First things first, step by step -- that was how to do it now. "Miss Summers, Miss Kent. Shall we return to the Kent Farm?"
"I guess. Lex, we're all heading back to the Kents'. Talk to you later."
"That's it?" Mulder asked. "We've been searching for these damn caves for days, and that's it? We're just going away again?"
"We found what we came for," Joe reassured him. "Naman needs us to be where he can find us. Segeeth, too. Let's get these ladies back home."
"We know the actual way home from here?" Buffy seemed to be asking the child. Cara nodded, and Buffy addressed Joe and Fox. "You guys just come with us. Looks like Kent Organic Farm is gonna be Command and Control for this one."
Stonetree followed Buffy and Cara, and Mulder followed Stonetree.
By the time their little procession pulled into the yard at the Kent Farm, Mulder's continual questions and building panic had only worn away a little at Joe's steady calm. It wasn't like this was the first time he'd met up with something incredible, and that had worked out pretty well. Well, not as badly as it could have, anyway. The thing to do was stay calm and alert, and handle things as they came up. He tried telling Fox that, but the kid was a lot more high-strung when he wasn't drunk off his ass or dragging along in a blue funk.
It was probably just as well. Maybe high-strung could work in their advantage.
Joe parked the Caddy at the side of the dirt lane behind the battered farm truck. A buxom red-haired woman came hurrying out to the vehicles as they drove up. From the way she snatched the little girl out of the truck, she must be Cara's mother. Buffy jumped down out of the cab and started explaining. Joe and Fox got out of the car and joined the group. The farmwife's expression became suspicious.
"Buffy? Won't you introduce your friends?" The woman talked right over the little girl's chatter about mutant lightning bugs. She must be Cara's mother.
"Not exactly friends," Buffy huffed under her breath. "Mrs. Kent, this is Joe Stonetree and Fox Mulder. They were looking for the Cow-Hickey Caves, and they rescued us from some of those bugs that Cara is allergic to, after -- never mind. Short form -- Norman, Shuggie, Superman, end of the world. Can I use your phone?"
"End of the world?" Her eyes went wide, and she clutched the toddler to her ample chest. Joe wondered briefly whether Mrs. Kent might be a divorcee or a widow, and was shocked at himself. It was a long time since he'd thought of a woman like that.
"Don't worry," the babysitter reassured her. "We're totally on it. Phone?"
"Didn't C -- um, Superman, bring you that, your cell phone?"
"Oh! Yes, totally. Thanks." Buffy took the little electronic device out of her pocket and flipped it open. "Dingbat," she muttered under her breath. Squinting a little, she used the light from the Caddy's headlights to pick out a phone number on the tiny keypad. Holding it up to her ear, she looked at the Mulder and Stonetree and flapped her free hand at them. "Talk among yourselves!" She turned her back to the group and said, "Hey! Willow. It's me. Whattaya got on End of World, Extraterrestrials, Caused by?"
A small domestic car drove up, and a man got out. "Martha! You found them!" He came up to Mrs. Kent and hugged her and the child. Not a widow, then. Joe knew better than to be disappointed.
"They came back on their own. Mr. Stonetree and Mr. Mulder here helped them out of a sticky situation." Mrs. Kent backed away out of the conversation, petting her child and going to stand watchfully on the porch. Joe heard the little girl start clamoring for her missed dinner.
The farmer heartily shook Joe's hand. "Jonathan Kent. Thanks for helping the girls out, Mr. Stonetree is it?"
Joe liked Mr. Kent even more when he shook Mulder's hand and apparently left it stinging. "Glad to do it. They helped us out, too. We were having a hell of a time finding the Kawatche Caves, and your daughter was able to direct us."
"Kawatche Caves?" Kent asked, suddenly sounding suspicious as well. "What did you want there?"
"We were looking for Naman and Segeeth," Stonetree started to explain.
"We're trying to prevent the end of the world," Mulder put in, sounding tired again.
Instead of treating them as if they were crazy, Jonathan Kent gave both old ex-cops a long, appraising look. Finally, he said, "You all better come on into the house, then."
Superman landed on the roof of Pete Ross's apartment building in Metropolis, but moments later it was Clark Kent who super-sped through the hot, muggy, neon-lit downtown and ended up at the leafy but still stifling Met. U. Campus. He zipped unerringly to Applied Physics, and slowed to a fast Earth-normal speed only after he got the after-hours lock-code wrong twice.
Blessing his freak memory (he'd only seen Dawn tap in that combination once, during the early stalking phase of their relationship, which she didn't actually know about yet) and cursing his fast, clumsy fingers, Clark thundered down the worn tile steps, calling "Dawn! Lex!"
Dawn's shiny brunette head poked out of the door of Lab Seven. "What's wrong?" she asked.
He took her hand and let her pull him into the room. Lex was there, too, as Clark had known he would be. There was a smear of graphite on his temple. Sometimes it was just freaky how alike he and Cara looked.
"Real alien invasion fleet?" Lex asked, as soon as he saw Clark's face.
Clark nodded miserably. "Five ships." He looked all the way through the floor and the ground and the planet and the atmosphere on the other side, and gestured. Now that he knew exactly where to look, they were depressingly obvious. "Right there." Superman didn't let a little thing like being massively outnumbered and outclassed bother him (possibly because it had never happened before) but Clark felt, frankly, doomed. He sat down on the linoleum floor. "What are we going to do?"
"Okay, great, Will. You'll get in touch with Riley and Mrs. Riley and the surviving Government Monster Squadders, and you'll call Angel in L.A. and Giles and those Coven Guys in England, and hey! I've got another call coming in! This is the coolest phone ever. Catch you later! Hello?"
"Buffy, it's me."
"Hi, Lex." Buffy's heart was doing that little singy thing it did when she had a new beau, and she tried to squelch it, because that never turned out well, and besides they had a big alien invasion counter-plan to do. She was about fifty percent successful.
"Superman is here with me." Buffy could hear the air-quotes, but that was only because she knew what was up with that.
"Was he able to find the bad guys?"
Clark was audible in the background. He sounded upset. "Yes. There are five ships."
"Five?" Okay, time for the we're-all-going-to-die plummet. It was weird feeling that and the new-boyfriend feeling all at once. Never happened that way before. "Five seems like a lot. How long do we have?"
"Four or five days, he thinks." Clark's voice in the background again, then "Closer to four. He can see them from here, now."
Mmm. Freaky. Four days was good, though. The certainty of impending world-endage eased off a notch. "Well, I've sent a heads-up around to my troops, but we prolly need to know a where as well as a when. How. Who."
Clark said something in the background. "Huh?" Lex asked, and Buffy echoed him. "Cl - Superman thinks... Here. You talk to her."
Buffy heard Clark clear his throat, and then he spoke, in the same self-consciously heroic voice he'd used earlier when in costume. "The President of the United States will be in Metropolis for Independence Day. It's never happened before. Additionally, I took your advice about speaking with the Metropolitan Police. Lieutenant Sawyer agrees that the behavior of the President's security team is extremely suspicious."
"Oh, yeah! That makes a lot of sense. Especially with what those two old cave guys said, about international government conspiracies and stuff. 'Cause if I was a government conspiracist, I'd make sure the big alien invasion went down way the hell away from my nice marble buildings and statues. Washington Monument, White House, you know."
"You're right. Independence Day, then."
"Like the movie!" Buffy laughed, even though she knew that it would probably make Clark feel upset. End of the world -- she felt almost comfy, in her own proper place. "Okay, so that's at least one ship headed for Kansas. Do you suppose they're all coming here, or are they setting up around the globe?"
"I don't know. I suppose I can sneak around up there and keep an eye on them."
"That won't give us that much warning, and I think it'd be a better use of your skills if you take out as many of them as you can as high up as possible. Nope. Plenty of witches in England, with locating spells and prognostication and stuff. I'll call Willow back."
"Wait. Take out? Buffy!" Huh. He was using his regular dorky college boy voice again.
"Uh. Alien Invasion!"
"Just because they're aliens doesn't necessarily mean they're bad!"
Buffy's jaw literally dropped. "Excuse me?"
"I'm serious, Buffy."
"So am I, you know. World-endage, kinda my speciality."
"How do we even know that they're really an invasion?"
Dawn's voice was loud enough to be made out clearly, even on the other end of the phone connection. "Well, the fact that they're, you know, invading would tend to bear that theory out!"
Clark sounded mulish. Buffy thought he was mostly talking to Dawn. "Just because they're aliens coming to this planet doesn't mean they're bad."
"Mulder and Stonetree --," Buffy started to put in.
"We don't know them! We don't know they're telling the truth!"
"We at least know they're human!" That provoked a startled gasp and a stunned silence from the boy on the other end of the line, and Buffy realized what a mean thing she'd just said. "Oh, God. Clark, I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." And damned if she hadn't just called Clark by his right name. Well, she never had been any good at Secret Identities. Hopefully the phones weren't tapped or anything.
Lex's voice came from the phone. Clark must have dropped it, or given it to him. "He could have a point. I'm certainly not one to give any unwarranted benefit of the doubt, but it would be better if we could be sure. How much do you know about these two characters, exactly?"
"I guess we could do some research, but if we only have a few days -- fine. Fox Mulder, Joe Stonetree. I'll ask Willow to check on them, along with all the other --"
"No, it sounds as if your friend will have enough to do as it is. Checking backgrounds is right up Chloe Sullivan's alley. I'll call her. I wish there were a way to communicate with the ships themselves. You don't pick a fight with someone you can't talk to."
Buffy'd only known Lex for two months, but she already knew he was a Giles-class quotations guy. "Sun Tzu's Art of War?" she guessed.
Lex's little huff of a chuckle was very cute. "C. J. Cherryh, the Chanur saga. I'll talk to Chloe."
"And tell Clark I'm sorry about that human crack?"
"He knows."