Susan had never been quite as scared in her life as she was just now.
She'd seen a lot in her nineteen years, far more than any nineteen-year old girl from Pennsylvania should ever see. Running away from an abusive, alcoholic stepfather at fifteen, she'd spent weeks wandering the countryside before a man named Jonas had offered to help her get back on her feet. And at first, it was a dream come true for her. He'd brought her to New York City, just like she'd always wanted to do. He'd bought her beautiful clothes, jewelry and shoes – the kinds of things she'd always dreamed of. And when he asked her to do a little favor for him, just to sleep with another man on camera, it hadn't seemed like such a horrible price to pay. The other guy was kind of cute, after all, and Jonas had pretty much saved her life. It was only sex, after all. Her stepfather had robbed her of whatever virginity she once might have had; she had nothing to protect anymore.
For a little over a year, she'd made movies for Jonas, sleeping with all sorts of men and women alike. She'd gotten used to it, even come to like it after a while. Then, one day, she started to feel uncomfortable during one of the scenes. It wasn't a moral thing; her crotch felt like it was on fire whenever anyone touched her there. She'd gone to the doctor, and the test results had sent her heart falling: herpes. Nothing that a little medication couldn't suppress, but she didn't exactly have health insurance to pay for it. More importantly, though, it was the kiss of death for her porn star career. Nobody wanted to work with someone who's got a disease, Jonas had told her as he took back all of the things he'd ever bought her. She begged and pleaded to let her stay, but it was just business, he'd said. Nothing personal.
Susan soon found herself cast into the deeper, darker parts of the illicit sex trades, until she found herself where she was today – a hundred-dollar whore working out of a house in the lower Bronx. Her pimp, Fitzie, had been "managing" her for over a year now – she still found it easier to think of the man as a "manager" rather than what he really was, because accepting that would mean she'd have to accept what she'd become – had a nasty tendency to beat his girls when they did wrong, but he also made sure that nobody else ever laid a hand on them – security which she was willing to trade the occasional black eye for. Things weren't all that good, she'd thought, but they could be worse. She could be dead.
Recently, however, Fitzie had begun making arrangements with all sorts of darker, shadier criminals, the likes of which Susan could only guess at. She only knew that most of them spoke some foreign language – Russian? Italian? Arabic? – and that they tended to carry weapons far larger than the nine-millimeter Glock Fitzie kept tucked into his pants. Fitzie's tasks had started off small – drug-running, money-laundering – but as time had gone on, things had gotten worse and worse. It wasn't until tonight, though, that Susan had realized how bad things were. She had been entertaining a client in her room when Fitzie's second, Wayne, had busted in and ordered the man to clear out before telling Susan to stay in her room and keep quiet. He'd seemed spooked – and Wayne never seemed spooked. So Susan followed him down the hallway and down the stairs to the basement, where she found a quiet, dark corner to hide in near the staircase. No sooner had she settled in when the back door connecting the alley to the basement opened up and three large foreign men rushed inside, carrying something in their arms. As they dropped it on the floor, Susan's heart leapt to her throat and she forced herself to stifle a scream. Not something.
Someone.
A young, blond girl, her face battered and bruised, lay unconscious on the concrete floor. From her clothes, she had money; from her body, she couldn't have been over sixteen. Susan had the strangest feeling she knew her from somewhere, but she couldn't place it. She was wracking her brain when Fitzie descended the stairs and let out a loud shriek at the sight.
"Oh, hell no! You did not just do what I think you did!" Fitzie gestured frightenedly in the direction of the beaten girl on his floor. "Get her out of here right this goddamn instant!"
The big foreign man merely shook his head solemnly. "Zis is the way ze boss wants it, Fitzgerald. Here and now. Ze trail is too hot; ze police will have us if we don't dispose of her now," he slurred through his foreign accent
The color rushed from Fitzie's face. "You can't be serious. You cannot be fucking serious! No. You are not going to whack the governor's daughter on my motherfucking floor!"
Susan was shocked; even in his worst times, Fitzie made a point of not swearing in front of people. He'd always said that his mother had taught him never to swear, no matter what – and it was the one lesson he'd taken to heart. But she knew he had as good a reason to now as he ever would; he was right in his identification of the girl. Eileen Spitzer, the daughter of the governor of New York. Susan had seen her in the paper once or twice, on page six of the Post.
The larger man shook his head. "No, Fitzgerald – we will not kill her."
"You will."
Fitzie shook his own head violently. "No way in hell, Stefan. No way I'm going to kill her. This is your mess, you take care of it."
"If you do this, my employer will extend his full protection to you. He is prepared to bring you into his inner circle if you go through with this. No more two-bit whores. No more street drugs. The real life.
"If you, however, choose not to…" Stefan's point was made by the simultaneous cocking of two machine pistols in Fitzie's direction. The message was obvious: kill or be killed. Susan fought off the sudden urge to vomit that had swept over her.
Fitzie, his hand shaking, reached into his pocket and pulled out his silver-barreled Glock. He stepped over the girl's body, placing himself above her chest with his gun arm extended towards her face. The barrel was three feet away from her head; nobody could miss at that range. Still, he was forced to use his other hand to steady the gun on the girl's face. Susan, from her hiding spot, could see the girl moan softly as she started to awaken, could see the sweat drip down Fitzie's face, could see the mobsters with their machine guns waiting for the bullet. She closed her eyes, covered her ears and said a silent prayer for a miracle.
The room seemed to explode.
Glass flew everywhere as the tiny windows near the roof shattered and something plowed through the double-gauge steel doors from the alley into the room with enough force to make the building shudder. Susan's eyes flew open – just to see the last ting she ever expected.
There, standing in the middle of the room, stood Indiana Jones.
The leather jacket-and-fedora clad man's appearance surprised everyone in the room, from Susan to Fitzie and the mobsters. Fitzie, in shock, just stared at the man, his pistol still pointed towards the girl's head. The mobsters, who had dove for cover, looked out at the stranger in awe.
In the blink of an eye, the stranger effortlessly smacked the gun out of Fitzie's hand and into the air; it clattered against the ceiling before falling back to the cement only a few feet from Susan's hiding place. Fitzie, in a rare moment of intelligence, decided that this would be a good time to turn tail and beat a hasty retreat – but before he could even turn ten degrees, the man's palm lashed out and caught Fitzie in the solar plexus, sending him skidding across the floor on his ass before smacking into a wall.
Two of the mobsters, realizing that offense was probably their best course, leapt up from their hiding places and opened up with their guns, spraying bullets in the direction of the mysterious man. Their Mac-11's chattered wildly as they each unleashed a steady stream of lead in the direction of the man, but he didn't move out of the way; instead, he seemed to blur with motion in one place, his arms vibrating fast enough to be all but unseen.
He's catching the bullets, Susan thought with irrational clarity, given the circumstances. He's catching the bullets in his hands.
Whether the two mobsters came to this conclusion or not, they didn't let up off their triggers until their guns clicked dry on empty magazines. The stranger smiled as he held up his fists, then opened them to his sides; sixty deformed bullets fell to the ground with a tinkle. He hadn't missed one. The man's eyes suddenly glowed a supernatural red, and a beam of reddish heat haze suddenly shot forth from each pupil into the gun of the first man, causing him to let out a scream as he dropped it, his hand burnt from the conducted heat. The stranger turned his head to follow suit to the second mobster's gun – but he'd already dropped it of his own accord, and was now holding his hands high above his head.
Stefan took advantage of the mysterious man's sudden distraction to make a break for the shattered remains of the door, but he'd barely made it three steps before the stranger shot across the room - sending his fedora flying - and placed himself into an intercept course directly between the gangster and the doorway. Stefan slammed into the taller man at a full sprint, but the heavy mobster's mass seemed, inexplicably, no match for the other fellow – he bounced off "Indiana Jones" like a baseball bounces off oak, slumping backwards and collapsing to the ground.
The stranger leaned down over Stefan, who despite his dizzying encounter with the man's body was still coherent enough to show the clear signs of fear. The taller man lowered his face to the mobster's.
"Now, have you learned your lesson?" The taller man's voice was patronizing, but the gangster clearly didn't care. Stefan nodded emphatically.
"You know that kidnapping people is wrong, right?"
Stefan again nodded so heard it seemed like his head would fall off.
"Good," "Indy" said, before tapping Stefan on the forehead with two fingers and enough force to knock him out.
The man rose to his feet, still staring at Stefan below him. He shook his head, and sighed, seemingly unable to comprehend what would make people do something like this. He glanced over at the girl, who was starting to stir, when out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement. From near the stairs.
The bullet from a 9 millimeter handgun travels at 1,280 feet per second. In this case, it had to travel about six feet from the chamber of the gun to the man's face, a journey which would take it about 0.0047 seconds. In that time, the stranger's survival instincts kicked into gear, sensing the sudden danger and bringing his right arm up to protect his face as he ducked away. The bullet reached the man's forearm –
-and ricocheted off, leaving no lasting effect other than a tear through the leather of the jacket.
Susan, shocked, just let the still-smoking gun drop to the floor. She had figured that by getting the drop on the man, he wouldn't have time to see it and dodge. She hadn't counted on him having no need to.
The man, to her surprise, didn't attack her – he just glanced down at his sleeve, turning it right and left to survey the damage. "Damn," he said as he looked at the tear before glancing towards Susan. "What did you do that for?"
"You…killed Fitzie…" was all she could stumble out. She'd seen him throw her pimp across the room.
"Who?" the man asked incredulously; when she gestured to the man slumped against the wall in the purple suit, the stranger just chuckled. "Oh, him? No, he's just passed out. He's still breathing," he said in a strangely reassuring way.
The stranger reached down and picked up his fedora, placing it back on his head before gently scooping up the governor's daughter. "Now, if you don't mind, this girl needs to see a doctor. If I were you, I wouldn't stick around here – the cops will probably follow the trail out here, even if the girl is safe."
He was turning to leave, when Susan's voice made him stop. "Wait!" He looked back at her. "Who…are you?" she couldn't help but ask.
He smiled. "A friend."
And with a wink from beneath the shadow of his brim, he stepped up the stairs into the alleyway and disappeared.
---------------------------------------Hours later, Clark Kent was still fingering the bullet hole in his old bomber jacket.
The girl had ended up being fine; though he hadn't stuck around the hospital to find out, he'd listened in from across the street as the doctors at Beth Israel had checked her over. He'd been relieved to hear that her injuries were superficial; for the hours he'd been tracking the kidnappers down, Clark's head had been filled with thoughts about what unspeakable acts the men might be performing on the poor girl who'd done now wrong other than happen to have a politically powerful father.
Not that it would have mattered if she had done anything wrong, though, he told himself as he often did. Even if she'd killed somebody, she still would have deserved finding. She still would have deserved saving.
He'd gone back to check up on the men he'd left unconscious in the whorehouse after he was sure that the girl was okay; as he'd expected, the NYPD were already there, taking statements and making arrests. Clark knew that the mobsters would talk about what happened to them, if only to try and make themselves look like the victims; after all, getting beaten up by some guy off the street doesn't make for the most threatening-sounding mobster, even in a jury's eyes – and even if the man could catch bullets out of thin air. Hence, the Indiana Jones getup; while a few open-minded cops might be able to believe that someone had smashed through the doors and moved fast enough to catch speeding bullets, they'd be a lot less likely to believe that a movie character did it. Plus, the fedora had hid his face a bit in the cramped, dark lighting – a fact which Clark hadn't realized until he arrived. Everything had worked out for the best.
But he still couldn't get his mind off the bullet hole in his jacket.
I really liked this thing, too. Now, I'm either gonna have to walk around with a big tear in the sleeve or I'll have to bring it home and have Mom sew it up, but then it'll have a patch on it, and she'll ask me what I was doing with it, which will get into a whole debate over why I'm running around disguised as Harrison Ford fighting crime while I have a perfectly good costume sitting in my room that won't get torn up.
He knew his mother had a good point, too – he did have a very nice uniform hidden under his shoes in a case in his closet. But he still couldn't shake that feeling that putting on that suit was something he wasn't ready for yet. Clark Kent had gotten to know himself very well over all his years; as a farm kid in rural America, as a somewhat unusual teenager, and as an alien from another planet, Clark had come to understand himself, because he'd never had anybody who could quite understand him otherwise. Sometimes he wondered if everybody felt this way, like there was nobody else out there who could really comprehend you. His parents had insisted that was the case; that his situation, though certainly special, was really just the same thing everyone went through.
Clark just wasn't sure whether he could believe them.
But he wasn't sure of a lot of things. He'd always thought of Smallville as just a stepping stone, someplace for him to grow up but not a place for him to make his destiny. After he'd left, though, he began wondering that maybe that was where he belonged.
But it isn't, he told himself. You never really belonged there. Out here, in the city, away from all those social woes and small-town problems…this is where I belong. This is where I can be myself. How many tall buildings are there to leap in Kansas? And where else can you find a view like this?
From his perch atop the Chrysler Building, the city did indeed seem beautiful. The towers of midtown rose up alongside of him, with the taller buildings of downtown visible past the Empire State Building's patriotic light scheme. The world around him seemed to glow amber with the light from a hundred thousand sodium-vapor lamps and a million headlights, the glow stretching off in every direction. It was like standing in the middle of the galaxy, watching stars stream off in every direction. The sounds and smells of Manhattan in early September blew past Clark, and he closed his eyes to suck it in. He cast his arms to his sides and held himself out to the wind, letting it blow past him as he smiled broadly. In that moment, all his doubts, all his troubles faded away like dust in the wind, leaving only...peace. There was nowhere like this place in the whole world, he thought as he tucked his hat under his arm and stepped off into the sky. Nowhere at all.