So I didn't complete NaNo this year and technically I kind of did. I got to day 16 before blegh'ing out with around 28,500 words. But I decided to tally up my total word count for the entire month. It came to 63,911 words. Spread across two separate WiPs. So I guess I did it.
And now this chapter.
I feel like I've been sitting on this chapter five-ever you guys.
Chapter Thirteen: Bushwhacked
Luthor had liked Miss Lane since the first day she had gotten up in his face and laid out the many ways he was ruining Metropolis, with a fucking spreadsheet and a flow-chart outlining the corresponding data (to be honest, he would have hired her on the spot if he'd thought for a second she'd actually take the job). Truly, he had admired the way she had taken the time to lay out the argument. She was a bit annoying, but he couldn't help but respect her. She was always challenging him, re-ordering his plans, both long-term and short-term, to better accommodate her would-be interference. Her presence encouraged him to stay several steps ahead ahead of the competition, to shore up his weak points and leave nothing to chance.
There was something to be said about a woman like her.
He had never quite imagined hearing her scream, though.
Truthfully, it was the sound of one of the Daily Planet's staunchest, toughest reporters screaming in horror that startled Luthor more than the giant, purple, and slightly glowing monster that charged through the doors, knocking people aside. It was the reason that the monster was nearly at the stage, its grasping hands outstretched for him, before Luthor reacted.
"Activate, LX-1! Engage!" He ordered into the tiny radio speaker masquerading as a cuff-link.
This was the code-phrase that unlocked the control panel of the combat-ready military suit. Having climbed inside before the presentation, Sergeant Corben grinned and engaged the drive system. The suit's hydraulics kicked like a grasshopper, sending the heavy hunk of metal at the purple monster. The armored fists of the suit started to pound the monster's head with a force that should have turned it to pudding on the first few blows (but whatever Rudy Jones was now, he was made of stronger stuff than before).
Nothing cleared a room faster than danger, potential or realized. The first appearance of the purple monster and people had started running for the doors, but when Corben went to engage, that was when evacuation started in earnest.
It was a wild rushing tide that carried Lois out the nearest door of the auditorium, hands and elbows pushing into her sides and her back. She had to keep moving with it or she would get trampled. She fought against the crush and soon extricated herself from the stampede, stumbling out towards the edge where people weren't so closely packed together. She hurried around the corner to go and find Clark.
The pavilion had been built with the auditorium as the inner-most room. The exterior hallway wrapped halfway around and off it came a series of smaller rooms that could easily be used for small parties and group meetings. There were restrooms snuggled up at the end of the hall.
"Clark?" she called out.
Nothing answered her. There was no sign of any damage in the hallway; not so much as a crack in the wall, and therefore, no sign of Clark either. The only place he could have been was inside the restroom.
Lois gritted her teeth and ran down the hall, trying to tell herself that it was foolish to expect an answer. Clark had been thrown like a bowling ball through as least one wall; a ten full inches of reinforced concrete and rebar. The pavilion was supposed to double as a storm shelter, in the rare event the weather turned inclement enough. His bones would be fragments, his insides pulverized, his body broken. There was no way he could have survived it.
Because what if he wasn't Superman? What if Clark Kent was just an ordinary guy and what if she had just been following a long string of coincidences and what if Superman was really some bum who lived on the corner and wore nothing but a sandwich board warning folks about doomsday when he wasn't saving the day?
She had to be ready to accept that possibility too.
She had to be willing to accept it.
She wasn't.
"Clark?"
Lois scrambled into the ladies restroom, the closest to the auditorium. Sure enough, there was a large gash in the wall by the sinks. The toilet stalls had collapsed inwards, bent over by a very heavy weight. A set of blue-clad legs sprawled over the edge of a stall door, attached to pair of a not-so-shiny imitation leather loafers.
Clark.
A vice squeezed her chest. She could have screamed again.
"Clark!"
Ignoring the way her voice cracked, she crawled over the wreck of the bathroom stalls towards her partner. Clark was sprawled there, looking surprisingly not dead. Indeed, his chest still rose and fell visibly. He was covered in just gray concrete dust, in his clothes and his hair, though his jaw was clenched and his eyes squeezed shut as if he was in a great deal of pain nonetheless.
"Hey, Clark." Lois dropped down beside him and tapped his cheeks. His skin was warm and he was showing no signs of shock. That was good. "Clark, can you hear me? You with me down there?"
Her heart was thudding wildly in her chest, her nerves thrumming in agitation. Clark looked fine; that was the weird part. For a guy who had just been flung through a concrete wall hard enough to flatten the metal toilet stalls, there wasn't even a scrape on him. Hell, his glasses weren't even scratched.
"Clark?" Lois licked her dry lips. Her mouth was dry, her throat too.
What if she was wrong and Clark was bleeding internally on a massive scale? What if there was a chunk of rebar spearing through his back because he actually wasn't Superman and wasn't indestructible?
She patted him down, starting at his neck and down his well-muscled chest to the tapered waist, then down each of his muscular legs. She ran her hands down his arms, feeling the contours of the serious muscles he never showed off. But she didn't feel any broken bones anywhere or anything that might have speared through him not far enough to come out the other side. As far as she could tell, every inch of him was still where it was supposed to be.
"C'mon Smallville, you're too pretty to die this young. I haven't even asked you to dinner yet. I still need to make you my kick-ass stir fry." she whispered, throwing open his suit jacket and reached for the buttons of his shirt to check for bruising.
"...Lo's?..."
The breathy, half-coherent mutter of her name made Lois jump. She looked down at him properly and found his navy blue irises peering up at her questioningly, like he wasn't quite sure it was her. His eyes were hazy with every sign of confusion, possibly a concussion.
"...naan bread..." he mumbled.
"That's right, you still owe me a birthday dinner." Lois told him, feeling a bit weak with relief. Consciousness was a good sign. Recognizing her was an even better one. "You get the cake and the naan, I'll make the stir fry, and we'll do an evening out of it. We'll watch a movie. How do you feel about Godzilla? I'm sure there's at least one movie where he fought a giant purple ooze monster."
Clark's head was buzzing almost too much to really get a handle on what Lois was saying. Why on earth was she talking about Godzilla? His body hurt. Nothing was broken, but he had been flung through a wall and blunt force trauma still hurt. The throb was disappating slowly, but it still bounced and rolled under his skin as though it was a living thing.
The top half of the suit had spread around his upper body just a moment before he'd hit the wall, in response to his sudden panic. He could feel the strange armor still clinging to him. In his semi-dazed state, he could hardly acknowledge it was there. Just Lois hovering over him like a hummingbird, her shaking fingers fiddling with the buttons of his shirt.
"Lois?..."
The concussion-like haze cleared instantly because Lois was there and trying to get his shirt open and the suit was still active-- He tried to sit upright, to stop her this was too soon--
"Clark, don't move!" Lois instructed, still panicked but controlling it marvelously, she felt. She didn't quite shove him back down. "For fuck's sake, you just got pinballed through a wall! You could be bleeding internally and not feeling it!" Her hands scrabbled around the buttons on his shirt and then she gave up trying to get them open one by one. "I'm going to look at your chest. Nothing feels broken, but I have to see it to know--"
"Lois, wait--!" Clark protested, flinging up a hand too late.
Lois ripped open his shirt, popping half the buttons off.
Time could have ground to a halt for all the reaction Lois gave at the sight of the scarlet and gold S-shield emblazoned on the field of royal blue, in plain sight across Clark's chest. Very slowly, she reached over and brushed the tips of her fingers against it. It was distinct roughness that she hadn't felt anywhere else in her lifetime. Not even Kevlar could manage the dichotomy of feeling like metal and fabric at the same time. She had been just inches away from this thing on many occasions -- half the time with her face pressed to it and she couldn't count the number of times she had run her fingers over it in the past nine months. There was no conceivable way she could mistake it.
This was no cheap imitation of Superman's suit. It wasn't a clever one. She was touching the real thing and Clark Kent was the person wearing it.
There was literally only one conclusion to come to.
Clark Kent was Superman.
Superman was Clark Kent.
Lois felt something bubble up in her chest that could have been the urge to laugh or cry or scream in frustration or relief. How long had she been trying to claim this very thing? Two months now. The entire summer. Ever since the Tweeds and then nothing else had added up unless you took it as Clark Kent was Superman.
But laid out in front of her like it was, she wasn't sure that she believed it.
Clark Kent was a farm boy dork who would grow tomatoes on an apartment terrace, but couldn't remember the train schedule to any degree and still found hot dog vendors on the sidewalk to be a novel experience and when he took cabs, he ended up in a minute long ramble of trying to describe where he was going rather than giving an address or a nearby landmark. Clark Kent had been around the world and back but didn't have any exciting stories to tell, or he had exciting stories but refused to share them. Clark Kent had grown up in Kansas, in a ridiculous place called Smallville that she wanted to visit just because it sounded like a proper small town and not a suburb like Pittsdale and she was way too curious to know what it was like. He had lived an apple pie kind of life where "normal" also meant "so fucking vanilla white-bread it glows in the dark". Smallville did not sound like an exciting place to live, once you were past the doomsday cult and meteor showers.
Exciting things did not happen to this man on even an irregular basis.
But Clark Kent was Superman.
"Lois?" Clark prompted, starting to worry that he had broken her brain with this one.
Lois continued to absently stroke the suit with a look of concentration that was slowing veering into a sort of terror; the expression one wore when they had failed to fully grasp the enormity of the situation and were really just screaming internally.
"It's not what it looks like." Clark tried to tell her, very belatedly. But what the hell was he saying? Of course it was what it looked like. Lois wasn't dumb and she had been suspecting him for a bit now.
That did the trick, however, to knock her out of her stupor. Lois looked up sharply, her glare as piercing as a needle.
"From this angle, there's only one thing it looks like, Smallville." she snapped, eyes narrowing dangerously. "Or do I call you 'Superman'?"
He didn't say anything when she tugged at his glasses, coaxing them off his nose. His familiar navy blue eyes transformed into the equally familiar bright blue of Superman's eyes, right in front of her. Her brow furrowed, Lois pushed the glasses back up his nose, causing the irises to turn navy blue again. She pushed them down and the bright blue came back.
"What is the actual color of your eyes?" she asked.
"The bright blue. My glasses are lead-plated, transparent." Clark told her. "They dull the color. Everyone remembers the blue first."
"Your glasses are fake."
"Yeah."
"Your Hubble lenses are fake."
"Why do you sound disappointed?"
Lois scowled and shoved the glasses back up his nose. "You lied to me."
"Lois--" Clark bit his lip momentarily, adjusting the thick-rimmed spectacles so they sat more comfortably. "I haven't even known you a full year yet."
"Isn't nine months long enough?" Lois demanded, crossing her arms. "Were you ever planning to tell me or was this something you were just going to keep to yourself like a lying liar pants on fire--!"
She was, thankfully, interrupted by a really nasty crunching noise behind them in the auditorium. For a bizarre moment that would probably never come around again, Clark had never been so glad to hear a gargled scream of pain, as it reminded both of them that this was neither the time nor the place for discussion of the secret identity nature.
"I think there's something I should be taking care of." he said.
"Yeah..." Lois agreed, however reluctantly.
She shuffled back to her feet, picking a path out of the mangled toilet stalls. She didn't stick around to help him up and she even turned her back, but that would have to be addressed later. Clark stripped off his suit and shirt and pants, letting the suit spread out in full and the cape unfurled. He half-heartedly folded his clothes and tossed them on one of the sinks, placing the glasses on top.
"Lois..." he started, shrugging.
"Just go." Lois ordered. "Before someone kicks it. That scream didn't sound very good."
"We'll talk later." he offered.
Then he rushed off to the auditorium.
Superman raced into the auditorium in record time, though he took care to come in through the front door. Luthor and the team of techs were the only people who had remained behind, more or less sheltered in the wings of the stage. The huge purple creature was still there, standing victoriously over the mangled exo-suit and John Corben's body inside. A quick check showed that the sergeant was still alive, but the monster had done a number on him and if he didn't get medical help soon...
"Hey!" Superman called out, causing the beast to jolt in surprise.
It turned around to face him. It didn't have much of a face; an enormous gaping mouth lined in teeth that looked uncomfortably like that of a lamprey eel, and flat lavendar eyes that had a smaller darker spot that might have been a pupil. But they weren't the eyes of a mindless beast and it was far more than just rudimentary intelligence that lurked there.
Superman scanned it with x-ray vision. The skeletal structure inside was grossly misshapen, but otherwise human in its general construction. Skull, backbone, a barrel-shaped ribcage that went all the way down to the massive pelvic bones. Almost zilch on internal organs too. The lungs were there in a more or less familiar shape, and the brain looked like it had been turned sideways in the skull, but still mostly the same in size. The creature didn't so much have an intestinal tract as it had an enormous sack in its belly that contracted and released like a heart, with fluid spurting into the body on every contraction.
Oh! That was a sight he could have done without!
"What are you?" he whispered, mostly to himself. Not human, for sure. That was as much as Superman could guess at a glance.
The purple monster was standing quite close to the exo-suit, close enough to give it a good kick. The first priority that Superman had was to get the monster away from the exo-suit so the techs could get to Corben and get him out of there.
After that, I-- defeat it? I suppose...
What was he supposed to do with it if and when he subdued it?
The purple monster's mouth opened and it made a sucking noise similar to a slurp. The flat eyes roved over Superman's form and he could see the greedy glitter from thirty feet away. He had a skin-crawling feeling that it would have licked its lips if its tongue had allowed for that. It wasn't just intelligence in those flat eyes.
There was hunger too.
Mindless, unsated hunger.
The monster let out a noise that sounded like an avalanche and charged in his direction. It was fast despite how lumbering it moved and Superman was already acquainted with its strength; enough to knock him through a wall. But he held his ground, since it was coming at him and therefore away from Corben. He was prepared for that strength this time.
The purple beast swung a fist the size of a manhole cover. Superman caught the punch in his hands and rolled with the impact, throwing the monster past him and sank a punch right between where the shoulder blades probably were. His punch sank all right. Despite the skeletal structure, he might as well have punched at bouncy rubber to the same effect.
The creature grunted, a sound like two rocks scraping together, but it didn't seem hurt. It whirled around, lashing out with an open palm. Superman raised his arms in time, in the blocking manuever that Lois had spent weeks teaching him. Her tutelage paid off and even with his feet not touching the floor, Superman knew how to brace himself against the impact. The blow echoed all the way up to his shoulders and left his joints feeling slightly rattled, but it didn't knock him down as it once might have.
Right, physical strength isn't going to get me anywhere in a hurry. Superman knew, still pushing back nonetheless. Suppose I run down the list of what I can do and see what has the best effect.
Across the auditorium, Luthor watched the fight with undisguised fascination. He had seen Superman in action before, but always from a distance. Always on video several hours old. Rarely in real time and never so close.
He was magnificent.
A picture perfect portrait of human perfection.
Would-be human perfection.
He was an alien and yet so human in his appearance. The physiological differences were not immediately apparent. He had the same number of fingers and presumeably toes as well. Eyes, ears, nose, and mouth all in the familiar positions. The musculature and what of the skeletal structure that Luthor could see was very much identical to a human's.
How fascinating.
Did the Kryptonian and the human races have a common evolutionary demoninator? So far back in the foggy mists of time uncounted, had they once been the same species? From the same branch of the evolutionary tree? There were so many questions to be asked, so many mysteries about Superman to explore. The answers themselves might change the very fabric of mankind. Imagine what Luthor might be able to do if he could harness and control even a fraction of Superman's potential. Planet Earth would never be the same.
Look at how he just glided! He moved through the air with the grace of any career ballet dancer. A little uncoordinated in his boxing swings, perhaps, but he combined with the aerial movement well enough. He was quite fast too. When he didn't catch the sledgehammer punches, he moved out of the way so swiftly the edges of his form blurred. As he moved, he kept the creature moving away from Corben.
He was giving them an opening.
Luthor glanced down the stage where the techs cowered in the opposite wing, equal parts terrified, speechless, and awed.
"Well? What are you waiting for?!" he snapped at them. "Get Sergeant Corben out of there! He needs medical attention! And get the exo-suit out of there! We can salvage that!"
They shared apprehensive looks, but Lex Luthor was not a man to be disobeyed. One of the three women in the group slipped off the stage first and dropped low to the floor to crawl across it. Not about to let their egotistical pride be upstaged by two X-chromosones, the men started to follow.
If Luthor had been any less of a dignified individual, he might have rolled his eyes. But he wasn't going to indulge in such a base act that was reserved for teenagers and catty reporters. He left the techs to the task of retrieving Corben and lowered himself from the stage. Cautiously, he crept towards the fight.
He wanted a closer look.
He might never get another chance like this.
Superman delivered a one-two combo to where his x-ray vision told him the knees were and the tree trunk legs buckled. The purple monster staggered and hit the floor with a shaking thud, but it didn't stay down. It heaved itself back to its feet and turned to face him again.
This isn't working! Superman gritted his teeth. The rubbery body absorbed every single one of his blows. He wasn't doing the thing any real damage. Nothing that would slow it down for more than a few seconds.
The monster's mouth widened in an obvious smile. "That all you got?" it asked in a gutteral voice like scraping rocks.
"Not necessarily." Superman hedged.
He did have his heat vision, but he was reluctant to use that. It burned blue-white these days and if he remembered his college science classes right, that was roughly twenty-six hundred degrees Farenheit. He knew the kind of damage it could leave on another Kryptonian and he could guess what it could do to a human, but this purple thing was an unknown.
"That's all you got." the monster said smugly.
"Don't count me out just yet." Superman advised.
He was going to have to take a leap of faith (of a sort) here and see what happened. He flew back several paces, the familiar heat gathering in and around his eyes, and tried to concentrate on a lower temperature. The heat blasted out of his eyes in tight, concentrated beams, a little more yellow-ish than white this time.
The beams hit the purple monster square in its chest area with enough force to knock it backwards and it roared, that rocky avalanche noise again. Superman thought he heard something sizzling, but there was nothing to smell except the ozone. The beast twisted and its mouth gaped open, large and round and brimming with more teeth than the Osmond family. Superman saw it duck its head into the path of the heat beams--
--swallowed the beams?
He broke off the attack in shock.
"Did you just-- eat that?" he demanded in horrified disgust.
The monster shrugged, looking sort of thoughtful. The tip of the slug-like tongue lapped at its lips.
"Tangy." it declared.
For a second, Superman didn't move save for a shiver of horror. The purple monster had swallowed heat beams with a two thousand plus degree temperature and it pronounced them to be 'tangy'?
Heat is just energy. Does it--
"Lex Luthor!" the purple monster bellowed, flat lavendar eyes narrowing on a point somewhere behind Superman. The Kryptonian whirled around and saw Luthor trying to creep a little closer unnoticed, unsucessfully.
"What are you doing?!" Superman shouted, appalled by the man's nerve.
"Don't look at me, idiot!" Luthor shouted back.
It took Superman a second to work out who the businessman was yelling at, but by the time he did, it was too late to act. Two enormous hands grabbed him by the cape and yanked him out of the air with whiplash force. He thought, fleetingly, it would have broken his neck if he'd been normal, but the thought was smashed out of his head when he met the concrete floor face-first. The purple monster stomped on his back, driving him a little deeper into the floor, and made its way towards Luthor.
For his part, Luthor didn't cringe or cower or lose his head. He had always been able to keep a calm demeanor in any situation; his father's son to the bone and back again. He glanced away from the monster's approach just long enough to check on the techs (they were pulling and pushing the exo-suit to the stage ramp -- and bits of it were falling off -- they would get Corben out later). They were doing exactly what they needed to be doing and nothing more.
"Mr. Luthor!" the monster growled. "This is your doing! You did this to me!"
Luthor scowled. "I don't know what you're talking about." he snapped, beginning a retreat. He was not a dumb man. He was not going to boldly stand his ground against something that was eight feet tall, built more solidly than a brick shit-house, and had put the "Man of Steel" into the floor. It didn't seem to have suffered any lasting damage from the laser eyes either.
"I'm sure, however, that a team of my analysts could figure out what's been done to you--" he started.
"No, no! This isn't a mistake you get to fix and then brush off like it never happened!" the monster roared, advancing. "I'm going to make you pay for what happened to me! I'll make everyone pay!"
Superman raised his head and shook the concrete bits out of his hair. His skull was ringing a little from the hit. A flash of color against the dull concrete wall of the auditorium caught his eye and he glanced over to see Lois, hovering just beside the doors with his clothes folded over one arm and her phone in her hand. The red recording light blinked.
Lois Lane, the intrepid reporter.
He glanced the other way. Luthor was backing up, but the monster was advancing with every step. It tilted its head back, proving that it had sort of a neck, and opened its mouth wide. And then wider. The lower jaw appeared to unhinge and split apart into two separate halves connected by a web of skin. Like a snake's mouth. It gave Luthor a good look all the way down the monster's throat and the three rows of teeth that circled the full circumfrence of the creature's mouth.
"Oh no..." Luthor said quietly. A weak feeling jellied into his knees.
"Mr. Luthor!"
Superman catapulted himself up from the floor and across the auditorium. Without thinking about it first, he got between Luthor and the purple monster, and grabbed its face with both hands. The large head twisted on its thick neck and, somehow, the monster had enough leverage to sink its three rows of teeth into Superman's arm. They didn't puncture his skin - nothing did. But it was what happened immediately after that was most alarming.
He started to feel very weak very suddenly.
Rudy Jones was in ecstacy. He reeled from the sudden rush of exquisite energy that filled the gaping maw of his stomach. If the cop from the river-side had been like lava from the earth, then Superman was like a super-nova. He wasn't star-stuff. He was an entire galaxy of stars. He wasn't the burning core of the planet, but the burning core of trillions of planets! He was the solar winds of a million suns, sweeter and hotter than anything Rudy had ever tasted in his short, bland life. The spark of Superman's life flared like a hundred million auroras. The glow of every star in the night sky. That cop had been a piddling little stream during a drought compared to the great thundering Inga Falls that was Superman.
Luthor took advantage of the moment to run. He sprinted away. He had seen plenty from a close distance. Hell, he had gotten too close. He would go through the security footage later and see what there was to see.
Superman needed a moment to process what was going on. The teeth that were actually sinking into his arm. He could feel those needle-points beginning to pierce his skin and draw blood. He felt like a reservoir of water, but all the floodgates were open and everything was emptying from him. An endless rapid rush that he was helpless to stop.
Energy... It feeds on energy. It's like a... a parasite.
And if he didn't do something to make it let go, it was going to keep draining him until there was nothing left.
Superman gritted his teeth and fired a burst of his heat vision. It was a lot harder than usual and the beams came out a cherry red color. That couldn't be good. They hadn't been that color since he was sixteen, when the heat vision had first manifested.
But they were still hot and the monster was so close there was no way he could miss. The beams hit the top of its bald head and it released his arm with a surprised squawk. Superman let go of it as well and darted backwards. He didn't stay in the air as planned, though. His flight flickered like a faulty lightbulb and then dropped out and his heels hit the floor. The weakness went deeper than the partial collapse of his powers; it went into his muscles as well. For a second too long, his legs refused to hold him and he dropped to the floor in a slump.
His arm was bleeding. He saw that for just a second before the holes in the suit sealed over by themselves and the armor tightened just slightly, applying pressure to the wounds.
Several feet away, the monster drew a hand across its lips.
"That was a rush." it groaned ecstatically. "You're like a nine-course meal of the best steak in the world! I heard you weren't human, but that just proved it! The cop didn't taste like that! Marty didn't taste like that! They were like-- like brussel sprouts! Raisins! I hate raisins!"
"Who are you? What are you?" Superman asked, not sure which question was more important. His closed fist seemed to shake.
"What I am, I don't know anymore." the monster admitted. "'Cause there's no way I'm human!" It laughed uproariously. "Who am I? I think that's changed too. I don't really feel like 'Rudy Jones' anymore, you know?"
"And who was Rudy Jones?" Superman asked. In his peripheral vision, he saw the techs finally drag the exo-suit and Corben along with it out of sight behind the stage curtain.
"Oh, no one in particular. A loser." the purple beast sneered. "The world's better off without him."
"That's not true! You don't know what you could have contributed to the world!" Superman said.
"What I could have contributed? God, don't you sound like a motivational infomercial." The monster's eyes didn't roll, but the motion of the head conveyed that just the same. "For your information, Superman, Rudy Jones lost everything that ever made him a worthwhile person the moment he grabbed that diploma back in high school. He might as well have died right then for all the impact he made on the world. That's how pathetic a man I used to be."
It grabbed Superman by the cape again and hauled him up to that flat purple face.
"Rudy Jones was a spineless coward who got himself into a bad mess and became something else. Something different. Something stronger." The thing that was once Rudy leered and a chill trembled down Superman's spine. "Past-me finally made the best decision for future-me."
"That's not true." Superman said, teeth gritted. "I don't think you had a choice in the matter at all. No sane person makes the choice to become a purple people eater."
The monster tilted its head. "Well... You're probably right about that." it conceded. "But I finally got dealt a pretty good hand. I've got your strength now. I can feel it. I feel like I can do anything!"
And it hurled Superman halfway across the auditorium. The spinal helix worked frantically, trying to push out any measure of counter-force. His own muscles seemed to strain with the herculean task. But he landed with a heavy crash that went all the way through him, into the bits and pieces that had come off the exo-suit, and he skidded into a fragment of a green stone.
A bone-deep weariness bit into him like fangs and what little energy he had left was suddenly sapped out of him. A burning itch started from below one shoulder blade and spread quickly across his back. He tried to move, but it felt like some great big weight was sinking down onto him - legs useless, fingertips numb, and his vision graying at the edges.
What's happening to me?...
"What's a matter? Can't move?" the purple monster crooned in a mockingly sympathetic tone. "Here, let me help you with that!"
Ham-like hands fisted into his cape again and Superman was hoisted above the monster's head as easily as though he was a ragdoll. It bellowed out a triumphant laugh.
"So easy! So easy! Look how weak you are!" it crowed. "Let's see how well you fly now!"
It flung him like a stone straight up through the skylight windows thirty feet overhead. Superman crashed through the glass and into the bright lunch-hour sunlight, arcing out with the blue sky gleaming above him. Instantly, the burning itch on his back subsided to a more tolerable level and the numbness fled his fingertips.
Sunlight... of course...
The yellow sun gave him his powers.
The few times he had felt under the weather in his life, sitting down in a patch of sunlight had always made him feel better. He had always thought it was just a placebo effect, of a sort. He had always known where the sun was in the sky -- rising, setting, high noon. He had always felt like a lodestone homing in on that big ball of gas.
But now he knew better.
Just a little... Just a little, that's all...
The helix of fibers along his spine -- millions of years of Kryptonian evolution that allowed them to alter the gravity immediately around them -- pushed out the necessary counterforce, however weakly. He didn't immediately plunge to the ground like a stone, but he didn't fall like a feather either. The ground was far from soft. Landing was still jarring and sure to leave bruises. He bounced once and rolled to a halt some distance away.
For a second, all Superman could do was lay there with the smell of new grass in his nose and the sunlight subduing the itch on his back while he waited for his head to quit spinning. He didn't get to wait long enough. With a whoosh of air and a shaking *thud*, the parasite monster landed nearby. The adrenaline got Superman moving, but it didn't feel like enough. His arms shook, his legs wobbled, and at the moment, he didn't think he could do anything more than heave himself backwards, much less off the ground. The monster made its slurping noise again as it approached him.
"You've still got some juice left in you." it commented. "Mind if I take it? I promise I'll use it wisely."
"You have to stop this. Nothing good is going to come of it!" Superman shouted, though not entirely sure why he was saying, but anything slow the beast down.
"Really? I beg to differ, Superman." the purple monster scowled. "Just because life was good to you from the start doesn't mean it was so easy for the rest of us! With all that power, you have an obligation to help the rest of us little guys! Starting with me!"
It made to grab at him, but with perfect cinematic timing, a yellow-orange taxi plowed into its legs. The parasite monster was knocked off its huge feet and the taxi, miraculously, didn't sputter and die, but continued to drive forward with all the dogged determination of the person behind its wheel -- none other than Lois.
She plowed over the purple monster until it was twenty feet away and then gunned the taxi into reverse. Its brakes squeaked as she pulled up alongside him, already shifting the gear back into drive.
"Get in!" she ordered.
Superman didn't need to be told twice. He could have yanked the door off for as quickly as he plunged into the back seat. Lois put the gas pedal all the way to the floor and screamed off the lawn just as soon as the door was shut and Superman collapsed onto the sticky vinyl of the seat. He sagged, torn on whether that feeling was relief, surprise, or resignation.
They bumped over the sidewalk curb and sped across the parking lot beside the pavilion out into the road. Lois checked her mirrors for any sign of pursuit from the big purple people eater, then really noticed Superman in the back. He looked wrecked.
She had seen some of her fellow reporters pull all night benders with crap food and energy drinks, and they showed up the next morning looking like their own computer had beaten them soundly in consecutive wrestling matches. Glassy bloodshot eyes, pasty skin tones, and a sense that they were either going to collapse in a dead faint or spend the rest of the day in a state of manic energy.
Clark-- Superman?-- looked like he was going to collapse in a dead faint.
"Smallville, you are the worst." Lois muttered.
Superman opened one eye to regard the back of her head and smiled faintly. She had come to his rescue and she had called him 'Smallville'. If she was really actually mad at him, she would have used his last name. Instead, she had used her own version of the affectionate nickname.
She couldn't be that mad at him.
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