Clark was halfway back to Metropolis. The miles streaked away beneath him, the white-brown blurs of the snowy cornfields and then the many-colored checkerboard of the outlying suburbs.
His mother's words from the day before had backlit all his thoughts since that moment, all that following morning and afternoon, as he restructured the stalls and put up rails round the hayloft. Among the rotten beams and underfoot nails, and the wintry sunlight slanting down among the rafters, he had felt the thick warmth of her words still sinking into the crannies of his own heart, recasting, rearranging it.
He had been strangely at peace, stilling his thoughts and his imagination. He had had the vague conviction that these moments, still drenched in the afterglow awe of the bright space the universe had just opened wide for him, were not yet the time for making decisions. They were the time for letting things sink in.
And for remodeling barns.
Then, as he dropped altitude, he felt his cell phone vibrate on his back, receiving a voice mail.
The coverage in Smallville was still temperamental at best, and cell phones and pagers on his person tended to receive poorly in general. There was no telling when in the last four days the call had come in.
He wondered for a moment if it was his mother, if he had left something back there yet again.
Careening down low in the drizzle, over the wet rooftops of one of his Metropolis alleyways where the walls and dumpsters cast their dingy shadows, he realized he was looking deep into each building, from pure habit. Looking for little Dawn Summers, Howie Grant, Jason Montano and David Marshall.
He allowed himself just a moment to consider the possibility that the call might be from Lois.
He landed and changed, at speed, in the gray corner of the alley behind one of the bins, listening to the last post-rainfall dripping from the gutters around him. No windows looked down on him from the unbroken factory walls that rose all around. Yet.
If they really do ever turn this place into lofts, I'm in trouble.
Then it occurred to him, with mild alarm, that if the present yuppie takeover of the slums of Metropolis continued, in a couple of years he might run out of windowless alleyways altogether. He wondered idly if it would be unethical to use the Planet as a platform to write a piece against gentrification. He could strike a blow for himself and for the low-income tenants it crowded out at the same time.
Of course, if the slums of Metropolis did gentrify and come up to code, there would be a lot less 1940's-vintage, lead-based paint on the walls. Which would help the visibility on all his flyover searches tremendously.
Not until he had buttoned up his last shirt button over his uniform did he let himself check the caller ID.
It was from Lois, on her cell. The time stamp was 9:42 PM last night, almost twenty hours ago.
Clark looked up at the factory walls reaching for the sky around him, at the waning sunlight dazzle through the breaking clouds. He reflected ruefully that yet another of the memorable moments of his life might be about to take place in a dark alleyway. He dialed in to his voicemail.
As the message started, over the typical static that dogged all his cell phone reception, he heard for a moment a methodical wooden pounding in the background, with a deep trembling after each beat, as if it shook the walls. Where was she calling from? A few seconds passed before she spoke, as if she had been listening to it too, distracted.
"Clark, it's me."
The razor edge of tension in her voice made his heart begin to pound. This was no social call.
She laughed raggedly out of the speaker. "These guys are so low-budget, they cut the phones but aren't jamming my signal. Unbelievable."
Oh, God. Lois.
"Clark, listen, the diaphragms are transmitters. The music's not the point. You have to warn the big guy. The kids, the speakers, it's all about kryptonite. Tell him it's not just a short-range weapon any more."
He froze. The gutters kept drizzling; his breath steamed in the chill air.
She laughed bitterly again on the other end. "I think kryptonite ought to be our default assumption by now. Tell him to get away."
The banging through the speaker ended with a tinkle, instead, of shattering glass. Men's voices – three, now four distinctly, shouting. Racing footsteps.
A grunt from Lois, as if she were wedging herself through or climbing up something. Then she talked faster, pressured, almost tripping over her words. "The little ones were prototypes. Now there's a big one. They get them from a 'dealer', and I think he's…not…normal. I don't know the range, I don't know how it aims, I don't know where it is, I don't know what they'll do with us."
Involuntarily, he imagined her there, crouched under her desk, one small hand holding the phone, the other gesticulating wildly. He closed his eyes and felt weak.
The footsteps were louder. A man's voice - "Put it down."
A small sound caught in her throat. "Gotta go."
In his mind's eye he saw her lowering the phone to the floor, keeping her hands in plain sight, under a gun muzzle.
Brushing sounds, fingers on her phone casing. The same man's voice again, into the phone now, calm, weirdly casual. "All right, whoever this is. If I see, hear, or imagine the G.M.P.D. trying to follow us, we'll shoot her in the head. If not, she'll go home in two days."
Lois's voice, in the background now - "Is that what you said about Dawn Summers?"
Lois, for the love of God, he thought sickly, could you try to hold it in?
"And Howie Grant? And Jason Montano?"
"Oh, yeah, them." Then, into the phone, "Okay. The same goes for them, too. Bye now." Click.
He opened his eyes. The message had lasted less than thirty seconds. Very precisely, he closed the connection and tucked the phone back in his pocket. Then he stood there, absolutely still, looking into the darkness.
Clark had discovered very young that he lacked the human panic response, the shunting of blood to the active extremities, the blinding mental blankness and confusion that came with the adrenaline kick. He had long suspected that half of what looked to others like his extraordinary speed was really a lack of ordinary shock.
And so, while his heart pounded with the terror of what things named and nameless they might do to her, while his vision almost literally swam with fury, his mind wove and shuttled among the details of the message, the geography of the city, the implications of the things she said, the questions remaining.
No telling how long he had. No telling if he was vulnerable right now. He would have to work out of uniform, to have a chance of surviving long enough to get to her.
He called her cell phone. It rang, once, then twice. Then he heard it going off two miles away at the G.M.P.D., the Greater Metropolis Police Department. No doubt in an evidence bag.
Over the next twenty minutes, he learned many things. Lois, of course, was missing. So was Jimmy.
Presumably, from the Planet newsroom, in the break-in the night before that he had heard in the background – while I ate oatmeal cookies. The phone lines had, in fact, been cut. Fingerprint dust lay heavy on everything now, but there were no prints. And no bullet holes, and no blood, and no leads. The perps had taken her desk contents and her hard drive before torching the bullpen.
But they're so low-budget, he almost heard her saying, as he entered the newsroom from the frosty night through the window, and ducked under the reams of yellow police tape, that they didn't even stop to look for my backup on the shared server.
He raced through her backed-up files like a man possessed, pursued close behind by the single vision of that lead-lined room that had haunted his every, every nightmare.
Only now it was Lois and Jimmy, tied to a pole in the darkness, and they were supposed to scream for him but they wouldn't, and Lois stared out in wide-eyed terror as a pistol muzzle rested on her temple, but would only say over and over, blinking back tears, "It's not just a short-range weapon any more."
She had last backed up her work several hours before they were taken. Loislike, her notes were cryptic from both brevity and creative spelling. Most were from the days before they had last spoken, leads and half-leads and false leads on the kidnappings.
Her entries from the last hours before the break-in were set apart.
Summers: access
Grant: construction; "things I didn't leave there"
Montano: tuning
Marshall?
no imaging!
Sheep from different folds. Wolves too?
And then, below that, exactly what he did need: the addresses of the internal Luthorcorp websites she and Jimmy had been breaking and entering.
He gave himself sixty seconds to ponder the rest of it, on his way to her apartment.
Did the last names reference the children? Or the parents, paired with terms that looked like tasks?
Imaging – using imaging to aim the transmitter? Or a warning, not to 'image' something? Or the brain imaging - no imaging done on any of the parents, perhaps? Because it would show what? Nothing?
If four sets of young parents were not pawns but accomplices, he thought numbly, he really should go back to Smallville, where he might occasionally read someone correctly.
Sheep, folds, and wolves. Lucy's fingerprints, on Lois' thoughts? Different folds – different groups? Cities? Nations?
He thought back on her message. The music, being a red herring…but how, when during that week it had spread the madness when the victims even hummed it?
Time was up. There would be time enough to ponder soon. He stepped soundlessly into her apartment through the balcony. Under the sweep of his deep vision from the threshold, it was dark, empty, untouched, and noteless.
He briefly considered making his next move from home. But there were too many neighbors who might come investigate when they heard the noise. He took a thirty-second detour there instead, to change out of his uniform and slip it into the jacket with the double lining that he wore on cases where he might be searched. He filled his pockets with candy bars and a water bottle.
He dumped fish food in his tank and set it outside in the hallway, where it would be found before they could starve.
Then he headed to the University of Metropolis campus. He tried one computer cluster building after another, but the first three all had one or two unshaven postdoc students, working haggardly on their dissertations in the bleaching light of their screens.
He debated with himself, as he flashed from one cluster to another, over whether to send Lois and Jimmy a message. If she still had her pager. If they're still sane, and not humming a seven-note tune to each other. If that's relevant.
And, if they weren't, would they spill out the meaning of his message with their other secrets, and tip his hand?
But you outdid yourself there, Luthor. Turns out they won't really answer your questions. They'll just keep making their confessions.
And if they were untouched, and thought no help was coming, what desperate thing might she try?
Finally he found a cluster that was deserted. There in the darkness, in the flat phosphorescent glow of the monitor, he brought up the Planet text paging screen and Lois' pager ID.
I passed your invitation on, he typed. He says don't forget his sweet sixteen tonight. Don't worry - it'll go better than mine. Love you both.
Would she remember the reference, from a year ago?
Of course she would.
Then he brought up three different windows with high-security Luthorcorp internal site logins, and broke into all three of them. For good measure he added a fourth. Making a mental note to ask Lois for forgiveness for taking her training in vain, he did a theatrically shoddy, low-budget job of hiding his IP address.
Then he sat back, alone with his visions of Lois and Jimmy and maybe four children under ten, surrounded by shadows full of dealers who were not normal, and he waited for their move.