- Chapter 14 - Vindicated -
Nursing her fifth cup of coffee, Chloe leaned forward toward her computer monitor to scan the timeline she'd been building since yesterday afternoon. In all honesty the bits of info she'd found couldn't quite be called a smoking gun, but Clark's theory about Mrs. Flutey seemed more plausible now that she had it all laid out in a Word document.
"Okay, I'm giving up my lunch break for this so spill it. What's the big scoop you wanted to share with me?" Pete asked. He breezed over and slid into the seat next to her.
Chloe snorted and passed Pete a copy of the timeline she'd written. "Don't even talk to me about missing one measly lunch. I got three hours of sleep last night. This research doesn't do itself you know."
"You want pity? I didn't hold a gun to your head and make you research..." Pete stopped to skim the page Chloe had given him. "Allison Flutey? Isn't she the special ed teacher or something? Is there a scandal brewing in the land of diminished capacity?"
"Nice, Pete. Try and be a little more tactful when Clark gets here. It's special topics, and don't use that phase, diminished capacity. It has negative connotations." Before Chloe could tactfully explain to Pete that Clark was enrolled in special topics for the semester, said alien had arrived. After her scolding maybe Pete would have to good sense to keep the special-ed jokes to a minimum. "Finally, my audience is complete. Sit and listen gentlemen."
Sliding into the seat beside Pete, Clark started skimming the timeline over his shoulder. "Did you find proof that I was right? Can we prove she's a mutant?"
"Not quite yet," Chloe said. "But we have some highly suspicious coincidences. Follow the timeline, boys. In fall of 98' we have a car accident that leaves Mrs. Flutey in a vegetative state. The accident was caused by one of her students, one Howie Matthews. He was drunk."
"She obviously didn't stay vegetative, but that doesn't make her a mutant. Where is this witch hunt thing coming from?" Pete asked. "What did Mrs. Flutey do to sic the Torch-mutant-squad on her?"
"Wait for it," Chloe said. "Mrs. Flutey did recover in late 99' and was back teaching by 2000. The coincidence that is stinking up this timeline is what happened to little Howie Matthews. Instead of a couple of years in juvenile detention, he's in a long term care facility in Metropolis, in a coma. He dropped into his coma inexplicably on November 6, 1999, the exact day Mrs. Flutey is supposed to have made her miraculous recovery."
"I was right," Clark said. "I told you she was a mutant. She brain-drained that other kid, Howie, just like she does her students every day. She's a brain vampire. It's how she stays cognizant."
"Come on," Pete said. "She's the special ed teacher. How can you even tell if she's brain draining that crowd?"
Oh lord, Chloe thought. She could see practically see Clark bristling inside though he made no show of it externally. "Pete, there's a difference between brain dead and dyslexic. You can tell what she's doing, but only really when she gets a student alone for a significant period. Francis Gold went pseudo-brain-dead yesterday after his student teacher conference. Clark witnessed it."
"Who is Francis Gold?" Pete asked. "I mean, sure I bet Clark found this kid zoning out in his student teacher conference, but he's probably just slow. It's special ed."
Chloe winced, and gestured at Pete to shush before he burned every inroad he'd made with Clark over the last few weeks. "If you can't see the pattern, Pete, maybe I overestimated your intelligence."
Clark had been so certain that his friends and parents would think he was more damaged than they already did if they found out about him failing the functional literacy test. He'd been ashamed to take the special topics class, ashamed of the deficiency it implied. Now that one of his friends was running down another member of the special topics class, Clark didn't feel ashamed anymore. He felt protective and indignant and a little angry. "Francis isn't slow. He has a learning disability. If everyone in special topics is automatically brain dead, I guess I'm screwed since I've been in there all semester."
Pete collapsed back against his seat back, sighing. "I'm sorry," Pete said. "Why would they even put you in that class?" Gesturing ineffectually, he couldn't find the words to undig the hole he'd created with the situation. Chloe should have warned him, if she knew Clark had been schlepping his way through the special ed class. She just stood there and winced and dropped hints and let him offend his best friend. Didn't she know how overly sensitive Clark was these days?
"It's okay, Pete," Clark said. "Chloe told me that this mutant was going to be a hard sell to most people, and I see why. The stigma of special-ed, brain dead until proven otherwise, it's the perfect cover for a brain vampire."
No angry accusations? No blow up? Pete had gotten in more trouble for trying to help Clark, than calling him brain dead. "You really think this woman is draining the brains of her students. What are we going to do about it? Can you imagine trying to sell this to the sheriff?"
Chloe was smiling, the smile of a girl who is used to dealing with the mutants without the usual authorities. "I'm working on an article for the Torch now. Clark is skipping special topics. I think we should start interviewing her students, maybe visit Howie in the hospital. We have a skeleton of a story, a guide to the truth. Now we just have to build a real case. There's not much else we can do, but there's power in the truth."
"I think we should confront her. She's using her students, today, right now, every day. She acts like a saint, like she wants to help, but she's just helping herself. I can't stand that she's doing this." Maybe he was still riding high from revealing his stint in special topics to his friends, but Clark felt defiant, brave. "I don't want to hide from this."
"What happened to avoidance?" Chloe asked. "I mean, confrontation might make this go faster or it might just clue Mrs. Flutey in that we're on to her game."
Clark stood up and took a step for the door. "Chloe, this will be safer with a group. Can we go now? Coming Pete?"
"What about avoiding further brain drainage? I liked that idea." Chloe hardly recognized the alien charging after Smallville's latest renegade mutant. The new Clark was taking a page out of the old Clark's play book, riding in hero-style. "Hold up a half a second and let me get my tape recorder."
Scrolling through the antique list she'd pulled up on E-Bay, Martha scanned for a suitable container, something lead to keep a meteor rock in from time to time. Jonathan had absconded with their old one to parts unknown, and she was officially not asking about it anymore. They had a truce, and they needed a lead box. Scrolling, through the 41,003 results her search had thrown out, Martha skimmed descriptions, her eyes always stopping at the price bar. "You'd think the thing was gold plated," Martha muttered.
"Martha!" Jonathan called. The screen door slammed loudly, and he came striding into the living room.
Martha spun in her chair and took in Jonathan's state quickly. His face was red, his posture tense, and he was clutching a letter in his left hand. Was it the bank again? She sent their mortgages in on time. "What's wrong?"
"I should never have signed anything from a Luthor. That snake is stealing the acreage we were renting them, Martha." Jonathan snapped a suspiciously check-shaped piece of paper. "IF I ever sell a grain of sand off this farm it will not be to LuthorCorp."
Rising quickly, Martha snatched the letter from Jonathan and scanned the document. "They can't do this Jon. We didn't agree to sell, and they can't make us. We'll go see Lex now. It's a mistake."
"Damn right, we're going to see Lex," Jonathan growled.
"Hey, let's be calm. This was a mistake." Martha caressed Jonathan's shoulder, trying to calm his temper at least a degree or two before they hit the road. "I'm driving, hothead."
Tuna salad with onions, pickles, garlic, and parmesan cheese, Allison Flutey opened her smelliest lunch of the week. "Why do the stinky foods taste so good?" she asked her empty classroom. With an admiring sigh she dug into the tuna goop. Fortunately, her Doug was tolerant of tuna breath. He usually didn't even make her down a Tic Tac before kissing.
When the door opened and three students came waltzing in, Allison quickly snapped the Tupperware container shut, acutely aware of the pungent aromas lingering in the air. "Hi Clark, class doesn't start for forty five minutes, and I'm trying to have a little lunch here. Can I help you and your friends?"
"Mrs. Flutey, I'm not coming back to your class." Clark took Chloe's timeline from Pete and placed it in front of his teacher. "I really thought you cared. I thought you were a good person, who wanted to help her students, but you're a monster, a mutant. You feed on us, devour our minds piecemeal to keep yourself going."
"What?" Alison asked. Clark wasn't making any sense, and the poor kid had seemed to be doing so well. She hadn't even planned to have him back next semester, but he wasn't behaving like the well-adjusted young man she was used to. Allison had a sinking suspicion another classmate probably had a hand in this. She didn't know either of the students who breezed in with Clark very well. She'd never taught them, but Chloe was the Torch's editor, an editor who had a tendency toward writing some outlandish fairytales in her spare time. She glanced at the timeline Clark had offered not taking time to really read it. "I don't know who has been telling you these things, but Clark, people can't do things like that, feed on other people's brains? It's a bad plot from a comic book. Come on, we've been studying the world, reading about it, making it our own for the past weeks. You have to be able to understand when someone's lying to you. Someone lied to you Clark."
He felt it begin, a dullness, a drain. Clark stepped back toward the exit. "I know exactly who lied. I wanted to give you a chance to admit it, to stop being a hypocrite, but I'm not going to stand here and let you do it again, what you did to me yesterday."
"Yesterday? Clark, if something strange happened to you yesterday, maybe you should see a doctor. I didn't do anything, but you had a very serious accident recently. What exactly happened?" Allison rose and tried to follow Clark on his accelerating retreat.
Planting herself in the doorway so that Clark could make a clean get away, Chloe crossed her arms over her chest. "Look Mrs. Flutey, leave him alone. He can't deal with you right now," Chloe said. Mrs. Flutey wasn't showing the angry/insane tendencies most mutants resorted to when confronted with the truth of their quirks. It was scaring Chloe just a little, scaring her because as many coincidences as she'd uncovered, there was still the possibility that Mrs. Flutey wasn't a mutant, and Clark was just getting worse. "Pete, don't let her follow us, okay? I'm going to check on Clark. Pete?"
The world had slowed down for Pete. Chloe and Clark and that Flutey woman were yammering on about things, unimportant things. Then someone was pulling on his arm, and he let them lead him away. It would be too much trouble to ask where they were going or why, too much trouble to not follow.
"Don't you touch him, lady," Chloe snapped as she pushed Pete out the door in front of her. "Move it Peter. You're going into a trance on me."
The look in that kid's eyes, Pete's eyes, Allison knew that look. She had students with that look in her classes, the students she spent so much time fighting for, the students who listened but didn't hear. She knew those children's unwillingness to try and learn wasn't her fault. She worked so hard with them, spent classes reading with them drilling them. With a mental shake, Allison dismissed the train of thought Clark's strange rant had sparked in her. She straightened her blue linen skirt and sank back into the seat behind her desk, but she couldn't go back to her lunch. "Poor Clark was just confused." It was her job to help her students with their problems, and in Clark's case she was supposed to be helping him adjust to life. Obviously, she was failing. Allison headed out to find her husband and brainstorm with him about how to help her confused amnesiac student.
"Clark! Wait up!" Chloe called. She knew Clark had the speed to be halfway to Calcutta by now, but Pete's zoning out had her very nervous, and she wanted help. "Pete, talk to me. Snap out of it." Chloe continued to drag her Pete-zombie to the Torch offices. The halls were beginning to fill with students now that lunch was winding up, and Pete was in no condition to head to his afternoon classes.
The Torch wasn't empty when she and Pete arrived. Clark had made his not-so-heroic retreat to aisle five of the computer section. "I thought you said Mrs. Flutey wasn't really dangerous in groups, and that it took some time for things to go bad. Pete's zoned completely."
"Completely? It happened that fast?" With a sheepish grimace, Clark joined Chloe with Pete. "I shouldn't have left you guys alone like that. She was in my head, you know. I felt it and panicked."
"Yeah, well Pete felt it too," Chloe said. "Pete, can you hear me?"
With a groan and a couple of owlish blinks, Pete came back to some degree of consciousness. "Stop. Shouting. Oh God, there's a jackhammer in my brain."
"I think it hits different people harder than others," Clark whispered. "Pete, do you remember what happened. Do you remember what Mrs. Flutey did?"
"Jeez, turn off a light," Pete begged. He sank into the nearest seat and covered his face with his hands. "I think I have a migraine."
"So," Clark whispered. He'd never felt more vindicated that he could remember. Chloe would have to believe him now, and so would Pete when his brain came back up to speed. "How do we bust her?"
"First things first." Chloe got an arm under Pete's armpit and hauled him up. "Give me a hand. We're getting Pete to the hospital, just to be safe."
Lex read over the letter that had Jonathan Kent in his study, glaring with enough force to bore a hole straight through him. Judging from ole Jonathan's expression, he wasn't too happy with LuthorCorp's attempt to bulldoze and double-deal his family. At least Martha seemed calm enough to listen, even if she wasn't going to like what he had to say. "I can't help you with this," Lex said. "I'm sorry, but my father replaced me at the factory. The new CEO is trying to be efficient, and from a big picture standpoint, it's more profit-conscious to own the test fields than rent them. My recommendation? Don't cash the check. Write back declining the section 4 action. He is trying to use a loophole in the contract that I wrote in to protect you. The fertilizer we're testing isn't dangerous, but it isn't tested either and on the off chance that we damaged your land I wanted a specific clause in which we could make the situation right." Lex folded the letter and offered it back to Jonathan. "He doesn't let on in the letter, but you have to accept the offer for it to be valid and binding."
"I doubt he's done with us, your father's new barracuda. I told you, Martha. Getting in bed with the Luthors was a mistake. Let's just hope getting out doesn't cost us the farm," Jonathan said. With a last glare he crumpled the letter into a ball and headed for the exit.
Martha stayed behind for a few moments and spared Lex a smile. "Thanks for letting us know what was going on. We do appreciate it."
Lex smiled in return and nodded. He wished he had a few extra moments to speak with Martha. He had more than a couple of questions for the cooler-headed Kent, but if she wasn't pretty close on Jonathan's heels, it would only lead to another blowup when Jonathan had to come back and collect his wife. Instead, Lex waited until he was alone in his study to dial the fertilizer factory. "Hi Cynthia, it's Lex. Pencil me in for a face-to-face with Mr. Dreyer. When? Yesterday."
Without bothering to knock, Allison Flutey cracked her husband's office door open enough to peek her head through. He was eating his lunch, a napkin on his lap, and a knife and fork in hand. He had to be the most fastidious straight man she'd ever met. "Honey, can I bother you for a couple of minutes?"
Doug smiled a sincere greeting and set aside his lunch. "You're never a bother. Is something wrong?"
"Am I that obvious? Because something is very wrong." Allison slid into the hot-seat normally reserved for students in front of the desk. "You sent me Clark Kent for a crash course on current events and common sense. I thought I was doing really well with him. He was acting really normal until today. One of his classmates tells him a tall tale about teachers feeding on the brains of their students, and he bought it, Doug, hook, line, and sinker. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't know how to handle this."
"Who told him the tall tale, Allison? How many students did they tell? Who's been told?" Doug asked. The spinach casserole he'd been enjoying five seconds earlier was resting uneasy in his stomach now. Allison obviously still didn't see, didn't understand, but it was better that way. He could protect her from the truth, from herself, but he had to know who knew. "Allison, I need to know who was told."
"The whole school will probably be reading the fabrication in our very own school-supermarket-tabloid within a day. I don't see why someone doesn't control the school paper better, but maybe when I'm outed as a brain-eating monster I'll get a little more respect from some of my students," Allison joked. But Doug wasn't laughing, not even a little. He looked terrified, pale, and shaken. "It's just a stupid tall tale. I'll recover when it comes out in the paper. I'm more worried about Clark."
"Of course you are. I wish for once, you'd worry about yourself first, or maybe worry about me. I love you, but you make it hard to protect you sometimes." Doug rose from behind his desk and started pacing. "I can stop this from being an issue if you'll just tell me everyone you know that knows."
"Doug, why are you acting like this? Why does this matter so much?" Allison met her husband's terrified gaze and her heart started to gallop in her chest. "Why are you afraid?"
