Chapter 4

The ground cracked beneath Clark's feet as the sheer force and speed of his landing rippled out from the floor, shaking the already damaged walls & windows.

He made no attempt to hide his arrival at the Luthorcorp factory, nor the rage that was boiling inside of him. He'd scanned the building with his x-ray vision before he landed, but it was Lex's building... it was of course lead lined. As soon as the information about his vision's limitations had leaked to the press, Lex had ensured all his buildings were adapted to his advantage.

Marcus sat behind a workman's bench, tinkering with wires on some kind of gauntlet. He barely flinched at the sound of Clark's arrival, looking way too calm and confident. He knew he had the upper hand in this scenario, despite the superhero's show of strength.

'Where are my sons,' Clark shouted at the man, scanning the inside of the building at the same time. He couldn't see them anywhere. There were multiple crates and hidden rooms, but they were all obscured by lead.

Marcus simply looked at him defiantly, daring him to make a move.

His anger and his desire to protect his sons made him ignore the red flags going off in his mind & he super sped towards the man who had kidnapped his children, grabbing him roughly by the throat.

His grip loosened almost immediately as multiple solar flares suddenly kicked in all around him, assaulting him with bright red light.

Clark cried out in pain and lifted his arms protectively over his face as a shock wave went through his nervous system. Usually, the sensation of red solar lights just made Clark feel weak, but so many of them turning on at once hit him like a wave. He fell to the floor, just about holding himself steady in a crouched position as he panted for breath.

'I had a feeling you might try that,' Marcus explained, straightening up and rubbing his throat, 'so I set these solar flares for motion detection.'

Clark looked around for a way out of their range, but they seemed to cover every angle and the energy was already draining from his body.

'Where are they,' he asked again, gritting his teeth against the assault on his body.

'They're safe,' Marcus reassured him. 'They were only a means to get you here.'

'You really are a Luthor aren't you?' Clark accused angrily, his hatred of the Luthor name evident in his tone. 'You'd hurt my children just to get me to meet you?'

Marcus' jaw clenched at Clark's confrontation of his dubious ethics.

'There's too much at stake not to take whatever means necessary,' he said with conviction. 'And Luthor… he was a friend. A hero. The only man smart enough to see you for what you really were, long before my world fell,' he retorted, with some sadness in his voice. 'And you killed him for it.'

'Your world?' Clark asked, relieved to hear his connection with Luthor wasn't what they'd feared.

'It's simple. Where I come from, the whole world was destroyed because of you. Here... I'm going to stop it,' Marcus explained, never breaking eye contact with his foe.

'And how exactly are you going to do that?' Clark questioned, though he could hazard a guess.

'By eliminating the threat,' Marcus confirmed, not needing to name him for it to be clear who he meant.

Clark shook his head in disbelief & desperation.

'Why are you so convinced that I'm a threat?' he demanded to know.

'Because I've lived it,' Marcus said, raising his voice as he crouched down so that he was inches from Clark's face. 'On my world, I watched helplessly while you decimated Metropolis. It took your people 7 mins to destroy the entire city,' he glared at Clark as he spoke. '7. Minutes,' he repeated, emphasising his words like he wanted to make sure they sunk in. 'You burned them alive. Women. Children. It was all the same to you, we were nothing more than ants to exterminate.'

Clark's eyes filled with concern for his old home .The idea that Metropolis would be destroyed like that, and with him powerless to stop it, was a frequent nightmare of his.

He knew he would never do anything like that, but he could tell from the man's stable and even heart beat that he wasn't lying. He truly believed what he was saying, and maybe, at least on his earth, it was true.

'I would never do that,' Clark tried to reason with him. 'Whatever world you've come from, whoever you saw... it wasn't me!'

Marcus looked at the man with a hint of pity. 'Maybe not yet... but it will be,' Marcus stated as though it were fact.

'How can you be so sure of that?' Clark asked, confused why the man would be so closed to the possibility things were different here.

'Because it's already happening,' Marcus shouted, 'Everything that lead up to the attack on my world is happening here too. Edge. The X-Kryptonite. Our Superman was a hero too, just like you… but he turned on us in an instant.'

'That's never going to happen here,' Clark said with as much strength as he could muster despite the solar flares continued weakening effect. 'You have no idea how much I care about the people of earth. I grew up here. I have a family. I'd never turn my back on them.'

He saw a flicker of doubt cross the man's face at the sincerity of his words, and he continued on.

'If there's really a threat coming, we should be working together,' he implored him. 'Let my sons go and I can help you.'

Marcus seemed to steel himself against whatever doubt had entered in.

'I can't take that chance,' he said with finality, 'I made a promise to kill you once. I wasn't able to keep that promise on my Earth. But I will here,' Marcus told him threateningly, pulling on the gauntlet he'd been tinkering with.

Marcus reached out his gloved hand and a large steel hammer flew into it from behind the workbench. Nestled in the side of the hammer's head was a shining green meteor.

'You see, Kal-El, you're not the Man of Steel,' he said menacingly, 'I am.'

Lois anxiously checked her phone again as she paced back and forth in the DOD's command centre.

She was becoming seriously worried. No one was answering her calls – not Clark, not the boys… not even Marcus, who'd been so desperate to set up a meet only an hour or so before.

Her mind spun like a washing machine with all the possible scenarios of what could have happened. Had Marcus figured out their plan somehow? Had he figured out who Clark really was? Or was this something to do with Edge?

She tried to push the worst-case scenarios out of her head. After all, she reassured herself, it was entirely possible the boys were just stuck into a video game and their phones were on silent, that her husband's attention had been diverted to a disaster somewhere. And maybe Marcus had simply realised they were on to him and was just lying low for a while.

She tried to focus on the answers she had come here for, hoping they might give her some clue as to what the next move might be.

'Okay, Rossetti, what did you find?' Lois asked eagerly, standing over him at his computer station.

'You say this guy's been creeping around Smallville?' he asked, a confused look on his face Lois simply nodded in response.

'The thing is, the prints you had us pull are from a guy who died six years ago,' he revealed, 'And his name's not Luthor, it's John Henry Irons.'

Lois didn't know whether to feel relieved or not. So, it wasn't what they'd most feared - he wasn't a Luthor, and he was clearly from another earth. But then... who was he?

'How did he die?' she asked, curious about the fate of the man's doppelganger.

Rosetti frowned at her lack of reaction to the news the man she was investigating was dead.

'Uh… it looks like he was one of Lex Luthor's victims. He got caught in the arson attack at LexLabs,' he answered a little flustered.

Lois remembered it well.

After they had exposed Lex for the criminal he was, he had managed to escape arrest and go underground with the help of Intergang. When he found out that the DOD were heading in to take possession of his tech at LexLabs, they'd salvaged what they could at gun point and then burned the place down.

If he couldn't have the credit, no one could.

Lois noticed Rosetti turn his attention to the door as General Sam Lane stepped into the command room, concern written all over his face.

'Lois, honey, I got your message. What's going on?' he asked.

Her message had been pretty cryptic but she knew took the name Luthor just as seriously as her and Clark did. Lois regarded him with a grim expression.

'This 'Stranger' you've been looking for,' she explained, 'there's a lot more to him than we thought.'

She looked around at Rosetti & the other soldiers in the room.

'Can we go somewhere and talk privately?' she requested, emphasising the last word with a raised eyebrow.

General Lane nodded understanding the implication of her words. He led her towards a sound proofed interrogation room down one of the many hallways in the DOD's maze like building.

Lois hit the trigger on the ELT on and off nervously in her pocket as she followed him.

'Clark where are you?' she whispered.

Jonathan cradled his already injured arm protectively as he tried the blinds at the front of the RV with his good hand. He knew it was likely pointless, but he'd already meticulously checked every inch of their prison on wheels for any possible way out, and this was the last bit left.

His brother still lay unconscious on the floor of the motor home. After their kidnapper had finished making his demands, Jordan had tried to take him down on his own. He'd watched his brother throw his full body weight into their attacker, clearly hoping his strength might take the man by surprise. But as soon as he got near him, Jordan had started turning a deathly pale, slowing right down and wobbling on his feet.

The man had countered his attack easily, and he'd fallen, hitting his head against the side of the RV.

He'd shoved them both inside after that, setting the security system to lockdown. No sound could get in or out.

'Jordan,' Jonathan shook his brother by the shoulders, desperately trying to wake him up.

There was still not even a flicker of consciousness in response.

'Dammit, Jordan!' he cursed.

The man must have had kryptonite. Could he be the one Jordan had heard their parents talking about earlier?

Typical Superboy, he'd gone rushing in with a really stupid idea even though he knew he might have weapons that would make his dad vulnerable, let alone him.

Jonathon decided to look around the RV and see if there was anything inside that could help him find a way out. It was better than doing nothing anyway. He started opening cabinets and drawers randomly. Pretty quickly, he came across a compartment full of guns.

'Woah,' he breathed, almost impressed for a second by the arsenal before him.

Then he realised there was a green glow coming from some of the weapons. He slammed the door shut as quickly as he could, looking back at his brother for any further signs of harm, but Jordan hadn't flinched. He was out cold.

Jonathan continued with his search. He came upon a compartment with a couple of computer monitors inside and they flickered on when he moved the mouse sitting next to them. The screens immediately brought up images & files about their kidnapper who apparently was called 'John Henry Irons'.

It seemed from the photos and documents that he was a decorated war hero. Jonathan clicked through the images, excited to have found information that could be useful.

Suddenly his mouth dropped open and he let go of the mouse. There were pictures of this man and what looked like his mom… getting married. Kissing. Then even more surprising were the images of the two of them with a little girl.

One photo, seemingly of the girl's birthday party, showed the name 'Natalie' on a bright pink cake with candles. They looked really happy.

He shook his head in disbelief. What was he looking at? Did his mom have a twin somewhere?

Then he saw a video file in the top corner of the desktop and went back to the mouse to click play. The footage showed his mom on top of a rooftop, his old home of Metropolis burning in the background. Explosions continued around her as she spoke into the camera, telling the world that they needed to find Kryptonite and protect themselves from the kryptonians.

He watched on in horror as what looked like his dad in a black Superman suit floated up behind her. His eyes glowed red as she said her goodbyes to the camera.

Jonathan turned away instinctively when he realised he was about to watch his mom be burned alive by his dad's heat vision. Her blood-curdling scream filled him with terror and his heart pounded in his chest He stepped away from the computer screens and stumbled back to his brother's side.

'Jordan! Jordan, please wake up,' he pleaded, shaking him by the shoulders desperately.

What he'd seen clearly wasn't his dad, he knew that, but if that man out there thought their dad had killed his wife… and maybe even his child?

Jonathan knew now - this man wasn't going to show Superman any mercy.