Just FYI, for the sake of this fic, Metropolis is a large island-city off of Long Beach, officially a part of New York, connected to the mainland by a dozen arcing bridges. Gotham is in New Jersey on the waterfront several miles south of the southernmost edge of Metropolis. I'm not sure if any of this will be relevant to this chapter, but it's just good to know.
I've never read the comic books (Batman or Superman) so if this is completely off, sorry. Now on with the fic—that last one was kind of a cliff hanger…
Clark shot up into the sky just shy of breaking the sound barrier. When he was high in the atmosphere, he shot across the city, hardly a streak in the sky.
He was panicking. He couldn't hear Lois's heartbeat; wherever she was she was either dead or in a sound proofed, lead-lined... something.
There was no sign of her in her parents' neighborhood or the surrounding area. He followed the main roads leading out of the area and scanned the convenient highways. There wasn't even a suspicious-looking paneled van driving down the road.
Clark landed a few blocks from the Lane house, forcing himself to take a deep breath, and pause to tie his shoes this time. It was 5:30a, Lois hadn't been missing for an hour yet. Back before he had gone to Krypton, Lois getting kidnapped had been an almost weekly occurrence. Usually he had been taken with her, which had helped his stress levels, but there were plenty of times when he'd spent hours flying over the city in search of her or ended up sitting and waiting at the police station with Perry—they would never tell Lois's parents when she was missing as Ella tended to panic and the General tended to call in all units, and neither reaction helped the police do their jobs or Clark his.
Long strides brought him to the Lane house, where he stood for a second to observe. It was a pleasant sort of house, two stories, tan-ish siding, black shutters, plain black shingles. Most of the windows were open, the curtains ruffling in the cool morning breeze. The lights were on in the kitchen and living room; Clark could hear the Lanes' panicked voices from within. The General was pacing, the kitchen cordless pressed to his ear, on hold to call in a favor with an old comrade. Ella was nervously stirring oatmeal for Jason on the stovetop; Jason sat on a barstool biting his lip, like his mother did when she was truly nervous, and staring at the front door.
Clark walked up the front sidewalk, lined with Ella's carefully kept flower beds, and raised his hand to knock on the door. Before he could even make a sound, Jason heaved the door open; Clark sadly shook his head in response to the boy's unspoken question, and gathered his son into his arms. Jason hung on, eyes pinched tight to hold back tears.
"We'll find her, Jason," Clark assured him, walking into the house. Jason nodded wordlessly against his chest.
"Clark," Ella said, almost surprised, when Clark and Jason entered the kitchen. Her eyes were puffy and red from the crying she'd been doing since the occupants of the house had been awoken by a single scream from Lois, protesting shouts from Jason, and the labored grunts of men. Then silence before Jason had thrown their bedroom door open, terror in his eyes. "What are you doing here?"
"Jason called me," Clark said, glancing at the boy he'd just set back on his barstool.
"He did?"
"I used Mommy's cell phone," Jason explained, his voice smaller than Clark could ever remember hearing it.
"What'd you go calling him for?" The General asked gruffly, still on hold and all the more annoyed.
"Uncle Clark always knows what to do," Jason observed quietly. Clark looked away; he'd been back for less than six months and Jason was already very loyal to him. He'd babysat for Lois when she and Richard wanted an evening alone to try and work out their ever growing list of issues, kept an eye on the boy in the bullpen—Jason gravitated to his desk no matter what time of day. Clark's eidetic memory was tested every time Jason visited the boy asking question after question about everything and anything. Some were deep philosophical questions that Clark had no idea how to answer but tried anyways, others were mindless trivia questions, which were more fun mostly because Clark knew a good deal about a lot of useless things and it entertained Jason to no end. Jason always seemed to be around when Lois and Clark were deciding their plan of attack for a new story. It was the one part of the process that Clark was able to outshine Lois in—she had the more current information, the majority of her contacts didn't presume her dead (though most of Clark's old 'friends' were checking in with him again), and she was the more forceful of their pair. Meanwhile, he had the mind for planning, able to map out a series of articles and guestimate the sort of information they'd need, whereas Lois, though she did just fine by herself, often rushed into her work and ended up playing catch-up moments before her deadlines.
"I doubt that," the General observed before resuming his pacing.
Clark ignored him, setting his messenger bag on the counter and putting his cell phone of top of it before looking up at Ella with a question, "Have you even called the police yet?"
"No—Sam has been trying to get a hold of—"
Clark shook his head, not letting her continue. He picked up his phone and dialed an old number, praying it went through.
"Lucy, I have to call Lucy," Ella said while Clark's phone rang. She dove for her cell phone in her purse.
"Tobias Krenske," the voice that answered was wearier than Clark remembered, but still TK's. Clark had always found him too serious, but very good at his job—a missing persons detective starting at about the same time Clark had started at the Daily Planet. They'd been neighbors for awhile before TK had married the girl upstairs and moved to suburbia to start a family. Clark had gone to the wedding and the wife's funeral just over a year later. TK had a daughter, eight years old now, by his late wife who Clark had babysat once upon a time, his only practice for Jason.
"TK," Clark greeted, "Clark Kent."
"Clark!" TK said, obviously surprised to hear from him. "It's been a long time. How was your trip?"
"It was good, the trip was good," Clark was nodding. The General gave him a look. "I've been back for almost six months now, got into town the same day Superman did, actually."
"Busiest news day in five years."
"You're telling me." They both chuckled for a brief moment.
"So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your conversation?"
"Are you still in missing persons?"
"I'm in charge of missing persons."
"Just my luck," Clark chuckled. "Lois is missing."
"Again?"
"Just like old times."
"You know, she's been doing very well while you were gone. She cut it down to once every few months after her kid was born."
"Well, I'm here with her kid now," Clark said, adding an edge to his voice. "He's the only witness."
"How long?"
"An hour."
"Where?"
- - -
Krenske's detectives were at the house a half hour later, questioning the Lanes while Clark sat on a stool out of the way with his laptop. He could stare at the screen while listening to the detectives in the other room as they carefully questioned Jason again. Lucy arrived an hour after the detectives and joined Clark on a stool in the kitchen.
- - -
Lois's return to consciousness wasn't nearly as effortless as slipping into the darkness upon the prick of the needle had been.
Sensations came first. Her neck burned where she'd been stuck with the needle that had injected whatever it was that had knocked her out. She was laying on her side on a flat, hard, and oddly warm surface. Her back ached; she'd been in the same position for some time. Her knuckles on her right hand were itchy with scabs from the one good hit she'd gotten off before she'd hit the floor.
The floor was concrete, probably near a source of constant heat, and very rough. The room was very warm, stifling, really. The air was thick, humid and smoky. Altogether quite uncomfortable. She could hear other people in the room. Kids, by the sound of it. They were whispering together a short distance away, their voices too muddled in the suffocating air for her to hear what they were saying.
She opened her eyes, closing them immediately. The air was indeed thick with smoke, burning her eyes. Slowly, she opened them again, blinking rapidly until she could hold her eyes open. It wasn't the smoke of a fire, but cigarette smoke billowing around the ceiling.
There went my record, Lois thought somewhere in the back of her mind. Two whole months of resistance… Clark throwing my stash away, Superman never letting me light up. The two of them peeved her to no end. Clark she could handle, but Superman… she forced the train of thought away and blinked her eyes open again.
She was facing a cement wall; it was rounded, sloping up towards the ceiling and out of view. The smoke was thicker higher up, whirling about as propelled by a wide-bladed ceiling fan with a light bulb shining through the cracked fixture.
Lois sat up fast to get it over with. The room went silent.
"Ugh," she couldn't help but wince, putting a hand to her head, then touching her neck where the needle had penetrated. It was swollen, hot—enflamed. Still burning.
"She's 'wake," one of the voices from behind her observed. Slowly, Lois shifted around, moving stiffly; she pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins and supporting her chin on her knees to try to stop the cylindrical room from spinning so much.
"Hi," a boy said. Not the same boy who had alerted the others to her consciousness, this one was older, older than all the kids in the room, she was sure.
"Hi," Lois replied, still blinking rapidly in an attempt to clear the smoke from her eyes.
"I'm Todd," the boy said. He was short, hardly taller than Jason, with the palest of blue eyes and sandy blond hair.
"Todd Evans?" Lois asked, recalling the name from Clark's exposition at the hospital after reading the police report on Juliana.
"Yeah," Todd said, perking up. "How'd you know?"
"I'm Lois Lane, I'm a reporter—there was a woman who told us about you…"
"Miss Juliana?" A little girl asked.
"Is Petey okay? Did they make it out?" Charlie Van Buren asked, eyes eager. Lois nodded, taking a moment to inspect the children in front of her. There were ten of them, three girls and seven boys, and none of them looked healthy. There were cuts and bruises on their faces, puffy eyes from crying and the smoke. None of them were standing up so Lois couldn't tell if any of them were injured more seriously. Charlie was holding his right arm close to his body; not a good sign.
"Last I heard he was back at home with your parents and sisters," she said. Her voice was scratchy, not coming out as loud as she planned for it to. She cleared her throat and repeated herself.
"Good," Charlie said, coughing for a moment before looking at the floor.
"You're the one that talks to Superman, right?" Todd asked. The rest of the kids were just sitting there, listening. Lois got the impression they were afraid she would hurt them despite the fact that she was still groggy from the drug, aching all over.
"Yes," Lois said, trying not to give away anything about her current standings with the superhero in the answer.
"So that means he'll be coming for us, right?" The smallest of the boys asked.
"He's been looking for you for almost a month," Lois said sadly. The older kids frowned, the younger kids looked concerned because the older ones did.
"Well, he'll be looking harder because you're here now, right?"
"Hey—" Lois started, but raised voices from the other side of what Lois had assumed was a wall but she now saw to be a very solid door.
"I told you to grab the BOY!" A man bellowed.
"That's Bill," Todd whispered to Lois.
"But there's that hit out on the reporter. Why not collect the money and use it to get more kids?" A second man replied, sounding almost, but not quite, repentant.
"Yeah, you said we couldn't start with the experiment 'til we got a few more kids." A third man, sounding much younger than the other two, said.
"No," Bill said forcefully. "The Boss wanted the reporter's kid specifically. We couldn't start 'til we got him, you idiot! The Boss put the hit out on Lane and Kent to get them out of the way to make our job easier. And YOU went and COMPLICATED IT!"
"Well, but…" The first man started to protest but was interrupted mid-sentence by what sounded like a fist to the face. All the kids in the bunker around Lois flinched.
"Bill," the younger man said in an almost calming tone.
"Aw, God, I think you broke my jaw," the first man whined.
"If I'd broken your jaw you wouldn't be able to talk," Bill growled.
"Oh."
"Pack everything up," Bill instructed. "We're moving to the new bunker early," Lois could practically feel him glaring at the other men. Their voices were quieter now, harder to make out. "I want everything in the trucks by two. Knock the kids out good and toss 'em in the lead-lined U-Haul."
"What about the reporter?"
"Give her a double dose and leave her where she is," Bill said. "Then torch the place. One less threat to worry about; the Boss'll be happy about that. Leave no evidence."
- - -
The detectives left to do their work leaving crime scene investigators to go over Lois's room and any other areas of the house and yard that could possibly yield anything helpful.
Perry arrived just after noon, furious that Clark hadn't called with an update. Clark, though, had been on the phone since the detectives had gone, setting himself up at the kitchen counter on a stool with a map of the city. He had more than a few contacts in the less pleasant areas of the city and not so noble professions. It was handy, as a journalist, and meant he could keep an eye on Metropolis' underworld, as Superman.
Clark hung up with a sigh, crossing off another few sections on his map and sitting back to study it.
"Eat something," Lucy insisted for the hundredth time. Clark, grudgingly, took the salami and mustard sandwich she'd been trying to feed him and had a big bite, giving Lois's sister a big grin before turning back to his map.
"What've you been working on?" Lucy asked, sitting down on the stool next to him. Jason looked up to listen from his place down the counter with his coloring book. Perry and Ella, who had been talking in the doorway, paused to listen as well.
"Well," Clark said, clearing his throat, "I've been getting in contact with the right people, c-calling in a few favors," he rolled up his sleeves and began explaining his map. He'd sectioned Metropolis off according to the gangs that ran the street corners, dealer territories, and other such segmentations, overlaying that with marks for specific places the big names and mob bosses called the office, and where people were most often stashed or dumped.
"Bit morbid, isn't it?" Lucy asked, looking shaken. Clark couldn't help but think of how much she looked like her sister when she was worried. Not many people would make that connection, of course, because Lois hardly let anybody in far enough to see her worry. The sisters had the same dark hazel eyes, their father's, and their mother's classical face shape and jaw line. Lucy's hair was darker than Lois's and straight, pulled back into a practical ponytail; she was a mother of three, after all. When they worried, their eyes went a little wider than normal, their body language closing off to protect themselves.
"It's practical," Clark said, sounding more like Lois than himself. "I've called all my useful contacts. No known gang took her. None of the drug dealers I know or the ones they know heard anything. Everybody knows ab-bout the hit, none of them admit to considering trying for it," a small smirk touched his lips briefly. He knew at least two of the gangs he'd talked to had come into the ownership of a very small amount of kryptonite.
"What's with all the red marks?" Perry asked, coming to look over Clark's shoulder.
"That's where she's not."
There were a lot of red marks.
"What does all that mean, then?" Ella asked, coming to stand just behind his other shoulder to examine the map herself. Clark sighed.
"Well… Mostly that nobody knows who took her and didn't take her themselves," he frowned at the map. He didn't believe any of them were lying. He'd met them in person before, able to monitor their heartbeats and other tells when they tried to lie. They'd learned not to lie to him. "There isn't much we can do with that," he set the red pen down after marking the last territory off with disappointed finality.
- - - Chapter 12
A raging fire in a warehouse only three units down from the yard he'd encountered Juliana in caught Clark's attention as he flew over the city. He had been both trying to clear his head and looking for anybody in need of his assistance and found himself back at the warehouse faced with a plume of black smoke.
The fire had most certainly been lit on purpose. He could practically smell the accelerant from a hundred feet up.
It had taken him less than a minute to put out the fire in the above-ground warehouse. It was mostly empty, a dozen wooden crates stacked against one wall, a few metal storage pods he normally wouldn't give a second glance. But one of the storage pods was at the center of the fire, the hottest part by far. It was only when he lifted the pod out of the warehouse, tossing it into the harbor, when he realized that the pod itself wasn't the source of the fire, as he'd suspected, but from beneath it. There was a twisting wood and metal staircase leading deep below the ground level, smoke billowing up in hot curls. The wood of the staircase had burned away, the metal much too hot for a human touch.
He'd dropped down the shaft, the hot metal supports clanging in protest as they broke against his boots. He could hear the echo of a familiar heartbeat coming from the bunker below.
The bunker was split into two rooms by a heavy metal door. The fire had originated in the main room closest to the staircase. The room was practically dripping in fire, gasoline staining the walls, lighter fluid the meager furniture. It seemed as though whoever had lit the fire had made sure it would burn hot and long, the room was littered with books and kindling, actual kindling, the type bought at a campground for roasting marshmallows in a fire pit. The facility was made of lead and lined with sound-proofing materials, making the interior almost a foot smaller than the outer wall would suggest.
Clark exhaled into the room, putting out the fire and coating what was left of the furniture and what wasn't left, namely the ash, in ice crystals. The smoke rushed out the stairwell area with his breath. The hinges of the cumbersome door squealed in protest when he pulled it out, thick black smoke swirling out at him. He slowly inhaled, taking most of the smoke in without creating a vacuum, then blew it out the stairwell. Above, he heard firefighters cry out in surprise when a rush of smoke and cold air hit them, but nobody was hurt.
Labored breathing from inside the bunker brought Clark's attention back to the lead shielded room he'd just opened up. The room hadn't been coated with gasoline and the floor wasn't littered with kindling, but the walls were stained black from the smoke. A ceiling fan continued to spin lazily, the smoky air that had rushed in to fill the room after Clark had removed the smoke billowing about lazily. There was no light in the back room of the bunker, the light bulb in the ceiling fan missing, the light coming in from above not making it past a hazy pool on the floor.
Lois was curled in a ball on the floor, her heartbeat thready, her breaths wheezing but strong. She's always had strong lungs, Clark couldn't help but think, desperately. He x-rayed her, relieved to see that nothing was broken. There was smoke in her lungs, her bronchial tubes constricted. Blood was rushing to her right cheek and a welt-looking thing on her neck.
He scooped her up into his arms and lifted off, hovering his way out to the ruined staircase and gently adjusting her to fit closer to his body so that she wouldn't hit the sides or the remaining metal staircase frame on the way up.
The firemen on ground level had the fire put out; the pods coated in crusty blackness, most of the contents of the pods closest to the underground bunker were filled with ash. The firemen were gathered near the hole leading deep down, peering into it. They jumped back when Superman floated out of the darkness, smoke wafting up with him, making the darkness seem to be moving.
Clark's face was guardedly neutral, keeping Lois tight to him as he flew out of the bunker and then the warehouse. He kept her head tilted back, keeping her airway as clear as possible.
"God, Lois, don't leave me now," he whispered, soaring toward the hospital.
