Holy crap it snowed last night
Okay, not gonna lie. I don't like chapter 35. I just don't know how to change it.
Chapter Thirty-Six:
It was like waking up from one of those drowning dreams and realizing that you were instinctively holding your breath. The tightness in Lois's chest prompted her to draw in the deepest breath she could and it went all the way down to the bottom of her lungs.
I think... I think I'm alive...
She tried to twitch her fingers and toes, slowly becoming aware of the cold concrete under one cheek and all down her right side and what was that awful sensation in her wrist?!
It was pain and there was nothing like it to wake Lois up faster.
She had not been asleep or dreaming or dead, she had passed out because she had stopped breathing for just long enough and some goddamn motherfucker had decided to bind her wrists and ankles together and I was falling what about Superman--!
Her eyes flew out and a bony hand sealed over her mouth.
"Don't shout." ordered an unfamiliar man's voice. It was husky, like he smoked a pack of cigarettes a week. "Unless you want to know just how far your neck can twist."
Lois looked up and found two things above her. One of them was the raftered ceiling made of corrugated metal about thirty feet overhead that just screamed 'warehouse'. And the other was the man, though she was slightly hesitant to use that because he didn't even look that old. He was her age or thereabouts, so normally brown-haired and brown-eyed with no stand-out features it was like someone had taken the top-most common genetic occurrences in the human race and run them all through a blender to get this guy. He could have been an anthropomorphic personification of the word 'generic'.
He didn't look very healthy, though. The fingers pressed to Lois's face were so thin she thought they might snap just from pressing down too hard. She could feel the outline of the metacarpals in his palm and the large sleeves of his shirt didn't hide the bony wrists or prominent elbows. She felt like one light kick would break his ribs.
But he wasn't alone and his two companions looked to be in better health. One of them had sandy hair and a very pointy chin. The other one had dressed himself all in black and while Lois suspected that the hair was naturally black, he must have undergone a skin-bleaching treatment to look that paper-white pale.
Great, so I'm being held captive by Generic Boy, Pointy Chin, and Gloomy. I don't know if I should be feeling scared about this. Maybe annoyed? I'll go with annoyed.
"Don't break her neck. You're not supposed to." Pointy Chin said with a resigned air, like they had had this conversation a few times already.
"Well, I just don't see why we can't kill her and be done with it." Generic Boy complained huffily, sounding quite a lot like an impatient teenager.
"Because orders." Pointy Chin said insistently. "Now look, we'll hold her down, you break her legs."
My legs? Aw hell no! I still need them!
Lois opened her mouth and bit hard on the first finger that slid between her teeth. Generic Boy yelped and yanked his hand away before she could really open her jaw, her teeth tearing open the skin of his finger.
"You little shit!" he yelled, staring at his finger like her bite was poisonous.
Lois grinned. "I try."
"Get her!" Gloomy shouted with more volume and pep that she would have figured.
They dive-bombed her, though it wasn't much a fight to begin with. Despite what she might have boasted, Lois couldn't take on three guys with her hands tied behind her back. At least not with her ankles tied too. Lying on the floor and wiggling like a worm didn't get her very far. Within seconds, Gloomy and Pointy Chin had her pinned down at the shoulders and knees, both grinning a touch sadistically.
She squirmed a little, trying to find some weakness in their grip, but they were strong. Their hands were borderline crushing. And she felt a bit of fear pool in her stomach. They were going to break her legs and there would literally be no walking away from this.
She might actually die here.
Probably from dehydration, which was three days too slow.
I think I rather would have fallen.
Before the fear could really set in, she caught a flicker of movement on the far side of the warehouse. The place looked like it had been abandoned quickly, so there was still hulking rusted hunks of fork-lifts and other pallet movers (which also gave her the impression she was somewhere along the waterfront and going by the state of the dilapidation, she was leaning towards the Slums). Even as she stared past Generic Boy's knees, she saw a rather hefty-looking boy wearing a newsboy cap dart out from behind the one fork-lift and dive behind the next one over. He poked his head back out and made a gesture with his hands, whirling his index fingers around the other like he was telling her to keep rolling.
Stall for time.
Well, rescued by a child is better than no rescue at all.
"Let me guess. This is the first time any one of you have even touched a woman." Lois grumbled, making sure that she looked bored with the proceedings.
"Ah, shut up." Gloomy mumbled.
"Bitch, I have a girlfriend!" Generic Boy retaliated, his tone wounded. It sounded like he had to say this a lot.
"Really? Is she impressed by cheap Matrix cosplay?" Lois asked. She scanned him up and down. "Are you wearing woman's boots? Those look like woman's boots. Do you borrow your girlfriend's clothes? Are you wearing her panties--"
"Shut up!" Generic Boy barked, though his comrades giggled a little. "You two shut up too and hold her down!"
"Gosh, you're not even going to give me a fighting chance. Where's the sport in that?" Lois lamented, a little dramatically. The hefty boy was climbing an old ladder up the back wall, heading for the rafters. "I think if I have to lay here and put up with your bullshit, I should at least get the chance to cold-cock one of you."
"This is your last warning!" Generic Boy shouted.
"Warning-schmorning, you losers wouldn't have caught me if I hadn't been a thousand feet up and falling." Lois growled. This time, hot anger banished the cold fear and she glared piercingly at Pointy Chin. "Don't think for a second I don't recognize your face. What did you do with Superman?!" she bellowed.
Admittedly, it had taken a moment for the recognition to set in, like a low simmer, but her mind had put the pieces together. Pointy Chin had been the grinning face above her while she'd blacked out. Gloomy and Generic Boy had likely been in the area, perhaps shooting the taser rounds.
And working under someone else's orders on top of that.
Someone trying to bring down Superman before he could make anything of himself.
Lieutenant Sawyer's observation relayed to her through Colletta via email, along with the proposal to out-shout the likes of Lex Luthor and Dierdre Merlo. There were plenty of criminal scum out there who had benefitted from the lack of superheroes and would continue to benefit if Superman was cut down before he ever started.
Some people would do anything to maintain the status quo.
"That won't be any of your concern in a few minutes!" Pointy Chin declared. He looked at Generic Boy. "Now do it."
"Still, why her legs?" Gloomy wondered. "I'm not disputing the orders--!" he added quickly at Pointy Chin's rising glare. "But wouldn't it be more debilitating to break her ribs instead?"
Lois glanced at the rafters where the hefty boy had disappeared and wondered if any of the Three Stooges were actually hearing the faint rattle of chains.
"Nah, you can still walk with broken ribs." Generic Boy said. He popped his knuckles and winced. "I mean it hurts like hell, but you can still do it." He wiggled his fingers and smiled nastily. "So Miss Lane, any last words before the screaming begins?"
"Look out." Lois said flatly.
Generic Boy had just enough time to go "wha?", his face twisting into a comical expression of confusion, before a heavy cargo hook smacked off the back of his skull. A normal person might have gotten their brains splashed across the floor, but he obviously wasn't a normal person. The impact made him bowl over, yelping loudly, but didn't leave so much as a dent in his skull.
Then the rescue attack started in earnest. The hefty boy wasn't unaccompanied. As soon as Generic Boy was knocked over by the hook, another young boy of about the same age came racing out of hiding with a cackle. Racing, because he was clipping along at a good forty miles an hour in his sneakers. He took out Pointy Chin and Gloomy in run-by punches, fast enough that the pair of them didn't seem terribly sure what had hit them.
"We're under attack!" Gloomy yelped, flailing after whatever had hit him, but the kid had already scrammed off into the darkness.
"I got it!" Pointy Chin said, getting to his feet and raising a clenched fist.
"Noyadon't!"
And the boy came zooming out of the shadows again with a manic grin on his face. He didn't look more than eleven years old and probably just a hundred pounds soaking wet, but even when something that small was moving at forty miles an hour, it hurt to get rammed in the gut. Which was precisely what the boy did, hitting Pointy Chin shoulders-first.
Generic Boy started to pick himself up, groaning. Another cargo hook came swinging out of the rafters and clocked him square in the back this time and he fell right back down.
Four sets of small hands seized Lois around the arms and shoulders, hauling her out of the line of fire while speedy kid came back around for round three. She looked back at them. Three of them were boys and the fourth was a girl (one white boy, one black boy, one Hispanic with glasses, and the girl was Asian), but they were wearing newsboy caps and looked like rough-and-tumble street kids from the nineteen-twenties; the ones who smoked a bit and made petty trouble for the police but were more like the loveable ruffian underdogs.
"Afternoon, Miss Lane!" the white boy said with a jaunty smile, like they had just met outside the corner store.
"No time for pleasantries! Cut the ropes!" Lois ordered, eager to make a run for it on her own two feet.
The girl complied, producing a pocket knife that she used to saw through the ropes holding the reporter's ankles together. Lois didn't wait for the girl to cut off the ropes at her wrists, but bolted to her feet and ran for the entrance on the ride-side wall.
The hefty kid up in the rafters was throwing cargo hooks in earnest and the speedy kid was having a ball knocking Pointy Chin and Gloomy off their feet as soon as they got back up. The kidnappers did appear to be quite durable, though.
Metas. Lois thought, if a little disparagingly. One shows up and then they all come pouring out of the wood-work. How do I even get into situations that start out like this?
She was out the door in record time and back in the gloomy Monday morning hanging over Metropolis and skidded to a halt. The prominent skyscrapers of New Troy were off to her left, the water and St. Martin's Island on her right, and ahead she could make out the tower of the Bronze Bridge. Definitely the Slums then, not that she was sure of where to go from here.
"Hang on, lemme get your wrists loose!" the girl with the pocket knife shouted, coming up behind Lois to cut the ropes way. They were off in a matter of seconds.
"C'mon, this way!" shouted the jaunty white boy from earlier, beckoning to her. He was the tallest of the four of them and probably the oldest.
"What about the Three Stooges?" Lois wondered, glancing over her shoulder. Pointy Chin, Generic Boy, Gloomy were going to get their wits about them eventually.
"No worries!" piped up the black boy, grinning widely. "Famous'll whammy 'em so hard they'll be walking in circles for the next fifteen minutes!"
"They won't catch us either! Not with my luck!" the white boy added confidently. He made a c'mon gesture with his whole arm. "This way! Scrapper and Gabby'll get away just fine! Let's go!"
No point in sticking around here. Lois thought, breaking into a run. Y'know what. I think I just got saved by a gang of meta-kids. Speed, strength... Cargo hooks aren't lightweight... And the whamminess.
The jaunty white boy was fairly fast for someone with such short legs, but Lois kept pace with him easily enough. The other three kids changed sides every couple of steps, heads swiveling this way and that as though making sure no one was following them.
A few blocks away from the warehouse, Lois looked up into the thick gray cloud cover across the expanse of New Troy, half hoping to see something red and blue, but all she saw was thin plume of smoke that she strongly suspected was the helicopter.
"He's not there!" The glasses-kid pressed a hand into her back to make sure she didn't slow down. "They pulled him out of the sky half an hour ago!"
"Who did?!" Lois demanded.
"Someone! We didn't really see!" the girl shrugged.
"Don't talk about it out here!" the white boy ordered, stopping long enough to peer down the next street. Seeing no one, he led the way to the next block and then down a narrow alley that, in better weather, probably wouldn't have been so dim. The buildings on either side had boarded-over windows up to the fifth floor.
"The stairs. Go up 'em." the black boy said, in more of a whispery tone.
"And go where?" Lois asked.
"Just come on!" the jaunty white boy said impatiently. He was a pulling down a fire escape ladder so they could each it. "Do you wanna know what's going on and why those metas were going to break your legs and leave you to die?"
"Honestly, it's not exactly a new situation for me, but the metas?... Yeah, that's a little newer." Lois admitted. "But seriously. Go where?"
"I'll go first!" The girl darted forward and scrambled up the ladder loud enough to make the white boy grimace at the clangs. She reached the platform of the fire escape, grabbed one side of the boards covering the window and pushed it aside as easily as though it was on hinges. She looked down and grinned as if to say 'see, it's that easy'.
"We aren't tricking you, Miss Lane. We actually came looking for you." the white boy said beseechingly. "But we can't talk about it out here on the street. You never can tell who's going to overhear."
"Uh, no..." Lois hesitated, crossing her arms. She wasn't going to go with them just because they had rescued her from a potentially slow death, no matter what her curiosity had to say in the matter.
"Mr. Bibbowski said you didn't trust easily." the glasses-kid said in a matter of fact way. He nudged his glasses up. "And to be very honest, Miss Lane, we'd rather not knock you unconscious and drag you up the ladder."
"Yeah, that wouldn't end well for anyone." the black kid agreed.
"Well, I'd call Bibbo and get his opinion on you kids, but wouldn't you know it, my bag and everything in it are probably burning in helicopter fuel right now. That includes my phone!" Lois snapped. She felt a little prickly-eyed at the loss of her phone. Sure she could get it replaced and get the refund thanks to the warranty, but her entire life had been tied up in that phone.
Not to mention getting her I.D. re-issued, cancelling her debit and credit cards in case any did survive, and fuck, she was going to go purse-shopping again.
Well, now she did have a real good excuse to get the latest in digital recorders.
"We know something about Dr. Essex." the jaunty white kid cut in, making the reporter all but snap back around to face him. "We know something about the certain thing he got fired from S.T.A.R. Labs for."
Oh goddammit, Bibbo must have told them how to get my attention. Lois grumbled internally, as her curiosity shredded her caution like it always did. She scratched her forehead. "Well, I didn't come this far for nothing. Let's go."
Jaunty white boy smiled and made an 'after you' gesture.
So she climbed the ladder and ducked through the window.
The inside of the building didn't match the outside one bit. When Lois crawled her way through the window, she found herself standing not in a shabby, dilapidated room that might have been an office once upon a time, but rather a studio apartment lit with solar lamps and furnished with decor from the early nineties and comic books as far back as the eighteen-nineties. It was heated, well-lit, and it looked like it might be a fine place to spend such a gloomy day.
"If this is your secret club-house, I will kill you." Lois said, half-glaring down at the white boy who had come in after her.
She and the other base kids had tried to have a secret club-house growing up, but the adults kept finding it and raiding it for funsies. So it never looked half as nice as this when they had to keep moving it around.
"Nah, it's more of a safe-house." the white boy shrugged modestly. "We don't come here very often, but there should be some canned ravioli in the cabinets, if you're hungry."
Lois's stomach chose that moment to betray her. Then again, if it was past noon like she was suspecting, then she hadn't eaten since breakfast which had been about six hours ago.
"Canned ravioli, then." The jaunty white boy said, grinning at her. "You can hover suspiciously over my shoulder while I put it in the microwave."
In the two and a half minutes it took for the ravioli to heat, the remainder of the kid-gang arrived. They were flushed and grinning madly at their success, swapping high-fives and talking excitedly like they were in the best form of their lives. The whole group rounded out to five boys and two girls of various ethnic backgrounds. The girl who wasn't Asian was a particularly familiar freckle-faced redhead whom Lois had seen just often enough to recognize.
"Aren't you Roberta Harper?" she asked, pointing to the girl with a spoon.
Some of the merriment sloughed off when they remembered Lois was in the room, eating ravioli.
"Call me 'Bobbi', with an I. Everyone does." Bobbi corrected, seeming to grin a little sheepishly like she had been caught lying. "Jim Harper's my uncle."
"Really? That's strange, because the last time I saw you, Harper introduced you as his baby sister." Lois commented in a would-be casual tone, but she didn't make eye contact and the undertone was a touch scalding.
That caused all seven children to flinch, looking more ashamed than startled. It was the sort of flinch from a person who had made that same goddamn mistake multiple times and kicked themselves over it.
"So which is it?" Lois wondered, her tone still casual. "Just know that from where I'm sitting, this whole business is awfully funny. One: it's a Monday. You kids should be in school right now. Compulsory education and all that. Two: why do a bunch of pre-pubescent kids have such a nice safe-house that they keep stocked with long-term foodstuffs? And that's without putting your apparent meta-abilities on the table."
She ate a few bites of ravioli and waited patiently for a response.
The jaunty white boy stepped to the front of the group. "It's actually a pretty long story, Miss Lane, and I'm sure you'd love to hear it, but it's too long to relay right now. I think we're on a time crunch." he said. "Suffice it to say for now, we are the Newsboys. I'm Tommy. That's Big Words--"
He pointed to the Hispanic kid with glasses.
"Gabby."
The speedy little Italian-looking boy.
"Scrapper."
The super-strong hefty boy, who looked a bit Irish.
"Flip."
The black kid, who grinned brightly and wiggled his (webbed!) fingers
"And Suzi."
The Asian girl, who nodded a greeting.
"And you all know about me through Bibbo?" Lois asked.
She trusted Bibbo enough not to intentionally lead her astray. And these kids knew enough about her through Bibbo that they were obviously in semi-regular contact. Bibbo didn't go to people who weren't on the level.
"And Jim." Bobbi added quickly, amid the nodding. "Jim sort of looks after all of us. I mean, we can't exactly live on our own and get by on delivering newspapers..."
"We're a little more than your average Slums kids, Miss Lane, but there's no time for the whole story." Tommy repeated, moving to sit down across from her. "We help keep an eye on things around here and we learned something about Dr. Essex that you'll want to hear."
Lois sat up a little. Anything new about Dr. Essex would be coming out of those two years he spent in Sofia's employ and as curious as she was about where Dr. Essex had actually come from, it was matched by wanting to know what he had been up to after S.T.A.R. Labs.
"Like what?"
"His secret lab."
Quickly as she could, Lois slurped down the rest of the ravioli and stood up.
"Show me." she ordered.
A few blocks away there was an old office building about five floors tall. Structural decay had taken down part of the fifth floor and something about the design suggested that it had had a sixth floor once upon a time. It was strange that the building was still there. Even in the Slums, collapsing buildings were brought down by the city. Many were left as empty lots until someone had the money and motivation to do something with them, but they didn't leave the structurally unsound ones to rot on top of neighborhood children.
But this one particular one was still there and Officer Harper strongly suspected that it might have been bought by one of Sofia's lieutenants. When the Newsboys had investigated it two hours ago, they found structural reinforcement in various forms and well-maintained locks on the doors, many of which had been replaced. In a city that was struggling to throw off the last of the Falcone roots, this was not much of a surprise. The mob was trying to maintain its stranglehold and that meant a lot of burrowing into places where they didn't need to be.
Except for the people who had gone missing in this area.
One person a week for six months, nearly all of them homeless men and women seeking refuge on the hollowed-out ground floor. Though they had stop taking refuge inside the building after the seventh person, when the police had realized it was the one thing that connected the missing. Nonetheless, people continued to vanish in a roughly three block radius.
When their bodies did turn up, they were neatly mutilated, as though someone had cut them open with a scalpel and then stitched them back together just enough to make sure their insides didn't slop out.
Officer Harper had done all the digging he could. The building had been passed through no less than three shell companies, the third of which was loosely tied to a suspected Gigante holding. That one was loosely tied to a known Gigante holding.
Between that and the bodies, Harper had concluded the building may have been used by Dr. Essex.
He had been hedging his bets, though. Without any chance to investigate, he'd only been able to guess.
"But you're sure?" Lois asked now, following Tommy and Scrapper up the stairs of the building in question. So far, it did look like every abandoned building she had set foot inside, but the steel reinforcement on the stairs was less than two years old.
"Can't mistake what we saw, Miz Lane." Scrapper said, shaking his head. He had a scratchy voice tinted by the dockside accents. "It was definitely a lab. Science ain't my thing. I couldn't make heads or tails what he doin' in there. Hell, Big Words couldn't and he's the brain."
Lois frowned. "He's like twelve." she said reflexively, glancing back to the Hispanic boy behind her on the stairs. "Anyways, I don't think there's a man or woman on this planet who could figure out Dr. Essex's science. I have it from the horse's mouth that he's not from this neighborhood."
"Didn't think he was from Metropolis." Suzi muttered thoughtfully.
"Hmm, try somewhere past Pluto." Lois corrected.
"Pluto?" Flip repeated incredulously.
"Past it. Think, strange visitor from another planet."
"What?" was the general chorus of disbelief.
"He's a damn alien, that's what."
The kids behind her stared at her back in disbelief and then immediately fell to whispering between themselves. Ahead of them, Tommy and Scrapper shared dubious expressions and looked like they wanted to join in the whispering, but couldn't do so without putting Lois in the middle. After a second of communicating solely with their eyebrows, Tommy turned to look at Lois over his shoulder.
"Are you sure?"
Lois shrugged. "I doubt he was lying. Seemed pretty proud of it."
She was sure. Dr. Essex was an alien. Lois really hadn't tried to take the time to wrap her head all the way around it -- that would come later when she was forced to fully acknowledge the same thing of Superman.
"I don't expect you to believe me, but all the same, he had some choice words for what he thought about us members of the human race." she added. "Now pick up the pace. I wanna see this lab."
They arrived on the landing of the third floor. The hallway was just as dingy and dirty as the rest of the building that Lois had seen so far, but that was just the camouflage. She doubted that anyone looking for something valuable would bother getting all the way up to the third floor if all they saw was dirt and grime and used condoms. The third floor, where just off the landing there was a heavy metal door locked by a keypad.
And a set of distinctly handprint-shaped dents on one side where it had been forced open.
"Uh, that was me." Scrapper said, shrugging like he was a little ashamed of causing property damage.
"Super-strength, that's impressive." Lois commented, nudging the steel door open even further. It moved easily, like Scrapper had first ripped it off its tracks and then put it back in the frame.
"Eh, it's nothing great. I can't- I'm not really strong." he said, sounding quite modest this time. He really wasn't that strong, truthfully. Way stronger than the average eleven-year old, but he couldn't stop a small car in the middle of the road.
"Beats having to fight with the keypad." Lois said, pushing the door open fully.
The science lab on the other side was the most blindingly white room Lois had seen. The walls, the floor, the counters and the cabinets and every single piece of equipment was white as to better see the stains. Glass cabinets of empty vials and jars and bottles. Everything was clean and neat and so orderly that Dr. Essex could probably see tampering in the two-degree shift of the top-most paper.
There were racks of chemicals that were labeled with their element symbols rather than names (and Lois had avoided the subject of chemistry as a whole). The papers were worse, because not only were they not written in English, they weren't in a single language that she could idly recognize.
"Wow... Wish I had my phone." Lois muttered, itching to take pictures. Honestly, this is why I need a photographer with actual balls of steel. So when I do stupid things and lose my phone, I still have access to a camera.
She walked past another glass-fronted cabinet, this one bearing vials full of some semi-cloudy liquid that she doubled back for another look at. The cabinet was locked, but the rack was labeled with an actual name: Hapalochlaena Caloraeger.
That still told her pretty much nothing.
She hadn't taken Latin in college.
"Miss Lane, there's a laptop." Tommy spoke up.
Lois spun around to look at him and then followed the direction of his pointing finger. There was a desk in the far corner under the windows, more or less the epicenter of the ungodly organization. It was the only dark thing in the room, making the gray laptop stand out all the more.
"Ah, hello nurse. Come to momma."
The reporter slid into the desk chair and flipped the computer's lid to turn it on. While the rest of the Newsboys pawed through Dr. Essex's paperwork to see if there was anything written in English and Gabby watched the door, Tommy sidled up next to her.
"There'll be a password before it loads the desktop. But I can guess it." he said confidently and grinned at her skeptical eyebrows. "We're all metahumans if you hadn't guessed, Miss Lane. I can manipulate probablity." He shrugged. "Sort of. I have really, really, really good luck. If I was older, I'd be a lot more adept at it."
"Handy to win off scratch-cards." Lois muttered. She moved the chair to the side. "Okay, impress me."
When the password screen finally came up, that was precisely what happened. There might have been a bit of a glow to Tommy's eyes as he entered the password, clicked the login button, and stepped back to smile triumphantly as the next screen welcomed them.
"Wow. What was it?"
"A lot of random letters. I'll write it down for you--"
"Peoplearecominghide!" Gabby suddenly hissed, jerking back from the door. "Peopleonthestairsthey'recominghide!"
The other Newsboys scattered for cover, but Lois, having not had ninety years to grow accustomed to Gabby's motor-mouth, hadn't caught a single individual word.
"People on the stairs, hide!" Tommy repeated for her benefit and immediately started to wedge himself under the desk.
There goes my hiding spot. Lois thought, rolling her eyes. She unplugged the laptop's power cord, snapped the lid closed, and snatched it up off the desk. She went straight for the cupboard under the nearby sink, finding it mercifully empty, if a bit smaller than she would have liked. She folded her legs up to fit and closed the cupboard door as much as she could, shutting herself in the dark.
It is a good thing I am neither claustrophobic or afraid of the dark, or this would be a living nightmare. Lois thought, holding the laptop to her chest. With any luck, the new arrivals wouldn't think anything of it being absent.
Muffled, she heard the door slide open, accompanied by a surprised exclamation that didn't sound like English at all. As the newcomers (two of them, judging from the number of footsteps) made their way into the lab, the not-English language became more recognizable as Italian.
Which she didn't speak.
Dammit, why is Clark in Hamstead when I need him? Lois thought, a tad frustratedlypiece of workears to believe me.
Not that Clark would come even if she had the phone and the balls to call him-- Well, he might come. Clark was the kind of nice guy who rescued people in peril, tried to be a bit of a stupid hero.
It was just that Lois didn't have the phone or the balls to call him.
There was the sound of a key in a lock and then the rattle of glassware. There was a sound of something thudding on the countertop and a click like suitcase latches. Lois got the impression that the men were loading vials into the case for transport.
It wasn't exactly a tense, heart-thumping moment during which Lois feared she would be found. The men took all of two minutes to load all the vials in, admonishing each other every now and again when glass rattled too sharply. If anything, they sounded more nervous than she felt. As far as she could tell, they didn't stop to look at anything else. They acted like they had orders to get in, get whatever they were after, and then get out. And they did. The suitcase latches snapped shut and they left.
Silence and stillness hung around the lab for another minute before someone let out a low whistle that must have been the all-clear signal, for the shuffling started almost immediately after. Lois open the cupboard door and unfolded her legs with a groan of relief; she had been in there just long enough to feel cramped. Tommy extracted himself from underneath the desk and the rest of the Newsboys started to filter into the reporter's line of sight.
"I hope one of you understands any Italian." Lois commented.
"I can!" Suzi thrust her hand in the air briefly. "But the dialect was weird. Probably an obscure, older, localized one that like only fifty people use, but I understood a little bit of it."
"What did they say?"
"Hmm... I caught something about a bomb? Maybe two bombs? They took the vials from that cabinet."
She pointed across the lab to the exact same glass-fronted cabinet that had held the vials of semi-cloudy liquid. All of them were gone now. And little sliver of suspicion slithered into Lois's brain, always so quick to put two and two together.
"Dirty bomb." she whispered. "Shit! Someone find a phone!"
"Here!" Bobbi thrust an old flip-phone at her. It was a dinosaur compared to what was on the market today, but it would do.
Lois shoved up the laptop lid, tapped the mouse-pad until it came out of standby, and immediately went into file hunting. Fortunately enough, Dr. Essex had not been the sort to label his files arbitrarily and he had them set to automatically organize by last file accessed. 'H. Caloraeger' was at the top of the list.
"Miss Lane?" Tommy prompted.
"Dirty bomb." Lois repeated, opening the phone to make her call. "Whatever they took, it's meant to be dispersed through the air. They disguise it as a bomb attack, cause panic and chaos, then we get a bunch of sick people on top it and everything's going to fray at the seams. Oh god, it's all coming together."
Everything that her dad and Sofia had tried to tap her for just a few weeks earlier. General Lane had talked about striking calamities and the ensuing disaster when "incompetant hands" failed to deal with the situation satisfactorily. It was an extreme measure to go to just to get Mayor Kovac out of office two years ahead of the next election, but when General Lane wanted to prove a point, he went big.
They were going to tear Metropolis down to bits and then rebuild it the way they needed it to be. And then they were going to ensure that Sofia Falcone Gigante gave it the full Gotham treatment. The city would be rebuilt to accommodate the chaos and corruption and they had wanted Lois on the inside to tell everyone that it was really all okay, this was for the best.
Fuck, who's got something in this? Is Ms. Merlo involved too? She talked a lot about uniting the city under a single banner and fuck me sideways if this isn't a way to do it.
Tommy looked terrified and then dragged the Newsboys off to the side for a private discussion.
The other end of the line picked up.
"S.T.A.R. Labs front desk, how may I direct your call?" asked the bored-sounding receptionist.
"To Anthony Sullivan, robotics. Tell him it's Lois Lane."
"One moment."
Lois busied herself in that moment to look over the file on and everything she saw scared her a little more. Then--
"Miss Lane?" Dr. Sullivan's voice sounded in her ear, tentative and unsure.
"Yeah it's me."
"Blessed Rao, you're alive! There's rumors going around that you might be dead! Half the city saw the chopper crash!"
"That doesn't surprise me. Listen, ask me questions later, I've got important things to ask you. The last thing Dr. Essex was working on before he got fired, the one involving the dead hobos. Do you know any details on that?" Lois asked.
"Ah..." Caught off-guard by the change of subject, Dr. Sullivan needed a moment to change tracts. "Probably not as much as you'd like. Frankly, I wasn't keen on asking. Why?"
"Because it looks like he was developing a very contagious virus." Lois answered, grimacing at the information in the file. "Looks like a nasty piece of work. Stage one is fever and a rash. Stage two is blue rings appearing on the skin. Stage three is a lot more pox-like--"
"Vystrata! Voed sharjora dr'quat!" Dr. Sullivan exploded, so loud and viciously that she had to take the phone away from her ear. "Zuen eignta ged! Zuen vystratayiq eignta ged!- Excuse me, I am so sorry. Pardon my language, Miss Lane. I really shouldn't be swearing like that."
Lois blinked. "That was swearing?"
"Indeed." Dr. Sullivan sounded abominably cheerful for having been shouting bloody murder just a few seconds ago. "But I know exactly what you're talking about now. Hapalochlaena Caloraeger, or Blue Ring Fever."
"Never heard of that."
"You wouldn't have. Apparently it's only found in Kryptonian systems--"
"What." Lois interrupted flatly.
"He told me he was an alien. Took me two years to believe him." Dr. Sullivan half-explained, shrugging his way through the lie. "From what I understand, Blue Ring Fever is highly contagious and easily transmitted. If it infects even one person, then the population of America will be decimated in a matter of weeks. Following a two week incubation period, I assume. He's obviously tweaked it for the human immune system, so he could have shortened the incubation period too..."
"Okay," Lois swallowed down her questions because this wasn't the time. "Then I should tell you that two of Sofia Gigante's men were just in here-- Dr. Essex's private lab, I mean. They just walked off with the entire supply of the stuff."
"Shit."
"They're going to disperse it in a dirty bomb. Best guess."
"Raise hell with the police."
"Now you're talking my language."
"And see if there's anything about a vaccine. If even one person gets infected-"
"The human race is doomed, caught that the first time."
"Go."
And with that, he hung up.
-0-