Metropolis - Blood (part 1)
Chapter One: The Day After
Bobbie Granger wasn’t happy. True, he hadn’t had to go to school yesterday or today, but he’d also had to spend hours in the car with Henry and Mandy listening to boring old people music on the radio and he’d missed all his favorite cartoons and they’d had to spend last night in a hotel somewhere in the middle of nowhere because something had been going on in the city. Plus, he hadn’t been able to take all of his toys with him; Henry and Mandy had been in a hurry to leave the house and when he forgot his Warrior Angel action figure, they’d flatly refused to go back for it.
They were finally home now, Henry and Mandy’s minivan had just pulled onto their street, but now the sun was setting so it would be time for bed soon and tomorrow it would be back to school. What was the point of not having to go to school if you couldn’t have any fun?
“Make sure you bring a bag in with you,” Henry told him as he grabbed two of the suitcases from the back and headed for the front door.
Bobbie deliberately took a long time getting his seatbelt undone and tarried just a bit longer before opening the side door of the van, hoping that maybe everything would be removed before he got around to the back himself. No such luck though, his travel bag was still sitting there waiting for him along with a bin filled with action figures and cars and video games and all the other toys that a typical boy owned.
Fixing his priorities, Bobbie grabbed the toy-filled bin from the back and started to lug it back into the house. It was heavy, but at least Henry and Mandy had left the front door open for him.
Bobbie staggered through the front door to find himself face to face with a stranger; a man he’d never met before. Glancing over he saw Henry and Mandy standing behind the man. They didn’t look nervous so he guessed the man must be okay.
“You must be Bobbie Granger,” the man said as he bent over to bring his eyes level with Bobbie’s own. “I’ve been hoping to meet you for a while Bobbie,” he added as he rubbed his hands together. “What fun we’re going to have.”
Bobbie just eyed the man warily. He was almost ten and he’d learned to never trust any adult who said they were going to be having fun because most adults’ ideas of fun usually wound up being completely lame at best.
“Who are you, Mister?” Bobbie asked the man, again looking to Henry and Mandy who were still just standing there with pleasant expressions on their faces.
“I’m from Family Services,” the man said. “But more important than who I am is who YOU are. You’re Bobbie Granger, removed from your mother’s care, currently in foster care with the Henry and Mandy Walter of 11347 Brighten Drive, and from the look of things a very unhappy boy am I right?”
Bobbie nodded.
“Yes, I thought so,” the man replied. “I certainly thought so,” he said again, almost as if to himself. Then his focus fell back on Bobbie. “Well Bobbie, today is your lucky day. I’m here to take you to someplace where you’ll never have to be unhappy again. How does that sound?”
For a third time Bobbie looked to Henry and Mandy and still they stood there with an unblinking expression on their faces.
“Hmm? Oh, yes!” the man exclaimed. “We should ask your foster parents what they think. Do you think this is a good idea Mr. and Mrs. Walter?”
Henry and Mandy’s heads bobbed up and down in affirmation.
“There! See! They think it’s a wonderful idea,” the man said. “Now why don’t we go out to my car and we’ll be on our way?”
“But what about my stuff?” Bobbie asked.
“Not to worry,” the man said. “I have all your toys here.” He picked up one of two duffle bags by his feet. It was so full that the surface was a mass of bumps from the jutting arms, heads, wings and other accessories of the toys crammed inside.
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much though,” he continued. “Where we’re going you’ll have toys beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Really?!?” Bobbie asked excitedly.
“I’ll prove it,” the man said as he pulled what looked like a TV remote from his pants pocket. He hit a button on its surface and a car came rolling around the corner and pulled into the driveway. As it came to a stop Bobbie saw to his amazement that there was no driver inside.
“Cool!!!” Bobbie exclaimed.
“Now, why don’t you go wait in the car while I finish up business with your foster parents,” the man said cheerfully.
“Sure,” Bobbie replied, his voice brimming over with enthusiasm. He raced for the mysterious and wonderful car and didn’t bother to look back.
The man turned back into the house and shut the door behind him. Things went so much more smoothly this time; this time he’d finally get it right for sure.
Adult cooperation made all the difference he had learned and his device had functioned flawlessly for a second time. He regarded the Walters with their blank and passive expressions made possible by his latest toy. He walked around them where he could clearly see the small blinking modules on the bases of their necks; devices that controlled their thoughts and made them pliant… made them giant living toys.
Finding a reliable way to quickly attach the ThinkChips had been the most difficult part, but his solution for that had been equally as inventive.
“Come, Cuckoo,” the man said as a hummingbird buzzed out of a dark corner and came to rest in his hand. It was not actually a hummingbird, but a small robotic drone that was even now folding down into a sphere barely the size of a golf ball.
With that accomplished the man turned again to the Walters. The crime of letting a child be unhappy was unforgivable. He picked up the second duffle bag, withdrew the machete and poncho from them, and advanced on the insensate couple. As their blood flowed freely the man’s only regret was that, with the ThinkChips still in place, they were not actually aware of the pain from his cuts which he knew they so richly deserved.
The young woman named Lois Lane shot bolt upright in bed; her eyes wide and her breathing heavy. Reflexively her right hand came up to her left wrist to feel that the Kryptonian bracelet which she wore there was still in its place. Though the device didn’t protect her from minor injuries or her nightmares, it did protect her from lethal harm and the psychological reassurance of its presence on her wrist did much to calm her.
So much for the theory that victory brings peace, she thought to herself as she pulled herself out of bed. Victory in this case meant having finally stopped the menace of Brainiac once and for all. Peace would have been the absence of the nightmares that plagued her almost every time she slept and had for eight years now.
Still, even as her heartbeat slowed down to its normal pace she knew this night had not been as bad as some; though visions of her father’s fiery death had still come, Lionel Luthor and Brainiac had not had the chance to torment her this night. She looked over at her alarm clock and was rallied further by the observation that she’d actually gotten six hours of sleep last night. Of course, given that she hadn’t actually had any sleep at all in the previous two days, she was still technically running a net sleep deficit.
Not that the theory of trying to catch up on sleep actually worked; mainly because it played hell with the biorhythms which could leave you feeling even less rested than when you first went to bed; she’d read all the literature on insomnia in those early days of anger and grief when true sleep seemed like some half-remembered dream. Besides, if it were actually true she’d probably need a solid year pulling a Sleeping Beauty just to catch up on all the sleep she’d lost in the eight years since her father had been murdered and she’d rather not waste that much time. The truth of the matter was that she’d become so used to the lost sleep in that time that four hours a night would probably still be her normal average now even if the nightmares had abandoned her completely.
Still, despite the relative lack of sleep, Lois was feeling a lot better rested this morning than she had in a long time; though that might also just be the thrill of anticipation at work. It had been a long time since Lois had felt… it felt silly to even think it, but… well, giddy. As giddy as a school girl with a high school crush is what she’d call it if she were being honest; which today she was more than willing to allow of herself.
A high school crush isn’t too far off, she thought to herself as she slid into the shower and bobbed in time to some nameless tune in her head that only she could hear. Barely twenty-four hours ago she’d finally heard and returned the words she’d dreamed of hearing from her friend Clark Kent since they had been back in high school.
“I love you Lois Lane!”
Okay, technically back in high school it would have been ‘I love you Chloe Sullivan,’ but debating that point would just be a case of to-may-to/to-mah-to style semantics. Whatever she was calling herself it was the person behind the name that Clark loved and that would be her.
She again brushed her hand across the surface of her bracelet. During the past few months she hadn’t dared take it off even for a moment lest she be caught defenseless by Brainiac. In that time it felt as if the bracelet had almost become a part of her; a physical symbol of her connection to Clark and their shared fight for truth and justice. That feeling of connection, to the bracelet and to Clark, had never felt stronger than it did this morning. She didn’t have to wear it all the time anymore… she just wanted to.
She still couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that it wasn’t just a dream on her part. It can’t be this simple, she’d said the day before; just after they’d first kissed. There’s supposed to be years of drama and missed declarations and breakups and misunderstandings and thinking we’ve lost each other forever before something this good happens with us.
Clark had just smiled at that. Lois, there was, he’d replied. It was called HIGH SCHOOL. Then he’d kissed her again.
He’d been absolutely right of course. As fresh and exhilarating and new as this felt it was sometimes hard to remember that they’d actually known each other for more than a decade now… since the eighth grade, actually, when her father’s job had moved them from Metropolis to Smallville and she’d shared an impulsive first kiss with a farm boy who’d been kind enough to show her around and now, after all the trials and tribulations, it had finally paid off. It really was just that ‘simple.’
By the time she was through in the shower that nameless tune in her head had turned into full-fledged humming of what might have been ‘Walking on Sunshine’ as she brushed out her hair and wondered if she shouldn’t do something about her hairstyle; or relative lack of one as the case might be.
Once upon a time, back when winning the attention of her farm boy had been as important to her as journalism, she’d gone out of her way to keep up with the latest styles. But in the years since her father’s death that concern had given way to functionality and simplicity. How many hours had she spent on bleaching her hair as a teenager and primping to get it to lie just so anyway?
Her hairstyle had been one of the first victims of her more functional outlook. She had bleached it back to blonde one last time after she’d come out of hiding; she had needed to look as she had before Lionel Luthor destroyed her world one last time for her videotaped testimony against him; but after that she’d simply let it grow back into her natural light brown. As to the style; others in her circle might feel the need to blow fifty bucks on a supposed designer do, but to her mind you got pretty much the same results for $14.95 at the GreatClips down the street.
Yet, today she was feeling the need to spruce herself up a bit more than usual; as she had done so long ago at the Smallville High Spring Formal. Not that she wasn’t already attractive, she’d turned enough men’s heads to know that she was, but she wanted to make herself look as beautiful on the outside as Clark made her feel on the inside.
No doubt about it, she was in love. Not just with Clark Kent; which was a given; but amazingly enough with her whole entire screwed up life. And what wasn’t there to love, really?
She had a job as an investigative reporter for the Daily Planet; the job she’d dreamed of having for as long as she could remember and how could you not love that? Some might wonder; why in this age of instant news anytime and anywhere that anyone would still want to be a print reporter? But they’d be missing the point. Any hack on the twenty-four hour cable news or the internet could get the story first. An investigative reporter’s job was to get the story right and a print investigative reporter’s job was to get the story right for posterity. If it wasn’t written down, then it never happened and unlike the internet; where stories were here today and gone tomorrow like soap bubbles amidst the vast oceans of information; a real solid copy of a story was something more enduring... more real. It wasn’t like people lived forever to share their memories of times past. Someone had to record what happened so that people years from now would be able to say, ‘this is the truth of what actually happened.’
You couldn’t leave out the hate mail on her list of things to love, either. Some might find it strange, but Lois loved getting hate mail… had loved it since she first had started working at a newspaper back in junior high. Lois didn’t make accusations in her stories lightly so any hate mail she received probably meant that her investigation was stepping on the toes of someone who probably needed to have them stepped on in the first place. So it really meant something to her that she’d actually earned hate mail from her fellow reporters … which would have pretty much topped her week if not for Clark. The e-mails had started pouring in from some of her fellow reporters yesterday afternoon once it leaked out to the rest of the press that ‘Superman’ had yet again given an exclusive interview to Clark and herself regarding the events of the last two days.
Well, what did they expect after the way they’d been trashing ‘Superman’ for months? Lois asked herself as she set about brushing her teeth. The hate mail had pretty much boiled down into one very illustrative complaint; the claim that Superman was playing favorites and using them because they had been supporting him since his debut instead of bashing him like every other member of the media had done.
In short, they’d chosen to run with the rest of the pack and now that the story had broken the other way they were stuck on the outside looking in and were griping about it. This was especially funny given that what they were really griping about was that she and Clark had been consistent and that consistency had apparently paid off. The vast majority of the media was eating crow this morning over their speculations that Superman was really a vigilante/alien conqueror and Lois thought it served them right because the headline of the Daily Planet this morning just about said it all.
‘HERO!’ the bold block letters proclaimed above the stunning picture taken by Jimmy Olsen during the final battle with Brainiac; a woman and young child huddled in fear as ‘Superman’ selflessly interposed himself between them and the massive blast of energy pouring from Brainiac’s hands. After yesterday only the truly deranged could honestly doubt that ‘Superman’ was a hero.
More accurately Clark was the hero, which was another thing she loved. She was one of a select few people who knew the truth; that ‘Superman’ was nothing more than a costume Clark Kent put on so he could use his powers to help people without drawing attention to his real life; to his friends and family.
My boyfriend’s a superhero, Lois thought as she suppressed the urge to bounce up at down with glee at the thought.
Best of all about the whole article in Lois’ mind was that they had been given a second chance to do it right; which was not something that happened often in any aspect of life. The first time she and Clark had written an interview with ‘Superman’ it had been an extremely rushed affair and the desire to preserve Clark’s secret and their personal feelings that ‘Superman’ might be the greatest thing since sliced bread resulted in the questions being pretty much softballs.
In the months since then Lois had rewritten that story a hundred times over in her head, so when the opportunity actually presented itself to do another interview without drawing suspicion to Clark and herself and their connection to ‘Superman’ the story was halfway done in her head before she and Clark even sat down to discuss it.
First and foremost was the rebuttal of the charges in Lex’s hit piece that had appeared the day after their first interview. This time they included virtually the entire story, the good and the bad; leaving out only the time frame that ‘Superman’ had been on Earth and that Kal-El was just his Kryptonian name as opposed to his real name. Yes, Kal-El was an alien from the now destroyed world of Krypton and yes, Brainaic came from Krypton as well. His father, Jor-El, had sent Brainiac and Kal-El to Earth in order to conquer it. Kal-El had arrived first, but after living among the people of Earth he rejected his father’s plan and did his best to thwart it. ‘Sons often rebel against their fathers,’ the interview had quoted Kal-El as saying; a sentiment that Lois hoped even Lex, whose conflict with his father Lionel had shaped his entire life, could relate to and hopefully take to heart.
Despite the pain her ex-boyfriend had put her through recently Lex had been a true friend during those first tumultuous years back in Metropolis. That friendship was the sole reason she’d been willing to forgive his brutal breakup with her; though admittedly she wasn’t in any hurry to reach out to him beyond that. If Lex was serious about wanting forgiveness as a friend he’d have to be the one to prove it. More than anything it pained Lois that Lex could be friends with Clark and herself and yet see Superman as such a grave threat. Hopefully the last few days would help him to see the light.
So yes, all things considered her whole crazy mixed up life was something Lois found herself loving a whole lot. Yet all of the above was not what had her so giddy this morning. What had her so giddy was that in about two hours, after putting in a perfunctory appearance at work, she and Clark would be going on their first kinda-sorta unofficial… date. She fought the urge to bounce up and down again, but only just barely.
More specifically, they were going to get a better to look at the Fortress that had been bequeathed to him by Brainiac.
The Fortress existed in a whole separate universe; inside a tesseract to be exact. If you had a doctorate in quantum mechanics you’d know that a tesseract was an infinite space contained within a finite area; in this case an apparently two dimensional plane just inside the roof access door of the Daily Planet. If you’d just read and watched as much science fiction as Lois had, you’d know it worked pretty much like Doctor Who’s TARDIS; it was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.
A LOT bigger. Big enough to more than warrant the mental capitalization she gave to the Fortress. She’d gotten a brief look at its layout when she’d been brainwashed by Brainiac and the fact of the matter was that the Fortress wasn’t just big… it was beyond even the word colossal. She was thinking that she’d have to invent a new word just to describe how big it was. The entry hall alone was big enough to hold a football stadium and the miles-high observation deck where they had watched the unfolding battle between Brainiac’s Eradicators and the U.S. Army hadn’t even been a quarter of the way up the main tower. It was a place so vast that the elevators, if the place had conventional elevators, would need four digits and the floor space of a single level could be measured using square miles.
It was, she had been told by Kelex, a perfect reproduction of Clark’s ancestral home; a massive arcology that had once been home to one of the three great ruling houses of Krypton; the House of El. Tens of millions had lived there once. Now all that was left was a shadow; an empty shell filled with ghosts, wonders, and possibly horrors, beyond counting.
And Clark was the only one with the key. The portal into that Fortress opened only for Kryptonians. Unless Clark was holding the portal open himself you were just pounding your fist against a concrete wall trying to get in. For all the jokes made when they were kids about the loft in his barn being his ‘Fortress of Solitude’ this place could really be such a place. If Clark went in on his own, there would be no one else who could go in after him to bring him out.
Which was pretty much why she’d insisted on coming with him when he went back into the Fortress. Okay, that and her insatiable curiosity for all things bizarre. The simple fact of the matter though was that, regardless of its origins, the Fortress was a solid and tangible link to where Clark had come from and he had so many questions about that alien world. Without someone to bring him back down to earth she worried, probably totally irrationally she was willing to admit, that he might get himself lost in that alien world.
Mostly though it was just a chance to spend some time with Clark in a place where neither of them had to wear masks; a place where Clark didn’t have to hide who he was and she could act just a little bit more like the girl he used to know. There was just something about having your identity violated by a god-like alien artificial intelligence that made you appreciate just being yourself a little more.
Lois was rummaging through her refrigerator and only belatedly remembering that there hadn’t been anything truly edible in it two days ago either; unless she wanted to risk something that looked like it might be growing bluish fur; when her doorbell buzzed. She looked up at the time on her radio, 7:27 A.M., and wondered who could possibly be trying to visit her at this hour.
The thought that it might be Clark coming by early to surprise her buoyed her steps as she went to the door and peaked through the peephole at who might lie beyond. She sagged slightly as she saw that it was not Clark visible through the fish-eye lens. It was a girl. She looked to be ten, maybe twelve years old; Lois hadn’t spent enough time around kids recently to really be able to guess with any degree of accuracy. Still, the girl looked vaguely familiar to Lois; she was dressed in camouflage pants and a leather jacket that looked about two sizes too big for her and her blonde hair was pulled back into a short ponytail.
She tried to remember where she might have met a girl that age before. She knew one of the families in the building had a daughter in the Girl Scouts because she’d bought several boxes of Thin Mints off her a few years ago, but she was pretty sure that girl had been a brunette. If she didn’t live in the building, she was pretty good at sneaking into places where she didn’t belong though.
Whatever the reason was for her being at her door, the girl seemed to be quite nervous; she was fidgeting from one foot to the other and looking back and forth along the hallway of the apartment building as she punched Lois’ doorbell again. Deciding that, whatever the girl wanted, she wasn’t a threat, Lois unlocked her door and opened it.
“Are you Lois Lane?” the girl asked without preamble.
“Um, yeah,” Lois replied. Okay, so she wasn’t going door to door at random.
“And your name used to be Chloe Sullivan?” the girl continued.
Despite her recent thoughts about just being yourself Lois found herself completely thrown by the question, though for reasons far more practical than philosophical. While her former identity wasn’t exactly top secret, it didn’t exactly fall into the common knowledge category either. “Who told you that?” Lois demanded.
“I found it in some court records,” the girl answered. “So are you?”
Lois just nodded. There was no point in really denying it, but now she was desperately trying to remember where she’d seen this girl before. She hadn’t used her old name in eight years and this girl would have been in pre-school at best at that time.
“And your father was Gabriel M. Sullivan?” she continued as if she needed to get whatever it was out as quickly as possible lest she lose her nerve.
Lois felt a tinge of loss at the sound of her dead father’s name and bit of annoyance at the girl for having brought it up.
“Who are you kid?” Lois demanded.
The words seemed to flow out of the girl like a torrent, as if she’d been waiting a lifetime to be able to say them.
“I’m Lucy… Lucy Monroe… and if Gabriel Sullivan was your father… then I’m your sister.”