ring,” he concluded, deliberately using vague descriptors so that any of Zod’s soldiers who might overhear them via super-hearing wouldn’t immediately deduce Lois and the others’ destination.
Particularly Knor-El, he thought as he and John left.
“Roy and I’ll scout ahead, make sure the coast is clear,” Oliver said as he and his former protégé headed for the door, followed closely by Lana. Lois started to follow after them, but paused when she saw that Chloe was still standing behind her desk.
“Go,” her cousin told her firmly as she entered a few more commands. “I’ll be right behind you.”
A few minutes later Lois was running through the streets of Metropolis in the general direction of the Daily Planet. Stopping for a moment to catch her breath, she took cover behind the blackened shell of a burned-up car as she frantically scanned the street behind her for any sign of Chloe. A few seconds later she saw her cousin round a corner at the end of the block and stop for a moment in front of Lucky’s Bar as she looked around for Lois.
“Chloe!” Lois shouted, and the blonde turned in the direction of her voice, then started running toward her.
Just as Chloe got going, though, Lois heard a loud whoosh and looked up to see one of the Kandorians flying in their direction.
“Come on!” she urged her cousin. “You can make it!”
But the Kandorian swooped in to intercept Chloe, landing in front of the blonde before she covered half the distance between herself and Lois. Skidding to a stop as she suddenly found Alia standing in front of her, dressed in a loose black V-necked outfit with shiny purple trim and knotted black sash, rather like a ninja’s outfit.
Chloe started to reach behind her for the kryptonite dagger that was sheathed in her belt, but Alia reacted with superhuman speed. Pulling a curved short sword similar to Zod’s from where it was sheathed on her back, the female Kandorian spun it in a quick, one-handed flourish, then viciously thrust it into Chloe’s abdomen before the blonde could draw her own weapon. Her eyes widening in shock and pain as the blade sliced into her stomach, Chloe dropped the still-sheathed knife.
“No!” Lois screamed, unthinkingly running from cover as Alia pulled her blade free and Chloe slowly fell to her knees with a grunt of pain. She briefly looked down at the bloody slit in her jacket before collapsing facedown onto the pavement.
Alia looked down with a mixture of satisfaction and contempt as blood dripped from the point of her lowered sword into the scarlet pool that was starting to form next to Chloe’s sprawled body before she heard an angry male voice directed at her.
“Get the hell away from her!” Oliver yelled as he released a kryptonite-tipped arrow from his bow.
The utterance proved to be a mistake, as Alia turned toward the sound of his voice and the arrow struck her in the arm instead of her heart like he’d intended. Her icy blue eyes narrowing in a glare at Oliver, Alia gritted her teeth in pain as she took hold of the shaft with her left hand and pulled the arrow free, then hurled the bloodied projectile aside and superspeeded away milliseconds before Oliver’s next arrow could hit her.
Muttering a curse under his breath as he lowered his bow, Oliver hurried after Lois as she raced over to her cousin’s prone body.
“Chloe,” Lois murmured as she knelt next to her cousin and gently turned her over. Taking Chloe in her arms, she said, “Chloe, look at me. You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be okay.”
Chloe’s quick, ragged breaths and her blood-soaked jacket gave the lie to Lois’ frantic assurances, however, and the blonde stopped breathing a few seconds later.
“No,” Lois sobbed as she saw the light leave Chloe’s eyes and her features go slack. “Chloe…”
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder as Oliver told her, “The best way to avenge her death is to get that ring.”
“No,” Lois protested, not looking at her ex-boyfriend as she gently closed Chloe’s eyes. “No, I won’t leave her.”
“She’s still alive in the past, Lois,” Oliver reminded her. “You can save her. Make sure this future never happens, and you’ll save all of us.”
Seeing his point, Lois nodded, then pressed a kiss to Chloe’s forehead before gently laying her cousin’s body on the pavement.
“You better go meet up with Roy and Lana,” Oliver told her as she stood and turned to face him. “Alia’ll be calling in reinforcements. I’ll cover you.”
Lois sprinted off in the direction of the Daily Planet. As he gazed after her, Oliver heard a very loud whoosh and turned to see dozens of Kandorians flying toward him from the vicinity of the solar tower.
Oliver drew a very special arrow from the quiver integrated into the back of his costume and fitted it to his bowstring. As he pulled the string back and aimed his bow at the swarm of alien soldiers heading his way, a famous poem by Alfred Tennyson that he’d learned during his time at Excelsior Prep came to mind, and he began reciting a stanza that seemed appropriate to the situation that he now faced:
“Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed & thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred…”
As he uttered the last line of the stanza, Oliver released his arrow into the Kandorians’ midst. He barely had the satisfaction of seeing several soldiers start to fall from the sky to their imminent deaths as the projectile exploded into a cloud of concentrated green kryptonite gas near them before he was cut down by converging blasts of their compatriots’ heat vision…
“So where’s this ring that’s supposed to fix everything?” Roy asked, still very skeptical about this plan as he, Lois, and Lana entered the Daily Planet via the employee entrance.
“Tess and I were duking it out in there,” Lois said, pointing in the direction of the bullpen as she and Lana descended the stairs to the basement while Roy covered the way they’d come with the SPAS-15 shotgun that he carried.
As the women entered the bullpen, Lois sighted the desk where she’d ran her fingers through the months of accumulated dust upon her arrival in 2010, then started scanning the floor in that vicinity. “Okay, I was standing right there when I woke up and dropped the ring, so it’s gotta be somewhere near.”
“Assuming that Knor-El hasn’t already come back and found it,” Lana commented darkly as she joined Lois in searching the floor for any sign of the Legion ring.
“I don’t think so,” Roy contradicted, having spotted the metallic glint of a small golden object under a desk as he came into the bullpen.
“Yes!” Lois smirked as she looked where Roy had indicated and snatched the ring up. “Time to push the reset button on Zod’s little takeover.”
Suddenly there was a whoosh, followed by the sound of Knor-El’s voice as he coldly declared, “I am afraid we cannot allow that.”
As Lois pocketed the Legion ring, the three of them turned to see Clark’s doppelganger standing in the doorway. He was flanked by a thin-faced blond male Kandorian who wore an outfit very similar to that of Knor-El and the other soldiers: a long leather coat and boots, black pants and T-shirt with Zod’s “Z”-like crest in white of two rotated “L”-shapes framing a diagonal slash with a knot in its center. The only difference was that the blond man’s coat was black as opposed to the blood-red hue of Knor-El’s.
“Pre-Us,” Roy growled before extending the green kryptonite wrist blade from the mechanism mounted on his prosthetic left arm as he charged at the blond Kandorian with a near-incoherent cry of rage, apparently forgetting about his shotgun in favor of the hand-to-hand approach.
His face paling and the blood vessels in his face and neck becoming raised and green as he felt the radiation from Roy’s blade, Pre-Us reached into his coat and pulled out a large, asymmetrical boomerang-shaped blade like the one that Lois had seen in Knor-El’s private collection of Kryptonian weapons. Gripping the weapon by a couple of the leather-wrapped grips cut into its rear edge as he backed away from Roy, the Kandorian barely raised it in time to block the human’s blade.
Seeing Knor-El disappear in a blur of superspeed instead of assisting his compatriot Pre-Us as he struggled with Roy, Lois and Lana unsheathed their kryptonite knives as they warily looked around them for any sign of Clark’s doppelganger. Then they heard his voice behind them.
“Why do you stubbornly continue to delay what is inevitable?” Knor-El asked, and they spun to see him standing at the far end of the bullpen, holding another item from his personal arsenal -- specifically, the chain whose ends each terminated in a semicircular blade. “Humanity’s dominion over this planet has ended, and the age of the new Krypton has begun.”
Letting a three-foot length of chain dangle from his right fist, the Kryptonian began whirling it in a circle as he started to advance on them, the spinning blade making a sound like a helicopter rotor as Knor-El came toward them.
Evaluating their options, Lois looked behind her to see Roy and Pre-Us slashing at each other with their respective weapons. The blond Kandorian seemed to be worse off, having sustained several nasty lacerations to his face, arms and chest from Roy’s kryptonite wrist blade, but he wasn’t down yet. As she watched, Pre-Us changed his grip on his weapon and swung it one-handed, hitting Roy in the ribs with the dull inner edge of his blade and knocking the human back against a desk.
Turning her gaze to a set of double doors set into a side of the bullpen not far from where they’d come in, Lois started edging toward it. She stopped, however, when Knor-El suddenly whipped his left arm forward, sending the blade on the other end of the chain shooting straight out between Lois and the exit.
“Great,” Lois sarcastically muttered as Knor-El pulled the bladed chain back to him with a quick, smooth movement. “We’re gonna get sliced, diced, and puréed by Clark’s psycho twin, and our backup’s still occupied.”
Lana’s only reply to Lois’ comment was to reverse her grip on her blue kryptonite knife and lunge at Knor-El, cutting through the air with vicious backhanded slashes of the blade. He lashed out at her with the end of the bladed chain that he’d been whirling like a propeller, but Lana slipped to his left and the chain’s blade whipped through the air where she’d been a moment before to strike sparks on the tile floor.
As Lana circled around Knor-El, slashing at him and narrowly dodging his strikes as he flailed at her with both ends of the bladed chain, she saw Roy ram his wrist blade up into Pre-Us’ chest, penetrating his heart.
“Looks like it’s three against one now, Knor-El,” she commented as Roy pulled his blade free and let the dying Kandorian crumple to the floor.
“I suggest you count again,” Knor-El snarled before he suddenly flicked the bladed chain straight out to strike Roy just under the jaw with the bladed end of the chain from almost a dozen feet away and severing the young man’s carotid artery. Roy made an awful gurgling sound as the Kryptonian yanked on the chain to pull the blade free, then fell to the floor, clutching at his neck as he swiftly bled out.
“Go get the ring to Clark,” Lana ordered Lois, not taking her eyes off Knor-El as he reeled the chain back to him with quick movements of his arms. “He and the others’ll be heading to the solar tower.”
Dipping one hand into her jacket pocket and clenching it around the Legion ring, Lois paused only a second before dashing out of the bullpen and up the stairs as Lana and Knor-El resumed their battle. Coming out the revolving door, she turned right and headed in the direction of the solar tower, using large pieces of debris for cover as she made her way down the street.
Spotting a figure dragging something through the street, Lois kept to the shadows as she came closer and saw that it was Zod, who was towing Clark by one of the younger Kryptonian’s legs. Clark’s battered blue jacket was torn open, completely exposing the “S”-shield on his T-shirt, and he was bleeding from several wounds on his face, including a cut over his right eyes and a deep gash on his left cheek.
Glancing back in the direction that Zod and Clark had come from, she could see the bodies of the other members of Clark’s team. A couple of them were charred and smoking like they’d been hosed down by a flamethrower, including one who lay in a large section of street where the pavement had apparently melted, the air above its surface still shimmering with heat.
“I should have known you’d come after me,” she heard the Kryptonian general comment to Clark, his voice thick with contempt as he went on to declare, “All to save a doomed race. When faced with a crumbling world, these humans, they’d rather die than unite under a single leader and do what is required to build a glorious new world.”
Zod abruptly let go of Clark’s leg, the younger Kryptonian groaning in pain from several cracked ribs as he rolled over and saw Lois take cover behind the remains of a wrecked Chrysler four-four sedan.
“It’s tragic,” Zod continued as he stepped away and turned to face Clark. If he saw Lois, he didn’t show it, as engrossed as he was in denouncing the younger Kryptonian for opposing his aims. “You thought you could take me on like this? Metropolis would not be destroyed if you had all just stopped fighting and joined me.”
In addition to the men that he’d lost the day before during the attack at the mansion, like Basqat, Quex-Ul, Va-Kox, and Orn-Zu, a half-dozen more of his soldiers had fallen when Clark’s team had ambushed him near LuthorCorp Plaza, including Faora Hu-Ul, Lo-Gar, and Rom-Lok, who had all served with distinction under his command during the Last War back on Krypton.
He himself had suffered temporary rupturing of his eardrums due to Dinah Lance’s canary cry, as evidenced by the now-drying blood that had trickled from his ears. Several of Clark’s other compatriots had inflicted numerous small cuts on him with kryptonite blades before he had neutralized them -- including, he thought darkly, the inhumanly fast boy who had forced him to liquefy the asphalt with heat vision to trip him up to deliver the coup de grâce.
“We’ll never stop fighting, Zod,” Clark defiantly contradicted, glaring over his shoulder at Zod as he pushed himself onto his hands and knees. “Humanity will never lose its spirit.”
He moved to stand up, but Zod effortlessly shoved him back to the ground with one hand and knocking the breath out of him.
Seeing Zod turn and start to walk away, Lois pulled the sheathed kryptonite knife from her belt and tossed it in Clark’s direction. The young Kryptonian started to reach for it, but his fingers had barely touched the knife’s metal handle when Zod stepped on his hand, eliciting a cry of pain from Clark as he felt the bones in his hand fracture under the pressure of Zod’s booted foot.
A sadistic, gloating smile spreading across his face as he pressed down harder with his foot, Zod momentarily glanced over at Lois as if to say, “You’re next,” before turning his attention back to Clark. His expression turning grim as he bent over the younger Kryptonian, he solemnly said, “Goodbye, son of Jor-El.”
He hooked his foot under Clark’s body, then punted him into the air, the kick sending the younger Kryptonian flying across the street and through a storefront window.
“Clark!” Lois screamed. Pulling the Legion ring from her pocket as she bolted from cover, she started to run toward where she’d seen him disappear, only for Zod to step into her path.
Zod seized Lois by the neck, ready to crush the life out of her before he was distracted by a thunderous sound behind him. As he turned to face it and saw white crackling discharges that occluded the crimson fountain of solar energy that emanated from the apex of the solar tower, Zod let go of Lois and stepped away from her, the look of grim fury on his face melting away into uncertainty.
His expression soon turned to one of dismay as the skyward flow of energy exploded in a bright white flash of light. As the flash died away, a circular patch of blue sky appeared above the solar tower and quickly spread across the heavens as the sun returned to its normal yellow.
“No,” Zod whispered in horrified denial as he suddenly felt his powers leave him and heard distant screams that were cut off seconds later -- screams doubtlessly emitted by those of his troops who had been airborne when the yellow sun returned and deprived them of their abilities.
Then he heard Clark Kent call his name. “Zod!”
Turning in the direction of the younger Kryptonian’s voice, Zod saw him standing in the middle of the street, his injuries completely healed by the light of the yellow sun as he declared, “Your reign of terror is over, Zod.”
Striding toward Zod, he said, “I’m sending Lois back to the past so she can warn us about your tower before it’s ever built.”
“You chose to fight me,” Zod argued, his face a mask of fury as he refused to own up to he and his soldiers’ responsibility for their actions, though inwardly he was panicking as he recalled the time travel device that Knor-El had told him of -- the one that until now they had both assumed destroyed. “You forced me to unleash my power. We could have made this planet a paradise!”
“It always was,” Clark argued back as he strode up to Zod and grabbed hold of the general by the lapels of his brown field jacket, “but you never gave humanity a chance.”
Looking over at Lois and seeing the Legion ring in her hand, Clark momentarily considered using the ring to go back in time himself instead of sending Lois. If he went back to before Tess had destroyed the black Phantom Zone crystal, he could separate Doomsday from Davis Bloome, send the unkillable Kryptonian monster to the Phantom Zone, and deliver Davis to the authorities and thus save Jimmy Olsen.
Lost in reverie, Clark was caught off-guard as he heard Zod hiss, “Men have made you weak,” before he felt the burning, nauseating sensation of kryptonite radiation at the same time that something sliced into his abdomen.
Looking back at Zod, Clark saw the look of gloating, contemptuous satisfaction on the general’s face before his gaze panned down to where Zod’s hand gripped a kryptonite knife that was buried almost to the hilt in his stomach -- the same knife that Lois had thrown to him a few minutes earlier.
“If she travels back in time, then the lives we know will cease to exist,” Zod stated, baring his teeth in a snarl as he put his hand on Clark’s shoulder for leverage before he proceeded to viciously twist the knife in the wound, amplifying the currents of agony coursing through the younger Kryptonian’s body. “You’ll have destroyed our world.”
“It’s not… your… world, Zod,” Clark gritted out before he lashed out with the last of his strength.
The force of the blow sent Zod flying through the air and into the side of a van, leaving a sizable dent in it before he lifelessly collapsed to the pavement, his neck broken by the impact.
Falling to his knees in pain, Clark gripped the handle of the knife buried in his stomach and slowly pulled it out. He snatched up the lead sheath that Zod had left lying on the ground and began to slide the knife into it -- then swore under his breath as he saw that a thumb-sized portion of the tip of the long, narrow green blade was missing. It had probably broken off inside of him after hitting a rib when Zod stabbed him.
That meant he would keep hemorrhaging until the kryptonite fragment was removed from his body, he thought as he cast the knife aside, and judging from the amount of blood current flowing from the wound, he doubted that it was possible to do that before he bled to death.
“Clark!” Lois cried as she ran up to him, still clutching the Legion ring in her hand and cursing herself for missing the fact that Zod had picked up her knife.
Barely holding onto consciousness as he looked up at her, Clark said, “Lois, the ring… put it on…”
Lois shook her head. There had to be something she could do save Clark without fleeing back in time. “No.”
“You have to… It’s… the only way… to save us…” Clark persevered.
Just then there was a whoosh and they both looked over to see Alia standing in front of the Daily Planet. She had found Knor-El lying in the basement bullpen, impaled by the blue kryptonite knife that Lana had stuck in his back before he managed to break her neck. Listening as he told her what Lois Lane and the others had been looking for at the Planet and what they intended to do with it, Alia had become enraged. If Knor-El had been more vigilant when Lois had arrived in their time, they could have obtained the Legion ring first and destroyed it. Now dozens of her fellow Kandorians were dead and the remainder were virtually helpless against the humans until the solar tower could be brought back online.
After deactivating the bracer that allowed Knor-El to derive his abilities through red sunlight like she and the other Kandorians did, she had used his blood to reset her blue kryptonite-mutated DNA so that she could process yellow sunlight like a normal Kryptonian, then she had executed Knor-El before heading outside.
Realizing there were only seconds to act, Clark took the Legion ring from Lois’ open palm and slid it onto her finger, the ring’s “L”-and-starburst emblem flaring with violet light as he tried to concentrate on the right time to send Lois to.
Pulling a black swatch of cloth over the lower half of her face, Alia blurred into superspeed as she raced toward Clark and Lois in an attempt to grab the ring before it activated. She had just reached Lois and her fingers were closing around the other woman’s hand when the violet radiance around the ring exploded in a burst of light that enveloped both her and Lois.
As she felt herself being pulled with Lois back into the past, she swore that she would find Knor-El’s past self and end him before his weakness destroyed Zod’s dream…
Moments later, Clark woke up, glimpses of Lois’ arrival on the monorail, her fight with Alia there, and its subsequent plunge flashing through his head as he returned to full consciousness. Pulling the kryptonite-infused electronic lead from his hand and dropping it on the floor, he grabbed the side of the metal-framed table that Lois was lying and pulled himself up.
“Welcome back, sweetheart,” Lana said, greeting him with a kiss when he was fully upright.
“Thanks,” Clark replied. Looking over at where Chloe stood on the other side of her cousin’s unconscious body, he asked, “How’s Lois?”
“She’ll be up in a few minutes with a headache, but it’s nothing that a couple of aspirin can’t handle,” the blonde replied.
“I was able to isolate the area of her cerebral cortex where her synapses were firing at an accelerated rate,” Emil Hamilton reported. “By injecting a chemical inhibitor, I effectively reset those cells.”
“So, her memories from the future are gone, right?” Clark asked, still shaken by what he’d experienced via Lois’ memories.
“If she had them while under the influence of the machine, she won’t now,” the scientist confirmed before he went back to monitoring Lois’ brainwaves to make sure no other damage had been done.
“Good,” Clark murmured faintly.
“From the look on your face, I take it the future isn’t so bright,” Chloe observed, seeing the way Clark took refuge in Lana’s embrace. “What did you see, Clark?”
Swallowing heavily as he recalled seeing Chloe, Oliver, himself, and so many others die, the Kryptonian’s only response was a grim, foreboding look.
* * * * *
But the Kryptonian’s gaze remained fixed, his pupil not contracting even the slightest bit at the glare of the penlight’s beam as the doctor repeated his inquiry, asking, “Can you hear me, Clark?”
Letting Clark’s eyelid close and shutting off his penlight, Emil rose from where he was crouched in front of the Kryptonian’s unconscious body, which rested against the metal support of Lois’ table. Lana had flown him here to Belle Reve to evaluate Clark’s condition after the young man had failed to check in after his departure more than an hour ago. He walked over to the terminal that controlled the machinery that Clark and Lois were connected to and began to type when Chloe entered the lab.
“The ambulance will be here soon,” Chloe reported as she walked over to Emil.
“Stuart’s lost a lot of blood, but luckily he’s still alive, and I’m sure Mercer the Merciless will be fine,” the blonde continued, her tone of voice indicating that she didn’t really care about Tess. Glancing over at her Kryptonian friend, she asked, “How’s Clark?”
“Somehow this machine synched their brainwaves,” Emil replied, his gaze fixed on the terminal’s display as he continued typing. “Clark’s literally locked into Lois’ memories, but I believe there’s a way that I can pull them out.”
“Don’t close the curtain just yet,” Chloe hurriedly interjected. Seeing the confusion on Emil’s face as he looked up from the terminal, she added, “I took a peek into Lois’ therapy files that Tess hacked into. I think that every time she saw her therapist, it actually unlocked more of her memories of the future.”
“Chloe, these memories are physically damaging,” Emil protested as he looked past the blonde to see the rather perturbed expression on Lana’s face as she sat next to Clark, holding her unconscious boyfriend’s hand. “Do you really wanna put their lives in danger?”
“Emil, if you pull Clark out now, it will put a lot of other people’s lives at stake,” Chloe asserted. “When that assassin came back from the future, she told Clark’s double that he would destroy the world. Now Clark has to find out how to save it.”
“Even if Clark could glean some information on the future from Lois’ memories, this isn’t my decision or yours to make,” Emil replied, shaking his head before looking off to his left.
Following the doctor’s gaze to Lana, Chloe walked over to her friend. Crouching in front of the other girl, she gently asked, “Lana?”
The dark-haired girl didn’t reply for a moment, choosing to gaze at Clark as she held his left hand. Then she looked up at Chloe, who said, “Lana, we need to know what Zod does in the future, and to do that Clark has to stay inside Lois’ mind for a while.”
Lana was silent for a moment before she reluctantly acquiesced. “All right.”
She then gave Chloe a severe look as she added a caveat: “But if Clark’s vital signs start slipping, we’re pulling him out.”
As Chloe nodded her agreement with that stipulation, Clark’s face began twitching in unconscious agitation as he experienced more of Lois’ previously repressed memories…
The red sun was beginning to rise the morning after the rescue at the mansion when Clark, Lana, Roy, Chloe, Oliver, John, and Lois arrived at Watchtower. As the seven of them walked inside, Chloe went to a small desk situated near the entrance. Retrieving a roll of gauze, she tossed it to Lois, who used it to wrap her injured left hand.
Clark grabbed a large black duffel bag from a closet and headed to the bathroom while John, Lana, and Roy retrieved weapons from various cabinets arranged at points around the room.
Walking over to a large metal cabinet in a corner of the room, Oliver entered a four-digit code on the attached electronic keypad, and the cabinet’s metal door slid up out of the way to reveal a green-tinted compound bow inside, along with several quivers of arrows with kryptonite arrowheads.
Taking the bow from its hiding place, Oliver murmured, “Honey, I’m home,” as he reacquainted himself with the familiar heft of the weapon.
Shucking her leather jacket as she headed up the wrought-iron staircase to the room’s second floor, Chloe flipped the main switch on the breaker box, turning the lights on in the room and activating the computer equipment. “Welcome to Watchtower.”
“Okay, Chloe, remember when we were ten and I kicked you out of my clubhouse for spilling soda and you said you’d just build a cooler one?” Lois commented as she gaped at all the equipment. From where she stood, it looked like her cousin could hack into the Death Star if she wanted to. “You win.”
Chloe tossed her jacket on a nearby chair as she reached the bottom of the wrought-iron spiral staircase, then unwrapped the dark scarf from around her neck and cast it aside as she went to the main computer workstation at her desk. After typing in a few commands on the keyboard, she brought up a video feed of the streets of Metropolis on Watchtower’s large main monitor.
“So this is what happens when there’s no Blur,” Lois murmured as Chloe clicked through various camera feeds that displayed scenes of devastation and leveled buildings across the span of Metropolis, including one where smoke rose from the burning wreckage of jets that had been brought down in the city’s waterfront.
“That’s why we need every hero we can get,” Clark commented, and Lois turned to see him standing next to Oliver, who was dressed in the green-and-black leather outfit that he’d worn as Green Arrow. By contrast, Clark wore blue jeans and jacket over a blue T-shirt. The jacket was partially open, allowing Lois to see what looked like the top portion of a white pentagular “S”-shield like the one on the tattered shirt on a pole that Knor-El had pointed out to her after she arrived in this nightmare of a future.
That puzzled her a bit. If the “S”-symbol belonged to the Blur like Knor-El had indicated, why was Clark wearing it? Was it his way of showing support for what the Blur stood for, in defiance of Zod and his army?
Or was there another reason, she wondered, remembering what the others had implied about the yellow sun making Clark more powerful. Could it be…
“For the woman who has everything,” Oliver said, distracting Lois from her previous train of thought as he handed her a long-bladed knife with a sheath that looked like it had been crudely hammered out of metal. “It’s a meteor rock knife. I’ve encased it in lead so that the enemy won’t know you’re packing till it’s too late.”
Briefly unsheathing the knife to look at its green crystalline blade, Lois briefly smiled at him as she replied, “Even in the future, you still know how to charm a girl.”
“Last firewall’s down,” Chloe interrupted from where she was typing at her desk. “I’m in the command center for Zod’s tower. The virus is almost ready.”
A moment later she said, “Take that, Master Control” as she hit a key, and the window with the words FIREWALL DISABLED on the main monitor was replaced by a larger one displaying the solar tower, with a smaller window overlaying it that read VIRUS INITIALIZED.
“There. In just a few minutes we should see our yellow sun rise and shine again,” Chloe said with a touch of satisfaction.
“The Kandorians’ll notice this place pretty soon, now that it’s lit up like a Christmas tree,” noted Roy, who wore a leather outfit similar to Oliver’s, only the younger man’s costume was dyed dark blue and purple instead of green and black. “We should go.”
“He’s right,” Clark confirmed. “John and I will meet up with Dinah’s team and go after Zod at LuthorCorp.”
With the unique talents of Dinah Lance, Bart Allen, and Andrea Rojas backing he and the Martian up, he hoped they could distract Zod long enough for Chloe’s computer virus to shut the solar tower down and change the balance of power in their favor.
“The rest of you go to the paper and get the ring,” he concluded, deliberately using vague descriptors so that any of Zod’s soldiers who might overhear them via super-hearing wouldn’t immediately deduce Lois and the others’ destination.
Particularly Knor-El, he thought as he and John left.
“Roy and I’ll scout ahead, make sure the coast is clear,” Oliver said as he and his former protégé headed for the door, followed closely by Lana. Lois started to follow after them, but paused when she saw that Chloe was still standing behind her desk.
“Go,” her cousin told her firmly as she entered a few more commands. “I’ll be right behind you.”
A few minutes later Lois was running through the streets of Metropolis in the general direction of the Daily Planet. Stopping for a moment to catch her breath, she took cover behind the blackened shell of a burned-up car as she frantically scanned the street behind her for any sign of Chloe. A few seconds later she saw her cousin round a corner at the end of the block and stop for a moment in front of Lucky’s Bar as she looked around for Lois.
“Chloe!” Lois shouted, and the blonde turned in the direction of her voice, then started running toward her.
Just as Chloe got going, though, Lois heard a loud whoosh and looked up to see one of the Kandorians flying in their direction.
“Come on!” she urged her cousin. “You can make it!”
But the Kandorian swooped in to intercept Chloe, landing in front of the blonde before she covered half the distance between herself and Lois. Skidding to a stop as she suddenly found Alia standing in front of her, dressed in a loose black V-necked outfit with shiny purple trim and knotted black sash, rather like a ninja’s outfit.
Chloe started to reach behind her for the kryptonite dagger that was sheathed in her belt, but Alia reacted with superhuman speed. Pulling a curved short sword similar to Zod’s from where it was sheathed on her back, the female Kandorian spun it in a quick, one-handed flourish, then viciously thrust it into Chloe’s abdomen before the blonde could draw her own weapon. Her eyes widening in shock and pain as the blade sliced into her stomach, Chloe dropped the still-sheathed knife.
“No!” Lois screamed, unthinkingly running from cover as Alia pulled her blade free and Chloe slowly fell to her knees with a grunt of pain. She briefly looked down at the bloody slit in her jacket before collapsing facedown onto the pavement.
Alia looked down with a mixture of satisfaction and contempt as blood dripped from the point of her lowered sword into the scarlet pool that was starting to form next to Chloe’s sprawled body before she heard an angry male voice directed at her.
“Get the hell away from her!” Oliver yelled as he released a kryptonite-tipped arrow from his bow.
The utterance proved to be a mistake, as Alia turned toward the sound of his voice and the arrow struck her in the arm instead of her heart like he’d intended. Her icy blue eyes narrowing in a glare at Oliver, Alia gritted her teeth in pain as she took hold of the shaft with her left hand and pulled the arrow free, then hurled the bloodied projectile aside and superspeeded away milliseconds before Oliver’s next arrow could hit her.
Muttering a curse under his breath as he lowered his bow, Oliver hurried after Lois as she raced over to her cousin’s prone body.
“Chloe,” Lois murmured as she knelt next to her cousin and gently turned her over. Taking Chloe in her arms, she said, “Chloe, look at me. You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be okay.”
Chloe’s quick, ragged breaths and her blood-soaked jacket gave the lie to Lois’ frantic assurances, however, and the blonde stopped breathing a few seconds later.
“No,” Lois sobbed as she saw the light leave Chloe’s eyes and her features go slack. “Chloe…”
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder as Oliver told her, “The best way to avenge her death is to get that ring.”
“No,” Lois protested, not looking at her ex-boyfriend as she gently closed Chloe’s eyes. “No, I won’t leave her.”
“She’s still alive in the past, Lois,” Oliver reminded her. “You can save her. Make sure this future never happens, and you’ll save all of us.”
Seeing his point, Lois nodded, then pressed a kiss to Chloe’s forehead before gently laying her cousin’s body on the pavement.
“You better go meet up with Roy and Lana,” Oliver told her as she stood and turned to face him. “Alia’ll be calling in reinforcements. I’ll cover you.”
Lois sprinted off in the direction of the Daily Planet. As he gazed after her, Oliver heard a very loud whoosh and turned to see dozens of Kandorians flying toward him from the vicinity of the solar tower.
Oliver drew a very special arrow from the quiver integrated into the back of his costume and fitted it to his bowstring. As he pulled the string back and aimed his bow at the swarm of alien soldiers heading his way, a famous poem by Alfred Tennyson that he’d learned during his time at Excelsior Prep came to mind, and he began reciting a stanza that seemed appropriate to the situation that he now faced:
“Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed & thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred…”
As he uttered the last line of the stanza, Oliver released his arrow into the Kandorians’ midst. He barely had the satisfaction of seeing several soldiers start to fall from the sky to their imminent deaths as the projectile exploded into a cloud of concentrated green kryptonite gas near them before he was cut down by converging blasts of their compatriots’ heat vision…
“So where’s this ring that’s supposed to fix everything?” Roy asked, still very skeptical about this plan as he, Lois, and Lana entered the Daily Planet via the employee entrance.
“Tess and I were duking it out in there,” Lois said, pointing in the direction of the bullpen as she and Lana descended the stairs to the basement while Roy covered the way they’d come with the SPAS-15 shotgun that he carried.
As the women entered the bullpen, Lois sighted the desk where she’d ran her fingers through the months of accumulated dust upon her arrival in 2010, then started scanning the floor in that vicinity. “Okay, I was standing right there when I woke up and dropped the ring, so it’s gotta be somewhere near.”
“Assuming that Knor-El hasn’t already come back and found it,” Lana commented darkly as she joined Lois in searching the floor for any sign of the Legion ring.
“I don’t think so,” Roy contradicted, having spotted the metallic glint of a small golden object under a desk as he came into the bullpen.
“Yes!” Lois smirked as she looked where Roy had indicated and snatched the ring up. “Time to push the reset button on Zod’s little takeover.”
Suddenly there was a whoosh, followed by the sound of Knor-El’s voice as he coldly declared, “I am afraid we cannot allow that.”
As Lois pocketed the Legion ring, the three of them turned to see Clark’s doppelganger standing in the doorway. He was flanked by a thin-faced blond male Kandorian who wore an outfit very similar to that of Knor-El and the other soldiers: a long leather coat and boots, black pants and T-shirt with Zod’s “Z”-like crest in white of two rotated “L”-shapes framing a diagonal slash with a knot in its center. The only difference was that the blond man’s coat was black as opposed to the blood-red hue of Knor-El’s.
“Pre-Us,” Roy growled before extending the green kryptonite wrist blade from the mechanism mounted on his prosthetic left arm as he charged at the blond Kandorian with a near-incoherent cry of rage, apparently forgetting about his shotgun in favor of the hand-to-hand approach.
His face paling and the blood vessels in his face and neck becoming raised and green as he felt the radiation from Roy’s blade, Pre-Us reached into his coat and pulled out a large, asymmetrical boomerang-shaped blade like the one that Lois had seen in Knor-El’s private collection of Kryptonian weapons. Gripping the weapon by a couple of the leather-wrapped grips cut into its rear edge as he backed away from Roy, the Kandorian barely raised it in time to block the human’s blade.
Seeing Knor-El disappear in a blur of superspeed instead of assisting his compatriot Pre-Us as he struggled with Roy, Lois and Lana unsheathed their kryptonite knives as they warily looked around them for any sign of Clark’s doppelganger. Then they heard his voice behind them.
“Why do you stubbornly continue to delay what is inevitable?” Knor-El asked, and they spun to see him standing at the far end of the bullpen, holding another item from his personal arsenal -- specifically, the chain whose ends each terminated in a semicircular blade. “Humanity’s dominion over this planet has ended, and the age of the new Krypton has begun.”
Letting a three-foot length of chain dangle from his right fist, the Kryptonian began whirling it in a circle as he started to advance on them, the spinning blade making a sound like a helicopter rotor as Knor-El came toward them.
Evaluating their options, Lois looked behind her to see Roy and Pre-Us slashing at each other with their respective weapons. The blond Kandorian seemed to be worse off, having sustained several nasty lacerations to his face, arms and chest from Roy’s kryptonite wrist blade, but he wasn’t down yet. As she watched, Pre-Us changed his grip on his weapon and swung it one-handed, hitting Roy in the ribs with the dull inner edge of his blade and knocking the human back against a desk.
Turning her gaze to a set of double doors set into a side of the bullpen not far from where they’d come in, Lois started edging toward it. She stopped, however, when Knor-El suddenly whipped his left arm forward, sending the blade on the other end of the chain shooting straight out between Lois and the exit.
“Great,” Lois sarcastically muttered as Knor-El pulled the bladed chain back to him with a quick, smooth movement. “We’re gonna get sliced, diced, and puréed by Clark’s psycho twin, and our backup’s still occupied.”
Lana’s only reply to Lois’ comment was to reverse her grip on her blue kryptonite knife and lunge at Knor-El, cutting through the air with vicious backhanded slashes of the blade. He lashed out at her with the end of the bladed chain that he’d been whirling like a propeller, but Lana slipped to his left and the chain’s blade whipped through the air where she’d been a moment before to strike sparks on the tile floor.
As Lana circled around Knor-El, slashing at him and narrowly dodging his strikes as he flailed at her with both ends of the bladed chain, she saw Roy ram his wrist blade up into Pre-Us’ chest, penetrating his heart.
“Looks like it’s three against one now, Knor-El,” she commented as Roy pulled his blade free and let the dying Kandorian crumple to the floor.
“I suggest you count again,” Knor-El snarled before he suddenly flicked the bladed chain straight out to strike Roy just under the jaw with the bladed end of the chain from almost a dozen feet away and severing the young man’s carotid artery. Roy made an awful gurgling sound as the Kryptonian yanked on the chain to pull the blade free, then fell to the floor, clutching at his neck as he swiftly bled out.
“Go get the ring to Clark,” Lana ordered Lois, not taking her eyes off Knor-El as he reeled the chain back to him with quick movements of his arms. “He and the others’ll be heading to the solar tower.”
Dipping one hand into her jacket pocket and clenching it around the Legion ring, Lois paused only a second before dashing out of the bullpen and up the stairs as Lana and Knor-El resumed their battle. Coming out the revolving door, she turned right and headed in the direction of the solar tower, using large pieces of debris for cover as she made her way down the street.
Spotting a figure dragging something through the street, Lois kept to the shadows as she came closer and saw that it was Zod, who was towing Clark by one of the younger Kryptonian’s legs. Clark’s battered blue jacket was torn open, completely exposing the “S”-shield on his T-shirt, and he was bleeding from several wounds on his face, including a cut over his right eyes and a deep gash on his left cheek.
Glancing back in the direction that Zod and Clark had come from, she could see the bodies of the other members of Clark’s team. A couple of them were charred and smoking like they’d been hosed down by a flamethrower, including one who lay in a large section of street where the pavement had apparently melted, the air above its surface still shimmering with heat.
“I should have known you’d come after me,” she heard the Kryptonian general comment to Clark, his voice thick with contempt as he went on to declare, “All to save a doomed race. When faced with a crumbling world, these humans, they’d rather die than unite under a single leader and do what is required to build a glorious new world.”
Zod abruptly let go of Clark’s leg, the younger Kryptonian groaning in pain from several cracked ribs as he rolled over and saw Lois take cover behind the remains of a wrecked Chrysler four-four sedan.
“It’s tragic,” Zod continued as he stepped away and turned to face Clark. If he saw Lois, he didn’t show it, as engrossed as he was in denouncing the younger Kryptonian for opposing his aims. “You thought you could take me on like this? Metropolis would not be destroyed if you had all just stopped fighting and joined me.”
In addition to the men that he’d lost the day before during the attack at the mansion, like Basqat, Quex-Ul, Va-Kox, and Orn-Zu, a half-dozen more of his soldiers had fallen when Clark’s team had ambushed him near LuthorCorp Plaza, including Faora Hu-Ul, Lo-Gar, and Rom-Lok, who had all served with distinction under his command during the Last War back on Krypton.
He himself had suffered temporary rupturing of his eardrums due to Dinah Lance’s canary cry, as evidenced by the now-drying blood that had trickled from his ears. Several of Clark’s other compatriots had inflicted numerous small cuts on him with kryptonite blades before he had neutralized them -- including, he thought darkly, the inhumanly fast boy who had forced him to liquefy the asphalt with heat vision to trip him up to deliver the coup de grâce.
“We’ll never stop fighting, Zod,” Clark defiantly contradicted, glaring over his shoulder at Zod as he pushed himself onto his hands and knees. “Humanity will never lose its spirit.”
He moved to stand up, but Zod effortlessly shoved him back to the ground with one hand and knocking the breath out of him.
Seeing Zod turn and start to walk away, Lois pulled the sheathed kryptonite knife from her belt and tossed it in Clark’s direction. The young Kryptonian started to reach for it, but his fingers had barely touched the knife’s metal handle when Zod stepped on his hand, eliciting a cry of pain from Clark as he felt the bones in his hand fracture under the pressure of Zod’s booted foot.
A sadistic, gloating smile spreading across his face as he pressed down harder with his foot, Zod momentarily glanced over at Lois as if to say, “You’re next,” before turning his attention back to Clark. His expression turning grim as he bent over the younger Kryptonian, he solemnly said, “Goodbye, son of Jor-El.”
He hooked his foot under Clark’s body, then punted him into the air, the kick sending the younger Kryptonian flying across the street and through a storefront window.
“Clark!” Lois screamed. Pulling the Legion ring from her pocket as she bolted from cover, she started to run toward where she’d seen him disappear, only for Zod to step into her path.
Zod seized Lois by the neck, ready to crush the life out of her before he was distracted by a thunderous sound behind him. As he turned to face it and saw white crackling discharges that occluded the crimson fountain of solar energy that emanated from the apex of the solar tower, Zod let go of Lois and stepped away from her, the look of grim fury on his face melting away into uncertainty.
His expression soon turned to one of dismay as the skyward flow of energy exploded in a bright white flash of light. As the flash died away, a circular patch of blue sky appeared above the solar tower and quickly spread across the heavens as the sun returned to its normal yellow.
“No,” Zod whispered in horrified denial as he suddenly felt his powers leave him and heard distant screams that were cut off seconds later -- screams doubtlessly emitted by those of his troops who had been airborne when the yellow sun returned and deprived them of their abilities.
Then he heard Clark Kent call his name. “Zod!”
Turning in the direction of the younger Kryptonian’s voice, Zod saw him standing in the middle of the street, his injuries completely healed by the light of the yellow sun as he declared, “Your reign of terror is over, Zod.”
Striding toward Zod, he said, “I’m sending Lois back to the past so she can warn us about your tower before it’s ever built.”
“You chose to fight me,” Zod argued, his face a mask of fury as he refused to own up to he and his soldiers’ responsibility for their actions, though inwardly he was panicking as he recalled the time travel device that Knor-El had told him of -- the one that until now they had both assumed destroyed. “You forced me to unleash my power. We could have made this planet a paradise!”
“It always was,” Clark argued back as he strode up to Zod and grabbed hold of the general by the lapels of his brown field jacket, “but you never gave humanity a chance.”
Looking over at Lois and seeing the Legion ring in her hand, Clark momentarily considered using the ring to go back in time himself instead of sending Lois. If he went back to before Tess had destroyed the black Phantom Zone crystal, he could separate Doomsday from Davis Bloome, send the unkillable Kryptonian monster to the Phantom Zone, and deliver Davis to the authorities and thus save Jimmy Olsen.
Lost in reverie, Clark was caught off-guard as he heard Zod hiss, “Men have made you weak,” before he felt the burning, nauseating sensation of kryptonite radiation at the same time that something sliced into his abdomen.
Looking back at Zod, Clark saw the look of gloating, contemptuous satisfaction on the general’s face before his gaze panned down to where Zod’s hand gripped a kryptonite knife that was buried almost to the hilt in his stomach -- the same knife that Lois had thrown to him a few minutes earlier.
“If she travels back in time, then the lives we know will cease to exist,” Zod stated, baring his teeth in a snarl as he put his hand on Clark’s shoulder for leverage before he proceeded to viciously twist the knife in the wound, amplifying the currents of agony coursing through the younger Kryptonian’s body. “You’ll have destroyed our world.”
“It’s not… your… world, Zod,” Clark gritted out before he lashed out with the last of his strength.
The force of the blow sent Zod flying through the air and into the side of a van, leaving a sizable dent in it before he lifelessly collapsed to the pavement, his neck broken by the impact.
Falling to his knees in pain, Clark gripped the handle of the knife buried in his stomach and slowly pulled it out. He snatched up the lead sheath that Zod had left lying on the ground and began to slide the knife into it -- then swore under his breath as he saw that a thumb-sized portion of the tip of the long, narrow green blade was missing. It had probably broken off inside of him after hitting a rib when Zod stabbed him.
That meant he would keep hemorrhaging until the kryptonite fragment was removed from his body, he thought as he cast the knife aside, and judging from the amount of blood current flowing from the wound, he doubted that it was possible to do that before he bled to death.
“Clark!” Lois cried as she ran up to him, still clutching the Legion ring in her hand and cursing herself for missing the fact that Zod had picked up her knife.
Barely holding onto consciousness as he looked up at her, Clark said, “Lois, the ring… put it on…”
Lois shook her head. There had to be something she could do save Clark without fleeing back in time. “No.”
“You have to… It’s… the only way… to save us…” Clark persevered.
Just then there was a whoosh and they both looked over to see Alia standing in front of the Daily Planet. She had found Knor-El lying in the basement bullpen, impaled by the blue kryptonite knife that Lana had stuck in his back before he managed to break her neck. Listening as he told her what Lois Lane and the others had been looking for at the Planet and what they intended to do with it, Alia had become enraged. If Knor-El had been more vigilant when Lois had arrived in their time, they could have obtained the Legion ring first and destroyed it. Now dozens of her fellow Kandorians were dead and the remainder were virtually helpless against the humans until the solar tower could be brought back online.
After deactivating the bracer that allowed Knor-El to derive his abilities through red sunlight like she and the other Kandorians did, she had used his blood to reset her blue kryptonite-mutated DNA so that she could process yellow sunlight like a normal Kryptonian, then she had executed Knor-El before heading outside.
Realizing there were only seconds to act, Clark took the Legion ring from Lois’ open palm and slid it onto her finger, the ring’s “L”-and-starburst emblem flaring with violet light as he tried to concentrate on the right time to send Lois to.
Pulling a black swatch of cloth over the lower half of her face, Alia blurred into superspeed as she raced toward Clark and Lois in an attempt to grab the ring before it activated. She had just reached Lois and her fingers were closing around the other woman’s hand when the violet radiance around the ring exploded in a burst of light that enveloped both her and Lois.
As she felt herself being pulled with Lois back into the past, she swore that she would find Knor-El’s past self and end him before his weakness destroyed Zod’s dream…
Moments later, Clark woke up, glimpses of Lois’ arrival on the monorail, her fight with Alia there, and its subsequent plunge flashing through his head as he returned to full consciousness. Pulling the kryptonite-infused electronic lead from his hand and dropping it on the floor, he grabbed the side of the metal-framed table that Lois was lying and pulled himself up.
“Welcome back, sweetheart,” Lana said, greeting him with a kiss when he was fully upright.
“Thanks,” Clark replied. Looking over at where Chloe stood on the other side of her cousin’s unconscious body, he asked, “How’s Lois?”
“She’ll be up in a few minutes with a headache, but it’s nothing that a couple of aspirin can’t handle,” the blonde replied.
“I was able to isolate the area of her cerebral cortex where her synapses were firing at an accelerated rate,” Emil Hamilton reported. “By injecting a chemical inhibitor, I effectively reset those cells.”
“So, her memories from the future are gone, right?” Clark asked, still shaken by what he’d experienced via Lois’ memories.
“If she had them while under the influence of the machine, she won’t now,” the scientist confirmed before he went back to monitoring Lois’ brainwaves to make sure no other damage had been done.
“Good,” Clark murmured faintly.
“From the look on your face, I take it the future isn’t so bright,” Chloe observed, seeing the way Clark took refuge in Lana’s embrace. “What did you see, Clark?”
Swallowing heavily as he recalled seeing Chloe, Oliver, himself, and so many others die, the Kryptonian’s only response was a grim, foreboding look.
* * * * *
Comment