Boy it's been a while, huh? Sorry about the long hiatus over the summer but work, internet service changes in my house, and life at home kept me from posting, but luckily not from writing. I'm posting it all up today so bear with me.
Smallville: ELSEWHERE
By Peter Amico
Note: I don’t own a bit of the rights to Smallville, so don’t flame me, or be an idiot about this. This story is written in fun and that’s it. Enjoy
Prologue
The ship was not of human origin. Perhaps six feet in length and oblong, it hurtled through the recesses of space without any obvious means of propulsion. A spherical bulge towards the back dominated most of the ship, with the front tapering off to a long point. Its hull was silver, unmarked, and seamless. It moved with a grace and speed that was impossible for modern human crafts. Even more impossible was how far it had come, and for what purpose.
Inside the ship, a small child slept dreamlessly, though not soundly. Voices and faces floated on the edge of his mind, some more familiar and distinct than others. As he slept, he almost remembered what they meant, but then the thought was gone. He had been asleep for a long while, frozen in time. He would not have survived the trip if he had not been. He had come a long way from a world he could never go back to.
As the ship passed around the dark side of the moon and into the sun’s light again, a remarkable change occurred inside the craft. The sphere’s upper hull became transparent, allowing the star’s light to bathe the child. He shifted idly in his sleep, stretching out in the warmth. The gentle hum of the ship reverberated inside the dome, quieting his sleep. He could feel the sun’s rays on his skin, revitalizing him. It was so different from the light of his home, richer and fuller in some fashion. Though he did not know, could not know, the light of this star had been the reason for his destination. It would feed him, make him stronger and faster than any other creature he would meet when his ship landed on the tiny planet that was its destination. It had been imagined that he would be like a god to them, descending from the heavens with fire and glory. He would have power, knowledge from behind the stars, everything that he would need to lead those lesser than him to glory.
If the child thought about the future that awaited him, it didn’t seem to bother him. He lowed peacefully in the light of the star, stretching out quietly. Then the hull abruptly darkened again as other objects appeared beside it.
Meteorites hurtled by the small craft, caught in the gravity of the blue planet that was the ship’s destination. The fragments were dark and jagged hunks of stone, shot through with streaks of a green, glowing crystal vein. As the green light reached the craft, it seemed to shudder and then began to shine with a brilliant white light of its own. The meteorites passed around the ship wildly, bumping and crashing into one another. Harsh dust and other small particles from the collisions clattered across the hull of the ship, but it held its course, only veering now and then to avoid running into one of the larger fragments. One of the meteorites smashed through a tiny satellite orbiting the planet, adding to the debris caught up in its wake.
As the ship and the meteorites passed into the edges of the planet’s atmosphere, the friction raised the temperature outside to incredible levels. Some of the smaller meteorites burned away in brilliant flashes of light, but the larger rocks kept going. The heat around them produced some startling changes in the green crystal veins though. Some of the stones fused and took on different colors, some red, others gold, and even blue. As the intense heat converted them, the stones began flashing wildly and sending out arcing bursts of energy into space. The ship meanwhile, rode out the heat without incident, the extreme temperature somehow being reflected by the skin of the craft. Inside, the child slept through it, hardly noticing any difference.
But then something unexpected happened.
A fragment broke off from a meteorite and, with the intense heat and force already buffeting it, the ship couldn’t swerve to avoid it. The chunk of rock, perhaps no more than ten inches across, shattered against the right edge of the ship and pushed it off course. The change was minute, not even a degree, a second’s, difference in fact.
But it was enough.
The ship hurtled through the air, descending into the inner atmosphere of the planet. Still on fire, it streaked over a vast body of water. Along side it flew the meteorites, which depending on their weight and path of entry, began to disperse over the planet. A large number still fell along side the ship, pulled along in its wake. The water underneath it gave way to a gentle, rolling land as the ship began its descent. The child was awake now, the roaring and shaking bringing him out of his deep sleep. He clutched the sides of his pod, suddenly afraid for the first time in his life. Something was wrong, he could feel it in the tremor of the ship. Something had gone wrong.
Indeed, something had. The ship was still going too fast. It passed over the abandoned field which its creator had deemed safe and isolated enough from his vantage point, so long and far ago. It tried to begin a turn that would put it back on course, but momentum had hold of it now and there was no going back. It darted through the air above fields and homes, coming in for a crash landing. The engines, preset to fire and slow the landing, tried to compensate, but the ship was still going too fast. This had not been planned on and the ship could not respond. It obliterated the first house it passed through, and then another, and another, and another. The child began to scream, calling out in a strange tongue for someone, anyone. Completely out of control, the ship tumbled and rolled, destroying everything in its path until it struck the pavement of a broad street and smashed deep into the ground. The hull, which had weathered the gravity and intense heat of countless suns, buckled finally and cracked in.
For a moment, there was silence. Then the tiny pod, tried beyond all the plans of its maker, slowly opened the spherical pod with a screech. Even as it did, the computers that had governed its flight and controlled the sleep of its passenger blinked and died out. The child opened his eyes and stared out, at first too frightened to move. He stared at his strange surroundings, so different from his dim memories of the past. Then slowly, he climbed out of the pod.
The ground was hot to the touch, but he barely noticed. He gazed around, taking in the devastation around him. Then there was noise, people shouting and crying out and pointing at him. He turned, staring at them. They looked familiar, but were not, he knew. He could sense that, they were different. He was alone here. Then a great roaring came from overhead and they all looked up, human and alien alike, as the meteorites passed above them, burning with fire and wrath.
A strangely adult thought passed through his young mind. Nothing would ever be the same here, he thought. Not for anyone.
Chapter 1
Clark woke up and it was several moments before he could even remember where he was. He got up slowly and turned on the lamp by his bed, the sudden light making him blink his eyes quickly. He was in his room at the farm, his school books piled on his desk with the notes he had been going over the night before. A Smallville High jacket was curled over his chair, looking weathered and a bit beaten, the white faded and no longer the bright color he remembered from last year. He rubbed his forehead briefly and then got up stretching.
The dream had been so real, he thought quietly. Disturbingly real. He threw back his covers and climbed out of bed, stretching. Clark didn’t dream very often; not even about a certain dark-haired beauty he knew. Sometimes he dreamed about strange buildings and nonsense words that didn’t make any sense. He’d never put any thought into his dreams before though. He left that for his mother, a great believer in dreams was Martha Kent. She frequently enjoyed dissecting hers, or anyone else’s, over the breakfast table, looking for hidden meanings and warnings. His father would often remark during this that he wouldn’t believe his dreams unless they came regularly and always said the same thing: good weather, healthy crops, and fine times ahead. His mother usually responded that you couldn’t force a dream to say anything, but he’d laugh and return to his paper, smiling at her.
Clark wondered idly what his mother would make of his dream as he padded through the upstairs quietly. The door to his parents’ room was open and he could see that it was empty. Downstairs, he could hear them chatting quietly and he smelled the delicious scent of his mother’s bacon and eggs come wafting up from the kitchen. Hopping in the bathroom, he quickly showered and got ready, pulling some relatively clean clothes off his floor to wear.
As he passed by the hallway mirror, he could see his reflection out of the corner of his eye. He was tall for a seventeen year old, with broad shoulders and dark hair. His face was dominated by a jaw-line that his friend Chloe had once said, ‘wouldn’t look that out of place on a statue.’ He still didn’t know what to think of that. Clark thought his face was serviceable, handsome without being too showy. He worried about his hair sometimes though. It hung wildly and seemed to refuse to be tamed by any comb. He’d noticed that a lock of his hair tended to curl up on his forehead when he wasn’t looking and that always bugged him. He’d considered cutting it back, but it was hard enough keeping his hair this length in the first place. That was of course, because Clark Kent wasn’t your normal teenage boy, if such a creature even existed.
He though uneasily about how similar his arrival on this planet and his dream had been. At first, he’d just thought he’d been reliving those events, until things had started to go wrong. He hadn’t landed in the middle of town, but in a field outside of it. And, as if by fate, it had only been Jonathon and Martha Kent who had seen his ship crash. The two, childless, had taken him in and loved him from the start, vowing to keep his secret safe for the rest of their lives. For a while, they had probably thought that wouldn’t be too difficult because from all outward evidence, Clark looked just like any normal human boy. But as they’d slowly discovered, he was most definitely not. As he’d gotten older, his strength had grown so much that he could now perform feats that were beyond belief. He could lift a car up easily with one hand, and was literally impervious to pain and injury. His could run and move faster than the eye could see, and most startling of all, was even able to see through almost any surface. Recently, his vision had taken a new and almost dangerous twist; by focusing himself, he could cast intense waves of heat through his eyes, capable of melting stone. Not even Clark knew whether this was the last of his abilities to emerge, but at times he wondered what else lay in store for him.
“As long as it’s not a pair of little antenna,” he reasoned to himself, “then it’s alright with me.”
He came into the kitchen and sat down on one of the stools. His mother had already laid out a plate with silverware and glasses ready for him. She was munching on a piece of toast and fussing with a pan full of scrambled eggs on the stove. He noticed that she was wearing one of the new business suits she’d bought when she’d taken her new job with Lionel Luthor. His father was standing by the open kitchen door with his favorite mug, which was spotted like a cow. He glanced back at Clark and smiled, raising his cup.
“I thought the smell of breakfast would get you up,” he smiled at him.
“Morning, Clark,” his mother said. She carried the pan over and heaped the contents on his plate. “We really need to get you a new alarm clock one of these days. You’re going to be late for school.” He grunted something that could have been in agreement, too busy with his breakfast to go on.
“Clark could get up with five minutes to spare, do my chores, put the cows out in the fields, drop the produce off at the market, run to school and still have four minutes to spare,” his father joked with her. He walked over and gave her quick peck on the cheek, stealing a piece of bacon from the plate she was carrying as he did. She smiled sweetly at him and put the plate on the table in front of Clark. “No need for an alarm clock with your cooking. And besides, have we forgotten what happened to the last one?”
“That was an accident,” Clark said in between bites. “I hit the snooze button a bit hard.”
“You put your hand through the nightstand, Clark.”
“It was an old nightstand,” he protested.
“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to get up on your own then,” his mother chided him. “I’m not going to be able to cook for you every morning, you know,” she said, carrying the pan to the sink. Clark could sense what was coming next. He saw his father frown and walk back over to the window, staring outside.
“Mr. Luthor’s going to need me to come in an hour earlier for the next few weeks,” she told them. “And maybe a few hours later as well.”
“I take it you already agreed to this, so there’s no reason for me to give you my opinion about it?” his father asked coolly.
“Everyone’s going to be very busy,” she explained to him patiently. “He needs me there.” Jonathon took another sip from mug and said nothing.
When the silence got threatening, Clark asked her quickly, “What are you going to be doing?”
“Last minute agreement things; checking on contracts, reviewing proposals,” she said, moving about the kitchen quickly. She picked up a briefcase he’d never seen before and started to put some papers in it. “Lionel’s signed a lot of deals with Wayne Enterprises.”
Clark choked on his meal and took a quick gulp of milk. “Wayne Enterprises? That’s not…”
“Yes, Bruce’s company. He bought up a lot of failing manufacturing and industrial companies and joined them together. He’s certainly stirring up things in Gotham. Lionel certainly underestimated him. He tried to short change him on a deal and Bruce wound up stealing a few contracts out from under his nose.”
Jonathon snorted into his cup, but Martha ignored that. “I have to say it’s nice to see him doing something constructive for a change,” she went on. “When he was in town last summer, the way he carried on… Well, it’s just nice to see him starting something that won’t end up with someone in the hospital.”
“The way Lionel conducts his business,” his father remarked, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Or from what we know of Bruce either.”
Clark understood that perfectly. Bruce Wayne had been traveling with a circus under the name of Tom Malone when he’d come to Smallville. Why someone with his amount of wealth would be living that way had been something of a mystery at first. Even more puzzling was his habit of showing up at just the right time, like when Lana had been attacked by a pair of car-jackers and Bruce had saved her. He had gotten suspicious and followed Bruce, but that had only complicated matters, revealing both of their secrets. He’d discovered that Bruce was some sort of vigilante, attacking criminals, and Bruce had found out about his powers. Neither had been happy about it, but a series of murders had forced them to pool their talents to survive and bring the killer to justice. It had also forced them to develop a kind of grudging respect for the other. Bruce might have been many things; stubborn, arrogant, intense, but he was also brilliant and very determined. If the Lionel wanted to take him on, Clark knew how much of a fight he was in for.
“Simply terrible about Lionel,” Jonathon remarked from the door, still looking out. Martha rolled her eyes in irritation. Clark watched the two of them, unsure of what to say.
His parents had always been divided when it came to the Luthors; both Lionel and Lex. His mother was willing to give them a chance, but his father had always seen things differently. His attitude towards them was that “leopards don’t change their spots.” Clark might have felt differently about Lex, but that fit Lionel pretty accurately in his view. When his mother had taken the job as Lionel’s personal assistant, it had only made things worse. She had told them she was only doing it because they needed the money, but sometimes Clark wasn’t sure.
Desperate to lighten the mood in some way, his eyes fell on the briefcase. “So, new briefcase, huh?” he tried to ask brightly. He saw his mother flinch and he instantly regretted it.
“It was a gift,” she said quickly. She put the last few papers in it quickly and shut the lid, setting it on the floor. Clark caught a glimpse of the embossed initial, LL, on the flap before it disappeared under the table.
“I think I’ll check on the cows,” his father remarked from the door and stepped out without another word. Thunder rolled suddenly overhead as Martha looked after him sadly. When she turned back to Clark, she gave him a wan smile.
“Storm’s coming,” she told him. “You almost never see those in the morning, huh? Gonna be pretty bad, I guess.” Clark nodded lamely as he finished up his breakfast.
“Virginia Woolfe, Chloe,” Pete asked her, amused. “Why, of all people, did you choose Virginia Woolfe to do a paper on? You do know you’ll actually have to read some of her books, don’t you?” Classes were over for the day and they were walking back through the halls to the lockers. Pete idly munched on what was left of his lunch, sharing with Clark, as Chloe and Lana walked slightly ahead of them, chatting quietly.
“I was going to choose Upton Sinclair, but I’d rather not have to take breaks throughout my research to barf up my lunch and swear off bologna, thank you very much,” she told them breezily. Her blond hair curled up at her neck and bounced as she walked. “And besides, it’ll be an easy report,” she went on. “Blah blah blah… women’s rights… blah blah blah… male dominated society. Easy A. I’m too busy with the paper to actually put effort into this.”
“I didn’t think you’d take something like that so lightly,” Lana mentioned, a bit puzzled. Taller than Chloe with a slightly exotic complexion, she was a natural born beauty. Not only that, she was one of the kindest and most caring people Clark knew. She glanced back at him and he felt the blood go rushing to his face. He always seemed to feel that way when she looked at him.
“Clark, Pete,” Chloe asked, bringing him back to reality, “do you still work for the paper?”
Pete and Clark shared a quick look. “Sure, last time I checked,” Pete replied. “I mean, we write an article here and there, if you call that work.”
She rolled her eyes but chose to ignore the comment. “Then you both work for me, right? Since I run the paper, correct?”
“When you put it that way,” Clark said slowly.
“So I can order you around or even fire you if I want to. I’m your boss.” Chloe turned back to Lana and nodded. “I think I’m about as liberated as I need to be, thank you.”
“That’s not really the point,” Lana started to say, but Clark shook his head.
“It’s not worth arguing with her,” he told her. “Trust me.”
She laughed and then asked, “So who did you both choose?” Lana was in the other English class than the rest of them.
Clark took out a thin book and held it out to her. “I got Lewis Carroll and Pete chose George Orwell. I figured, if I have to do a project about a past author, I may as well have some fun with it.”
Lana looked impressed. “Well, I guess we can count on you staying in for a while,” she joked with Pete. “Looks like you’ve got a bit of research ahead of you.”
“Not really,” he shrugged. “I checked the bookstores before we chose topics. Do you know how many Cliff Notes there are about him? It should be a crime to use them.”
“I think that’s why it sorta is,” Clark pointed out. At that moment a crack of thunder practically shook the school. Everyone jumped unconsciously and looked around nervously. The storm had started just before school and hadn’t let up once. If anything, the clouds outside seemed to be building in intensity.
“On that note,” Pete said, looking outside, “who wants a ride home?” No one looked that thrilled. “C’mon, guy with a cool car here, free ride, it’s raining, what’s not to like?”
“Your car’s a convertible,” Lana gently reminded him.
“The top works most times,” he said, nonplussed.
“As exciting as that sounds, I’ll pass,” Chloe said. “My dad’s of the belief that if you do anything during a storm you’re risking electrocution. I’d rather finish up the Torch here than hiding under my covers at home.”
Pete nodded grudgingly and looked at Lana. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m study hall bound. I promised I’d help tutor someone.”
“That’s alright,” he sighed. He turned towards Clark.
“Okay,” he agreed. “See you later,” he said to Chloe and Lana.
“Ooh, before I forget,” Lana said and started to dig around in her bag. “I have something for all of you.” She brought out film envelope and pulled out a stack of photos. “I was going through the junk drawer in the Talon and look what I found. From the grand opening; I guess Nell must have stuffed them in there and forgot about them. Ugh,” she said, holding up a photo, “look at me. That’s what I get for living off of coffee and no sleep the week before.”
“I know that routine,” Chloe said dryly. She flipped through a few of the photos and passed them to Pete. “I never know what to say when I see myself in a photo,” she admitted. “I mean, I look like me, what else is there to say?”
“Something like, ‘I’m looking fine,’ or my personal favorite, ‘Look who’s got it going on,’” Pete suggested to her. He pulled out a picture of him and another girl dancing and held it up. “As shown in this photo.”
“I don’t know about that,” she rolled her eyes, “but I’ll give you bonus points if you can actually remember the girl’s name you were dancing with.”
He stood there for a moment, and then looked at the picture closely. “Huh,” he said finally.
“She must’ve been really special,” Lana said to Chloe.
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
Clark chuckled and took the rest of the photos from Pete’s hands. He flipped through them quietly and then stopped at one and pulled it out. It was of all four of them, posing together in front of the Talon emblem. “Mind if I steal this one?” he asked Lana, holding it up.
“Go ahead,” she said. She touched the photo in his hand and smiled at him. “Nice choice by the way. Maybe we should blow it up and keep it in the Talon.”
Chloe snorted and rolled her eyes. “Okay, that’s really cheesy, but even I have to vote ‘yes’ on that.”
“Second the motion,” Pete chimed in. “Any opposed? Then the motion is cast. Get the negative blown up and framed and I’m all ready to sign it.”
“Should be ready by next week,” Lana laughed. Clark smiled and tucked the photo up and stuck it in his wallet. Lana took the rest of the photos from him and stuck them back in the sleeve and in her backpack. “I’ll have the rest in the Talon if anyone else wants to snag any more. Okay?” She smiled at them and she and Chloe started off down the hallways.
“So,” Pete said, turning to him. “What if we drive around and see if anyone else needs a ride home, okay? I hear the girl’s soccer team gets out after the late busses leave. You never know, you might be able to give a nice looking girl a rescue.”
“Have fun, Pete,” he told him and slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“You’re not actually gonna take me up on the ride, are you?” Pete realized.
Clark looked at him and grinned. “Why don’t we make a little race out of it?” he joked. “You drive, I’ll run.”
Pete rolled his eyes and gave him a withering look. “Thanks but no thanks,” he shook his head. “You know, I did a lot of oddjobs to save up for that car, and every time you lap it, all I can think about is how long it would take me to save up enough to buy a jet engine. ‘Cause without that, there’s no way I’m ever going to beat you”
“I could ask Lex about that,” Clark offered him. “He’d probably know what the going rate for one is these days.”
“Get out of here and leave me to my soccer players,” Pete told him. “Man, I think I liked you better when you were being all mysterious,” he complained.
A half-hour later, Clark was jogging down the backroads to home, enjoying the feel of the rain against his face. His poncho flapped behind him as he ran, trailing after him like a cape. It kept his shirt and book bag dry but his jeans were already soaked to his hips from the rain and splashing in the muddy roads. Clark didn’t mind though, he’d worked through a lot worse than this at the farm. The rain was actually quite cool and there was something innocently fun about running through the muddy road.
He ran around the smaller puddles putting his feet down in between them like it was an obstacle course. Laughing, he stepped nimbly around a series of them and saw a much larger puddle stretched across the road in front of him. Unless he left the road there would be no going around it. A grin stretched across his face, Clark didn’t slow down or step aside, he kept running and when he reached the edge of the puddle, he leapt up. He soared up and over it, at least twenty feet through the air, before coming back down on the other side. Not counting on the muddy ground there, he slipped as he landed and went skidding a few feet on his side.
Now he was really filthy, but he still didn’t mind. Clark picked himself up and tried to brush some of the mud off his jeans. That had been kind of stupid, he told himself, jumping like that. What if someone had seen him? He would’ve been hard put to explain how he could jump like that.
His parents had always harped on that danger, that someone, someday would discover his powers and take him away from them. Clark understood it, he’d been fending off the suspicions of both Chloe and Lex for the past year to realize how real the possibility was, but sometimes he wondered about it. Pete had found out about him, but he’d sworn never to reveal it to another person. If one person could handle it, why couldn’t others, he’d asked.
His father had remarked that “it only took one. The wrong kind of person finds out, and well… who knows what would happen.”
The problem was, of course, that he was right. Sam Phelan, a rogue cop from Metropolis, had discovered the truth, and he’d tried to blackmail Clark into committing crimes for him. He’d threatened his family and friends. The reporter, Roger Nixon, had done the same before he’d died. Even Professor Hamilton had almost tortured Pete to get the truth when he’d found the spaceship. There were too many reasons, Clark realized, to keep his powers a secret. But that didn’t make it any easier.
Most of all, he thought, he wanted to tell his friends. To share with them what made him special. Not that he wanted to rub their noses in it, but he wanted to show them everything he could do, everything he was. He wanted to show Lana, Chloe, and even Lex just who he really was.
But even as he thought it, he wondered, just what would they say? Chloe had devoted her life to chronicling the strange happenings in Smallville, how would she feel about finding out he was a major part of them? Lex had always gone on and on about how he hated people lying to him, how much he valued the truth in Clark. What would he say? And then there was Lana. Her parent’s had died the day of the meteor shower, an unfortunate casualty of his arrival. How well could she be expected to take that?
Clark sighed, thinking back over all those things. He started down the road again, and then stopped and looked around once more. There still wasn’t anyone around, and there probably wouldn’t be anyone on the road today with the storm. He hesitated briefly, his better judgment warning him against it, but in the end he gave in and hurried over to the side of the road. Taking off his poncho, he wrapped it around his book bag and stuck them both up in the branches of a nearby tree. Then, grinning like a maniac, he crouched on the ground.
“On your marks,” he muttered to himself. “Get set. Go!” Clark took off running, dashing at near full speed down the road. The wet mud exploded under his feet, throwing up torrents of brown water to either side of him. Laughing, he tried to turn around suddenly and found himself skidding helplessly along the road, carried by his own momentum. As he finally came to a stop, he fell over, gasping for breath. It was like ice skating or water skiing, he thought, exhilarated. Climbing to his feet, he dashed down the road again, going faster and faster until he slipped and went sliding madly again.
This was just what he needed sometimes, he thought. To just take off and run, get away from everything that was bothering him. It wasn’t fair that he had all these powers and he could never use them. That wasn’t something he could share with his parents though. How would they be able to understand?
Sometimes he felt like just taking off during the day and running free. To feel the wind get left behind him as he ran through the countryside. He’d sit in his chair at school and stare out the window and wonder what it would be like to do all the things he’d only dreamed about. To climb Mt. Everest in a day, and then jump off at the very peak just because he could survive the fall. Or to race a train to its destination and beat it there.
Someday I’ll be able to do all that, he promised himself. Or I’ll do it and let people say what they want. They won’t be able to stop me. I’ll just let them do what they want and not worry about what -
Lightning crashed to the ground not thirty feet away from him, startling Clark from his thoughts. He tripped and stumbled, sliding to a stop again. The storm was raging overhead more fiercely than ever. A bit frightened, he hadn’t noticed how bad it had been getting. He decided quickly that he’d had enough fun for now and had better get home. He’d been hit by lightning before, and wasn’t in much of a mood to try it again.
“I guess running down a road surrounded by trees hadn’t been too smart either,” he muttered to himself, spitting out a bit of mud. “Lucky I didn’t get shocked.” He picked himself up and started back for the tree with his books, when another burst hit the ground in the exact same spot previously. Clark jumped again, staring at the impossibility. Then a third bolt flashed from the spot. And another.
Stunned, Clark stared at it, and then he noticed something: the bolts were almost soundless. There was no thunder. That was as impossible as four bolts hitting the exact same spot one after another. Then a fifth bolt flashed and Clark realized it hadn’t come from the sky. The bolts were coming from the ground. To confirm this, another flashed upwards and then arced overhead and smashed down next to him. He jumped backwards in shock and fell to the ground again.
“Not lightning,” he hissed between his teeth. “Not lightning!” Another arc flashed from the ground and curved overhead. Clark saw it coming and rolled to the side away from it. The bolt hit the ground and exploded as three more bolts flashed upwards. He tried to get to his feet to avoid them, but the ground was still to muddy, and he slipped to his knees. One of the bolts smashed into the ground by his hand, but the other two fell on him squarely. Instead of exploding, they fastened to him like chains, circling his chest and neck. They burned like fire against his skin, making him cry out. Then suddenly he was pulled off his feet and face first into the mud.
Clark rolled onto his back and tried to pry the tendrils off him, but it was no good. It seemed like they had a death-grip on him. Slowly they started to pull him forwards. The spot in the ground they’d shot up from was now a circle of shimmering mud about six feet wide. The white arcs of energy were slowly drawing back down into it, pulling him along with them. He tried to brace his feet, but in the muddy road there was nothing to do so against. His feet scrambled and slipped against the mud, as he was pulled closer to the hole. It started to glow brighter as came nearer. Slowly the gap closed between them; first ten feet, then three feet away.
Finally throwing everything he had into it, Clark let go of the tendrils and sunk his hands into the mud, looking for purchase. His hands felt blindly in the muck as he was pulled slowly backwards. Then, amazingly, he felt something hard underneath his fingers. He latched onto it and felt himself stop right on the edge of the circle. The tendrils tightened against him neck and chest, leaving him choking for air. Still, he held on grimly. The wind whipped overhead as the storm raged on.
Then he heard it, faintly over the wind. Clark. It was just a whisper in his ear, but it sounded so familiar to him that he froze in shock. He knew that voice from somewhere.
“Is anyone there?” he bellowed, holding on for all he was worth. The tendrils tugged fiercely at him, but he fought against them, trying to pull himself away. “Can you hear me? Help me!”
Help me. It came again, echoing him. The tendrils writhed against his skin, getting tighter. One of his hands slipped and he dangled there, fighting for his breath. He clutched at the tendril’s fingers with his free hand, trying to pry them apart. He could feel his fingers slipping in the mud. Help me, it came again, the tendril’s fingers tightening. Then he realized they were fingers, and not bands of energy. Somewhere in the struggle, the tendril’s had formed into great, white arms and they were dragging him in. Like a living thing, they were dragging him in. Help me, it called out desperately. His grip slipped and he was pulled down in a rush, screaming, towards the shimmering circle. His last thought in this world, was that he could see a face in it.
Then he plunged in, and was gone.
Chapter 2
There was a rush of sound, light, and feeling, each more intense than anything he’d ever experienced before. Then it was gone and he was immersed in absolute blackness. The next thing he knew, he was choking. He sucked water into his lungs and gagged for air, waking up in a rush. Somehow, he was now underwater. The cold water bit deep into him and he struggled to the surface. He gulped air and paddled about, blinking to clear his eyes.
He was in a lake, about twenty feet from the shore. He stared about, paddling in the cold water. A small bridge extended over his head; wide enough to support one lane of travel. He swam over to the shore, and pulled himself onto the bank. There he collapsed, gasping for air. He’d never felt so drained before in his life.
For a long time he lay there, half out of the water. The sun shone down on him from the clear sky overhead, warming his skin. Finally he pulled himself up to his knees and stood up, his legs quivering. “Okay,” he said quietly, “what just happened?” A very good question he realized. And here was another, where was he? He stared around slowly, staggering again. Clark knew all the back roads in Smallville by heart, and he didn’t recognize this place. It hadn’t been the road he’d just been on, that was for sure. It didn’t go over any lake, so how had he gotten here? He stared around, and realized slowly, that he didn’t recognize the lake either. Where was he?
Numbly, he turned around and made his way up the bank on his hands and knees. Reaching the top, he heaved himself up and staggered out onto the road, staring around. The countryside around him looked familiar enough to him, but he glanced back at the lake in puzzlement. A small family of geese was bobbing around in the middle of the lake, honking at him. He brushed his wet hair out of his eyes absently and then stopped as he caught sight of his hand.
Where the tendrils had grabbed onto his wrist, his skin was a deep red, almost like it had been burned. He rubbed it gingerly, and then touched the skin on his neck, wincing. Without a mirror, there was no way of telling, but he was sure it was just as red.
“What the hell happened to me?” he gasped.
Feeling weak, Clark hobbled over to the bridge and sat down on one of the beams. For a few moments, he just rested in the sun, trying to catch his breath. Everything had happened so quickly on the road, he hadn’t had time to think about what had happened. He had just been snatched up and pulled into something, he thought, rubbing his wrists again. But by what? And why?
There’d been a face there, he thought to himself. At the end, he’d almost seen something, like he’d caught of glimpse of whatever had grabbed him. But now, he couldn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t even know if it had been human or not. But there had been something strange about it, he realized slowly. Something familiar, about the voice, I heard. But what was it?
Disquieted, he swallowed and stared around again. He glanced up at the sky, noting the lack of clouds and rain. It had been storming not five minutes ago, but now- How long had it all lasted? It looked to be the early afternoon, but beyond that, he couldn’t tell anything else.
As he stared upwards, his eyes fell on something else that gave him a shock. There was a sign over the bridge, attached to one of the poles. He read it once, and then got up slowly and walked into the middle of the road, staring up at it. “Sales Bridge, Siegel Road,” he read it again. He swallowed again and read it a third time, but it was still the same. “That’s impossible,” he breathed. Siegel road ran through Smallville and up to the interstate a few miles past their farm. His father had taught him how to drive on it. He’d run down it nearly everyday to get to school and town. And in all that time, there had never been a bridge on it.
As he stared overhead, a car appeared over the horizon. Clark stood there, stunned, still looking at the sign. The driver was forced to stop the car in front of him and lean on the horn. “Get out of the road,” he yelled, leaning out the window. Jumping slightly, Clark moved to the side quickly.
“Sorry,” he called out. The man shook his head at him and started to drive off. “Um… excuse me? Is that sign right?” he asked, pointing, before he could leave.
“Of course it is,” he leaned out again. He looked to be about sixty, with a thick gray moustache. Noting Clark’s confused look, he asked, “Something wrong?”
“I think you could say that,” he muttered. The old man raised his eyebrows. He seemed to take in Clark’s still wet clothes and disheveled appearance. “I kinda fell of the bridge,” he said quickly, trying to laugh it off. “Um… you wouldn’t really know where this road goes, would you?” he asked
“You lost or something?”
“New in town,” he said quickly. “Very new.”
The old man grunted loudly and stared at him a moment longer. Then he shrugged. “Well, if you’re looking for a ride, I might be able to help you,” he offered. He gestured to the back of the truck with his head. “I’ll take you as far as my farm. It’s about a half a mile into town from there.”
“Thanks.” Wherever he was, getting into town sounded like as good a plan as any. He climbed over the dusty railing of the car and stepped into the back. Then he paused, thinking of something. He leaned over the side to talk to the old man. “’Town’ is Smallville, right? That’s where we’re going?” he demanded.
The old man turned around in his seat to give him a brief look. “You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you boy?” he asked carefully. “I don’t care much for the corps, but I’m not gonna stick my neck out.”
Corps? I must have heard him wrong, Clark thought. “No, I’m just… a bit lost. I don’t really know where I am.” The old man searched his face and then turned back. He reached into his glove box and handed it back to Clark. It was an old road map.
“Knock yourself out,” the old man said lightly. “My name’s Earl Logan if you’re curious.”
“Clark Kent.” He picked up the map eagerly and opened it up. It was of Smallville all right, but not the Smallville he remembered. Earl started driving back down the road as Clark sat in the back of the pickup, poring over the piece of paper.
It was wrong, he thought at first. The map had to be wrong. He almost started to ask Earl whether he’d given him the right map, but he caught himself. The old man was suspicious enough about him as it was. Some of the roads and other features, he recognized, but the rest of it might have been of some different town all together. Streets were different, buildings were marked here that Clark knew had been closed down for years. There was the Ross Corn factory, and the old Ironworks. And there was Potter’s…
He traced Siegel Road’s path out for a moment and then turned around. “Are we near Potter’s field?” he called out.
“We’re driving through it,” Earl called back, not bothering to turn around. Clark looked up, his mouth open in amazement.
“It can’t be…” he breathed out. Potter’s field, at least the one he knew, was a barren stretch of soil, rendered barren by the meteor crash. It had been abandoned for as long as Clark could remember. But as he looked out over the land, all he could see was rolling fields of corn. The wind rustled through the stalks and passed by him. It wasn’t possible.
“What happened to this place?” he asked aloud. “The meteor shower was supposed to have hit this…” He was cut off as the truck stopped abruptly. Earl cut off the engine and stepped out the cab, staring up at him petulantly.
“What’s this about the meteor shower?” he grated at him.
“There was supposed to have been a big hit here,” he said, his eyes going back to the field. “This is… I mean, it’s supposed to be all barren.”
“Like hell there was. Meteor’s didn’t come close to here.” He paused and craned his neck down at Clark, eyeing him fiercely. “Say, you aren’t one of those alien freaks, are you?” Clark flinched and tore his eyes off the field. Alien freaks? How could he-
Earl spit into the dirt and gave him a hard look. “You all are always digging in my fields, looking for samples and spreading around your crazy stories. Sometimes I’m even glad we’ve got the Luthor Corps to keep you all away,” he snarled.
“But there was a strike…”
“That’s all you people ever want to talk about,” he went on, ignoring Clark. “That or aliens coming down with the blasted things. Why don’t you go bother someone else? I wasn’t even living here on Red Tuesday.”
If Clark was confused before, he was positively stunned now. It was like his ears weren’t working right. He couldn’t be hearing this, could he?
“I don’t understand,” he managed to blurt out, “what’s this about aliens?” Earl grunted and started to get back in the truck. “No please! Just tell me what you mean!” It was apparently the wrong thing to say.
“That’s it,” he remarked and turned back. “Out of the truck. I’m not taking you any further. Find your own way into town.” Clark numbly climbed out of the back, still trying to understand what was going on. First that strange lighting shower, and then all the other weirdness, and now this?
The old man climbed back into the truck and slammed the door shut. “And I don’t want to see you on my lands, you hear me? Dig anywhere else you want, but don’t go bothering me again!” He paused and then leaned over in the truck cab. “Here,” he said, removing something from the glove box. “If you’re so interested in the damn things, have one, just leave me be!” He tossed something at Clark as he drove off. Clark caught it instinctually, still staring at the receding car. Then he glanced down at and promptly dropped it and jumped back. Earl had tossed him a chunk of green stone about the size of a baseball. It was a meteor rock.
Clark stared at it like it might bite for a moment, but then he realized something. He raised the hand he’d caught it with and turned it over. There was none of the tell-tale reaction he usually experienced when he got near even a tiny meteor fragment. A rock that size should have had him on his knees in seconds, but he hardly felt a thing. Gingerly, he bent down and picked it up, still waiting for the radiation to hit him, but nothing happened.
“What the hell?” he muttered, turning it over in his hands. It looked like a chunk of the meteor, but where was the radiation? He studied it closer, wishing he had a microscope handy. Then again, he reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to tell if it was for real or not even if he had one. He’d never studied the meteor stones that closely before, preferring to stay far away from them.
While he was staring at it, he suddenly heard a high pitched scream. He cocked his ears, listening. It came again and he pinpointed it. It was a female, young, probably around his age. He shoved the stone into his jacket pocket and took off running, following the sound. It had come from the old iron works, not too far off the road. The ‘new’ ironworks, he had to remind himself as he saw it. It wasn’t the run down, husk he remembered, but a functioning building now. There was a chain link fence surrounding the property and inside Clark could see rows of cars and trucks, all of them dirty and broken down.
It must be some sort of junkyard now, he realized. Then he heard the scream again, and with it, the harsh barking of dogs. He came to a halt as he saw a girl come running through one of the aisles of junkers, clutching something to her chest. She was making for the fence, but hot on her heels were four large, angry dogs. She wasn’t going to make it, he thought, seeing how close the dogs were.
Clark ran up to the edge of the fence and vaulted himself over easily. He landed and motioned to the girl, holding his hands out. She clutched something to her chest tighter and ran faster. Her long blonde hair was whipping behind her fiercely as the dogs nipped at the ends of her leather jacket. Pouring on the speed, she managed to reach him with seconds to spare. He grabbed her and practically threw her over the fence and to safety. He saw her clear the edge and drop roughly to the grass on the other side. As Clark started to climb up after her, one of the dogs latched onto his leg tightly. Frowning, he shook him off as gently as he could and saw the dog drop off with a yelp of surprise. He climbed the rest of the way up and jumped down to the other side of the fence.
“There you go,” he said, landing easily. “Lucky I came along.” The girl groaned and picked herself off the ground, still cradling the box.
“God, thank you so much,” she said, dusting herself off. “The last thing I needed was to wind up as Alpo for those mutts.” There was something about her voice that was oddly familiar. Her jeans were torn and a bit dirty from the run, but they looked like they’d been expensive once. She was about a foot shorter than him, but her figure was definitely adult. Clark caught himself staring at her tight t-shirt and tore his eyes away.
“You should probably be a little bit more careful then,” he said as she straightened up. “I mean, that probably wasn’t the safest place to…” he stopped as he got a better look at her. She had a very pretty face, with a kind of pert, spunky look to it. She brushed out her long hair and gave him a one sided smile that he knew well. For what seemed the fifth time today, Clark was speechless.
“So what’s your name, handsome?” Chloe Sullivan asked him with a smile.
Chapter 3
It was like someone had unplugged Clark’s brain. He wasn’t capable of rational thought. All he could do was stare at the girl in front of him, looking her up and down and refusing to accept what he saw. It was not Chloe Sullivan, it couldn’t be. It was impossible.
“So, you have a name?” she asked finally, tilting her head in a way that sent a shudder of familiarity through him. If this person wasn’t Chloe, she certainly looked like her. She had the same smile, the same face, the hair was longer, but it was the same vibrant gold he remembered. There was the same sparkle in her eyes. She smiled a little as she waited for him to speak.
“Cl… Clark,” he managed to choke out finally.
“Is that with one cluck or two?” she remarked. She waited for him to laugh and then shrugged when nothing was forthcoming. “So, I guess they only make them big and pretty where you come from, not too swift on the uptake. Pity.” She turned around, her hair whipping about behind her. “Thanks again for the save,” she called back as she started off.
He watched her leave for a moment before his brain kicked back into gear. “Wait a minute,” he called, running up to her. He caught her arm to pull her back.
She glared down at his hand and then looked up at him. “You want to keep that?” she asked him acidly. He jerked his hand back and she nodded.
“Sorry, I just wanted to talk to you,” he said.
“Better ways to ask a girl,” she remarked.
He blinked and then frowned a little. “Like saving your life?” he asked her quickly. She considered that and then smiled at him.
“I’m all ears,” she told him. Chloe shifted around the metal box she was holding and waited.
“Okay,” he said, trying to find a way to start. The best way he decided, was to be blunt. “You don’t know me right?” he asked her.
She looked at him closely and then shrugged. “Sorry, but no. Should I?”
“But that’s,” he said, “that’s impossible…”
“Oh no. Let me guess,” she broke in, giving him a wry look. “We shared something very special once, right? We were soulmates or something? Probably met at a party or something and we just clicked, huh? Shared something wild and passionate that changed your life forever, is that your version? Well, bottom line, if we did, I can’t remember, and if I can’t remember, it probably wasn’t worth it in the first place.” Clark took a step back, shocked.
“Sorry to ruin your big fantasy, buddy, but that’s life,” she tossed off. On the other side of the fence they heard a door swing open loudly. The dogs picked up their barking on cue. Chloe bit her lip and hugged the box tighter to her chest.
“Geez, don’t get a break around here,” she yelled, and grabbed his arm. “Run!” she called out and tugged him after her. They took off across the road and through the fields. Clark could only follow after her, thoroughly confused.
Just where had he wound up that this was Chloe Sullivan? Was this some sort of joke? Or a dream? He didn’t remember falling asleep, all he remembered was the strange lighting shower and being pulled into some sort of…
“Portal,” he breathed out. They reached the edge of the forest and stopped, Chloe bending over and resting on her knees, puffing. It must have been a portal, Clark thought, standing there. There was no other way he could explain it. He wasn’t in Smallville anymore, not his Smallville anyway.
Chloe sat down on the ground and put the metal box on her lap. “I hate running,” she complained. “Damn dogs.” She started to fiddle with the box on her lap. Frowning, she glanced at him. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. She shrugged and went back to studying the box. Pulling out a pin, she started to pick the lock.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly, frowning.
“Checking it for defects,” she remarked. The lock sprang open with a click and she pulled it off. “Look, there’s one now.” She tossed it over her shoulder and opened the box. It was partly full of tens and twenties. To Clark’s unbelieving eyes, Chloe scooped them up and started to grin.
“You’re stealing!” She shushed him and motioned for him to keep his voice down. “What are you doing with that?” he demanded, much more softly.
“Don’t preach to me,” she warned him, pocketing the money. “I appreciate the help with the dogs and all, but there’s a limit to how much I owe you.”
“You have to return that, Chloe. I’m serious, you could go to jail for something like that."
She smirked at him and got up, kicking the empty box aside as she did. “Yeah, like my uncle would let that happen. And I don’t recall telling you my name,” she turned back to him.
“I… uh…” he stuttered, trying to think of an answer.
“Oh right, the connection thing,” she shook her head. “God, I’m glad I don’t remember you,” she told him and started to walk off.
“You have to return that money, Chloe!” he told her, running after her.
“What do you care?”
“I care because I don’t want to see you wind up in trouble,” he told her, a little exasperated.
“That’s only if you get caught,” she smirked at him. “And stop following me! It’s not that I don’t appreciate the save back there, but it’s getting a little creepy now.” She pointed at his muddy clothes. “Besides, you look like you just fell in a river.”
“Lake actually,” he admitted.
“Did you hit your head on the bottom, ‘cause that would explain a lot.” She tried to walk a little faster, but he kept up right behind her. They crossed over the fields and onto a tiny dirt road. Chloe tucked the wad of money into her jacket and started walking nonchalantly as Clark followed after her. She glanced back at him quickly and started walking even faster. He matched her speed easily, lengthening his stride. Finally, she turned around and stared at him, incredulous. “God, are you slow? Go. Away. I don’t want you near me.”
“Look if I had any other choice I would,” he said in a rush. “I just got here and you’re you, but you’re not and neither is anything else and it’s all really confusing right now.”
“Look,” she said, leaning in close to him, “even on my best day, I wouldn’t care enough to talk you down from this. So my suggestion is to turn around, go back to that lake you fell in before, and try again. Maybe you’ll get it right and drown this time.” Clark blinked in response, and then a black pickup appeared at the end of the road. Chloe glanced at it quickly and then sighed, shaking her head. “And now this day is perfect,” she said, dryly.
The truck pulled up next to them and a young man who looked vaguely familiar to Clark leaned out of the driver’s side window, smiling at them, or more precisely at Chloe. He had dirty blond hair cut short and had a flat ugly face. “Chloe,” he said lightly, leering down at her. “What brings you out here?”
“Open road, Sean” she shrugged, giving him a fake little smile. “Not breaking any laws going for a walk, am I?”
“I don’t know about that, but I guess you’d be the expert.” She smiled a little broader at that, then looked away, muttering under her breath. Sean looked over at Clark, as if seeing him for the first time and gave him an appraising glance. “He always look like that, or did I catch you two at a bad time?” he asked, nodding at Clark’s clothes. Clark glanced down at himself, shifting his weight uncomfortably. Looking back up, he noticed that Sean was wearing a Smallville High Football jacket and something finally clicked in his head.
“Sean Kelvin?” he blurted out. Sean and Chloe stared at him.
“Yeah,” he nodded slowly.
“But- But you died,” Clark said, bewildered. “You froze in the lake.”
Now they were really staring at him. “Excuse me?” Sean asked.
“Forget about him,” Chloe remarked. She stepped in front of Clark and stared up at Sean. “Look, I need to get into town. Can you just give me a ride or something?”
“He coming too?” He nodded over her shoulder to Clark.
“In every sense of the words ‘God, no’,” she replied.
“Good,” he said shortly, giving Clark a worried look. “Hop in.” He opened the passenger door and scooted back to the driver’s seat.
“Well,” Chloe said, turning back to Clark, “it’s been… “ she searched for a word for a moment and then just smiled and shrugged at him. “See ya.”
“Wait a minute,” he said quickly. “You’re just leaving?”
“And now you catch on quick,” she rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry if your lost or something, but I don’t see how I’m supposed to help you with any of this. So see ya…” she floundered for a name.
“Clark,” he said quickly. “Clark Kent, I’ve been your best friend for like three years now. You have to remember!” She took a step back and Sean opened the driver door, staring down at them.
“Chloe?” he asked quickly, giving Clark a hard look.
She ignored him for the moment and stared at Clark intently. “For the last time,” she said quietly to him, “I don’t know you, and I don’t even think I want to know you. Now are you going to let me go or are we going to have a problem here.”
He stared at her for a moment and then shook his head, backing off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, whatever,” she snapped. She hurried around the truck and climbed in, slamming the door behind her. Clark stood there, blinking as they drove off, the tires kicking some of the dirt back towards him. He watched it disappear down the road and then looked around at the fields and woods around him. Then he pulled the meteor rock out of his jacket pocket and held it up, giving it a bewildered look.
“Where the hell am I?” he breathed out, looking back down the road again.
Chapter 4
With nothing else left for him to do, Clark followed Sean’s truck into town, staying far enough behind them to keep from behind seen. And the nearer they got to the town, the more he saw what else was now different in Smallville. Most of the farms and homes that he remembered on the outskirts of town were now abandoned or bulldozed over. A few of the fields had been replaced by crummy looking housing projects and trailer yards. He could have counted on one hand the number of working fields left.
There were also a number of new Luthorcorp buildings that Clark didn’t remember. Shipping plants, office buildings, factories, they were all scattered around the outskirts of town. They even passed what suspiciously looked like a smaller version of a nuclear power plant, but Clark couldn’t be certain. How had all of this happened, he wondered. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of the answer.
Finally, they came to the edge of the main town and Clark had to slow down quickly, to keep from behind seen. He doubted that things had changed that much where a teenager moving at super-human speed wouldn’t draw a notice or two. He hurried down the street, watching Sean’s truck pull to a stop at a light. Ducking into an alley, he glanced out quickly to see if they’d moved on yet. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to follow them now that he couldn’t keep up anymore.
“Hey, you got a buck?” a rough voice asked him, making him jump. Clark turned around quickly, staring downwards. A man was lying in the alley, wrapped up in torn cardboard and old newspaper. He stared up at Clark with a slightly off-center gaze. “Anything, man?” he asked again.
“Here,” he said, a little put off, as he pulled out his wallet. He mechanically pulled out a few bucks and handed it to the man.
He took it eagerly. “Bless you, son.” He stared at the money, smiling a little and tucked it away inside his stained shirt. Clark moved away from him slowly, backing out of the alley, more than a little disquieted.
He’d never seen a homeless person in Smallville before. That sort of thing didn’t happen here. He’d seen them in Metropolis, yes, but not in Smallville. Glancing down at his feet, he saw that the sidewalk was covered with cigarette buts and other pieces of garbage. There was a trashcan not five feet from him that was dented in and overflowing. Then he looked around him, as if for the first time, and saw the grubby buildings and spray-painted walls of the town. He saw the people hurrying past him with their heads down, not making eye-contact. The people he remembered had taken pride in keeping their city clean and hadn’t looked so beaten down. What had happened here?
The sound of a car door slamming shut brought him back as he turned and saw Chloe climbing out of the truck. He ducked quickly back into the alley before she could see him and then stared around the corner, watching her carefully. She said a few more things to Sean and then walked away. The truck pulled into traffic and made a turn as the light changed. Clark watched it drive off and then focused back on Chloe, who was now walking down the street, away from him.
He carefully followed after her, staying far behind her and trying to keep out of sight. It was hard work, to stay focused on her as passed by so many strange and puzzling things. He followed her by a wall plastered with posters and flyers for Luthorcorp. All he could do was glance at them quickly, picking up such phrases as First in the Nation: By Demand!, Put Your Faith in The People Behind the Power, and WLIO: Bringing You the Best in Entertainment and News. Even more puzzling was one that said Lionel Luthor: the Man Whose Hand Guides the Nation. He glanced at Chloe’s receding figure and then back at the posters, sorely tempted to turn around and head back, but instead he hurried after her. Maybe she’d able to explain some of this, if he could get her to talk to him that was.
He followed Chloe past the Beanery, which surprisingly enough looked the same as it always had, and then got another shock for a moment as he glanced into the old antique shop his mother had used to frequent before the woman who owned it had died. Now it looked like it hadn’t been closed a day. Then he saw a girl about his age carry an old chair out from the back of the shop and he stopped dead in his tracks. Someone bumped into him roughly from behind and he heard something drop to the ground, but he hardly noticed. “Tina Greer?” he said as he stared inside.
“Watch where you’re going,” someone said and Clark turned around, startled. A woman was bending down behind him, picking up groceries and looking at him angrily.
“Sorry about that,” he said quickly, taking one last glance inside the shop. Then he bent quickly and started to gather her things up. He looked over his shoulder quickly to see where Chloe was, but couldn’t find her in the crowd. “Sorry,” he said again, not looking as he shoved the food in the woman’s bag.
“Just remember that next time,” she said quickly. She started to say something more when she suddenly stopped and stared at his face, her eyes growing wide. Clark missed her look as he glanced around again for Chloe.
“I will, I promise,” he said lightly. Then he seemed to notice her silence and turned around, frowning at her. She was still staring at him, her fingers white as she clutched the edge of her bag. “Is everything okay?” he asked her slowly. The woman fell over roughly and started to back away from him on all fours. He stared after her, his mouth open. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t believe this!” Chloe’s voice rang out. Clark turned around quickly to see her standing just behind him with her hands on her hips. She looked ready to explode. “How the hell did you even follow me here in the first place?” she snapped at him.
Behind him, Clark heard a sudden scuffling and he turned to see the older woman running away. She’d even left her groceries behind. He watched her dash around the corner and out of sight, utterly bewildered. “Well, I’m waiting,” Chloe said impatiently.
Turning back to Chloe, he stuttered for a moment, thinking. “I caught a ride into town after you left. I didn’t even know you were in front of me.”
“Okay, fair enough. You just caught a ride.” She repeated angrily, staring at him. Chloe nodded to herself and looked down the street in either direction. There was no one near them now. “So what way are you going now?”
“I… uh, don’t really know,” he hesitated, knowing he was trapped now. “That way,” he pointed down the street. Before he was even done speaking, Chloe was walking past him in the opposite direction. “Or maybe not,” he muttered, getting up to follow after her.
“Guess you’re not that good with directions, huh?” she called back to him, walking faster now.
“I just need to talk to you for a minute. C’mon, Chloe!”
She turned around, glaring at him. “How many different ways can I say it? NO! And stop saying that like you know me.”
“I do know you, or something like that,” he started, but she rolled her eyes and started walking away again. “Okay, how about this then: you’re dream is to become a newspaper reporter,” he said, catching up to her again. “How could I have known that unless I knew you?”
“Pretty easily since you’re wrong: I haven’t narrowed it down or anything but I was leaning towards groupie or… well, I haven’t thought of something else though, but I’m gonna,” she said in a rush. Then she frowned and looked down at herself for a moment. “And what about me suggests ‘newspaper reporter’ to you anyways?” she gestured with her hands.
“Okay… So maybe you’re not into newspaper reporting now, but you will be,” he promised her. “Alright, I know how bad that sounds,” he admitted as he caught her look. She stared at him flatly and he went back to racking his brain to find something else.
“Your father works for Luthorcorp,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t respond. “Your favorite color is pink. You have a fear of needles. Oh, you don’t eat tomatoes but you love ketchup!”
“How did you know-“ she started and then she recovered quickly. “Okay, maybe you do know a bit about me,” she said, nodding slightly. Then she smiled snidely at him and cocked her head. “Congratulations, you’re a stalker.” She turned around again and walked off.
“The morning your mother left, you came downstairs and found your dad making some eggs for you.” She stopped, frozen in place. “He’d burnt them, but you ate them anyways as he told you what happened. That was the first time he’d ever made you breakfast.” Chloe turned around slowly, her mouth slightly open. Then her face darkened and she stormed back over to him. Rearing back, she slapped him hard across the face. Clark turned his face as she hit him, absorbing the blow.
“Never say anything else about my mother,” she hissed at him. “You don’t have the right. You didn’t know her and you sure as hell don’t know me.”
He nodded slightly, seeing the look on her face. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “I wouldn’t have if-“ She glared at him, clearly not believing him. “I just need to talk to you, please. I don’t have anyone else here.”
“Fine then,” she said at last. Then her eyes widened and she cried out, “And ****!” Wincing, she held up her hand, which was swiftly turning beet red. She held it tightly by the wrist, her eyes screwed shut. “Ow, ow, ow…”
“Oh, geez, sorry!” Clark looked around swiftly. “Let’s get you some ice. The Talon would be the closest place.” He took her bye the shoulders and started to guide her down the street. Chloe shrugged off his help irritably, walking on her own.
“Don’t bother,” she said angrily. She walked over to a table outside a shop where someone had set down a Styrofoam cup down. Picking it up with one hand, she popped the lid off slightly and poured what was left in it on the sidewalk, keeping the lid in the way of the ice inside. Clark blinked, but didn’t say anything, glancing inside the shop nervously to see if anyone had noticed them. She grabbed a napkin from the table and poured the ice into it. Wrapping it around her swollen hand, she started to leave, nodding for him to come with her.
“What’s your name, again?” she asked, fussing with the napkin.
“Clark Kent,” he said, catching up to her. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Forget about it. So before I broke my hand across your face, what did you want to ask?” she asked shortly, clearly still angry at him.
He fell into step behind her. “Everything,” he shook his head, a little desperate.
“You’re going to have to get more specific than that.”
“Okay, how about that,” he said, spotting a Luthorcorp poster on the wall. It was the same one he’d seen earlier. Lionel Luthor, looking both paternal and respectable, stared back at them. “What’s with all the Luthorcorp stuff? I don’t remember anything like this. If there should be anything up it should be Lexcorp.”
“Luthorcorp,” she corrected him.
“Lexcorp,” he stressed it. She stared back at him, still confused, and shrugged. He sighed and shook his head. “Nevermind. Just tell me what Lionel Luthor is doing on a poster.”
Chloe glanced at the poster and smiled lightly. She reached out and toyed with the edge of the poster. “Luthorcorp puts those up everywhere. I guess they think if they wallpaper the town with them, maybe it’ll make everyone forget about all the crap they cause.” She sniffed and tore it off the wall in one motion, letting it fall to the ground. “Besides, it’s not like anyone is going to stop them. They own the wall, they own the building; hell, they probably own the street we’re walking on. They can advertise if they want.”
“But how?” He turned around and stared at her. “Luthorcorp doesn’t own anything in Smallville. They used to run the fertilizer plant, but that was bought by Lex.”
“Lex?” she asked. “You mean Lex Luthor? He doesn’t own anything; it’s all his dad’s. And Luthorcorp owns pretty much everything here. Here and everywhere else in the country.”
He absorbed this quietly, puzzling it over. Chloe continued to stare at him, looking confused. “You had to have known about this. It’s not like its recent news or anything.”
“Not to everyone,” he muttered. She shrugged and adjusted the icepack on her hand, not saying anything. He stared down the street, his breath hissing out between his teeth. Then his eyes fell on something and he stepped past her, gaping.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Tell me about that,” he said in a hushed voice. She craned her head, looking. “The Talon,” he said, pointing.
The bright and warm place he’d spent so many afternoons in was gone. Now, the Talon was a boarded up old husk. The marquee overhead was falling to pieces and had been propped up with a length of metal pipe. Peeling movie posters were taped to the doors, all for movies that were a few years old. Clark felt a cold shiver as he stared in the broken, dingy windows. He’d never seen it look this bad, even before Lana had renovated the building from a failing movie theater to a coffee shop. He walked across the street blindly, staring at the boarded up wreck. A car screeched around him, narrowly missing him. Clark didn’t even notice at all.
Chloe ran after him, dodging cars in the street as she crossed to his side. “What was that about?” she yelled. “You could’ve gotten killed!”
“What happened here?” he demanded, ignoring her question completely. “This place shouldn’t be a wreck, Lana fixed it up! What’s going on?” She stared from him to the Talon. Grabbing her arms he asked again, “Chloe, what happened?”
“Let go of me!” she yelled back at him, fighting him. Blinking, he released her and stepped back quickly. She glared back at him, rubbing her arms. He glanced around as people nearby stared accusingly.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said in a rush. “I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, well, I don’t really care,” she snapped back. “I had you pegged for a psycho from the start and so far you haven’t done anything to make me think differently. And speaking of which, so what if things are different than you remember? Everything else seems perfectly normal to me and everybody else, so did you ever think it was just you? What if you’re the one who’s crazy, huh? You think of that?”
“I’m not crazy,” he told her quietly.
“Yeah? Then I guess it’s just everyone else, huh?”
Turning angrily, she stormed off across the street. Clark hesitated and glanced back at the Talon. Then he set his chin and started after her. She heard him coming and turned around, her face set, but her eyes are little worried.
“If you don’t turn around and walk away right now,” she warned him, “I’m gonna scream bloody murder until the cops come.”
“With that money in your jacket?” he asked quietly. He reached into his pocket and she flinched, but he only pulled out his wallet. Opening it, he took out a picture tucked inside and held it out to her. “This morning I woke up and went to school with all my friends. One of them gave me this, a picture of all of us at the Talon, at its reopening.” She stared at him and then at the photo. “Look at the sign in the window,” he urged her, “look at the girl in the photo. It’s you, or the Chloe Sullivan I know.”
With trembling fingers, she took the photo and stared at it. “How…” she breathed out. She looked up at him and then at the Talon.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “One minute I was running home and the next I was pulled here.” She started to shake her head fiercely and he bent down, glancing around them as people gave them strange looks. “I know this is a lot to believe,” he said quietly, “but you have to trust me. I don’t know where I am or how I got here, but I do know who you are. You’re my friend. You have to help me.”
She stared up at him in shock. Blinking, she swallowed and then licked her lips, glancing at the picture again. “This is a trick,” she stammered. “It has to be.”
Before he could say anything, they were distracted abruptly as two large trucks screeched to a halt at the end of the street. Then almost simultaneously, another two pulled up at the opposite end, effectively sealing off the block. As soon as they were stopped, armed soldiers poured out from them, all wearing black and gray uniforms. Unconsciously, Clark grabbed Chloe and hurried her off the street and away from the soldiers, towards the Talon. Everyone else on the sidewalk seemed to have the same idea. In moments, a crowd of about ten people had gathered together around them, staring about fearfully.
“What’s happening?” someone asked fearfully, but no one had any idea. A woman began to moan quietly, staring at the troops.
Clark leaned down towards Chloe and gave her a quick look. “What’s going on?” he asked, gesturing to the troops. She didn’t answer.
A man in his car leaned on his horn fiercely at the massed soldiers in front of him, motioning them to move aside. Someone barked a command and they raised their guns to shoulder level, readying them. His horn died out slowly as he gaped at them. Then fearfully, he scrambled out of his car and dashed to the other side of the street, trying to get away from them. The soldiers were carrying strange, bulky guns, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a science fiction movie. There was a loud, collective hum as the soldiers flicked something on the guns on, arming them. Then on some order they leveled them at the crowd.
Someone started to shriek in fear as everyone panicked. A few people took off running, but turned back because there was no where to go. The street was sealed off at both ends by a wall of guns. Then he felt a sudden grip on his wrist and he looked down into Chloe’s fearful eyes.
“Run,” she said quietly. “Run!”
One of the soldiers boomed into a mike, “On the ground now! We have you surrounded. Step out of the crowd and no one gets hurt!”
“What?” he asked, staring down at Chloe.
“It’s the Luthor Corps!” she hissed at him. “Just get out of here!”
“What about you?”
“This isn’t the time to be noble, you don’t know these guys!”
“On the ground!” the soldier yelled again, waving his gun. Some people in the crowd started to kneel down, looking around nervously. As they did, one of the soldiers had an unobstructed view of Clark.
“He’s got a hostage!” he called. Almost in the same breath someone gave the order.
“Open fire!”
Chapter 5
In one motion, the soldiers leveled their guns and opened fire on the crowd. Bright, green pulses of light blasted out of the high tech weapons, streaking through the air towards them. People fell as the charges burned through them instantaneously. The blasts tore up the concrete and shattered the marquee over head. Sparks rained down as the old, but still hot, electrical lines inside it were ruptured. A car parked in front of the Talon was perforated in moments. No one but Clark had a chance to move before they were cut down.
Just as the cry came to fire, Clark had pivoted and grabbed Chloe around the waist. As roughly as he dared, he’d hurled her through the boarded up windows of the Talon, hoping she’d be able to find some cover inside. Then the pulses struck him from behind, knocking him to his knees.
Clark had been shot before and knew what the punch of a bullet felt like. This was much worse. He gritted his teeth as he felt the skin on his back burn. Then he felt the familiar kick of nausea in his stomach and realized the green color of the pulses hadn’t been a coincidence. The meteor rocks were powering those guns, whatever they were.
Gasping for breath, he crawled behind the wreck of a car. The shock was quickly fading from him and he was already starting to recover. At least the effect of the meteor rocks wasn’t very strong, he thought grimly. One of the pulses punched a hole in the car a few feet from his head. But they didn’t have to be, he reasoned, not when they had so many of them.
He stared suddenly at the bodies lying around him. A woman looked back him vacantly, part of her neck sheared away by a blast. His stomach heaving, he looked away as another salvo struck the car. How could they open fire on the crowd like that? Who the hell were these people?
“Clark!” he heard Chloe call from inside.
At least she was okay so far, he thought. “Get down,” he yelled as another salvo tore the door to the Talon off its hinges. He grimaced and then stared through the car. The soldiers were advancing on the theater in pairs, weapons ready. He had to find someway to keep them back. Glancing around, he finally settled on the car itself. Reaching underneath it, he felt around quickly till his fingers touched the fuel line. Then with one jerking motion, he tore it open.
“Hope they get the message,” he muttered as he turned and braced his feet against the car frame. Clark kicked out and sent the car tumbling end over end into the street. The soldiers scattered as the car came to a screeching stop on its side. The ones furthest back shouted as they spotted him and started to raise their weapons. Too late, he thought and he focused his heat vision at the ruptured fuel line.
The car went up in a fireball, the explosion’s shockwave sending the massed soldier’s flying. Not waiting to see who was left standing, Clark dashed through the ruined doors of the Talon, destroying what was left of the frame. A few random shots smashed into the wood around him, but none came very close.
“What happened?” Chloe called out to him. She was huddled behind an overturned sofa in the remains of the lobby. Clark jumped over the ratty furniture and landed next to her. “I told you to run!” She clutched at his jacket.
“If I did that you’d be dead right now,” he hissed at her.
“My uncle’s a general,” she told him. “He works with Luthorcorp. They wouldn’t shoot me.”
“They didn’t care about the people out there,” he snapped. “Why should they start with you?”
She glanced towards the door and her face went pale. “You should have run,” she moaned. “You just should have run.”
Clark looked back suddenly as he heard the soldiers start to regroup. They’d be ready to storm the building in minutes. “We have to get out of here,” he told Chloe quickly. Taking her hand he dragged her up and towards the back of the lobby. “There’s a back door here to the alley way,” he said. “If we follow that, we’ll come out down the…” he stopped suddenly, brought up short at a mass of rubble. There wasn’t a doorway in sight.
“I guess Lana put that back way in when they rebuilt,” he muttered to himself. The soldiers were getting louder outside. Frowning, he stared around with his x-ray vision, looking for an opening they could get through.
“What now?” Chloe said. “How do we get through?”
Clark stopped and then stared downwards. “We don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Bending down, Clark clenched his fist and then punched it through the cement floor. Chloe leapt back in shock as he pulled it out and then punched again, widening the hole he’d made. Finally, he stood up and kicked at the edges until it was wide enough for them to slip through. “There’s a sewer underneath that’s wide enough for us both to get through,” he said, staring down the hole. “I don’t know where it leads to, but it’s our only bet.” She just stood there, mutely staring at him.
Finally she managed to choke some words out. “How… how… did you…”
“We don’t have time, Chloe.” He took her hands and led her to the edge of the pit. “Trust me, I won’t let anything happen to you, okay?” She stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Good,” he smiled at her. Then he pushed her over the edge.
“Oh, you son of a-“ she yelled as she disappeared down the hole.
“Sorry, Chloe,” he muttered, turning around towards the door. The soldiers were right outside the Talon now. One of them smashed in one of the windows and started to fire inside. Clark focused his heat vision on the wooden door frame and the ceiling above the door. In a moment, they burst into flame, sending the troops scurrying back once more. That would only buy them a few more moments, he realized, so they’d have to make the most of them. He turned back to the hole and jumped down through it.
He landed in knee deep sludge, brackish water, and who knows what else. He gritted his teeth as he felt something bump against his knee and float away. There was enough dim light from the hole above his head to let him see a few feet in front of his face, but that was all. Not that he wanted to see too clearly in here, he reasoned.
“You bastard!” Chloe yelled at him from a few feet away. She slogged through the water and shoved him. “This is your plan! This!”
“It beats getting shot up there,” he pointed out.
“Not when our other option is getting shot down here, it doesn’t.” He gave her a look and she switched gears. “But I’m all up for running now.”
“Glad to hear it.” He took her hand and started to slog quickly through the muck.
“How did you do that back there?” Chloe asked him. “You punched through the floor like it was nothing. I’ve never seen anyone do that.”
“Short explanation: I’m not from around here,” he said tersely.
“You already told me that,” she sniffed.
“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” he yelled as they ran down the sewer tunnels.
The soldiers were swift and efficient. The wounded were carried out of harms way and swiftly bandaged up. Three of the soldiers broke out the mobile extinguishers and made quick work of the still burning car. The rest kept their guns trained at the Talon. The front door of the theater was a burning wreck, so they were forced to keep their distance for the time being.
“Get that fire out now,” their commander shouted, waving at the three soldiers battling the blaze. On the outside, she might have seemed cool and in control, but inside she was cursing herself roundly. There was no excuse for this. They were highly trained, motivated, had the best technology money could buy, and they had just botched things like amateurs. Damnit, they’d drilled for just this sort of situation and they’d still failed. She felt like screaming at something, but she did not. Instead, she keyed in her helmet radio with a touch of her fingers and looked skyward as an army issue helicopter roared overhead.
“Do you have visual?” she shouted into her comm.
“Nothing yet,” came the reply. “Switching over to infrared.” She waited tersely, staring at the blaze. He was so close now, she thought.
“Snipers, where are you? Any sign of the target?” she barked into the radio, growing impatient with the chopper.
“We’ve got two on the courthouse roof and another a block down,” one of her men radioed in. “So far, nada.”
“If you get a shot, go for the wound,” she reminded them. “Make it painful, we’ve seen how fast he can be.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“We’ve got something,” the chopper radioed back. “On the infrared; two signals. Heading southward from the Talon.”
“Snipers!” she yelled.
“We’ve got nothing!” they yelled back. “They’re not there!”
Snarling, she started towards the Talon doors. “Come on,” she barked at her men.
“What about the wall?” another shouted, gesturing at the Talon. “Shouldn’t we put that out first.”
In one motion, she drew out a hand gun and fired shot after shot into the top of the burning doorway. The gun wasn’t one of the special Luthorcorp models, designed with suppressing the alien in mind, but instead an old fashioned, fifty-caliber magnum. The high caliber bullets tore the door frame and upper wall to pieces. As it collapsed, the flames were buried under a pile of rubble and plaster.
“It’s out,” she told them, reloading the gun. Snapping the clip in, she took the point, leading them into the abandoned theater. Climbing over what was left of the doorway, she paused, scanning the room. Her men filed in around her, guns ready.
One of her men noticed her standing there, and nodded at her. “You okay?” he asked quietly.
“Fine,” she snapped out of her reverie. “You still following them?” she asked into the radio.
“Affirmative. Still heading south. They must be in the sewers; I can’t pick them up on visual.”
“Copy that,” one of her men yelled. “Found the rathole.” She followed him over to the gaping hole in the floor.
“We’re heading in,” she said to the chopper. “Keep us posted.”
Chapter 6
“Stop! Just a second, okay?” Chloe asked plaintively. She coughed and bent over, gasping for breath. It was hard to tell in the near darkness of the sewers, but she looked beat. Neither of them looked that good, he thought. The muck at the bottom of the tunnels had started at ankle deep and was now around mid thigh. Slogging through it had left them soaked and filthy. Every time they so much as brushed the walls, they came back with a thick coating of slime on them. On top of that, there was the smell and the loose floor on the bottom of the tunnel. Bits of stone, rubbish, and other things he didn’t want to name littered the soupy floor, waiting to trip them up and send them sprawling.
When she managed to catch her breath, she glanced up at him, still bent over. “Why didn’t you run?” she asked hoarsely. “I told you to.”
“And leave everyone there, you included?” He paused and stared down. “Not that it helped any.” He’d never have imagined those soldiers would just open fire on the crowd like that. He shuddered slightly as he remembered the sight of the bodies around him.
“Well, thanks anyway,” she said quietly. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t…” she stopped and glanced down at the murky waters. “Well, I definitely wouldn’t be here, but you get my point.”
He nodded and smiled a little. She stared at him strangely and then looked at his shoulder. Reaching over, she fingered one of the holes in his jacket. “You were shot…,” she said quietly.
“I’m fine,” he told her, moving her hand away. “Don’t worry.”
“That’s sorta the point though,” she said, reaching under the jacket. “You’re not even bleeding! And before, you punched through a concrete floor. How did you do that?”
He hesitated, unsure of how to begin. “It’s hard to explain. You know how I said I wasn’t from here, or at least, this wasn’t the Smallville I knew?” As he spoke, he started down the tunnel and she followed after him.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “I’m not sure I know what to think about that right now, but I have to admit that there’s not a lot about you that’s normal.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly. “Well, what do you know about the day of the meteor shower?”
“A bit,” she said, hopping over a floating lump of garbage. “I was still in Metropolis then, but people still talk about it. Meteor rocks came down all over Smallville, tore up half the town and killed a lot of people. They’ve got a plaque about it where the old city hall used to be.”
Clark stopped, looking at her. “They landed in town?”
“Most of them, I think,” she said. “Why?”
“I just remember hearing that most of the rocks came down outside of town,” he said quietly. “I guess that’s something else that’s different,” he wondered out loud.
She seemed to consider this and then shrugged. “So where were you doing all of this?”
He looked at her for a moment and then told her. “I came down along with them.” Chloe slipped on something suddenly and fell face first into the muck. She came up sputtering and hacking. When she had recovered, she stared up at him in shock.
“You what?” she asked.
“My ship came down with the meteor rocks. My parents found me and raised me as their son. I’ve been living here ever since.”
“Your ship?” she repeated. She blinked and then said slowly, “You’re an… alien?”
“Is that any harder to believe than anything else I’ve told you?” he pointed out.
“It’s just a lot of take in,” she remarked, looking a little wide-eyed.
“Imagine how I felt when my parents told me about it.” He smiled and stared down the tunnel and pointed to a branching path. “I think that one leads out of town.” He started down it and she hurried to catch up.
“Umm,” she asked hesitantly, “how do you know for sure?”
“About being an alien?” he asked her. “I guess I wondered about it for a while. I mean, I look like everyone else, and I didn’t really start to get my powers until I was older…”
“No,” she cut in, “I mean about the tunnel. How do you know it leads out?”
“Oh,” he said, a little put out, “I can see the streets above us. This leads out of town.” She looked at him for a moment and then nodded slowly. They walked through the tunnels in silence for a while.
Clark wasn’t sure why he had told her his secret just now. It might have been easier to lie to her, he realized, and just make up a slightly more believable story. As if there was one, he thought dryly. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could share with anyone. He’d never even told Chloe, his Chloe, about his secret, unsure of how she would take it. Not Lex or even Lana. Pete had eventually discovered, but only when Clark hadn’t had anything other choice. Sharing that kind of information with people, once done, it wasn’t something that he could really take back if things went wrong. How would she react, he wondered. It wasn’t like he really knew her, he reminded himself. She looked and sounded like his friend, but there were a lot of differences. Especially considering how they met. And yet, this was Chloe, he thought, one of his best friends. He knew her, or at least, he knew his Chloe. He shook his head. It was all very confusing.
To break the silence, he asked, “So who were those guys back there?”
She coughed and spat. “The Luthor Corps: the company’s own private security force. They’re more like mercenaries though. The company keeps them around to do all their dirty work and guard their labs. That’s how they were able to buy up most of the land around here. They’d threaten them, cause a few accidents, or worse,” she glared, “and people would eventually cave in and just sell.”
“How can they do that? What about the police?”
“You mean, old Ethan?” she asked, amused. “He doesn’t blow his nose without Lionel Luthor’s permission. The police are all bought off; you spot a brand new Lexus in town I guarantee you it belongs to a cop. They don’t care what happens to the rest of us. They just go after drifters or people like me,” she shrugged. “Same way with the Ledger; it’s more like a promotional flyer than a newspaper. No body cares what happens to this town anymore.”
“Has it always been like this?” he asked, a little sickened.
“For as long as I’ve been here,” she said wearily. “I guess things started to change just after the meteor shower. Luthorcorp set up shop in that Fertilizer plant you mentioned before, the one your friend owns. Well, they tore it down and built this huge lab where it used to be. It’s state of the art. My dad used to work there and he told me about it. He used to say there were all these restricted sections inside and all kinds of top secret stuff went on in there.”
“Used to?” Clark asked.
“He died,” she said flatly. “There was a lab explosion or something a few years ago.” Clark took a quick look at her face, but she seemed not to care. Or at least, he thought, she was trying to look like she didn’t care.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I know your dad, or I knew him,” he floundered for a moment. “He was, is a good man.”
She shrugged again and walked ahead of him, so all he could see was her back. “Whatever,” she remarked, her voice tight. Clark kept up behind her, wanting to say something more, but deciding to keep quiet.
“So anyway,” she went on, “after the meteor shower, the Luthors set up shop in Smallville and started to make a lot of donations, saying they were going to help everyone rebuild.” She looked back at him and smirked. “You can guess where all those donations wound up though.”
“I’ve seen how Lionel Luthor can corrupt people,” he agreed, thinking of Sheriff Ethan.
“Ain’t business grand,” she laughed. “So pretty soon Luthorcorp had all the city officials in their pocket and owned most of the property in town. They started putting up all these factories, saying they were going to provide new jobs and better lives. Nobody ever mentioned what the jobs were going to be like though.”
“What do you mean?” She smirked and pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the wall nearby. The same thick, soupy water that were standing in was pouring out of it noisily. “Luthorcorp,” he said grimly, reading the name on the pipe.
“Imagine working day in and day out right next to vats of this stuff,” she said, kicking her feet in the water. “Breathing it in when they process it, having it on your hands when you take your lunch break. And it’s not like it’s just down here and in the factories, there are bogs of this stuff to the north, you can smell it for miles around. It gets in the soil, rots crops out,” she wrinkled her nose up in disgust. “And it’s not like no one’s tried to do anything about it. They tried to strike a few years ago, get better conditions. Luthor just brought in scabs and had the protestors arrested. They never even found some of the guys in charge of organizing it.”
Clark listened quietly, strangely enough, wanting to laugh. It was all too unbelievable. This was Smallville, it couldn’t be like this. It just couldn’t. But something in Chloe’s voice made him listen, the dull anger that became more pronounced as she went on. How could it go from such a warm place to this? What had happened here that hadn’t in his world?
When she was finished, she brooded quietly for a minute. Clark let her, thinking over everything. Then he looked at her and gave her a little smile. She noticed it and stared back at him. “What, you think this is funny?” she snapped.
“No,” he shook his head. “I just wanted to say I told you so.” She stared at him. “I told you, you’d be a great reporter. You missed your calling.” He shrugged and smiled shyly at her. She blinked and then burst out laughing. He did as well.
Smiling, she looked at him, studying him for a moment. “You are different,” she said finally.
“That’s sort of an understatement.”
“No, you are. I don’t know how to explain it…” she trailed off. A sudden noise at the other end of the tunnel made him turn around quickly though. “Trouble?” she asked, getting ready to run again.
“They’re still after us,” he told her quietly. She moaned a little, staring into the darkness. Clark focused his vision through the darkness behind them and concentrated for a moment. The blackness of the sewers fell away as he stared through the walls. He could see skeletons behind them, dim, white figures running in small groups. Most were still far off, but two of the soldiers were getting dangerously close.
“Two of them are near the start of this tunnel,” he said quietly, pulling her down in the muck with him. The slimy water came up to her chin as she ducked down and he saw her choke back a gag. “Stay here,” he warned her quietly. She gave him a ‘do-you-think-I’m-an-idiot’ glare and nodded. Taking a deep breath, he dove under the water.
Clark reflected briefly on how lucky he was that his eyes wouldn’t be hurt by whatever was floating around in that water. And the fact that without x-ray vision, he’d have never been able to see an inch in the murky water in the first place. He swam as quickly as he could down the tunnel without churning up the water behind him like a speedboat. The tunnel hit a T-junction at the end and it was there that he waited underwater, watching the pair of legs getting closer. The soldiers were advancing slowly, with guns drawn, he guessed from their stances. He let his head break the surface so he could see them more easily as he waited.
They were ten feet from the branch of the junction now, then eight, then six. He waited tensely for them to clear the gap. The only sound was the gush of water from a pipe and the sounds of the soldiers’ wading through the stagnant muck. Then before he could move, there was a burst of static from the soldiers’ walkie-talkies that cut through the silence.
“Target re-acquired!” a voice yelled through it. “Team 3! He’s right in front of you, Team 3!” The soldiers leapt back with startled shouts as Clark exploded up out of the water. He knocked one out cold against the stone wall with a brush of his arm and charged the other one. The unlucky soldier had time enough to get off a poorly aimed shot that sizzled upwards into the ceiling before Clark reached him. The shot tore open a steam pipe which started to hiss loudly. Grabbing the soldier’s armored vest, Clark lifted him up and slammed the top of his helmet into the ceiling. The soldier stiffened and then went limp.
Clark checked their status quickly with his vision. The one slumped against the wall was unconscious and didn’t seem to be too badly off. The soldier he was still holding had a slight concussion, but nothing too serious, he guessed. Before he dropped him, he plucked the soldier’s walkie-talkie off his belt and listened in for a moment.
“Team 3! Team 3, respond!” the cry came over it. “We’ve lost you over the sensor. Report your status. All teams converge on unit’s location. Team 6, head down two junctions and take a left, he should be there.”
Depressing the call button, he tried to make his voice sound more threatening then it was. “Call them off if you know what’s good for them. I can’t promise to go easy on them if they keep at this.”
“Target is there! Converge on location,” the reply came. Snarling, he almost threw it away when he thought better of it and stuffed it in his pocket. It would keep him posted on how close they were at least. He started to slog back to where he left Chloe when the walkie-talkie broke in again.
“Target on the move southward.” They were tracking his every move, he realized. How? He stared upwards, through the stone ceiling and the street above it. A helicopter was circling the air above him, panning back and forth. That must be it, he thought. But how where they tracking him?
Unconsciously, his ears picked up on the hiss of steam escaping from the broken pipe. “They lost me when the pipe blew,” he muttered. They must be using a heat sensor. Smiling, he started to jog back towards Chloe.
He found her exactly where he had left her. “Are you okay?” she asked quickly, standing up. She touched his shoulder lightly and Clark was suddenly very conscious of her sopping wet shirt.
“Yeah, fine,” he said, looking away quickly. She noticed where he’d been staring and laughed.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling her shirt off of her skin, unselfconsciously. “But what do you expect me to do, stay crouched over in that muck? And besides,” she smiled and pointed calmly to his chest,” it’s not like you’re any better.” Clark glanced down and saw how tight his shirt was pressed against his abs and blushed, pulling it away quickly.
“Forget about that,” he hissed through her laughter, “we’ve got bigger problems. They’ve got a helicopter up there tracking us by heat. It’s leading the rest of them right towards us.”
“Can’t you just, fight them off or something?” she asked. “You know, make with the super strength.”
“Wish I could. Those guns of theirs would make mincemeat of me in these close quarters,” he said, glancing at the tunnel walls. “But… I might be able to delay them.”
“How?” she asked quickly.
“Just start running for now. I’ll catch up with you in a minute. I think I can block their sensors.”
“Clark, I’m not just…”
“Just go, I’ll be right behind you,” he promised her. She held out for a moment, then nodded. Then, before he could stop her, she stepped towards him and kissed him on the cheek. He stared at her in surprise as she pulled back and made a gagging face.
“Oh, gross,” she said and started to retch.
“Not the response I was expecting,” he remarked.
“I forgot you’re covered in this muck,” she told him. She made a face. “Not exactly minty fresh.” She spit once more and then smiled lamely at him. “Good luck,” she said before running down the tunnel.
“Yeah… you too,” he said, watching her go. Then he shook himself out of his reverie and stared upwards. There were a number of pipes running around the ceiling, but it only took him a second to find the right ones. “Hope no one’s taking a shower now,” he muttered quickly.
Delicately, he started to heat up the water pipes with his heat vision. He didn’t want them to start melting, but he wanted to warm them enough to throw off the sensors in the helicopters. When the pipes started to glow a dull red, he stopped and moved farther down the tunnel, repeating the process. Clark could feel the heat begin to build up slowly as he kept at it. Just as he thought, with no where for the heat to go, the tunnels were starting to turn into an oven. Luckily, he was unaffected by the heat, but he couldn’t say the same for the smell. Heating up the muck hadn’t done much to improve it’s smell, and the fumes coming off it were getting thicker.
When he was satisfied, he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his pocket and listened for a moment. The panic and confusion he heard on the other end made him smile grimly. The helicopter was useless and the soldiers were turning back from the heat and gas. He turned around and started to jog towards the other end. Hopefully Chloe wouldn’t be too far ahead already, he thought.
Something roughly the size of a baseball plopped into the water next to him. On pure instinct, he threw himself forwards as it detonated in a burst of green energy. The meteor radiation picked him up like a wave and slammed him into the sewer wall. Masonry tumbled down next to him as he lay there, gasping for breath. Before he could pick himself back up, more of the green blasts exploded by his head. Apparently, not all of the soldiers had turned back.
Clark ducked down, still woozy from the radiation, but he still had enough of his vision left to make out a lone soldier charging him from down the tunnel, firing wildly. The soldier was wearing a full helmet equipped with a gas mask. Using all his strength, he leapt forwards and cleared the distance between them in an instant. Using his momentum like a bull, he slammed into the soldier’s chest. He heard her grunt as she went flying backwards, the gun falling into the water somewhere. It was a woman, he thought. In the uniform and helmet, he hadn’t noticed. She was lying down the tunnel on her back, groaning. He took a few steps forward so he could check on her when he saw her sit up and unholster another gun. It wasn’t one of the futuristic kinds she’d been sporting earlier, but it was still very large.
A chunk of the ceiling blew out as she missed her first shot, but Clark wasn’t going to stick around for more. He ran down the tunnels away from her. She kept firing after him, one of her shots even tagging him in the shoulder. It made him pitch off balance for a moment, but that was all. As he left her far behind him, he was glad that she’d been alone. Whoever she was, she was dangerous.
Picking up his speed, Clark found Chloe at the end of one of the tunnels. It looked like the sewers emptied in a large drainage ditch on the outside of town. Chloe stood there by the pipe opening, waiting for him. She was winded, sweaty, and covered in dirt, but she’d never looked better to him. When she saw him stumble out of the darkness, he could see her face light up and then turn red. Without a word, she threw herself at him and held onto him tightly for a moment. He hugged her back silently, then gently pried her off.
“I heard shooting,” she said quickly, not quite willing to let go of him. “Are you alright?”
“I’m stinking, but other than that,” he smiled at her. She sighed and shook her head.
“We have to keep moving though,” he told her. “I don’t know if we really lost them yet. It’s better if we find somewhere safe to lie low for a while.”
Chloe frowned, thinking. “I might know someone who could help with that,” she said slowly. “I don’t know if he can, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Lead the way,” Clark told her.
The Luthor Corps captain grunted as she slid the manhole cover off and started to climb out. A gun jammed itself down the sewer entrance though, right into her face.
“Hold it right there!” a young voice ordered her. She rolled her eyes and then glanced at the gun, unconcerned.
“You still have the safety on,” she remarked dryly at the soldier who held it.
Stuttering, he jerked it back quickly as he recognized her. “Sorry, ma’am! My mistake.” He reached down to help her out, but she shouldered his hand out of the way and climbed out herself. She glanced up and down the street, frowning. She’d come out close to half a mile away from the Talon. Without the helicopter to guide her, she’d been wandering blind down there. It had only been luck that had led her to the alien. Seeing how things had gone though, she didn’t know whether to call it good luck or bad.
Sitting down on the empty street, she groaned as she felt something in her chest twitch. All the soldiers were wearing body armor and helmets capable of stopping a bullet, but it couldn’t do much against the raw strength of the alien. Feeling under her armored vest, she winced as she probed her ribs. At least two were broken, maybe more.
The soldier stood there dumbly, holding his rifle. “Are you alright, ma’am?” She ignored him for the moment, as she sighed and took off her helmet.
She had short black hair that fell softly around her face, which had an almost exotic cast to it; with slightly almond shaped eyes and an eastern complexion. It was a face of startling beauty, but it was marred by the cold, tired look in her eyes. With her helmet off, someone might have been struck by how young she looked, which was of course because she was young, the youngest to hold her position. She’d trained all her life to get there, sacrificed so much, to get to where she was.
Another soldier came running up the street, holding a phone out. She hissed in irritation and chucked her helmet away in frustration. It bounced and rattled down the street.
“It’s…” he started to say when he got close, but she cut him off.
“I know who it is.” She took the phone from him and sighed before speaking into it. “Mr. Luthor, Captain Lang here.” Explaining this wasn’t going to be easy.
Smallville: ELSEWHERE
By Peter Amico
Note: I don’t own a bit of the rights to Smallville, so don’t flame me, or be an idiot about this. This story is written in fun and that’s it. Enjoy
Prologue
The ship was not of human origin. Perhaps six feet in length and oblong, it hurtled through the recesses of space without any obvious means of propulsion. A spherical bulge towards the back dominated most of the ship, with the front tapering off to a long point. Its hull was silver, unmarked, and seamless. It moved with a grace and speed that was impossible for modern human crafts. Even more impossible was how far it had come, and for what purpose.
Inside the ship, a small child slept dreamlessly, though not soundly. Voices and faces floated on the edge of his mind, some more familiar and distinct than others. As he slept, he almost remembered what they meant, but then the thought was gone. He had been asleep for a long while, frozen in time. He would not have survived the trip if he had not been. He had come a long way from a world he could never go back to.
As the ship passed around the dark side of the moon and into the sun’s light again, a remarkable change occurred inside the craft. The sphere’s upper hull became transparent, allowing the star’s light to bathe the child. He shifted idly in his sleep, stretching out in the warmth. The gentle hum of the ship reverberated inside the dome, quieting his sleep. He could feel the sun’s rays on his skin, revitalizing him. It was so different from the light of his home, richer and fuller in some fashion. Though he did not know, could not know, the light of this star had been the reason for his destination. It would feed him, make him stronger and faster than any other creature he would meet when his ship landed on the tiny planet that was its destination. It had been imagined that he would be like a god to them, descending from the heavens with fire and glory. He would have power, knowledge from behind the stars, everything that he would need to lead those lesser than him to glory.
If the child thought about the future that awaited him, it didn’t seem to bother him. He lowed peacefully in the light of the star, stretching out quietly. Then the hull abruptly darkened again as other objects appeared beside it.
Meteorites hurtled by the small craft, caught in the gravity of the blue planet that was the ship’s destination. The fragments were dark and jagged hunks of stone, shot through with streaks of a green, glowing crystal vein. As the green light reached the craft, it seemed to shudder and then began to shine with a brilliant white light of its own. The meteorites passed around the ship wildly, bumping and crashing into one another. Harsh dust and other small particles from the collisions clattered across the hull of the ship, but it held its course, only veering now and then to avoid running into one of the larger fragments. One of the meteorites smashed through a tiny satellite orbiting the planet, adding to the debris caught up in its wake.
As the ship and the meteorites passed into the edges of the planet’s atmosphere, the friction raised the temperature outside to incredible levels. Some of the smaller meteorites burned away in brilliant flashes of light, but the larger rocks kept going. The heat around them produced some startling changes in the green crystal veins though. Some of the stones fused and took on different colors, some red, others gold, and even blue. As the intense heat converted them, the stones began flashing wildly and sending out arcing bursts of energy into space. The ship meanwhile, rode out the heat without incident, the extreme temperature somehow being reflected by the skin of the craft. Inside, the child slept through it, hardly noticing any difference.
But then something unexpected happened.
A fragment broke off from a meteorite and, with the intense heat and force already buffeting it, the ship couldn’t swerve to avoid it. The chunk of rock, perhaps no more than ten inches across, shattered against the right edge of the ship and pushed it off course. The change was minute, not even a degree, a second’s, difference in fact.
But it was enough.
The ship hurtled through the air, descending into the inner atmosphere of the planet. Still on fire, it streaked over a vast body of water. Along side it flew the meteorites, which depending on their weight and path of entry, began to disperse over the planet. A large number still fell along side the ship, pulled along in its wake. The water underneath it gave way to a gentle, rolling land as the ship began its descent. The child was awake now, the roaring and shaking bringing him out of his deep sleep. He clutched the sides of his pod, suddenly afraid for the first time in his life. Something was wrong, he could feel it in the tremor of the ship. Something had gone wrong.
Indeed, something had. The ship was still going too fast. It passed over the abandoned field which its creator had deemed safe and isolated enough from his vantage point, so long and far ago. It tried to begin a turn that would put it back on course, but momentum had hold of it now and there was no going back. It darted through the air above fields and homes, coming in for a crash landing. The engines, preset to fire and slow the landing, tried to compensate, but the ship was still going too fast. This had not been planned on and the ship could not respond. It obliterated the first house it passed through, and then another, and another, and another. The child began to scream, calling out in a strange tongue for someone, anyone. Completely out of control, the ship tumbled and rolled, destroying everything in its path until it struck the pavement of a broad street and smashed deep into the ground. The hull, which had weathered the gravity and intense heat of countless suns, buckled finally and cracked in.
For a moment, there was silence. Then the tiny pod, tried beyond all the plans of its maker, slowly opened the spherical pod with a screech. Even as it did, the computers that had governed its flight and controlled the sleep of its passenger blinked and died out. The child opened his eyes and stared out, at first too frightened to move. He stared at his strange surroundings, so different from his dim memories of the past. Then slowly, he climbed out of the pod.
The ground was hot to the touch, but he barely noticed. He gazed around, taking in the devastation around him. Then there was noise, people shouting and crying out and pointing at him. He turned, staring at them. They looked familiar, but were not, he knew. He could sense that, they were different. He was alone here. Then a great roaring came from overhead and they all looked up, human and alien alike, as the meteorites passed above them, burning with fire and wrath.
A strangely adult thought passed through his young mind. Nothing would ever be the same here, he thought. Not for anyone.
Chapter 1
Clark woke up and it was several moments before he could even remember where he was. He got up slowly and turned on the lamp by his bed, the sudden light making him blink his eyes quickly. He was in his room at the farm, his school books piled on his desk with the notes he had been going over the night before. A Smallville High jacket was curled over his chair, looking weathered and a bit beaten, the white faded and no longer the bright color he remembered from last year. He rubbed his forehead briefly and then got up stretching.
The dream had been so real, he thought quietly. Disturbingly real. He threw back his covers and climbed out of bed, stretching. Clark didn’t dream very often; not even about a certain dark-haired beauty he knew. Sometimes he dreamed about strange buildings and nonsense words that didn’t make any sense. He’d never put any thought into his dreams before though. He left that for his mother, a great believer in dreams was Martha Kent. She frequently enjoyed dissecting hers, or anyone else’s, over the breakfast table, looking for hidden meanings and warnings. His father would often remark during this that he wouldn’t believe his dreams unless they came regularly and always said the same thing: good weather, healthy crops, and fine times ahead. His mother usually responded that you couldn’t force a dream to say anything, but he’d laugh and return to his paper, smiling at her.
Clark wondered idly what his mother would make of his dream as he padded through the upstairs quietly. The door to his parents’ room was open and he could see that it was empty. Downstairs, he could hear them chatting quietly and he smelled the delicious scent of his mother’s bacon and eggs come wafting up from the kitchen. Hopping in the bathroom, he quickly showered and got ready, pulling some relatively clean clothes off his floor to wear.
As he passed by the hallway mirror, he could see his reflection out of the corner of his eye. He was tall for a seventeen year old, with broad shoulders and dark hair. His face was dominated by a jaw-line that his friend Chloe had once said, ‘wouldn’t look that out of place on a statue.’ He still didn’t know what to think of that. Clark thought his face was serviceable, handsome without being too showy. He worried about his hair sometimes though. It hung wildly and seemed to refuse to be tamed by any comb. He’d noticed that a lock of his hair tended to curl up on his forehead when he wasn’t looking and that always bugged him. He’d considered cutting it back, but it was hard enough keeping his hair this length in the first place. That was of course, because Clark Kent wasn’t your normal teenage boy, if such a creature even existed.
He though uneasily about how similar his arrival on this planet and his dream had been. At first, he’d just thought he’d been reliving those events, until things had started to go wrong. He hadn’t landed in the middle of town, but in a field outside of it. And, as if by fate, it had only been Jonathon and Martha Kent who had seen his ship crash. The two, childless, had taken him in and loved him from the start, vowing to keep his secret safe for the rest of their lives. For a while, they had probably thought that wouldn’t be too difficult because from all outward evidence, Clark looked just like any normal human boy. But as they’d slowly discovered, he was most definitely not. As he’d gotten older, his strength had grown so much that he could now perform feats that were beyond belief. He could lift a car up easily with one hand, and was literally impervious to pain and injury. His could run and move faster than the eye could see, and most startling of all, was even able to see through almost any surface. Recently, his vision had taken a new and almost dangerous twist; by focusing himself, he could cast intense waves of heat through his eyes, capable of melting stone. Not even Clark knew whether this was the last of his abilities to emerge, but at times he wondered what else lay in store for him.
“As long as it’s not a pair of little antenna,” he reasoned to himself, “then it’s alright with me.”
He came into the kitchen and sat down on one of the stools. His mother had already laid out a plate with silverware and glasses ready for him. She was munching on a piece of toast and fussing with a pan full of scrambled eggs on the stove. He noticed that she was wearing one of the new business suits she’d bought when she’d taken her new job with Lionel Luthor. His father was standing by the open kitchen door with his favorite mug, which was spotted like a cow. He glanced back at Clark and smiled, raising his cup.
“I thought the smell of breakfast would get you up,” he smiled at him.
“Morning, Clark,” his mother said. She carried the pan over and heaped the contents on his plate. “We really need to get you a new alarm clock one of these days. You’re going to be late for school.” He grunted something that could have been in agreement, too busy with his breakfast to go on.
“Clark could get up with five minutes to spare, do my chores, put the cows out in the fields, drop the produce off at the market, run to school and still have four minutes to spare,” his father joked with her. He walked over and gave her quick peck on the cheek, stealing a piece of bacon from the plate she was carrying as he did. She smiled sweetly at him and put the plate on the table in front of Clark. “No need for an alarm clock with your cooking. And besides, have we forgotten what happened to the last one?”
“That was an accident,” Clark said in between bites. “I hit the snooze button a bit hard.”
“You put your hand through the nightstand, Clark.”
“It was an old nightstand,” he protested.
“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to get up on your own then,” his mother chided him. “I’m not going to be able to cook for you every morning, you know,” she said, carrying the pan to the sink. Clark could sense what was coming next. He saw his father frown and walk back over to the window, staring outside.
“Mr. Luthor’s going to need me to come in an hour earlier for the next few weeks,” she told them. “And maybe a few hours later as well.”
“I take it you already agreed to this, so there’s no reason for me to give you my opinion about it?” his father asked coolly.
“Everyone’s going to be very busy,” she explained to him patiently. “He needs me there.” Jonathon took another sip from mug and said nothing.
When the silence got threatening, Clark asked her quickly, “What are you going to be doing?”
“Last minute agreement things; checking on contracts, reviewing proposals,” she said, moving about the kitchen quickly. She picked up a briefcase he’d never seen before and started to put some papers in it. “Lionel’s signed a lot of deals with Wayne Enterprises.”
Clark choked on his meal and took a quick gulp of milk. “Wayne Enterprises? That’s not…”
“Yes, Bruce’s company. He bought up a lot of failing manufacturing and industrial companies and joined them together. He’s certainly stirring up things in Gotham. Lionel certainly underestimated him. He tried to short change him on a deal and Bruce wound up stealing a few contracts out from under his nose.”
Jonathon snorted into his cup, but Martha ignored that. “I have to say it’s nice to see him doing something constructive for a change,” she went on. “When he was in town last summer, the way he carried on… Well, it’s just nice to see him starting something that won’t end up with someone in the hospital.”
“The way Lionel conducts his business,” his father remarked, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Or from what we know of Bruce either.”
Clark understood that perfectly. Bruce Wayne had been traveling with a circus under the name of Tom Malone when he’d come to Smallville. Why someone with his amount of wealth would be living that way had been something of a mystery at first. Even more puzzling was his habit of showing up at just the right time, like when Lana had been attacked by a pair of car-jackers and Bruce had saved her. He had gotten suspicious and followed Bruce, but that had only complicated matters, revealing both of their secrets. He’d discovered that Bruce was some sort of vigilante, attacking criminals, and Bruce had found out about his powers. Neither had been happy about it, but a series of murders had forced them to pool their talents to survive and bring the killer to justice. It had also forced them to develop a kind of grudging respect for the other. Bruce might have been many things; stubborn, arrogant, intense, but he was also brilliant and very determined. If the Lionel wanted to take him on, Clark knew how much of a fight he was in for.
“Simply terrible about Lionel,” Jonathon remarked from the door, still looking out. Martha rolled her eyes in irritation. Clark watched the two of them, unsure of what to say.
His parents had always been divided when it came to the Luthors; both Lionel and Lex. His mother was willing to give them a chance, but his father had always seen things differently. His attitude towards them was that “leopards don’t change their spots.” Clark might have felt differently about Lex, but that fit Lionel pretty accurately in his view. When his mother had taken the job as Lionel’s personal assistant, it had only made things worse. She had told them she was only doing it because they needed the money, but sometimes Clark wasn’t sure.
Desperate to lighten the mood in some way, his eyes fell on the briefcase. “So, new briefcase, huh?” he tried to ask brightly. He saw his mother flinch and he instantly regretted it.
“It was a gift,” she said quickly. She put the last few papers in it quickly and shut the lid, setting it on the floor. Clark caught a glimpse of the embossed initial, LL, on the flap before it disappeared under the table.
“I think I’ll check on the cows,” his father remarked from the door and stepped out without another word. Thunder rolled suddenly overhead as Martha looked after him sadly. When she turned back to Clark, she gave him a wan smile.
“Storm’s coming,” she told him. “You almost never see those in the morning, huh? Gonna be pretty bad, I guess.” Clark nodded lamely as he finished up his breakfast.
“Virginia Woolfe, Chloe,” Pete asked her, amused. “Why, of all people, did you choose Virginia Woolfe to do a paper on? You do know you’ll actually have to read some of her books, don’t you?” Classes were over for the day and they were walking back through the halls to the lockers. Pete idly munched on what was left of his lunch, sharing with Clark, as Chloe and Lana walked slightly ahead of them, chatting quietly.
“I was going to choose Upton Sinclair, but I’d rather not have to take breaks throughout my research to barf up my lunch and swear off bologna, thank you very much,” she told them breezily. Her blond hair curled up at her neck and bounced as she walked. “And besides, it’ll be an easy report,” she went on. “Blah blah blah… women’s rights… blah blah blah… male dominated society. Easy A. I’m too busy with the paper to actually put effort into this.”
“I didn’t think you’d take something like that so lightly,” Lana mentioned, a bit puzzled. Taller than Chloe with a slightly exotic complexion, she was a natural born beauty. Not only that, she was one of the kindest and most caring people Clark knew. She glanced back at him and he felt the blood go rushing to his face. He always seemed to feel that way when she looked at him.
“Clark, Pete,” Chloe asked, bringing him back to reality, “do you still work for the paper?”
Pete and Clark shared a quick look. “Sure, last time I checked,” Pete replied. “I mean, we write an article here and there, if you call that work.”
She rolled her eyes but chose to ignore the comment. “Then you both work for me, right? Since I run the paper, correct?”
“When you put it that way,” Clark said slowly.
“So I can order you around or even fire you if I want to. I’m your boss.” Chloe turned back to Lana and nodded. “I think I’m about as liberated as I need to be, thank you.”
“That’s not really the point,” Lana started to say, but Clark shook his head.
“It’s not worth arguing with her,” he told her. “Trust me.”
She laughed and then asked, “So who did you both choose?” Lana was in the other English class than the rest of them.
Clark took out a thin book and held it out to her. “I got Lewis Carroll and Pete chose George Orwell. I figured, if I have to do a project about a past author, I may as well have some fun with it.”
Lana looked impressed. “Well, I guess we can count on you staying in for a while,” she joked with Pete. “Looks like you’ve got a bit of research ahead of you.”
“Not really,” he shrugged. “I checked the bookstores before we chose topics. Do you know how many Cliff Notes there are about him? It should be a crime to use them.”
“I think that’s why it sorta is,” Clark pointed out. At that moment a crack of thunder practically shook the school. Everyone jumped unconsciously and looked around nervously. The storm had started just before school and hadn’t let up once. If anything, the clouds outside seemed to be building in intensity.
“On that note,” Pete said, looking outside, “who wants a ride home?” No one looked that thrilled. “C’mon, guy with a cool car here, free ride, it’s raining, what’s not to like?”
“Your car’s a convertible,” Lana gently reminded him.
“The top works most times,” he said, nonplussed.
“As exciting as that sounds, I’ll pass,” Chloe said. “My dad’s of the belief that if you do anything during a storm you’re risking electrocution. I’d rather finish up the Torch here than hiding under my covers at home.”
Pete nodded grudgingly and looked at Lana. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m study hall bound. I promised I’d help tutor someone.”
“That’s alright,” he sighed. He turned towards Clark.
“Okay,” he agreed. “See you later,” he said to Chloe and Lana.
“Ooh, before I forget,” Lana said and started to dig around in her bag. “I have something for all of you.” She brought out film envelope and pulled out a stack of photos. “I was going through the junk drawer in the Talon and look what I found. From the grand opening; I guess Nell must have stuffed them in there and forgot about them. Ugh,” she said, holding up a photo, “look at me. That’s what I get for living off of coffee and no sleep the week before.”
“I know that routine,” Chloe said dryly. She flipped through a few of the photos and passed them to Pete. “I never know what to say when I see myself in a photo,” she admitted. “I mean, I look like me, what else is there to say?”
“Something like, ‘I’m looking fine,’ or my personal favorite, ‘Look who’s got it going on,’” Pete suggested to her. He pulled out a picture of him and another girl dancing and held it up. “As shown in this photo.”
“I don’t know about that,” she rolled her eyes, “but I’ll give you bonus points if you can actually remember the girl’s name you were dancing with.”
He stood there for a moment, and then looked at the picture closely. “Huh,” he said finally.
“She must’ve been really special,” Lana said to Chloe.
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
Clark chuckled and took the rest of the photos from Pete’s hands. He flipped through them quietly and then stopped at one and pulled it out. It was of all four of them, posing together in front of the Talon emblem. “Mind if I steal this one?” he asked Lana, holding it up.
“Go ahead,” she said. She touched the photo in his hand and smiled at him. “Nice choice by the way. Maybe we should blow it up and keep it in the Talon.”
Chloe snorted and rolled her eyes. “Okay, that’s really cheesy, but even I have to vote ‘yes’ on that.”
“Second the motion,” Pete chimed in. “Any opposed? Then the motion is cast. Get the negative blown up and framed and I’m all ready to sign it.”
“Should be ready by next week,” Lana laughed. Clark smiled and tucked the photo up and stuck it in his wallet. Lana took the rest of the photos from him and stuck them back in the sleeve and in her backpack. “I’ll have the rest in the Talon if anyone else wants to snag any more. Okay?” She smiled at them and she and Chloe started off down the hallways.
“So,” Pete said, turning to him. “What if we drive around and see if anyone else needs a ride home, okay? I hear the girl’s soccer team gets out after the late busses leave. You never know, you might be able to give a nice looking girl a rescue.”
“Have fun, Pete,” he told him and slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“You’re not actually gonna take me up on the ride, are you?” Pete realized.
Clark looked at him and grinned. “Why don’t we make a little race out of it?” he joked. “You drive, I’ll run.”
Pete rolled his eyes and gave him a withering look. “Thanks but no thanks,” he shook his head. “You know, I did a lot of oddjobs to save up for that car, and every time you lap it, all I can think about is how long it would take me to save up enough to buy a jet engine. ‘Cause without that, there’s no way I’m ever going to beat you”
“I could ask Lex about that,” Clark offered him. “He’d probably know what the going rate for one is these days.”
“Get out of here and leave me to my soccer players,” Pete told him. “Man, I think I liked you better when you were being all mysterious,” he complained.
A half-hour later, Clark was jogging down the backroads to home, enjoying the feel of the rain against his face. His poncho flapped behind him as he ran, trailing after him like a cape. It kept his shirt and book bag dry but his jeans were already soaked to his hips from the rain and splashing in the muddy roads. Clark didn’t mind though, he’d worked through a lot worse than this at the farm. The rain was actually quite cool and there was something innocently fun about running through the muddy road.
He ran around the smaller puddles putting his feet down in between them like it was an obstacle course. Laughing, he stepped nimbly around a series of them and saw a much larger puddle stretched across the road in front of him. Unless he left the road there would be no going around it. A grin stretched across his face, Clark didn’t slow down or step aside, he kept running and when he reached the edge of the puddle, he leapt up. He soared up and over it, at least twenty feet through the air, before coming back down on the other side. Not counting on the muddy ground there, he slipped as he landed and went skidding a few feet on his side.
Now he was really filthy, but he still didn’t mind. Clark picked himself up and tried to brush some of the mud off his jeans. That had been kind of stupid, he told himself, jumping like that. What if someone had seen him? He would’ve been hard put to explain how he could jump like that.
His parents had always harped on that danger, that someone, someday would discover his powers and take him away from them. Clark understood it, he’d been fending off the suspicions of both Chloe and Lex for the past year to realize how real the possibility was, but sometimes he wondered about it. Pete had found out about him, but he’d sworn never to reveal it to another person. If one person could handle it, why couldn’t others, he’d asked.
His father had remarked that “it only took one. The wrong kind of person finds out, and well… who knows what would happen.”
The problem was, of course, that he was right. Sam Phelan, a rogue cop from Metropolis, had discovered the truth, and he’d tried to blackmail Clark into committing crimes for him. He’d threatened his family and friends. The reporter, Roger Nixon, had done the same before he’d died. Even Professor Hamilton had almost tortured Pete to get the truth when he’d found the spaceship. There were too many reasons, Clark realized, to keep his powers a secret. But that didn’t make it any easier.
Most of all, he thought, he wanted to tell his friends. To share with them what made him special. Not that he wanted to rub their noses in it, but he wanted to show them everything he could do, everything he was. He wanted to show Lana, Chloe, and even Lex just who he really was.
But even as he thought it, he wondered, just what would they say? Chloe had devoted her life to chronicling the strange happenings in Smallville, how would she feel about finding out he was a major part of them? Lex had always gone on and on about how he hated people lying to him, how much he valued the truth in Clark. What would he say? And then there was Lana. Her parent’s had died the day of the meteor shower, an unfortunate casualty of his arrival. How well could she be expected to take that?
Clark sighed, thinking back over all those things. He started down the road again, and then stopped and looked around once more. There still wasn’t anyone around, and there probably wouldn’t be anyone on the road today with the storm. He hesitated briefly, his better judgment warning him against it, but in the end he gave in and hurried over to the side of the road. Taking off his poncho, he wrapped it around his book bag and stuck them both up in the branches of a nearby tree. Then, grinning like a maniac, he crouched on the ground.
“On your marks,” he muttered to himself. “Get set. Go!” Clark took off running, dashing at near full speed down the road. The wet mud exploded under his feet, throwing up torrents of brown water to either side of him. Laughing, he tried to turn around suddenly and found himself skidding helplessly along the road, carried by his own momentum. As he finally came to a stop, he fell over, gasping for breath. It was like ice skating or water skiing, he thought, exhilarated. Climbing to his feet, he dashed down the road again, going faster and faster until he slipped and went sliding madly again.
This was just what he needed sometimes, he thought. To just take off and run, get away from everything that was bothering him. It wasn’t fair that he had all these powers and he could never use them. That wasn’t something he could share with his parents though. How would they be able to understand?
Sometimes he felt like just taking off during the day and running free. To feel the wind get left behind him as he ran through the countryside. He’d sit in his chair at school and stare out the window and wonder what it would be like to do all the things he’d only dreamed about. To climb Mt. Everest in a day, and then jump off at the very peak just because he could survive the fall. Or to race a train to its destination and beat it there.
Someday I’ll be able to do all that, he promised himself. Or I’ll do it and let people say what they want. They won’t be able to stop me. I’ll just let them do what they want and not worry about what -
Lightning crashed to the ground not thirty feet away from him, startling Clark from his thoughts. He tripped and stumbled, sliding to a stop again. The storm was raging overhead more fiercely than ever. A bit frightened, he hadn’t noticed how bad it had been getting. He decided quickly that he’d had enough fun for now and had better get home. He’d been hit by lightning before, and wasn’t in much of a mood to try it again.
“I guess running down a road surrounded by trees hadn’t been too smart either,” he muttered to himself, spitting out a bit of mud. “Lucky I didn’t get shocked.” He picked himself up and started back for the tree with his books, when another burst hit the ground in the exact same spot previously. Clark jumped again, staring at the impossibility. Then a third bolt flashed from the spot. And another.
Stunned, Clark stared at it, and then he noticed something: the bolts were almost soundless. There was no thunder. That was as impossible as four bolts hitting the exact same spot one after another. Then a fifth bolt flashed and Clark realized it hadn’t come from the sky. The bolts were coming from the ground. To confirm this, another flashed upwards and then arced overhead and smashed down next to him. He jumped backwards in shock and fell to the ground again.
“Not lightning,” he hissed between his teeth. “Not lightning!” Another arc flashed from the ground and curved overhead. Clark saw it coming and rolled to the side away from it. The bolt hit the ground and exploded as three more bolts flashed upwards. He tried to get to his feet to avoid them, but the ground was still to muddy, and he slipped to his knees. One of the bolts smashed into the ground by his hand, but the other two fell on him squarely. Instead of exploding, they fastened to him like chains, circling his chest and neck. They burned like fire against his skin, making him cry out. Then suddenly he was pulled off his feet and face first into the mud.
Clark rolled onto his back and tried to pry the tendrils off him, but it was no good. It seemed like they had a death-grip on him. Slowly they started to pull him forwards. The spot in the ground they’d shot up from was now a circle of shimmering mud about six feet wide. The white arcs of energy were slowly drawing back down into it, pulling him along with them. He tried to brace his feet, but in the muddy road there was nothing to do so against. His feet scrambled and slipped against the mud, as he was pulled closer to the hole. It started to glow brighter as came nearer. Slowly the gap closed between them; first ten feet, then three feet away.
Finally throwing everything he had into it, Clark let go of the tendrils and sunk his hands into the mud, looking for purchase. His hands felt blindly in the muck as he was pulled slowly backwards. Then, amazingly, he felt something hard underneath his fingers. He latched onto it and felt himself stop right on the edge of the circle. The tendrils tightened against him neck and chest, leaving him choking for air. Still, he held on grimly. The wind whipped overhead as the storm raged on.
Then he heard it, faintly over the wind. Clark. It was just a whisper in his ear, but it sounded so familiar to him that he froze in shock. He knew that voice from somewhere.
“Is anyone there?” he bellowed, holding on for all he was worth. The tendrils tugged fiercely at him, but he fought against them, trying to pull himself away. “Can you hear me? Help me!”
Help me. It came again, echoing him. The tendrils writhed against his skin, getting tighter. One of his hands slipped and he dangled there, fighting for his breath. He clutched at the tendril’s fingers with his free hand, trying to pry them apart. He could feel his fingers slipping in the mud. Help me, it came again, the tendril’s fingers tightening. Then he realized they were fingers, and not bands of energy. Somewhere in the struggle, the tendril’s had formed into great, white arms and they were dragging him in. Like a living thing, they were dragging him in. Help me, it called out desperately. His grip slipped and he was pulled down in a rush, screaming, towards the shimmering circle. His last thought in this world, was that he could see a face in it.
Then he plunged in, and was gone.
Chapter 2
There was a rush of sound, light, and feeling, each more intense than anything he’d ever experienced before. Then it was gone and he was immersed in absolute blackness. The next thing he knew, he was choking. He sucked water into his lungs and gagged for air, waking up in a rush. Somehow, he was now underwater. The cold water bit deep into him and he struggled to the surface. He gulped air and paddled about, blinking to clear his eyes.
He was in a lake, about twenty feet from the shore. He stared about, paddling in the cold water. A small bridge extended over his head; wide enough to support one lane of travel. He swam over to the shore, and pulled himself onto the bank. There he collapsed, gasping for air. He’d never felt so drained before in his life.
For a long time he lay there, half out of the water. The sun shone down on him from the clear sky overhead, warming his skin. Finally he pulled himself up to his knees and stood up, his legs quivering. “Okay,” he said quietly, “what just happened?” A very good question he realized. And here was another, where was he? He stared around slowly, staggering again. Clark knew all the back roads in Smallville by heart, and he didn’t recognize this place. It hadn’t been the road he’d just been on, that was for sure. It didn’t go over any lake, so how had he gotten here? He stared around, and realized slowly, that he didn’t recognize the lake either. Where was he?
Numbly, he turned around and made his way up the bank on his hands and knees. Reaching the top, he heaved himself up and staggered out onto the road, staring around. The countryside around him looked familiar enough to him, but he glanced back at the lake in puzzlement. A small family of geese was bobbing around in the middle of the lake, honking at him. He brushed his wet hair out of his eyes absently and then stopped as he caught sight of his hand.
Where the tendrils had grabbed onto his wrist, his skin was a deep red, almost like it had been burned. He rubbed it gingerly, and then touched the skin on his neck, wincing. Without a mirror, there was no way of telling, but he was sure it was just as red.
“What the hell happened to me?” he gasped.
Feeling weak, Clark hobbled over to the bridge and sat down on one of the beams. For a few moments, he just rested in the sun, trying to catch his breath. Everything had happened so quickly on the road, he hadn’t had time to think about what had happened. He had just been snatched up and pulled into something, he thought, rubbing his wrists again. But by what? And why?
There’d been a face there, he thought to himself. At the end, he’d almost seen something, like he’d caught of glimpse of whatever had grabbed him. But now, he couldn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t even know if it had been human or not. But there had been something strange about it, he realized slowly. Something familiar, about the voice, I heard. But what was it?
Disquieted, he swallowed and stared around again. He glanced up at the sky, noting the lack of clouds and rain. It had been storming not five minutes ago, but now- How long had it all lasted? It looked to be the early afternoon, but beyond that, he couldn’t tell anything else.
As he stared upwards, his eyes fell on something else that gave him a shock. There was a sign over the bridge, attached to one of the poles. He read it once, and then got up slowly and walked into the middle of the road, staring up at it. “Sales Bridge, Siegel Road,” he read it again. He swallowed again and read it a third time, but it was still the same. “That’s impossible,” he breathed. Siegel road ran through Smallville and up to the interstate a few miles past their farm. His father had taught him how to drive on it. He’d run down it nearly everyday to get to school and town. And in all that time, there had never been a bridge on it.
As he stared overhead, a car appeared over the horizon. Clark stood there, stunned, still looking at the sign. The driver was forced to stop the car in front of him and lean on the horn. “Get out of the road,” he yelled, leaning out the window. Jumping slightly, Clark moved to the side quickly.
“Sorry,” he called out. The man shook his head at him and started to drive off. “Um… excuse me? Is that sign right?” he asked, pointing, before he could leave.
“Of course it is,” he leaned out again. He looked to be about sixty, with a thick gray moustache. Noting Clark’s confused look, he asked, “Something wrong?”
“I think you could say that,” he muttered. The old man raised his eyebrows. He seemed to take in Clark’s still wet clothes and disheveled appearance. “I kinda fell of the bridge,” he said quickly, trying to laugh it off. “Um… you wouldn’t really know where this road goes, would you?” he asked
“You lost or something?”
“New in town,” he said quickly. “Very new.”
The old man grunted loudly and stared at him a moment longer. Then he shrugged. “Well, if you’re looking for a ride, I might be able to help you,” he offered. He gestured to the back of the truck with his head. “I’ll take you as far as my farm. It’s about a half a mile into town from there.”
“Thanks.” Wherever he was, getting into town sounded like as good a plan as any. He climbed over the dusty railing of the car and stepped into the back. Then he paused, thinking of something. He leaned over the side to talk to the old man. “’Town’ is Smallville, right? That’s where we’re going?” he demanded.
The old man turned around in his seat to give him a brief look. “You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you boy?” he asked carefully. “I don’t care much for the corps, but I’m not gonna stick my neck out.”
Corps? I must have heard him wrong, Clark thought. “No, I’m just… a bit lost. I don’t really know where I am.” The old man searched his face and then turned back. He reached into his glove box and handed it back to Clark. It was an old road map.
“Knock yourself out,” the old man said lightly. “My name’s Earl Logan if you’re curious.”
“Clark Kent.” He picked up the map eagerly and opened it up. It was of Smallville all right, but not the Smallville he remembered. Earl started driving back down the road as Clark sat in the back of the pickup, poring over the piece of paper.
It was wrong, he thought at first. The map had to be wrong. He almost started to ask Earl whether he’d given him the right map, but he caught himself. The old man was suspicious enough about him as it was. Some of the roads and other features, he recognized, but the rest of it might have been of some different town all together. Streets were different, buildings were marked here that Clark knew had been closed down for years. There was the Ross Corn factory, and the old Ironworks. And there was Potter’s…
He traced Siegel Road’s path out for a moment and then turned around. “Are we near Potter’s field?” he called out.
“We’re driving through it,” Earl called back, not bothering to turn around. Clark looked up, his mouth open in amazement.
“It can’t be…” he breathed out. Potter’s field, at least the one he knew, was a barren stretch of soil, rendered barren by the meteor crash. It had been abandoned for as long as Clark could remember. But as he looked out over the land, all he could see was rolling fields of corn. The wind rustled through the stalks and passed by him. It wasn’t possible.
“What happened to this place?” he asked aloud. “The meteor shower was supposed to have hit this…” He was cut off as the truck stopped abruptly. Earl cut off the engine and stepped out the cab, staring up at him petulantly.
“What’s this about the meteor shower?” he grated at him.
“There was supposed to have been a big hit here,” he said, his eyes going back to the field. “This is… I mean, it’s supposed to be all barren.”
“Like hell there was. Meteor’s didn’t come close to here.” He paused and craned his neck down at Clark, eyeing him fiercely. “Say, you aren’t one of those alien freaks, are you?” Clark flinched and tore his eyes off the field. Alien freaks? How could he-
Earl spit into the dirt and gave him a hard look. “You all are always digging in my fields, looking for samples and spreading around your crazy stories. Sometimes I’m even glad we’ve got the Luthor Corps to keep you all away,” he snarled.
“But there was a strike…”
“That’s all you people ever want to talk about,” he went on, ignoring Clark. “That or aliens coming down with the blasted things. Why don’t you go bother someone else? I wasn’t even living here on Red Tuesday.”
If Clark was confused before, he was positively stunned now. It was like his ears weren’t working right. He couldn’t be hearing this, could he?
“I don’t understand,” he managed to blurt out, “what’s this about aliens?” Earl grunted and started to get back in the truck. “No please! Just tell me what you mean!” It was apparently the wrong thing to say.
“That’s it,” he remarked and turned back. “Out of the truck. I’m not taking you any further. Find your own way into town.” Clark numbly climbed out of the back, still trying to understand what was going on. First that strange lighting shower, and then all the other weirdness, and now this?
The old man climbed back into the truck and slammed the door shut. “And I don’t want to see you on my lands, you hear me? Dig anywhere else you want, but don’t go bothering me again!” He paused and then leaned over in the truck cab. “Here,” he said, removing something from the glove box. “If you’re so interested in the damn things, have one, just leave me be!” He tossed something at Clark as he drove off. Clark caught it instinctually, still staring at the receding car. Then he glanced down at and promptly dropped it and jumped back. Earl had tossed him a chunk of green stone about the size of a baseball. It was a meteor rock.
Clark stared at it like it might bite for a moment, but then he realized something. He raised the hand he’d caught it with and turned it over. There was none of the tell-tale reaction he usually experienced when he got near even a tiny meteor fragment. A rock that size should have had him on his knees in seconds, but he hardly felt a thing. Gingerly, he bent down and picked it up, still waiting for the radiation to hit him, but nothing happened.
“What the hell?” he muttered, turning it over in his hands. It looked like a chunk of the meteor, but where was the radiation? He studied it closer, wishing he had a microscope handy. Then again, he reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to tell if it was for real or not even if he had one. He’d never studied the meteor stones that closely before, preferring to stay far away from them.
While he was staring at it, he suddenly heard a high pitched scream. He cocked his ears, listening. It came again and he pinpointed it. It was a female, young, probably around his age. He shoved the stone into his jacket pocket and took off running, following the sound. It had come from the old iron works, not too far off the road. The ‘new’ ironworks, he had to remind himself as he saw it. It wasn’t the run down, husk he remembered, but a functioning building now. There was a chain link fence surrounding the property and inside Clark could see rows of cars and trucks, all of them dirty and broken down.
It must be some sort of junkyard now, he realized. Then he heard the scream again, and with it, the harsh barking of dogs. He came to a halt as he saw a girl come running through one of the aisles of junkers, clutching something to her chest. She was making for the fence, but hot on her heels were four large, angry dogs. She wasn’t going to make it, he thought, seeing how close the dogs were.
Clark ran up to the edge of the fence and vaulted himself over easily. He landed and motioned to the girl, holding his hands out. She clutched something to her chest tighter and ran faster. Her long blonde hair was whipping behind her fiercely as the dogs nipped at the ends of her leather jacket. Pouring on the speed, she managed to reach him with seconds to spare. He grabbed her and practically threw her over the fence and to safety. He saw her clear the edge and drop roughly to the grass on the other side. As Clark started to climb up after her, one of the dogs latched onto his leg tightly. Frowning, he shook him off as gently as he could and saw the dog drop off with a yelp of surprise. He climbed the rest of the way up and jumped down to the other side of the fence.
“There you go,” he said, landing easily. “Lucky I came along.” The girl groaned and picked herself off the ground, still cradling the box.
“God, thank you so much,” she said, dusting herself off. “The last thing I needed was to wind up as Alpo for those mutts.” There was something about her voice that was oddly familiar. Her jeans were torn and a bit dirty from the run, but they looked like they’d been expensive once. She was about a foot shorter than him, but her figure was definitely adult. Clark caught himself staring at her tight t-shirt and tore his eyes away.
“You should probably be a little bit more careful then,” he said as she straightened up. “I mean, that probably wasn’t the safest place to…” he stopped as he got a better look at her. She had a very pretty face, with a kind of pert, spunky look to it. She brushed out her long hair and gave him a one sided smile that he knew well. For what seemed the fifth time today, Clark was speechless.
“So what’s your name, handsome?” Chloe Sullivan asked him with a smile.
Chapter 3
It was like someone had unplugged Clark’s brain. He wasn’t capable of rational thought. All he could do was stare at the girl in front of him, looking her up and down and refusing to accept what he saw. It was not Chloe Sullivan, it couldn’t be. It was impossible.
“So, you have a name?” she asked finally, tilting her head in a way that sent a shudder of familiarity through him. If this person wasn’t Chloe, she certainly looked like her. She had the same smile, the same face, the hair was longer, but it was the same vibrant gold he remembered. There was the same sparkle in her eyes. She smiled a little as she waited for him to speak.
“Cl… Clark,” he managed to choke out finally.
“Is that with one cluck or two?” she remarked. She waited for him to laugh and then shrugged when nothing was forthcoming. “So, I guess they only make them big and pretty where you come from, not too swift on the uptake. Pity.” She turned around, her hair whipping about behind her. “Thanks again for the save,” she called back as she started off.
He watched her leave for a moment before his brain kicked back into gear. “Wait a minute,” he called, running up to her. He caught her arm to pull her back.
She glared down at his hand and then looked up at him. “You want to keep that?” she asked him acidly. He jerked his hand back and she nodded.
“Sorry, I just wanted to talk to you,” he said.
“Better ways to ask a girl,” she remarked.
He blinked and then frowned a little. “Like saving your life?” he asked her quickly. She considered that and then smiled at him.
“I’m all ears,” she told him. Chloe shifted around the metal box she was holding and waited.
“Okay,” he said, trying to find a way to start. The best way he decided, was to be blunt. “You don’t know me right?” he asked her.
She looked at him closely and then shrugged. “Sorry, but no. Should I?”
“But that’s,” he said, “that’s impossible…”
“Oh no. Let me guess,” she broke in, giving him a wry look. “We shared something very special once, right? We were soulmates or something? Probably met at a party or something and we just clicked, huh? Shared something wild and passionate that changed your life forever, is that your version? Well, bottom line, if we did, I can’t remember, and if I can’t remember, it probably wasn’t worth it in the first place.” Clark took a step back, shocked.
“Sorry to ruin your big fantasy, buddy, but that’s life,” she tossed off. On the other side of the fence they heard a door swing open loudly. The dogs picked up their barking on cue. Chloe bit her lip and hugged the box tighter to her chest.
“Geez, don’t get a break around here,” she yelled, and grabbed his arm. “Run!” she called out and tugged him after her. They took off across the road and through the fields. Clark could only follow after her, thoroughly confused.
Just where had he wound up that this was Chloe Sullivan? Was this some sort of joke? Or a dream? He didn’t remember falling asleep, all he remembered was the strange lighting shower and being pulled into some sort of…
“Portal,” he breathed out. They reached the edge of the forest and stopped, Chloe bending over and resting on her knees, puffing. It must have been a portal, Clark thought, standing there. There was no other way he could explain it. He wasn’t in Smallville anymore, not his Smallville anyway.
Chloe sat down on the ground and put the metal box on her lap. “I hate running,” she complained. “Damn dogs.” She started to fiddle with the box on her lap. Frowning, she glanced at him. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. She shrugged and went back to studying the box. Pulling out a pin, she started to pick the lock.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly, frowning.
“Checking it for defects,” she remarked. The lock sprang open with a click and she pulled it off. “Look, there’s one now.” She tossed it over her shoulder and opened the box. It was partly full of tens and twenties. To Clark’s unbelieving eyes, Chloe scooped them up and started to grin.
“You’re stealing!” She shushed him and motioned for him to keep his voice down. “What are you doing with that?” he demanded, much more softly.
“Don’t preach to me,” she warned him, pocketing the money. “I appreciate the help with the dogs and all, but there’s a limit to how much I owe you.”
“You have to return that, Chloe. I’m serious, you could go to jail for something like that."
She smirked at him and got up, kicking the empty box aside as she did. “Yeah, like my uncle would let that happen. And I don’t recall telling you my name,” she turned back to him.
“I… uh…” he stuttered, trying to think of an answer.
“Oh right, the connection thing,” she shook her head. “God, I’m glad I don’t remember you,” she told him and started to walk off.
“You have to return that money, Chloe!” he told her, running after her.
“What do you care?”
“I care because I don’t want to see you wind up in trouble,” he told her, a little exasperated.
“That’s only if you get caught,” she smirked at him. “And stop following me! It’s not that I don’t appreciate the save back there, but it’s getting a little creepy now.” She pointed at his muddy clothes. “Besides, you look like you just fell in a river.”
“Lake actually,” he admitted.
“Did you hit your head on the bottom, ‘cause that would explain a lot.” She tried to walk a little faster, but he kept up right behind her. They crossed over the fields and onto a tiny dirt road. Chloe tucked the wad of money into her jacket and started walking nonchalantly as Clark followed after her. She glanced back at him quickly and started walking even faster. He matched her speed easily, lengthening his stride. Finally, she turned around and stared at him, incredulous. “God, are you slow? Go. Away. I don’t want you near me.”
“Look if I had any other choice I would,” he said in a rush. “I just got here and you’re you, but you’re not and neither is anything else and it’s all really confusing right now.”
“Look,” she said, leaning in close to him, “even on my best day, I wouldn’t care enough to talk you down from this. So my suggestion is to turn around, go back to that lake you fell in before, and try again. Maybe you’ll get it right and drown this time.” Clark blinked in response, and then a black pickup appeared at the end of the road. Chloe glanced at it quickly and then sighed, shaking her head. “And now this day is perfect,” she said, dryly.
The truck pulled up next to them and a young man who looked vaguely familiar to Clark leaned out of the driver’s side window, smiling at them, or more precisely at Chloe. He had dirty blond hair cut short and had a flat ugly face. “Chloe,” he said lightly, leering down at her. “What brings you out here?”
“Open road, Sean” she shrugged, giving him a fake little smile. “Not breaking any laws going for a walk, am I?”
“I don’t know about that, but I guess you’d be the expert.” She smiled a little broader at that, then looked away, muttering under her breath. Sean looked over at Clark, as if seeing him for the first time and gave him an appraising glance. “He always look like that, or did I catch you two at a bad time?” he asked, nodding at Clark’s clothes. Clark glanced down at himself, shifting his weight uncomfortably. Looking back up, he noticed that Sean was wearing a Smallville High Football jacket and something finally clicked in his head.
“Sean Kelvin?” he blurted out. Sean and Chloe stared at him.
“Yeah,” he nodded slowly.
“But- But you died,” Clark said, bewildered. “You froze in the lake.”
Now they were really staring at him. “Excuse me?” Sean asked.
“Forget about him,” Chloe remarked. She stepped in front of Clark and stared up at Sean. “Look, I need to get into town. Can you just give me a ride or something?”
“He coming too?” He nodded over her shoulder to Clark.
“In every sense of the words ‘God, no’,” she replied.
“Good,” he said shortly, giving Clark a worried look. “Hop in.” He opened the passenger door and scooted back to the driver’s seat.
“Well,” Chloe said, turning back to Clark, “it’s been… “ she searched for a word for a moment and then just smiled and shrugged at him. “See ya.”
“Wait a minute,” he said quickly. “You’re just leaving?”
“And now you catch on quick,” she rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry if your lost or something, but I don’t see how I’m supposed to help you with any of this. So see ya…” she floundered for a name.
“Clark,” he said quickly. “Clark Kent, I’ve been your best friend for like three years now. You have to remember!” She took a step back and Sean opened the driver door, staring down at them.
“Chloe?” he asked quickly, giving Clark a hard look.
She ignored him for the moment and stared at Clark intently. “For the last time,” she said quietly to him, “I don’t know you, and I don’t even think I want to know you. Now are you going to let me go or are we going to have a problem here.”
He stared at her for a moment and then shook his head, backing off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, whatever,” she snapped. She hurried around the truck and climbed in, slamming the door behind her. Clark stood there, blinking as they drove off, the tires kicking some of the dirt back towards him. He watched it disappear down the road and then looked around at the fields and woods around him. Then he pulled the meteor rock out of his jacket pocket and held it up, giving it a bewildered look.
“Where the hell am I?” he breathed out, looking back down the road again.
Chapter 4
With nothing else left for him to do, Clark followed Sean’s truck into town, staying far enough behind them to keep from behind seen. And the nearer they got to the town, the more he saw what else was now different in Smallville. Most of the farms and homes that he remembered on the outskirts of town were now abandoned or bulldozed over. A few of the fields had been replaced by crummy looking housing projects and trailer yards. He could have counted on one hand the number of working fields left.
There were also a number of new Luthorcorp buildings that Clark didn’t remember. Shipping plants, office buildings, factories, they were all scattered around the outskirts of town. They even passed what suspiciously looked like a smaller version of a nuclear power plant, but Clark couldn’t be certain. How had all of this happened, he wondered. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of the answer.
Finally, they came to the edge of the main town and Clark had to slow down quickly, to keep from behind seen. He doubted that things had changed that much where a teenager moving at super-human speed wouldn’t draw a notice or two. He hurried down the street, watching Sean’s truck pull to a stop at a light. Ducking into an alley, he glanced out quickly to see if they’d moved on yet. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to follow them now that he couldn’t keep up anymore.
“Hey, you got a buck?” a rough voice asked him, making him jump. Clark turned around quickly, staring downwards. A man was lying in the alley, wrapped up in torn cardboard and old newspaper. He stared up at Clark with a slightly off-center gaze. “Anything, man?” he asked again.
“Here,” he said, a little put off, as he pulled out his wallet. He mechanically pulled out a few bucks and handed it to the man.
He took it eagerly. “Bless you, son.” He stared at the money, smiling a little and tucked it away inside his stained shirt. Clark moved away from him slowly, backing out of the alley, more than a little disquieted.
He’d never seen a homeless person in Smallville before. That sort of thing didn’t happen here. He’d seen them in Metropolis, yes, but not in Smallville. Glancing down at his feet, he saw that the sidewalk was covered with cigarette buts and other pieces of garbage. There was a trashcan not five feet from him that was dented in and overflowing. Then he looked around him, as if for the first time, and saw the grubby buildings and spray-painted walls of the town. He saw the people hurrying past him with their heads down, not making eye-contact. The people he remembered had taken pride in keeping their city clean and hadn’t looked so beaten down. What had happened here?
The sound of a car door slamming shut brought him back as he turned and saw Chloe climbing out of the truck. He ducked quickly back into the alley before she could see him and then stared around the corner, watching her carefully. She said a few more things to Sean and then walked away. The truck pulled into traffic and made a turn as the light changed. Clark watched it drive off and then focused back on Chloe, who was now walking down the street, away from him.
He carefully followed after her, staying far behind her and trying to keep out of sight. It was hard work, to stay focused on her as passed by so many strange and puzzling things. He followed her by a wall plastered with posters and flyers for Luthorcorp. All he could do was glance at them quickly, picking up such phrases as First in the Nation: By Demand!, Put Your Faith in The People Behind the Power, and WLIO: Bringing You the Best in Entertainment and News. Even more puzzling was one that said Lionel Luthor: the Man Whose Hand Guides the Nation. He glanced at Chloe’s receding figure and then back at the posters, sorely tempted to turn around and head back, but instead he hurried after her. Maybe she’d able to explain some of this, if he could get her to talk to him that was.
He followed Chloe past the Beanery, which surprisingly enough looked the same as it always had, and then got another shock for a moment as he glanced into the old antique shop his mother had used to frequent before the woman who owned it had died. Now it looked like it hadn’t been closed a day. Then he saw a girl about his age carry an old chair out from the back of the shop and he stopped dead in his tracks. Someone bumped into him roughly from behind and he heard something drop to the ground, but he hardly noticed. “Tina Greer?” he said as he stared inside.
“Watch where you’re going,” someone said and Clark turned around, startled. A woman was bending down behind him, picking up groceries and looking at him angrily.
“Sorry about that,” he said quickly, taking one last glance inside the shop. Then he bent quickly and started to gather her things up. He looked over his shoulder quickly to see where Chloe was, but couldn’t find her in the crowd. “Sorry,” he said again, not looking as he shoved the food in the woman’s bag.
“Just remember that next time,” she said quickly. She started to say something more when she suddenly stopped and stared at his face, her eyes growing wide. Clark missed her look as he glanced around again for Chloe.
“I will, I promise,” he said lightly. Then he seemed to notice her silence and turned around, frowning at her. She was still staring at him, her fingers white as she clutched the edge of her bag. “Is everything okay?” he asked her slowly. The woman fell over roughly and started to back away from him on all fours. He stared after her, his mouth open. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t believe this!” Chloe’s voice rang out. Clark turned around quickly to see her standing just behind him with her hands on her hips. She looked ready to explode. “How the hell did you even follow me here in the first place?” she snapped at him.
Behind him, Clark heard a sudden scuffling and he turned to see the older woman running away. She’d even left her groceries behind. He watched her dash around the corner and out of sight, utterly bewildered. “Well, I’m waiting,” Chloe said impatiently.
Turning back to Chloe, he stuttered for a moment, thinking. “I caught a ride into town after you left. I didn’t even know you were in front of me.”
“Okay, fair enough. You just caught a ride.” She repeated angrily, staring at him. Chloe nodded to herself and looked down the street in either direction. There was no one near them now. “So what way are you going now?”
“I… uh, don’t really know,” he hesitated, knowing he was trapped now. “That way,” he pointed down the street. Before he was even done speaking, Chloe was walking past him in the opposite direction. “Or maybe not,” he muttered, getting up to follow after her.
“Guess you’re not that good with directions, huh?” she called back to him, walking faster now.
“I just need to talk to you for a minute. C’mon, Chloe!”
She turned around, glaring at him. “How many different ways can I say it? NO! And stop saying that like you know me.”
“I do know you, or something like that,” he started, but she rolled her eyes and started walking away again. “Okay, how about this then: you’re dream is to become a newspaper reporter,” he said, catching up to her again. “How could I have known that unless I knew you?”
“Pretty easily since you’re wrong: I haven’t narrowed it down or anything but I was leaning towards groupie or… well, I haven’t thought of something else though, but I’m gonna,” she said in a rush. Then she frowned and looked down at herself for a moment. “And what about me suggests ‘newspaper reporter’ to you anyways?” she gestured with her hands.
“Okay… So maybe you’re not into newspaper reporting now, but you will be,” he promised her. “Alright, I know how bad that sounds,” he admitted as he caught her look. She stared at him flatly and he went back to racking his brain to find something else.
“Your father works for Luthorcorp,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t respond. “Your favorite color is pink. You have a fear of needles. Oh, you don’t eat tomatoes but you love ketchup!”
“How did you know-“ she started and then she recovered quickly. “Okay, maybe you do know a bit about me,” she said, nodding slightly. Then she smiled snidely at him and cocked her head. “Congratulations, you’re a stalker.” She turned around again and walked off.
“The morning your mother left, you came downstairs and found your dad making some eggs for you.” She stopped, frozen in place. “He’d burnt them, but you ate them anyways as he told you what happened. That was the first time he’d ever made you breakfast.” Chloe turned around slowly, her mouth slightly open. Then her face darkened and she stormed back over to him. Rearing back, she slapped him hard across the face. Clark turned his face as she hit him, absorbing the blow.
“Never say anything else about my mother,” she hissed at him. “You don’t have the right. You didn’t know her and you sure as hell don’t know me.”
He nodded slightly, seeing the look on her face. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “I wouldn’t have if-“ She glared at him, clearly not believing him. “I just need to talk to you, please. I don’t have anyone else here.”
“Fine then,” she said at last. Then her eyes widened and she cried out, “And ****!” Wincing, she held up her hand, which was swiftly turning beet red. She held it tightly by the wrist, her eyes screwed shut. “Ow, ow, ow…”
“Oh, geez, sorry!” Clark looked around swiftly. “Let’s get you some ice. The Talon would be the closest place.” He took her bye the shoulders and started to guide her down the street. Chloe shrugged off his help irritably, walking on her own.
“Don’t bother,” she said angrily. She walked over to a table outside a shop where someone had set down a Styrofoam cup down. Picking it up with one hand, she popped the lid off slightly and poured what was left in it on the sidewalk, keeping the lid in the way of the ice inside. Clark blinked, but didn’t say anything, glancing inside the shop nervously to see if anyone had noticed them. She grabbed a napkin from the table and poured the ice into it. Wrapping it around her swollen hand, she started to leave, nodding for him to come with her.
“What’s your name, again?” she asked, fussing with the napkin.
“Clark Kent,” he said, catching up to her. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Forget about it. So before I broke my hand across your face, what did you want to ask?” she asked shortly, clearly still angry at him.
He fell into step behind her. “Everything,” he shook his head, a little desperate.
“You’re going to have to get more specific than that.”
“Okay, how about that,” he said, spotting a Luthorcorp poster on the wall. It was the same one he’d seen earlier. Lionel Luthor, looking both paternal and respectable, stared back at them. “What’s with all the Luthorcorp stuff? I don’t remember anything like this. If there should be anything up it should be Lexcorp.”
“Luthorcorp,” she corrected him.
“Lexcorp,” he stressed it. She stared back at him, still confused, and shrugged. He sighed and shook his head. “Nevermind. Just tell me what Lionel Luthor is doing on a poster.”
Chloe glanced at the poster and smiled lightly. She reached out and toyed with the edge of the poster. “Luthorcorp puts those up everywhere. I guess they think if they wallpaper the town with them, maybe it’ll make everyone forget about all the crap they cause.” She sniffed and tore it off the wall in one motion, letting it fall to the ground. “Besides, it’s not like anyone is going to stop them. They own the wall, they own the building; hell, they probably own the street we’re walking on. They can advertise if they want.”
“But how?” He turned around and stared at her. “Luthorcorp doesn’t own anything in Smallville. They used to run the fertilizer plant, but that was bought by Lex.”
“Lex?” she asked. “You mean Lex Luthor? He doesn’t own anything; it’s all his dad’s. And Luthorcorp owns pretty much everything here. Here and everywhere else in the country.”
He absorbed this quietly, puzzling it over. Chloe continued to stare at him, looking confused. “You had to have known about this. It’s not like its recent news or anything.”
“Not to everyone,” he muttered. She shrugged and adjusted the icepack on her hand, not saying anything. He stared down the street, his breath hissing out between his teeth. Then his eyes fell on something and he stepped past her, gaping.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Tell me about that,” he said in a hushed voice. She craned her head, looking. “The Talon,” he said, pointing.
The bright and warm place he’d spent so many afternoons in was gone. Now, the Talon was a boarded up old husk. The marquee overhead was falling to pieces and had been propped up with a length of metal pipe. Peeling movie posters were taped to the doors, all for movies that were a few years old. Clark felt a cold shiver as he stared in the broken, dingy windows. He’d never seen it look this bad, even before Lana had renovated the building from a failing movie theater to a coffee shop. He walked across the street blindly, staring at the boarded up wreck. A car screeched around him, narrowly missing him. Clark didn’t even notice at all.
Chloe ran after him, dodging cars in the street as she crossed to his side. “What was that about?” she yelled. “You could’ve gotten killed!”
“What happened here?” he demanded, ignoring her question completely. “This place shouldn’t be a wreck, Lana fixed it up! What’s going on?” She stared from him to the Talon. Grabbing her arms he asked again, “Chloe, what happened?”
“Let go of me!” she yelled back at him, fighting him. Blinking, he released her and stepped back quickly. She glared back at him, rubbing her arms. He glanced around as people nearby stared accusingly.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said in a rush. “I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, well, I don’t really care,” she snapped back. “I had you pegged for a psycho from the start and so far you haven’t done anything to make me think differently. And speaking of which, so what if things are different than you remember? Everything else seems perfectly normal to me and everybody else, so did you ever think it was just you? What if you’re the one who’s crazy, huh? You think of that?”
“I’m not crazy,” he told her quietly.
“Yeah? Then I guess it’s just everyone else, huh?”
Turning angrily, she stormed off across the street. Clark hesitated and glanced back at the Talon. Then he set his chin and started after her. She heard him coming and turned around, her face set, but her eyes are little worried.
“If you don’t turn around and walk away right now,” she warned him, “I’m gonna scream bloody murder until the cops come.”
“With that money in your jacket?” he asked quietly. He reached into his pocket and she flinched, but he only pulled out his wallet. Opening it, he took out a picture tucked inside and held it out to her. “This morning I woke up and went to school with all my friends. One of them gave me this, a picture of all of us at the Talon, at its reopening.” She stared at him and then at the photo. “Look at the sign in the window,” he urged her, “look at the girl in the photo. It’s you, or the Chloe Sullivan I know.”
With trembling fingers, she took the photo and stared at it. “How…” she breathed out. She looked up at him and then at the Talon.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “One minute I was running home and the next I was pulled here.” She started to shake her head fiercely and he bent down, glancing around them as people gave them strange looks. “I know this is a lot to believe,” he said quietly, “but you have to trust me. I don’t know where I am or how I got here, but I do know who you are. You’re my friend. You have to help me.”
She stared up at him in shock. Blinking, she swallowed and then licked her lips, glancing at the picture again. “This is a trick,” she stammered. “It has to be.”
Before he could say anything, they were distracted abruptly as two large trucks screeched to a halt at the end of the street. Then almost simultaneously, another two pulled up at the opposite end, effectively sealing off the block. As soon as they were stopped, armed soldiers poured out from them, all wearing black and gray uniforms. Unconsciously, Clark grabbed Chloe and hurried her off the street and away from the soldiers, towards the Talon. Everyone else on the sidewalk seemed to have the same idea. In moments, a crowd of about ten people had gathered together around them, staring about fearfully.
“What’s happening?” someone asked fearfully, but no one had any idea. A woman began to moan quietly, staring at the troops.
Clark leaned down towards Chloe and gave her a quick look. “What’s going on?” he asked, gesturing to the troops. She didn’t answer.
A man in his car leaned on his horn fiercely at the massed soldiers in front of him, motioning them to move aside. Someone barked a command and they raised their guns to shoulder level, readying them. His horn died out slowly as he gaped at them. Then fearfully, he scrambled out of his car and dashed to the other side of the street, trying to get away from them. The soldiers were carrying strange, bulky guns, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a science fiction movie. There was a loud, collective hum as the soldiers flicked something on the guns on, arming them. Then on some order they leveled them at the crowd.
Someone started to shriek in fear as everyone panicked. A few people took off running, but turned back because there was no where to go. The street was sealed off at both ends by a wall of guns. Then he felt a sudden grip on his wrist and he looked down into Chloe’s fearful eyes.
“Run,” she said quietly. “Run!”
One of the soldiers boomed into a mike, “On the ground now! We have you surrounded. Step out of the crowd and no one gets hurt!”
“What?” he asked, staring down at Chloe.
“It’s the Luthor Corps!” she hissed at him. “Just get out of here!”
“What about you?”
“This isn’t the time to be noble, you don’t know these guys!”
“On the ground!” the soldier yelled again, waving his gun. Some people in the crowd started to kneel down, looking around nervously. As they did, one of the soldiers had an unobstructed view of Clark.
“He’s got a hostage!” he called. Almost in the same breath someone gave the order.
“Open fire!”
Chapter 5
In one motion, the soldiers leveled their guns and opened fire on the crowd. Bright, green pulses of light blasted out of the high tech weapons, streaking through the air towards them. People fell as the charges burned through them instantaneously. The blasts tore up the concrete and shattered the marquee over head. Sparks rained down as the old, but still hot, electrical lines inside it were ruptured. A car parked in front of the Talon was perforated in moments. No one but Clark had a chance to move before they were cut down.
Just as the cry came to fire, Clark had pivoted and grabbed Chloe around the waist. As roughly as he dared, he’d hurled her through the boarded up windows of the Talon, hoping she’d be able to find some cover inside. Then the pulses struck him from behind, knocking him to his knees.
Clark had been shot before and knew what the punch of a bullet felt like. This was much worse. He gritted his teeth as he felt the skin on his back burn. Then he felt the familiar kick of nausea in his stomach and realized the green color of the pulses hadn’t been a coincidence. The meteor rocks were powering those guns, whatever they were.
Gasping for breath, he crawled behind the wreck of a car. The shock was quickly fading from him and he was already starting to recover. At least the effect of the meteor rocks wasn’t very strong, he thought grimly. One of the pulses punched a hole in the car a few feet from his head. But they didn’t have to be, he reasoned, not when they had so many of them.
He stared suddenly at the bodies lying around him. A woman looked back him vacantly, part of her neck sheared away by a blast. His stomach heaving, he looked away as another salvo struck the car. How could they open fire on the crowd like that? Who the hell were these people?
“Clark!” he heard Chloe call from inside.
At least she was okay so far, he thought. “Get down,” he yelled as another salvo tore the door to the Talon off its hinges. He grimaced and then stared through the car. The soldiers were advancing on the theater in pairs, weapons ready. He had to find someway to keep them back. Glancing around, he finally settled on the car itself. Reaching underneath it, he felt around quickly till his fingers touched the fuel line. Then with one jerking motion, he tore it open.
“Hope they get the message,” he muttered as he turned and braced his feet against the car frame. Clark kicked out and sent the car tumbling end over end into the street. The soldiers scattered as the car came to a screeching stop on its side. The ones furthest back shouted as they spotted him and started to raise their weapons. Too late, he thought and he focused his heat vision at the ruptured fuel line.
The car went up in a fireball, the explosion’s shockwave sending the massed soldier’s flying. Not waiting to see who was left standing, Clark dashed through the ruined doors of the Talon, destroying what was left of the frame. A few random shots smashed into the wood around him, but none came very close.
“What happened?” Chloe called out to him. She was huddled behind an overturned sofa in the remains of the lobby. Clark jumped over the ratty furniture and landed next to her. “I told you to run!” She clutched at his jacket.
“If I did that you’d be dead right now,” he hissed at her.
“My uncle’s a general,” she told him. “He works with Luthorcorp. They wouldn’t shoot me.”
“They didn’t care about the people out there,” he snapped. “Why should they start with you?”
She glanced towards the door and her face went pale. “You should have run,” she moaned. “You just should have run.”
Clark looked back suddenly as he heard the soldiers start to regroup. They’d be ready to storm the building in minutes. “We have to get out of here,” he told Chloe quickly. Taking her hand he dragged her up and towards the back of the lobby. “There’s a back door here to the alley way,” he said. “If we follow that, we’ll come out down the…” he stopped suddenly, brought up short at a mass of rubble. There wasn’t a doorway in sight.
“I guess Lana put that back way in when they rebuilt,” he muttered to himself. The soldiers were getting louder outside. Frowning, he stared around with his x-ray vision, looking for an opening they could get through.
“What now?” Chloe said. “How do we get through?”
Clark stopped and then stared downwards. “We don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Bending down, Clark clenched his fist and then punched it through the cement floor. Chloe leapt back in shock as he pulled it out and then punched again, widening the hole he’d made. Finally, he stood up and kicked at the edges until it was wide enough for them to slip through. “There’s a sewer underneath that’s wide enough for us both to get through,” he said, staring down the hole. “I don’t know where it leads to, but it’s our only bet.” She just stood there, mutely staring at him.
Finally she managed to choke some words out. “How… how… did you…”
“We don’t have time, Chloe.” He took her hands and led her to the edge of the pit. “Trust me, I won’t let anything happen to you, okay?” She stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Good,” he smiled at her. Then he pushed her over the edge.
“Oh, you son of a-“ she yelled as she disappeared down the hole.
“Sorry, Chloe,” he muttered, turning around towards the door. The soldiers were right outside the Talon now. One of them smashed in one of the windows and started to fire inside. Clark focused his heat vision on the wooden door frame and the ceiling above the door. In a moment, they burst into flame, sending the troops scurrying back once more. That would only buy them a few more moments, he realized, so they’d have to make the most of them. He turned back to the hole and jumped down through it.
He landed in knee deep sludge, brackish water, and who knows what else. He gritted his teeth as he felt something bump against his knee and float away. There was enough dim light from the hole above his head to let him see a few feet in front of his face, but that was all. Not that he wanted to see too clearly in here, he reasoned.
“You bastard!” Chloe yelled at him from a few feet away. She slogged through the water and shoved him. “This is your plan! This!”
“It beats getting shot up there,” he pointed out.
“Not when our other option is getting shot down here, it doesn’t.” He gave her a look and she switched gears. “But I’m all up for running now.”
“Glad to hear it.” He took her hand and started to slog quickly through the muck.
“How did you do that back there?” Chloe asked him. “You punched through the floor like it was nothing. I’ve never seen anyone do that.”
“Short explanation: I’m not from around here,” he said tersely.
“You already told me that,” she sniffed.
“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” he yelled as they ran down the sewer tunnels.
The soldiers were swift and efficient. The wounded were carried out of harms way and swiftly bandaged up. Three of the soldiers broke out the mobile extinguishers and made quick work of the still burning car. The rest kept their guns trained at the Talon. The front door of the theater was a burning wreck, so they were forced to keep their distance for the time being.
“Get that fire out now,” their commander shouted, waving at the three soldiers battling the blaze. On the outside, she might have seemed cool and in control, but inside she was cursing herself roundly. There was no excuse for this. They were highly trained, motivated, had the best technology money could buy, and they had just botched things like amateurs. Damnit, they’d drilled for just this sort of situation and they’d still failed. She felt like screaming at something, but she did not. Instead, she keyed in her helmet radio with a touch of her fingers and looked skyward as an army issue helicopter roared overhead.
“Do you have visual?” she shouted into her comm.
“Nothing yet,” came the reply. “Switching over to infrared.” She waited tersely, staring at the blaze. He was so close now, she thought.
“Snipers, where are you? Any sign of the target?” she barked into the radio, growing impatient with the chopper.
“We’ve got two on the courthouse roof and another a block down,” one of her men radioed in. “So far, nada.”
“If you get a shot, go for the wound,” she reminded them. “Make it painful, we’ve seen how fast he can be.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“We’ve got something,” the chopper radioed back. “On the infrared; two signals. Heading southward from the Talon.”
“Snipers!” she yelled.
“We’ve got nothing!” they yelled back. “They’re not there!”
Snarling, she started towards the Talon doors. “Come on,” she barked at her men.
“What about the wall?” another shouted, gesturing at the Talon. “Shouldn’t we put that out first.”
In one motion, she drew out a hand gun and fired shot after shot into the top of the burning doorway. The gun wasn’t one of the special Luthorcorp models, designed with suppressing the alien in mind, but instead an old fashioned, fifty-caliber magnum. The high caliber bullets tore the door frame and upper wall to pieces. As it collapsed, the flames were buried under a pile of rubble and plaster.
“It’s out,” she told them, reloading the gun. Snapping the clip in, she took the point, leading them into the abandoned theater. Climbing over what was left of the doorway, she paused, scanning the room. Her men filed in around her, guns ready.
One of her men noticed her standing there, and nodded at her. “You okay?” he asked quietly.
“Fine,” she snapped out of her reverie. “You still following them?” she asked into the radio.
“Affirmative. Still heading south. They must be in the sewers; I can’t pick them up on visual.”
“Copy that,” one of her men yelled. “Found the rathole.” She followed him over to the gaping hole in the floor.
“We’re heading in,” she said to the chopper. “Keep us posted.”
Chapter 6
“Stop! Just a second, okay?” Chloe asked plaintively. She coughed and bent over, gasping for breath. It was hard to tell in the near darkness of the sewers, but she looked beat. Neither of them looked that good, he thought. The muck at the bottom of the tunnels had started at ankle deep and was now around mid thigh. Slogging through it had left them soaked and filthy. Every time they so much as brushed the walls, they came back with a thick coating of slime on them. On top of that, there was the smell and the loose floor on the bottom of the tunnel. Bits of stone, rubbish, and other things he didn’t want to name littered the soupy floor, waiting to trip them up and send them sprawling.
When she managed to catch her breath, she glanced up at him, still bent over. “Why didn’t you run?” she asked hoarsely. “I told you to.”
“And leave everyone there, you included?” He paused and stared down. “Not that it helped any.” He’d never have imagined those soldiers would just open fire on the crowd like that. He shuddered slightly as he remembered the sight of the bodies around him.
“Well, thanks anyway,” she said quietly. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t…” she stopped and glanced down at the murky waters. “Well, I definitely wouldn’t be here, but you get my point.”
He nodded and smiled a little. She stared at him strangely and then looked at his shoulder. Reaching over, she fingered one of the holes in his jacket. “You were shot…,” she said quietly.
“I’m fine,” he told her, moving her hand away. “Don’t worry.”
“That’s sorta the point though,” she said, reaching under the jacket. “You’re not even bleeding! And before, you punched through a concrete floor. How did you do that?”
He hesitated, unsure of how to begin. “It’s hard to explain. You know how I said I wasn’t from here, or at least, this wasn’t the Smallville I knew?” As he spoke, he started down the tunnel and she followed after him.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “I’m not sure I know what to think about that right now, but I have to admit that there’s not a lot about you that’s normal.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly. “Well, what do you know about the day of the meteor shower?”
“A bit,” she said, hopping over a floating lump of garbage. “I was still in Metropolis then, but people still talk about it. Meteor rocks came down all over Smallville, tore up half the town and killed a lot of people. They’ve got a plaque about it where the old city hall used to be.”
Clark stopped, looking at her. “They landed in town?”
“Most of them, I think,” she said. “Why?”
“I just remember hearing that most of the rocks came down outside of town,” he said quietly. “I guess that’s something else that’s different,” he wondered out loud.
She seemed to consider this and then shrugged. “So where were you doing all of this?”
He looked at her for a moment and then told her. “I came down along with them.” Chloe slipped on something suddenly and fell face first into the muck. She came up sputtering and hacking. When she had recovered, she stared up at him in shock.
“You what?” she asked.
“My ship came down with the meteor rocks. My parents found me and raised me as their son. I’ve been living here ever since.”
“Your ship?” she repeated. She blinked and then said slowly, “You’re an… alien?”
“Is that any harder to believe than anything else I’ve told you?” he pointed out.
“It’s just a lot of take in,” she remarked, looking a little wide-eyed.
“Imagine how I felt when my parents told me about it.” He smiled and stared down the tunnel and pointed to a branching path. “I think that one leads out of town.” He started down it and she hurried to catch up.
“Umm,” she asked hesitantly, “how do you know for sure?”
“About being an alien?” he asked her. “I guess I wondered about it for a while. I mean, I look like everyone else, and I didn’t really start to get my powers until I was older…”
“No,” she cut in, “I mean about the tunnel. How do you know it leads out?”
“Oh,” he said, a little put out, “I can see the streets above us. This leads out of town.” She looked at him for a moment and then nodded slowly. They walked through the tunnels in silence for a while.
Clark wasn’t sure why he had told her his secret just now. It might have been easier to lie to her, he realized, and just make up a slightly more believable story. As if there was one, he thought dryly. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could share with anyone. He’d never even told Chloe, his Chloe, about his secret, unsure of how she would take it. Not Lex or even Lana. Pete had eventually discovered, but only when Clark hadn’t had anything other choice. Sharing that kind of information with people, once done, it wasn’t something that he could really take back if things went wrong. How would she react, he wondered. It wasn’t like he really knew her, he reminded himself. She looked and sounded like his friend, but there were a lot of differences. Especially considering how they met. And yet, this was Chloe, he thought, one of his best friends. He knew her, or at least, he knew his Chloe. He shook his head. It was all very confusing.
To break the silence, he asked, “So who were those guys back there?”
She coughed and spat. “The Luthor Corps: the company’s own private security force. They’re more like mercenaries though. The company keeps them around to do all their dirty work and guard their labs. That’s how they were able to buy up most of the land around here. They’d threaten them, cause a few accidents, or worse,” she glared, “and people would eventually cave in and just sell.”
“How can they do that? What about the police?”
“You mean, old Ethan?” she asked, amused. “He doesn’t blow his nose without Lionel Luthor’s permission. The police are all bought off; you spot a brand new Lexus in town I guarantee you it belongs to a cop. They don’t care what happens to the rest of us. They just go after drifters or people like me,” she shrugged. “Same way with the Ledger; it’s more like a promotional flyer than a newspaper. No body cares what happens to this town anymore.”
“Has it always been like this?” he asked, a little sickened.
“For as long as I’ve been here,” she said wearily. “I guess things started to change just after the meteor shower. Luthorcorp set up shop in that Fertilizer plant you mentioned before, the one your friend owns. Well, they tore it down and built this huge lab where it used to be. It’s state of the art. My dad used to work there and he told me about it. He used to say there were all these restricted sections inside and all kinds of top secret stuff went on in there.”
“Used to?” Clark asked.
“He died,” she said flatly. “There was a lab explosion or something a few years ago.” Clark took a quick look at her face, but she seemed not to care. Or at least, he thought, she was trying to look like she didn’t care.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I know your dad, or I knew him,” he floundered for a moment. “He was, is a good man.”
She shrugged again and walked ahead of him, so all he could see was her back. “Whatever,” she remarked, her voice tight. Clark kept up behind her, wanting to say something more, but deciding to keep quiet.
“So anyway,” she went on, “after the meteor shower, the Luthors set up shop in Smallville and started to make a lot of donations, saying they were going to help everyone rebuild.” She looked back at him and smirked. “You can guess where all those donations wound up though.”
“I’ve seen how Lionel Luthor can corrupt people,” he agreed, thinking of Sheriff Ethan.
“Ain’t business grand,” she laughed. “So pretty soon Luthorcorp had all the city officials in their pocket and owned most of the property in town. They started putting up all these factories, saying they were going to provide new jobs and better lives. Nobody ever mentioned what the jobs were going to be like though.”
“What do you mean?” She smirked and pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the wall nearby. The same thick, soupy water that were standing in was pouring out of it noisily. “Luthorcorp,” he said grimly, reading the name on the pipe.
“Imagine working day in and day out right next to vats of this stuff,” she said, kicking her feet in the water. “Breathing it in when they process it, having it on your hands when you take your lunch break. And it’s not like it’s just down here and in the factories, there are bogs of this stuff to the north, you can smell it for miles around. It gets in the soil, rots crops out,” she wrinkled her nose up in disgust. “And it’s not like no one’s tried to do anything about it. They tried to strike a few years ago, get better conditions. Luthor just brought in scabs and had the protestors arrested. They never even found some of the guys in charge of organizing it.”
Clark listened quietly, strangely enough, wanting to laugh. It was all too unbelievable. This was Smallville, it couldn’t be like this. It just couldn’t. But something in Chloe’s voice made him listen, the dull anger that became more pronounced as she went on. How could it go from such a warm place to this? What had happened here that hadn’t in his world?
When she was finished, she brooded quietly for a minute. Clark let her, thinking over everything. Then he looked at her and gave her a little smile. She noticed it and stared back at him. “What, you think this is funny?” she snapped.
“No,” he shook his head. “I just wanted to say I told you so.” She stared at him. “I told you, you’d be a great reporter. You missed your calling.” He shrugged and smiled shyly at her. She blinked and then burst out laughing. He did as well.
Smiling, she looked at him, studying him for a moment. “You are different,” she said finally.
“That’s sort of an understatement.”
“No, you are. I don’t know how to explain it…” she trailed off. A sudden noise at the other end of the tunnel made him turn around quickly though. “Trouble?” she asked, getting ready to run again.
“They’re still after us,” he told her quietly. She moaned a little, staring into the darkness. Clark focused his vision through the darkness behind them and concentrated for a moment. The blackness of the sewers fell away as he stared through the walls. He could see skeletons behind them, dim, white figures running in small groups. Most were still far off, but two of the soldiers were getting dangerously close.
“Two of them are near the start of this tunnel,” he said quietly, pulling her down in the muck with him. The slimy water came up to her chin as she ducked down and he saw her choke back a gag. “Stay here,” he warned her quietly. She gave him a ‘do-you-think-I’m-an-idiot’ glare and nodded. Taking a deep breath, he dove under the water.
Clark reflected briefly on how lucky he was that his eyes wouldn’t be hurt by whatever was floating around in that water. And the fact that without x-ray vision, he’d have never been able to see an inch in the murky water in the first place. He swam as quickly as he could down the tunnel without churning up the water behind him like a speedboat. The tunnel hit a T-junction at the end and it was there that he waited underwater, watching the pair of legs getting closer. The soldiers were advancing slowly, with guns drawn, he guessed from their stances. He let his head break the surface so he could see them more easily as he waited.
They were ten feet from the branch of the junction now, then eight, then six. He waited tensely for them to clear the gap. The only sound was the gush of water from a pipe and the sounds of the soldiers’ wading through the stagnant muck. Then before he could move, there was a burst of static from the soldiers’ walkie-talkies that cut through the silence.
“Target re-acquired!” a voice yelled through it. “Team 3! He’s right in front of you, Team 3!” The soldiers leapt back with startled shouts as Clark exploded up out of the water. He knocked one out cold against the stone wall with a brush of his arm and charged the other one. The unlucky soldier had time enough to get off a poorly aimed shot that sizzled upwards into the ceiling before Clark reached him. The shot tore open a steam pipe which started to hiss loudly. Grabbing the soldier’s armored vest, Clark lifted him up and slammed the top of his helmet into the ceiling. The soldier stiffened and then went limp.
Clark checked their status quickly with his vision. The one slumped against the wall was unconscious and didn’t seem to be too badly off. The soldier he was still holding had a slight concussion, but nothing too serious, he guessed. Before he dropped him, he plucked the soldier’s walkie-talkie off his belt and listened in for a moment.
“Team 3! Team 3, respond!” the cry came over it. “We’ve lost you over the sensor. Report your status. All teams converge on unit’s location. Team 6, head down two junctions and take a left, he should be there.”
Depressing the call button, he tried to make his voice sound more threatening then it was. “Call them off if you know what’s good for them. I can’t promise to go easy on them if they keep at this.”
“Target is there! Converge on location,” the reply came. Snarling, he almost threw it away when he thought better of it and stuffed it in his pocket. It would keep him posted on how close they were at least. He started to slog back to where he left Chloe when the walkie-talkie broke in again.
“Target on the move southward.” They were tracking his every move, he realized. How? He stared upwards, through the stone ceiling and the street above it. A helicopter was circling the air above him, panning back and forth. That must be it, he thought. But how where they tracking him?
Unconsciously, his ears picked up on the hiss of steam escaping from the broken pipe. “They lost me when the pipe blew,” he muttered. They must be using a heat sensor. Smiling, he started to jog back towards Chloe.
He found her exactly where he had left her. “Are you okay?” she asked quickly, standing up. She touched his shoulder lightly and Clark was suddenly very conscious of her sopping wet shirt.
“Yeah, fine,” he said, looking away quickly. She noticed where he’d been staring and laughed.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling her shirt off of her skin, unselfconsciously. “But what do you expect me to do, stay crouched over in that muck? And besides,” she smiled and pointed calmly to his chest,” it’s not like you’re any better.” Clark glanced down and saw how tight his shirt was pressed against his abs and blushed, pulling it away quickly.
“Forget about that,” he hissed through her laughter, “we’ve got bigger problems. They’ve got a helicopter up there tracking us by heat. It’s leading the rest of them right towards us.”
“Can’t you just, fight them off or something?” she asked. “You know, make with the super strength.”
“Wish I could. Those guns of theirs would make mincemeat of me in these close quarters,” he said, glancing at the tunnel walls. “But… I might be able to delay them.”
“How?” she asked quickly.
“Just start running for now. I’ll catch up with you in a minute. I think I can block their sensors.”
“Clark, I’m not just…”
“Just go, I’ll be right behind you,” he promised her. She held out for a moment, then nodded. Then, before he could stop her, she stepped towards him and kissed him on the cheek. He stared at her in surprise as she pulled back and made a gagging face.
“Oh, gross,” she said and started to retch.
“Not the response I was expecting,” he remarked.
“I forgot you’re covered in this muck,” she told him. She made a face. “Not exactly minty fresh.” She spit once more and then smiled lamely at him. “Good luck,” she said before running down the tunnel.
“Yeah… you too,” he said, watching her go. Then he shook himself out of his reverie and stared upwards. There were a number of pipes running around the ceiling, but it only took him a second to find the right ones. “Hope no one’s taking a shower now,” he muttered quickly.
Delicately, he started to heat up the water pipes with his heat vision. He didn’t want them to start melting, but he wanted to warm them enough to throw off the sensors in the helicopters. When the pipes started to glow a dull red, he stopped and moved farther down the tunnel, repeating the process. Clark could feel the heat begin to build up slowly as he kept at it. Just as he thought, with no where for the heat to go, the tunnels were starting to turn into an oven. Luckily, he was unaffected by the heat, but he couldn’t say the same for the smell. Heating up the muck hadn’t done much to improve it’s smell, and the fumes coming off it were getting thicker.
When he was satisfied, he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his pocket and listened for a moment. The panic and confusion he heard on the other end made him smile grimly. The helicopter was useless and the soldiers were turning back from the heat and gas. He turned around and started to jog towards the other end. Hopefully Chloe wouldn’t be too far ahead already, he thought.
Something roughly the size of a baseball plopped into the water next to him. On pure instinct, he threw himself forwards as it detonated in a burst of green energy. The meteor radiation picked him up like a wave and slammed him into the sewer wall. Masonry tumbled down next to him as he lay there, gasping for breath. Before he could pick himself back up, more of the green blasts exploded by his head. Apparently, not all of the soldiers had turned back.
Clark ducked down, still woozy from the radiation, but he still had enough of his vision left to make out a lone soldier charging him from down the tunnel, firing wildly. The soldier was wearing a full helmet equipped with a gas mask. Using all his strength, he leapt forwards and cleared the distance between them in an instant. Using his momentum like a bull, he slammed into the soldier’s chest. He heard her grunt as she went flying backwards, the gun falling into the water somewhere. It was a woman, he thought. In the uniform and helmet, he hadn’t noticed. She was lying down the tunnel on her back, groaning. He took a few steps forward so he could check on her when he saw her sit up and unholster another gun. It wasn’t one of the futuristic kinds she’d been sporting earlier, but it was still very large.
A chunk of the ceiling blew out as she missed her first shot, but Clark wasn’t going to stick around for more. He ran down the tunnels away from her. She kept firing after him, one of her shots even tagging him in the shoulder. It made him pitch off balance for a moment, but that was all. As he left her far behind him, he was glad that she’d been alone. Whoever she was, she was dangerous.
Picking up his speed, Clark found Chloe at the end of one of the tunnels. It looked like the sewers emptied in a large drainage ditch on the outside of town. Chloe stood there by the pipe opening, waiting for him. She was winded, sweaty, and covered in dirt, but she’d never looked better to him. When she saw him stumble out of the darkness, he could see her face light up and then turn red. Without a word, she threw herself at him and held onto him tightly for a moment. He hugged her back silently, then gently pried her off.
“I heard shooting,” she said quickly, not quite willing to let go of him. “Are you alright?”
“I’m stinking, but other than that,” he smiled at her. She sighed and shook her head.
“We have to keep moving though,” he told her. “I don’t know if we really lost them yet. It’s better if we find somewhere safe to lie low for a while.”
Chloe frowned, thinking. “I might know someone who could help with that,” she said slowly. “I don’t know if he can, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Lead the way,” Clark told her.
The Luthor Corps captain grunted as she slid the manhole cover off and started to climb out. A gun jammed itself down the sewer entrance though, right into her face.
“Hold it right there!” a young voice ordered her. She rolled her eyes and then glanced at the gun, unconcerned.
“You still have the safety on,” she remarked dryly at the soldier who held it.
Stuttering, he jerked it back quickly as he recognized her. “Sorry, ma’am! My mistake.” He reached down to help her out, but she shouldered his hand out of the way and climbed out herself. She glanced up and down the street, frowning. She’d come out close to half a mile away from the Talon. Without the helicopter to guide her, she’d been wandering blind down there. It had only been luck that had led her to the alien. Seeing how things had gone though, she didn’t know whether to call it good luck or bad.
Sitting down on the empty street, she groaned as she felt something in her chest twitch. All the soldiers were wearing body armor and helmets capable of stopping a bullet, but it couldn’t do much against the raw strength of the alien. Feeling under her armored vest, she winced as she probed her ribs. At least two were broken, maybe more.
The soldier stood there dumbly, holding his rifle. “Are you alright, ma’am?” She ignored him for the moment, as she sighed and took off her helmet.
She had short black hair that fell softly around her face, which had an almost exotic cast to it; with slightly almond shaped eyes and an eastern complexion. It was a face of startling beauty, but it was marred by the cold, tired look in her eyes. With her helmet off, someone might have been struck by how young she looked, which was of course because she was young, the youngest to hold her position. She’d trained all her life to get there, sacrificed so much, to get to where she was.
Another soldier came running up the street, holding a phone out. She hissed in irritation and chucked her helmet away in frustration. It bounced and rattled down the street.
“It’s…” he started to say when he got close, but she cut him off.
“I know who it is.” She took the phone from him and sighed before speaking into it. “Mr. Luthor, Captain Lang here.” Explaining this wasn’t going to be easy.
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