Chapter Eleven: Revelation

September 22, 2017

Clark choked back his tears as he lay Lois' body down on the floor. The wound on her chest was still bleeding, but he listened carefully and could hear no heartbeat with his sensitive hearing. And his eyes that could tell the molecular structure of any surface saw no rising a falling of her chest. She was gone.

"You killed her," he said, turning to face Lex. The other man was still pointing the gun at him. "You murdered her. I always knew that you'd turn out this way."

"Really?" Lex asked. "Because you really had me fooled for a while. I always knew that there was something different about you. I always suspected that you were one of those meteor mutants since that day on the bridge. But I could never prove it."

"Well, you've got your proof now," Clark said. "But Lois didn't have to die for it."

"No," Lex said. "You're right. Lois didn't have to die for it. But that wasn't my fault. If you had just done what I had asked you to do…"

"You didn't really expect me to commit murder for you," Clark said. "Did you?"

"No," he replied. "Unfortunately, I didn't. You're not strong enough for that. So you would rather allow me to kill your friends than to do what I asked."

"You're not killing anyone else today, Lex," Clark said. He stared at the gun and tried to produce enough heat from his eyes to make him drop it. But as soon as the heat started, he felt a searing pain shoot through his head. He cried out.

"It won't be long, Clark," Lex said. "That thing in your head has probably already leaked a dangerous amount of kryptonite into your brain. In another minute or two you'll be so weak that you'll be lying on the floor in a big, useless, super heap."

Clark fell to his knees and looked around. Lex was smiling at him. He had the most sinister look on his face, as if he was truly enjoying the devastation that he was causing in their lives. He had gone completely insane. He glanced at Mercy and Hope. Their faces were scratched and bloody from their little tousle with Clark. They, too, were smiling at him in delight. Soon, the man that had shown up out of nowhere and threatened to rob them of the fruit of their plans, whatever they had been, would be dead. Then they could all go on about their merry and ludicrous way.

Then Clark glanced at Jimmy. He was wide awake and looking at Clark in expectancy. He did not know what he thought about finding out that Clark Kent and Superman had been the same person all along, but he could see that he expected him to snap out of it and save them. Chloe was next to him. Her head was hanging to one side and she was obviously still out of it. Though he could tell by her breathing that she would be awake very soon. At least they were both alright for right now.

Then he glanced at Lana. Her face was just as sweet as it had always been. He was scared for her. He had promised Pete that he would bring her home and he knew that she had a baby waiting for her. But when he looked into her large dark eyes he could see that she was not afraid of what was going to happen to her. She had a history with Lex, and there was probably a time when he would not have harmed a hair on her head. But this Lex was different. She was in just as much danger as the rest of them. But Clark could see that she was only concerned for him. She was watching him die and it was killing her.

Clark pulled himself up to his feet and lurched forward. Lex aimed the gun at him and fired a round. The bullet went into the front of his shoulder and exploded from his back. He screamed. He had never had a bullet do anything more than glance off of his skin before. He was truly becoming weaker by the second. But he took another step. Lex fired again and this time blood squirted out from his right thigh in a gush.

"Just stop it, Clark!" Lex yelled. "It's over! Lay down and die!"

"Why?" Clark yelled back. "So you can take over Metropolis?"

"That's what I was doing," Lex said. "I was in control of everything. I own everything, Clark! It's my town! And you think that you can just fly in here in a pair of pajamas and start undoing my projects. Do you know what you cost me when you stopped that roller coaster?"

"I saved lives," Clark responded.

"You cost me money," Lex said. "Acmuud could have died and I could have bought his land. Then that rock would have been mine and I could have kept my projects going. But you have to be a boy scout!"

"Is that why Lois had to die?" Clark asked. "To raise your bottom line?"

"Lois had to die because you're too stubborn to do as you're told," Lex said. "That's the same reason Chloe has to die, Jimmy has to die, Lana has to die, and you have to die."

Clark could see that this was not going his way. He did not know how to get out of what was happening. He could deal with his own murder, but he could not stand the thought of his friends being killed because of something that he had caused. He wished that he had never decided to but this uniform on and go parading around town. His life had been difficult enough when he had been using his powers in secret. Ever since he had used them in public it had not gone well.

He decided that he was going to die. This thing that Lex had put in his head was going to kill him. But he was not going to let anything else happen to those that he cared about. He leaped into the air and flew toward Lex. The other man fired three shots, only one of which struck its target, hitting Clark in the stomach. He grabbed Lex by the lapels of his suit and rocketed into the air. He burst through the ceiling, through the floor above, and out into the blue sky outside. Lex passed out from the blow to his head as they had crashed through the floorboards and mortar. The gun in his hand dropped safely to the ground below. Clark kept climbing. He got so high that he was having trouble breathing. He realized that in a moment he would have too much of the kryptonite serum in his brain to even sustain this. He had used everything that he had to become airborne and he could see that even the weight of Lex was almost too much for him.

Lex opened his eyes and looked around. He cried out and grabbed hold of Clark's shoulders. Clark winced at the pain as his hands found his gunshot wound.

"Don't drop me," Lex said. "You just said that you wouldn't kill a person."

"You're not a person," Clark said. With that, he let go of Lex's suit. The man screamed as he plummeted back toward the building that was no more than a speck below them. Clark watched him fall. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Lex was falling and screaming and soon he would have nothing more to worry about.

"You have a lot of power."

Clark looked around at the sound of the voice. Then he realized that he was not hearing the voice with his ears. It was coming from his mind. He was hearing a memory of his father's voice.

"You're a lot more powerful than the people that surround you," his father had told him. He remembered that it was not long after he had discovered the truth about where he had come from. "But you have to be careful to use your abilities only to help…never to hurt."

Clark nodded, almost as if his father had just said those words for the first time. He turned his body downward and shot himself back toward the earth.

He had only been able to fly for a couple of years, but in all of that time he had never found it as hard to do as he did right now. To fly at this angle was only a heartbeat away from falling. But he managed to maintain control of his body and he caught up with Lex ten feet before he would have landed on the roof of the warehouse. He grabbed him and pulled him close to him. Clark pulled up and slowed his descent, but they still crashed through the roof and back into the room where Chloe, Jimmy, and Lana were still tied up. They landed with a thud. Lex managed to stay conscious, but Clark was out. There was a cold sweat gleaming on his skin that had a slightly green tint to it.

"Kill him!" Lex said. "Kill him right now!"

Hope and Mercy reached beneath their leather coats and pulled out a pair of handheld machine guns. They both pointed their barrels at Clark's chest and stomach. There was a deafening series of small explosions as the two women filled Clark's body with bullets. Blood poured from the wounds that they opened in his once invulnerable body. Then Hope turned the barrel and put one bullet right between his eyes.

"He is dead, sir," Hope said.

"Are you sure?" Lex said. "He's not human!"

Mercy got down on one knee and listened for his breath and checked his pulse. "As far as I can tell, sir," she said. "He is dead."

Lex turned to the three prisoners. Jimmy was hyperventilating behind his gag and there were tears streaming down Lana's face. Chloe was just beginning to open her eyes, the gunshots being enough to bring her out of her slumber. She blinked groggily and looked down at the bodies of Lois and Clark on the floor.

"Now kill them," Lex said. "Start with Ms. Sullivan."

Hope walked over to where Chloe was sitting and pointed her gun at her. She squeezed the trigger and fired a half dozen rounds into an empty place in the floor.

"Where is she?" Lex asked.

"I do not know, sir," Hope said. "She vanished."

Lex looked down at the place where Chloe had been and saw that gag lying on the floor. The metal ring that she had been bound to only held a piece of rope that was still tied in a knot. The rope had been broken.

Lex heard a crack next to him and felt the warm sensation of blood as it splattered across his face. He turned and found Chloe standing with Hope's gun aimed at his face. He looked down and saw the pretty Amazon lying motionless on the floor as blood poured from her nose.

"You're not a killer, Ms. Sullivan," Lex said.

"She's not dead," Chloe replied. "But you're about to be. You bastard!"

Chloe turned and fired a quick burst, striking Mercy in the chest. She had raised her own gun and had been about to fire on her. She fell to the floor in a heap. Chloe turned back to Lex who now had a pistol in his hand. It was aimed at her. She saw his index finger about to squeeze the trigger. She disappeared from in front of him just as the bullet left the barrel. It hit the wall instead and he felt the tip of her gun in his back.

"Drop it!" Chloe said.

"What are you?" Lex asked as he allowed the gun to clatter to the floor next to where Hope was lying.

"I grew up in Smallville," she replied. "And I spent a lot of time around meteor rocks. You do the math! Now, get up against the wall!"

Lex moved over to the wall and stood with his back to it. Chloe proceeded to untie Lana and Jimmy. They looked at her in amazement.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Lana asked.

"After all the trouble I caused the meteor freaks in my youth?" Chloe said. "I didn't want to tell anyone."

"What can you do, Chief?" Jimmy said, massaging his wrists.

"Well," Chloe said. "Most of the people that mutate from meteor exposure get powers from things that they spend a lot of time around. In my case, I was around Clark a lot when we were young."

"You have Clark's abilities?" Lana asked.

"I have a watered down version," Chloe said. "I can't fly and I'm not invulnerable. And I can't do all of that stuff with my eyes. But I'm pretty fast. And I'm strong, too."

Lana looked at Lex and continued to talk to Chloe. "Why don't you do something about him? He killed Clark and Lois."

"Yeah," Chloe said. "About that. There's something else that I can do." She handed her gun to Jimmy and walked over to where Lois lay on the floor. She turned her over so that she was lying on her back. Then, she held her hand over the bloody spot on her chest and closed her eyes. A small ball of light began to form between her palm and Lois' body. As the others watched, tiny little black specks began to swim out of the wound and into the ball, causing it to grow bigger and bigger until it was about the size of a tennis ball.

As this was happening, no one noticed that Hope had awakened. She rose up off of the floor and picked up the pistol that Lex had left. She pointed it at Chloe and stepped forward.

Lana noticed her when she had come within a few feet of her. "Chloe!" she yelled. "Behind you!"

Chloe's instincts took over. She turned quickly and held her hands in the air. The ball that had formed over Lois shot out and exploded when it struck Hope in the face. The woman screamed as the tiny black specks flew into her mouth and her nose. When the ball and the specks had completely vanished, she stopped screaming. She fell to the floor, as dead as her sister.

Lois coughed and everyone turned to her. Chloe helped her to sit up. She felt of her chest and realized that the wound was gone. She looked at Chloe with questions dancing in her eyes like the tears that were welling up in everyone else's.

"Lois," Chloe said. "Are you okay?"

"I think so," Lois said. "Am I alive?"

"Yeah," Chloe said.

"How?" Lois asked.

"I think Chloe healed you," Jimmy said. He and Lana went to her and looked at where the bullet had struck her. As they did so, Lex tried the same thing that Hope had failed at. He slipped away from the wall and quickly lifted the pistol. He aimed it in their direction.

"I may not have killed you all," he said, startling all of them. They turned and looked at him. "But I can't have you bringing the ones that I did kill back to life."

"Are you kidding me?" Jimmy said. "Don't you ever give up?"

He pointed the gun at Jimmy and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He looked puzzled.

"You forgot the safety," Jimmy said, leveling the machine gun at him. Lex still looked puzzled when his stomach and chest were filled with eight rounds. He fell over and hit the floor face first. Jimmy turned to Chloe. "Do me a favor and don't heal him."

"Don't worry," Chloe said. She scooted over to where Clark was lying. He was definitely dead. She held both hands over him and another ball of light formed. The others looked on in amazement as the wounds closed up and the ball filled with the black specks of death that had filled him a moment before. Chloe lifted her hands and the ball shot up through the ceiling and into the sky. They all imagined that they would go on into space and to somewhere else from there.

Clark moaned. He pulled himself into a sitting position and looked down at himself.

"Did I get shot?" he asked.

"You did more than that, CK," Jimmy said. "You got whacked! Chloe healed you."

Clark looked at her. "You healed me? How?"

"I'm a meteor freak," Chloe said. "I was going to tell you. But I was afraid that it would get out. I don't want my picture in the Inquisitor. I'm the chief editor of the Daily Planet."

"I think that you're going to be a pretty famous hero one day," Lana said. "Maybe as big as Superman."

Chloe shook her head and looked at Clark. "Are you alright?"

"I think so," he said. He looked around at the bodies of Lex, Hope, and Mercy. "I didn't…"

"I killed the Amazon's," Chloe said. "Jimmy took care of Lex."

"I couldn't kill him," Clark said. "What kind of superhero can't kill the bad guy?"

"The best kind," Lana said. "You're a superhero with a heart."

"You're the best superhero that Metropolis could ask for," Chloe said.

"And don't worry," Jimmy said. "Your secret is safe with us."

"What about the thing that Lex put in my head?" Clark asked.

"It should have gone out when I healed you," Chloe said.

Clark nodded. He stood up and hugged Chloe and Lana and shook Jimmy's hand. "Thank you all." He turned and saw Lois for the first time. "Lois!"

"Hi, Clark," she said.

"I tried to save you," Clark said. "I tried to catch the bullet. But the kryptonite…"

"Clark," Lois said. "I've learned a lot about you today. But the one thing that I didn't have to learn was that you'll be there for me. I've always known that."

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

"I love you, Superman," Lois said.

"I love you, too, Lois," Clark replied. "I love you, too."

End of chapter eleven.

Note:

One more chapter guys. I've got a lot of loose ends to tie up. Then I'll begin working on Elseworlds: Book Two-Infinite Worlds. See you next time.

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