Since the holidays are coming upon us, I'm going on hiatus again until January 6th. I know I'm ending the year in the middle of endgame, but it's the holidays. Also, I really need to buckle down and finish Iris's arc in Story 4. I've been slacking bad on making signficant progress.
So have a good holiday season and I'll see you all in the new year.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Final Countdown
Lois didn't jump into action immediately. As much as she would have expected herself to, the truth was that she needed a minute to absorb what was going to go down at the heart of Metropolis if someone didn't do something fast.
Virus-infused dirty bombs and secret villain plots to turn Metropolis into a twin of Gotham.
I hope this isn't what my life is going to turn in to. I hope it goes back to normal after this. Lois thought optimistically, but then her usual pessimism decided to intrude. Nah, forget it. It's probably going to be permanently twisted. I mean, if Superman sticks around, things are going to get weird and this might not even be the worst of it. Get used to it, Lane.
And do the thing!
Motivated by her own brand of cheerleading, Lois snapped the laptop shut and stood up. Both happened so loudly that the Newsboys looked back at her in slight alarm.
"All right kids, the end of human civilization is nigh." she announced.
"That doesn't sound good." Bobbi whispered.
"You're damn right it's not." Lois nodded. "The Gigante crime family has gotten their hands on a modified alien super-virus that they're going to unleash on the city via dirty bomb and I have no idea how long we have before someone actually does it."
"Shit." Scrapper said quietly, to the fervent agreement of his comrades.
"Exactly. And right now, we're the only people on this side of the line who know anything about it." Lois told them. She looked at the seven kids seriously. "You lot got me this far and quite honestly, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. For now. Provided you're willing to give me the full story later."
"The price of working with Lois Lane, we're aware." Tommy nodded. Bibbo had warned them months ago that Lois would be able to smell the bigger story and she would try and extract it from them at a later date. "What should our next course of action be?"
"Raise hell with the police until they listen." Lois answered. "Apparently this virus, Blue Ring Fever, is incredibly contagious and could demolish the United States by the end of the year."
"Do the files have any information on a vaccine?" Big Words asked, impulsively reaching for his glasses to polish them, but he stopped the motion mid-way.
"Didn't look, but common sense tells me notes exist for one, if there's not already an existing batch." Lois shrugged. If her father, Sofia, and a few select others were going to establish some New Metropolis Order, then they would need to be able to survive the plague first. Then dish the vaccine out to all those who hadn't been killed in the initial wave.
Play the hero, that was what they would do in order to gain control of the city.
"We may not get any warning. At best, they're probably going to frame it like a terrorist attack." she added. "So that would mean multiple bombs at strategic locations around the city..."
"The federal reserve." Suzi whispered thoughtfully. "Maybe the mint?"
"The copper vaults, for sure." Bobbi agreed. "Metropolis still has the largest supply of unrefined copper in the nation. They'd cripple the market."
"That would cause the stock market to go haywire." Big Words added. "Any government buildings could be considered fair game."
"Pedestrian areas too. They'd need civilian casualties to make it really look like a terrorist attack." Scrapper said.
"Miss Lane, I think you should go to the precinct." Tommy said, gesturing to the laptop. "James'll listen to you. He likes your honesty. He thinks you're the only reporter in this city with good sense."
"He's the only one thinking that." Lois commented, but still nodded approvingly. "What about you lot?"
"We've got our own network of contacts." he said. He tugged the brim of his newsboy cap and winked. "I'll look forward to adding you to the list, Miss Lane."
"Looking forward to hearing that long story of yours." Lois said sincerely. Whoever these kids, they weren't entirely normal. But that seemed to be the theme of the last few weeks. All normal until you had a second look.
They would have parted ways there, but they had to leave the same way they'd come in. Nonetheless, they had their immediate plans and they made their way back down to the stairs to the ground floor where they saw the first problem. Both of Gigante's men sprawled across the dirty concrete, bloody and unmoving. The case of the virus was absent.
"Oh no..." Lois murmured.
She sprinted down the last dozen steps, skipping the bottom two, and dashed across the floor with the Newsboys more or less on her heels. As she got closer and saw the full spread of the blood, it became apparent that one of the men was dead. The other was still breathing and struggling to stay conscious.
"A third party?" Tommy suggested, as Lois kneeled down to check the living one.
"Scares the hell out of me just to hear it, but yeah, probably." the reporter nodded. She pinched up an eyelid to peer at the blown pupil. The other one was a pinprick. "Okay, he's got a serious concussion and he needs to stay alive to confess what the hell happened." She waved the phone for someone to take it. "One of you needs to call 9-1-1 and stay with him."
"I'll do it." Flip offered, taking the phone. "They'd 'spect me to be skippin' school anyways."
"And the rest of us need to do what we said we'd do." Tommy made shooing motions to get them moving.
Bobbi raised her hand. "Does that mean warning the Dingbats--"
"Yes Bobbi, it means warning the Dingbats."
"Dammit."
"We'd better get moving. A third party might give us even less time." Lois said, getting back to her feet and dusting off her slacks. "Good luck, kids."
"You too, Miss Lane." was the gist of the reply as they properly parted ways. The Newsboys headed one way and Lois the other with a bit of prompting. She didn't know the Slums as well as she knew other parts of the city and it was a moment like this where she missed the map app on her phone.
Tweaked alien virus, Sophia Gigante wanted it, a third party stole it, and I need to tell Officer Harper all about it because I think he's the only one who's going to believe me off-hand.
Further on that note, there's rumors going around already that I might be dead, my dad is plotting to help destroy half the city or more, Superman is god knows where, and I just met a group of weird meta-kids. Wow, this has just been a great Monday!
God I hate Mondays...
All that going through her mind at once, Lois sprinted up the road as fast and as safely as her shoes let her, keeping a sharp eye out for any patches of ice and the inevitable pot-hole. Fortunately, the Slums was just not a big neighborhood and she made it to the police precinct before the cold air really started to rasp in her throat. She ran up the steps and let herself through the door.
Funding from taxes meant that the building was still in one piece, but the neglect showed in the crumbling plaster molding. There was an orange traffic cone sitting over a patch of floor that had been water-damaged well over two years ago. The desk bore a number of knife scars and patched bullet holes and there were enough stains on it to look like a Jackson Pollock painting. There was a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, playing the lunch-time news. It was the newest thing in the station, even despite the crack in the bottom right corner.
The sergeant at the front desk was half-asleep when she entered, but startled awake when the bells above the door jangled raucously.
"Wakey, wakey! It's the end times!" Lois shouted.
"M-Ms. Lane?" the sergeant peered at her uncertainly, probably thinking he was still dreaming.
"I know Officer Harper's on shift today. I need to talk to him." Lois said, marching up to the desk. "When I say this is important, I mean it's time-sensitive and making me sit in a chair is just going to end in disaster. And when I say 'time-sensitive', what I mean is that I don't actually know how much time we actually have, so buzz him right now or we are all going to die if the circumstances get out of our control. That is not a threat. This is information I'm trying to pass along so don't sit there staring at me."
"R-Right." The sergeant reached for the phone, obviously deciding she was not a figment of his imagination. "You'll have to-- to sign in..."
Lois was already doing that. She had set the laptop down and scribbling her name in the big book of visitors because Metropolis P.D. required a daily log of the people who had visited the station.
The sergeant had barely put the phone to his ear when the door to the bullpen opened and a slightly harried-looking Officer Harper rushed through it. He looked around the lobby for a second as though he didn't know what he expected to see, until his eyes landed on Lois.
"Ah, I got a call." he said, holding up his cell phone. He glanced at the desk sergeant and resumed his professional demeanor. "I can take this from here, Sergeant Lockett. I was informed she was coming."
He stood aside to gesture Lois through the door. The reporter grabbed the laptop off the desk and waggled the pen.
"I need to borrow this. I lost all my pens." she said.
The sergeant didn't put up a fuss, too busy sinking back into his previous lethargy to care.
"How are you not dead?" Harper asked as he led her through the bullpen.
"Apparently, they had orders to break my legs and let me die of dehydration, instead of significant full-body trauma." Lois explained. "Is it always like this around here?"
The bullpen was alarmingly sedate. There was no one there to report thefts or murders or to give statements and several of the officers were very clearly napping or watching porn. Most of the desks were empty, their occupants likely having gone on lunch break.
"Only on the quiet days." Harper grumbled, bothered by the lack of vigilance. He wished he'd been assigned to a more vivacious precinct. "What did the kids find?"
"Dr. Essex's secret lab, as you probably suspected." Lois said, glad that they weren't bothering with pretense. She presented the laptop at him. "And an alien super-virus with the capacity to wipe out the human race, as you likely did not suspect."
Harper made a grim face. "Walter said it was stolen from the Italians just after they took it from the lab."
"Who?"
"Flip. The black kid with the webbed hands? He called me."
"Did he call that ambulance? Yeah, a third party came after the virus." Lois nodded. "Which is problem number one. I could tell you exactly who wanted the virus originally and why they were planning to use it because they told me, but I haven't got a clue who the third party is."
"Well, who would benefit from practically destroying Metropolis?"
"Arguably, no one."
There were televisions located around the bullpen and all of them suddenly issued a loud blast of static. Every active computer did the same thing, the porn watchers reeling, especially those with headphones. Every screen went blank gray and displayed the words 'signal lost'.
"Ah shit." Harper whispered. "Hijacked."
"Time's up." Lois said quietly.
The screens came back to life, but they didn't return to their original programming. The screens showed six people instead. They were back-lit by a bright light that effectively rendered them silhouettes. Half for theatrical effect, and half for concealing their identities. They were varied in size; at least two of them appeared to be women and one of the others was so broad in the shoulder region that Lois was willing to swear in front of a court that it was Mr. Herniated-Shoulders standing on the far left.
"Greetings, Metropolis." said a mechanical voice, presumably from the person standing in the middle. "I hope that this has been a good day for every one of you because it will be the last good day you ever have."
He (as Lois presumed) sounded incredibly smug. The disguised voice couldn't hide that emotion.
"I won't waste time introducing ourselves; our names aren't very important. What is important," the leader, no doubt, went on. "Is the warning you never heeded. We tried to tell you the truth, but you just buried your head in the sand and swatted us down like house-flies. Now you're going to reap the reward of your folly."
Harper grabbed the laptop from Lois's hands and set it down on his desk so he could open it, to see exactly what the files held.
"In another few minutes, the mayor's office should receive a contact number from us. Metropolis, once this broadcast ends, you will have one hour to surrender the Superman to our custody."the leader continued. There was the faintest rustle of paper. "If the city has not done so before the end of the countdown, I can't even estimate the number of people who will suffer the consequences. But it's going to be very high and Metropolis will merely be the epicenter."
"Oh, those assholes!" Lois shouted, a combination of rage and fear rushing through her because they were...
Either this was part of Sofia's plan and her two delivery boys had been aware that they would not make it out of the building... Or it wasn't part of her plan and this lot was just piggy-backing on the plan which meant they must have been originally involved and were out there double-crossing a Falcone -- their balls must have been titanium-plated and bigger than Pluto, if that was the case.
Hands down, the mayor would agree to give them Superman. Mayor Kovacs had to think of the city's safety, even if that mean turning over the first super-hero in two decades. It wouldn't be the easy thing to do -- as it seemed likely that Superman was probably the best chance at finding all the bombs before they detonated -- but it was the only sure way to ensure Metropolis's safety.
Lois ran her fingers through her hair, her thoughts moving so fast they were a useless blur. This was definitely some terrorist shit, but what on earth did they want Superman for?
Didn't they already have him?
Because she could have sworn...
"Use this time wisely, Metropolis." the leader warned smugly.
The TV screens went gray again.
"Countdown on." Lois whispered into the ensuing silence.
Holy shit... What was I drinking last night?...
It was the first thought to cross Clark's mind as awareness staggered back in like it had been out partying all night. He felt like proper shit; his shoulder, thigh, and both wrists and ankles throbbing dully in time with his heartbeat. His head ached in a slow way and his mouth was cotton-dry.
Y'know... I've never actually tried to get drunk before...
Clark tried to open his eyes, but the first glimpse of the bright lights made his head throb and he quickly squeezed his eyes shut. He felt a little nauseous and stuffy-headed and the world seemed to be a swimming a little all on its own.
He hadn't felt anything like this since... Oh, perhaps in two decades. He must have been three years old the one and only time he could recall getting sick; coming down with a head-cold that had left him stuffy and miserable for a few days. He remembered it well enough, because it was the only time he remembered ever feeling like that.
What he was feeling now was a lot like that, except it was a bit more pronounced.
And his wrists and ankles burned.
It was an itchy, burning sensation, like a poison ivy rash to go on top of a sunburn. It was tolerable, but unpleasant and he found that he just couldn't ignore it. He started to reach over to scratch at it--
And the arm he tried to lift didn't go anywhere at all.
Alarmed, Clark's eyes snapped open and he squinted through the uncomfortable glare until he saw what was keeping his arms down. He was laid out flat on a table, cuffed at the wrist and ankle. The cuffs didn't look like bog-standard material. Silvery though they were, they also bore a faint toxic-green hue.
Clark jerked on his arm again, expecting the cuff to break because everything else did, but it held surprisingly firm and steady. He tried his legs, trying to yank his ankles out of the cuffs, but they didn't even creak, let alone the table under him. Not even when he tried to push off and fly, to break the table by smashing down on it with all his strength, because there didn't seem to be any strength there for him to use. His muscles quivered uselessly and the spinal helix seemed to shiver. He barely lifted his shoulders off the slab, much less anything.
I'm stuck.
No, I'm trapped.
Panic skittered along under his ribs and Clark found himself trying not to freak out. He had never been trapped before. Not like this, not ever. Nothing had truly held him down and certainly not this easily.
There wasn't really anything on Earth that could bring him down. Even electricity only had a limited effect on him...
Electricity...
The pricks in the back of his thigh and shoulder.
The burning sensation pouring in his skin.
No...
And her eyes, dark blue and horrified as he'd thrown her.
No! Lois!
He had thrown her aside so she wouldn't be electrocuted along with him, but there hadn't been anything there to catch her. He had dropped her and she had fallen to her death. There was nothing else that could have happened.
Despite that, Clark renewed his struggles to escape the impossible cuffs. He had to be sure! He had to be absolutely sure that he hadn't accidentally sent Lois to her death! He wouldn't be responsible for that!
But the cuffs stubbornly refused to crack and a sudden swell of nausea in his gut stopped his efforts on the spot. Clark's head thumped back onto the slab, his eyes started to burn in a tell-tale manner.
Lois wasn't dead.
She couldn't be. She couldn't die like that! That was no blaze of glory, no final stand for justice! It was an inglorious ending for such a brilliant a woman who had shone so brightly, whose time had been all too brief. She had only just started to shine.
Lois Lane was the very type of woman who'd take her enemies with her on the way down
What did I say to her? Didn't I ask her what would happen if I wasn't there to catch her? Clark thought despairingly. I didn't even get the chance to try and apologize. Whatever we could have been, we never got the chance...
He also didn't get the chance to mourn Lois's fate. With a pneumatic hiss, the door to the cell-like room he was in slid open and in marched two individuals. Clark recognized Sofia Gigante; he wouldn't have been able to mistake her for anyone else. She was smirking in a gentle manner, all the sharp edges relaxed and sated. She moved like she had won.
The second person was a man dressed in the stiff uniform and peaked cap of the U.S. Army. Four stars were pinned to each shoulder, displaying the rank of general. He had graying brown hair and a stress-lined face and his frown was more than just a little familiar. Clark scanned the front of the uniform, passing over the medal pins until he found the general's name-plate: Samuel Lane.
"I don't know. Are you scared of General Sam Lane of the United States Army?" Lois voice taunted in his head.
Well, I can see where she gets her scowl from... Clark thought absently. What does he want?
"Good afternoon." General Lane said in a tone was cordial only because that was how he'd been taught to say it. "Those cuffs are designed to hold you, as I'm sure you've discovered by now. They are also electrified."
He held up a remote with just two buttons on it, one green, one red.
"I'm going to ask you several questions. For every question you refuse to answer or if you lie to me, I will administer a shock. Is that understood or do you require a demonstration?"
Clark grimaced. "No demonstration."
"Good." General Lane nodded. He still kept the remote in sight, a silent threat. "First question. Where is Dr. Essex?"
"Precise location? I don't know." Clark responded.
General Lane tapped the red button and a jolt of electricity tingled up Clark's arms from the cuffs, strong enough to make him yelp.
"I should re-phrase the question. What happened to Nam-Ek?"
Clark grimaced a little harder. The pretenses were down, or at least they had never been there, judging from Gigante's lack of reaction to the name 'Nam-Ek'. Clearly it had been no secret between them that Nam-Ek wasn't from Earth.
"He was opening a portal to another dimension. I pushed him in." Clark replied, deciding to leave the details sparse. If they wanted to know more, they could just ask.
General Lane's eyebrows popped briefly. "Is he coming back?"
"Not if I have any say in it."
The red button was tapped again and held down longer this time. The electricity spiraled all the way up to Clark's shoulders before it stopped, leaving him panting and burning along every nerve in his arms.
"Is he dead?" General Lane inquired.
"I don't know." Clark shook his head. "But he might not survive the reunion with his superior officers."
General Lane frowned and hit the red button again. Clark saw sparks around the cuffs just before the electricity darted all the way up his arms and into his shoulders, making his muscles seize and contract hard, until he felt his bones creak. It was over before he lost the battle with not screaming.
"I'm not lying!" Clark shouted at the man through the left-over pain. "Don't zap me just because you don't like the answer!"
"I don't have the patience for you giving me the run-around." General Lane said, his tone cold. "What is your position in the ranks?"
Clark blinked. "What? What ranks?"
General Lane twisted his hand around so the cuffed alien could see how close his finger was to the red button. "I don't have the patience for the run-around." he repeated. "I know about the invasion force. And I know a diversion when I see one. You sent Nam-Ek back to the army under the guise of 'saving the city'. And while everyone lauds you as a hero, you continue acting as a listening post and feeding your commanders vital information. Are you spy or a sleeper agent?"
Clark would have laughed if he hadn't been in this situation right now, because he had never heard a more off-base conclusion in his life. But he was in this situation and General Lane only knew half the story. He thought it was the full story.
"Who gave you that idea?" Clark wondered.
"I believe you're acquainted with former Agent Trask." General Lane said. "He was a gung-ho idiot with foolish methods, but he wasn't a liar. Now the truth please. When is the invasion due to arrive?"
"There is no invasion." Clark told him.
The red button went down.
"Aaah!"
"The truth." General Lane said again.
"I'm the only one-- Aaaagh! Stopstopstop! It's the truth!"
"No!" General Lane lifted his thumb from the red button. "There have been three of you. Nam-Ek, yourself, and the third who arrived in the spring of '99. Who was that?"
Clark giggled despite the tremors of pain shaking down his spine. They didn't have a clue about Dr. Sullivan; his grandfather was safe. No, instead they only knew about Krypto.
"That was my pet." he said, gasping a little.
"Your pet." General Lane repeated incredulously, his frown morphing into a more impressive scowl.
"My pet." Clark nodded, relieved that the trigger-happy general wasn't zapping him this time.
"What kind of pet?"
"A dog."
General Lane made a growling noise in the back of his throat.
"I'm serious. He's a bit more wolf-like, sort of like a Husky, but he's identical to any other sled-dog on this planet." Clark said. He kept it vague so the general would have no idea what to look for. No extraneous details.
"And for what reason would you send an alien canine to our planet?" General Lane asked.
"I was a year old and he was six months. We weighed about the same." Clark explained. It was almost no explanation at all to the general, but it was the truth. At the time Lara had completed the prototype shuttle, she had known they wouldn't have the time to grow a second larger shuttle for the entire family. And since six-month old Krypto had weighed just about the same as her eleven-month old child, she had placed the dog in the pod for proper readings. She had just expected the shuttle to come from its orbital trip.
She would have calibrated the second pod for double the weight.
"What are you talking about?" General Lane demanded. His frown was familiar and almost heart-breaking for Clark, because he knew he wouldn't see it again on a much nicer face.
"Nam-Ek left out parts of the story, didn't he." he said. "I swear on my life that I'm telling you the truth. That portal Nam-Ek opened leads into the Phantom Zone. It's a prison dimension. A super-max. There's an army in there, led by General Zod."
"What were they imprisoned for?" General Lane barked.
"An uprising. I don't know the details. It happened two years before I was born." Clark said. "Nam-Ek was one of Zod's soldiers. He was going to help Zod build a new empire here on Earth."
"Why?"
"Because Krypton is gone. It collapsed under its own weight and imploded. There was an energy crisis and they harvested so much the of core that it destabilized beyond recovery. There's no home for any of us to return to." Clark said. "My parents sacrificed their lives to send me here. If I'm anything, I'm a refugee." He leaned forward as much as the cuffs and his current position allowed. "I have a job, by the way. My taxes pay for your salary."
He didn't know why he threw that last bit in there, but maybe he was channeling Lois's spirit for the moment.
Fortunately, General Lane looked too thoughtful to have heard the last part. He glanced over at Gigante like he expected her to say something and then made a small dismissive noise before turning back to Clark.
"This army... They'd all have powers like yours?" he asked.
Clark shrugged. "I'd assume so." he said.
General Lane nodded. "In that case, we still need you." he said, putting the remote back in his pocket. "It's a hostile universe out there and your genetic structure will contribute to the defense of Planet Earth."
"What? No-- No, there is no invasion!" Clark said quickly, pulling off the cuffs again to no avail. "There isn't going to be an invasion! The army can't get out of the Phantom Zone!"
"Make yourself comfortable, Superman. General Eiling will be along within the hour." General Lane said casually, walking back to the door.
"General--!"
The door hissed open and General Lane walked through without looking over his shoulder. Sofia did, her smirk gaining sharper edges as she looked at the bound alien with a sort of smug superiority. Then she followed the general out into the corridor and the door hissed shut.
"Fascinating." she commented.
"Yes." General Lane agreed. "I have you to thank for delivering him."
He was tempted to ask how she had done it, because it could not have been easy. But long experience had taught him to keep that question to himself. 'Don't burden yourself with the secrets of scary people' she had said to him once.
"How did you know the cuffs would hold?" he asked instead.
"Secrets, General." Sofia replied, meaning it was not a line of questioning to pursue if he wanted plausible deniability. "Are you still intending to carry through the with the plan?"
General Lane shook his head. "We have a limited supply of the vaccine. To proceed now would mean an unacceptable number of casualties." he said. "No, I'm going to postpone the plan until we have manufactured the full supply."
"Ah, and I presume what you do have is safely locked away." Sofia said.
"Guarded, but no one is going to get at it down here." General Lane stated. As if anyone really knew where to find them. "The virus itself is en route, I hope?"
"I assure you General, it is being prepped for delivery as we speak." Sofia replied, but she didn't look at him when she said that and General Lane felt his normally tight paranoia meter jump a little.
Sofia Gigante believed in direct and constant eye contact.
"Is everything all right?" he asked.
"The police have been watching a little more closely than I'm comfortable with, but it's nothing I can't deal with." Sofia said, this time making eye contact. "If you'll excuse me, I have phone calls to make. I'll inform you when the virus is at your door step."
General Lane nodded his understanding and took a left at the first corner, parting ways with Sofia as she continued straight ahead. The facility was a sterile white environment that had been a blasted fortune to build, but it served its purpose marvelously. Some aspects of the government needed secret, quiet places to conduct their research and experiments, and Project 7734 was one such aspect.
No one needed to know that Project M had survived long enough to be revived.
He produced his security pass and swiped it through the reader by the nearest door, then tapped his pass-code into the keypad. The red light turned green and the door slid open. Beyond it was a room that was half a laboratory and half a monitoring station, to keep an eye on the alien locked down in the secure cell. It was occupied only by six people and four of them were assistants whose number one job was to keep their heads down and their mouths shut unless called upon.
"Doctors, give me good news." he ordered of the two men in charge; Dr. Dabney Donovan and his long-time research partner, Dr. Reginald Augustine.
"Sorry General Lane, I don't think we have much to go on." Dr. Donovan said, shrugging sheepishly. He ran a hand over his wild black hair. "The process of extracting viable material from the Superman could be a lengthy one."
"And he might not be genetically different from humans." Dr. Augustine added, his eyes glued to a microscope. "This saliva sample doesn't look any different from mine. Even the skin scrapings we were able to obtain before the scalpel went dull don't look any different." He looked up from the microscope. "I'm sorry General Lane, but on the surface, Superman appears just as human as you or I. We'll need to go deeper."
"We need blood, tissue, cerebral fluid, spinal fluid, bone marrow. If we can take X-rays, CAT scans, even a sonogram... There must be some biological differences! He's an alien life form!" Dr. Donovan shouted, throwing his arms into the air frantically. "The applications for his genetics would go beyond military! Think about what we could do for illness! Muscular dystrophy could be a thing of the past! Congenital defects gone! He might hold the cure for AIDs! Maybe we could wipe out cancer in our lifetime!"
"If you ignore the wildly contagious virus sitting in his DNA strands that may or may not be active and compatible with humans." Dr. Augustine commented, being a little less frantic and fervent to explore the possibilities. He was excited for them, yes, but baby steps for goodness sake.
"What would you need to extract blood from him?" General Lane, reaching for a syringe that lay on the nearby table-top. It had been rendered useless, the needle bent at a fifty degree angle. Another needle had crumpled all the way up to the capsule.
Dr. Donovan sobered. "Well, as you can see, he's still as durable as ever, but-" He pointed to the monitor at his work-station, where the security feed showed the Superman in the cell. He was still pulling on his cuffs, but half-heartedly. "That green material in the cuffs. Whatever it is, it appears to be sapping his strength. I think we'll need a lot more of it if we expect to even get through his skin, much less all the way down to his bones."
"I'll talk to Ms. Gigante immediately. She wouldn't tell me where she acquired it, but I imagine she can obtain more on short notice." General Lane said. He patted Dr. Donovan heavily on the shoulder. "Do what you can for now and keep me posted about any improvements."
"Yessir, will do."
A lackluster update, and not much to hope for, General Lane knew. The green stuff worked like a charm on the Superman and it would be just the sort of thing Sofia would try and hold over his head in exchange for who knew what.
But he could make her see reason.
He marched down the white sterile corridors to the room where he knew he could find Sofia. She hadn't left the facility yet; there was a process to getting out and he was informed of everyone's arrivals and departures. That security feature assured that Mrs. Gigante couldn't sneak past under his nose. She was a vital component to fixing Metropolis, but that didn't mean General Lane trusted her implicitly.
She was up to something. She was always up to something.
"You, big stern army man, by the book and everything, just shat on your own integrity by aligning yourself with a Falcone."
General Lane frowned tightly at himself. Now was not the time to be allowing his daughter's words to come back to him. He knew what he was doing and this was for the best. It was the only way to stay on top of a changing world.
He arrived at the spare office he had lent to Sofia and entered without knocking - men of his rank didn't need to knock. And if he had knocked, he would have provided Sofia ample time to put away the syringe she was holding to her bare forearm.
Beside her on the desk was a small case holding seven vials of mostly clear liquid, quite clearly labeled 'H. Caloraeger vaccine'. Sofia locked eyes with him, held her chin up, and depressed the plunger, injecting the vaccine into her system.
"You're double-crossing me." General Lane realized.
"I already have." Sofia corrected, gently sliding the needle out of her arm. "The virus is being delivered, but to the bomb sites across the city. Oh no, don't bother looking. I've already changed the locations."
"I postponed the plan for a reason." General Lane growled.
"And I'm advancing it." Sofia pressed a gauze patch over the injection site. "The Falcone family has worked for too long to allow even a man like you to disrupt our plans. Metropolis was always going to be mine, general."
General Lane jumped to the conclusion far faster than he oughta have, but he knew what Sofia had done to get a hold of the Superman. She had baited a trap and there was only one person in this city whom it seemed Superman would coming running to rescue.
He pulled his gun and clicked the safety off.
"What have you done with my daughter?" he demanded.
"What gives you the idea that I've done anything to her?" Sofia asked, but her tone was far from innocent or ignorant. "Sometimes the bait gets eaten, but you knew better than I did that Lois was never going to cooperate. Better to remove her from the equation now before she becomes a serious problem." The mafia queen shrugged. "It was probably painless."
His hand shook a little and the gun rattled. Lois was dead. Lois was dead because of this bitch in front of him. Lois was dead because of the alien down the hall. His oldest daughter, headstrong and stubborn and the apple of her mother's eye, was dead because of this entire goddamn plan.
It was an injustice and it wouldn't stand.
Right between the eyes. Put the bullet there and this bitch isn't getting back up. He told himself.
Before he could shoot, the intercom squealed with feedback and then a man's voice started speaking. It belonged to no one in the facility; it had a hollow quality to it like it was coming from the outside. As though every radio and satellite signal in the city had been hijacked to ensure the message reached every corner.
But it was the way Sofia's face drained of color that told General Lane the most about the broadcast.
"Would that be your 'friend', Mrs. Gigante? Perhaps the individual from whom you acquired the green material?" the general asked a bit tauntingly, once it was over and the countdown had begun. "He seems quite daring, to wrench the plan away from you like that. How does it feel to be double-crossed just when you thought you had the upper hand?"
Sofia drew her gaze away from the intercom speaker and looked at him with a hard, steady glare, but with a smug toothy grin that showed all of her teeth. Things were still going her way even when they weren't.
"What have I got to worry about? I'm already immunized." she pointed out. "And the Superman is in your custody, not mine. The fate of Metropolis is now your sole responsibility."
Sofia rolled down her coat sleeve and couldn't resist throwing one last zinger at the man.
"Do your daughter proud."
-0-