CHAPTER 8
Clark Kent had moved into his apartment on Clinton Street two weeks after getting his job at the Daily Planet.
It was the first place since the Kent Farm, back in Smallville, that felt like home. In the intervening years dorm rooms, foreign hotels and Arctic citadels had all served as places for him to rest his head from time to time, but they weren't home.
The apartment was a place where he could go to be himself. His real self, a combination of all the various personalities he showed off to the world, and yet at the same time, something else. Something he had never shown to anyone.
Even the surrounding neighborhood had absorbed this feeling of freedom, of release from his strictly regimented identities.
Here, to the familiar yet indistinct faces of his neighbors, he was not Clark Kent Reporter, or Superman The Man of Steel, or even Kal-El of Krypton.
He was just, "that guy."
Oh, yeah, I love that guy. He's so nice and helpful.
As Superman crawled out from under a mountain of rubble, he could still recognize the pieces of this neighborhood. The various crumbling shards of rock and debris all held significance for him. With his super-eyes and his super-mind, he was able to piece together the buildings like a jigsaw puzzle.
With unconscious effort, his mind reassembled Clark Kent's broken neighborhood. Cruelly, to his mind's eye it was almost like witnessing the devastation in reverse, as if time moved backwards and the city was being rebuilt.
He could do it too, he thinks, in the haze caused by the collision. He could rebuild the buildings singlehanded.
But the lives. The lives would not be so easy to rebuild.
Sudden clarity, as he shakes off the fog and sharpens his ears, searching for any sign of life.
A ragged breath, not far away. He stumbles over to it and lifts a solid chunk of wall, finding beneath it a young woman, huddled in the fetal position and suffering from shock. Her leg is so badly mangled it might have to be amputated.
Quickly, but with all the skill of a surgeon and a world-class EMT, Superman lifts the girl out of the tomb and takes to the sky.
He moves shakily at first, unsure of where he's going for a moment, before he hears people.
With his eyes, he spots an area of city that hasn't been destroyed. Almost as if some arbitrary line had divided death from normalcy, a group of people stood at the edge of the devastation, having simply walked out of their homes to see what all the fuss was about.
He touches down and, with great care, lays the girl down, making sure to support her injuries.
"Call the authorities," he says to the crowd, "if you can reach them. Give them your address and tell them to meet up here. Tell them this is where I'm bringing the survivors."
The last word almost sticks in his throat. Survivors. It implies that there will be a second group. Others who have not been so lucky. Where will he bring them?
Taking one last breath in the real world, he turns and is off, back into Hell.
Scanning the area with his super-vision, he begins mapping out the extent of the damage. It seems that the impact of the fall created a crater, everything within the resulting "bowl" collapsed as the earth bent towards Ground Zero.
Miraculously, everything outside the rim of the "bowl" seemed fine.
It was a relatively small area, given the speed and size of what hit. But relativity has no place in his world. A single loss of life means absolute failure.
Even with all his vision and hearing powers, he can't bring himself to listen for the monster.
Something stops him. Something deep inside. Some ancient fear, hereditary in nature, and burned into his DNA, reaching all the way back to his earliest ancestors.
As his search expands, and as more survivors are found and lifted out of darkness, he is forced to establish other medical camps, in other undamaged areas, just to keep from crisscrossing the city dozens of times for each life he finds.
Doctors, nurses, anyone who can help, he says, should be found and brought to the people that need them. He instructs others, police, fire fighters, and anyone with an able body to begin digging into the edges of the abyss, where there is a greater chance of finding survivors.
And while there are sure to be many more heartbreaks than victories in that search, he knows the men and women of Metropolis need something to do, some way to help, some task to occupy their minds.
They'll be safe from the monster, he figures. He knows where it is at.
The center of the crater.
It lays there, unmoving, he senses. Perhaps it is dead, he thinks. It is possible it didn't endure planet-fall.
A thought strikes him. A terrifying one.
This thing, if it indeed is the Doomsday monster of legend, was able to destroy cities on Krypton, under a Red Sun. If it is Kryptonian, does that mean that under Earth's Yellow Sun…
Will it be that much more powerful?
He has no choice, he realizes.
He must find the monster, now, and deal with it. It could be unconscious, injured from the fall.
Or it could be playing dead, lying in wait for him.
It doesn't matter, he knows. He has to tackle this problem head on, and trust that he will find a way to solve it. There is always a way.
Fighting down centuries' worth of terror, he slowly yet purposefully makes his way towards what is either the monster's tomb or its cradle.
His heart-beat is elevated, he realizes. Beads of sweat have started to fall down his face. But he never sweats!
He looks down at his hand again, seeing more clearly the damage done to his supposedly invulnerable skin by just grabbing hold of the monster.
Kal-El, the Last Son of Krypton, fears for his life.
Just then, a sound. Soft and weak, but to his ears and his heart it has all the terrible power of a gun, fired right by your head.
"Lois," he whispers as, almost instantaneously he is standing above the sound of her unique and beautiful heart-beat.
But it's weak. Almost gone.
He tears the fallen building away by the ton. What is she doing here, he wonders. There is no reason for her to be in this part of town! Her apartment is miles away, as is the Daily Planet, LexCorp, any place that would matter to Lois Lane.
Why was she here!
Suddenly, he realizes where he is standing. The ruins of Clark Kent's apartment.
Beneath him lays the broken, bleeding, but still living body of Lois Lane. In her hands, she is clutching a pair of Clark Kent's glasses.
From behind him, comes a roar. An eruption of earth and stone, cascading out like a wave.
The monster has arisen.
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S-SHIELD'S NOTES
Intense, eh?
I hope the bleakness and darkness of this chapter is all the more biting given the fun and Saturday morning cartoon feel of the earlier chapters.
Thanks for reading, and please let me know what you think with a review.
