The Butterfly Legacy
by Lynn M. <l.mccreadie@comcast.net>
Rated: PG13
Submitted: December, 2004

Author’s notes:

First and foremost, I’d like to give a great big Thank You to CC 
Aiken, who not only cheerlead-ed me through the long days of 
writing, even from the paradise of Disney World, but also helped 
me find my way out of several corners I’d managed to paint myself 
into. Without her, I might have tossed this all into the garbage 
at the eleventh hour when I was tearing my hair out!

Mostly, though, she passed along some sage advice from an old pro 
(not to imply that LabRat is old <g>) that gave me the courage to 
write this story the way I saw it. With her support, I found my 
backbone.

This story was originally written as an Nfic. If you are of age 
and of a mind, I recommend that you read that version as it is 
the intended original. The nfic version can be found at 
annesplace.com.

The standard disclaimer applies and appears at the end of the 
story, as do some additional author’s notes.

This story is set after *Barbarians at the Planet* but veers on a 
different course than the one taken in *House of Luthor*.

Thanks for reading.

L.


~§~

Chapter 1

He flew low, through the thick band of towering cumulous clouds 
strung together like beads and hung across a cerulean sky. Icy 
mist pelted his face, stinging shards that caused no real pain 
but reminded him there was still some feeling left in his body. 
It would have been a simple matter to adjust his altitude a few 
thousand feet to avoid the clouds, yet he maintained his course. 
He didn’t want to see blue sky. Or sunshine.

Even though he had a destination, he didn’t fly at super-speed. 
The earthquake had occurred several hours earlier, his knowledge 
of it coming late. A few extra minutes wouldn’t make a difference 
by that point, and besides, he’d be there soon anyway. Metropolis 
to Colombia was only a jaunt half-way round the world, after all.

What a difference it made, to have something to actually run to 
when one needed to run away from something else, Clark noted as 
he swerved to avoid a United Airlines 747 banking left out of the 
clouds on its final approach into Miami. 

In the month since the Daily Planet’s destruction, he’d come to 
look forward to calls for help. While he absolutely regretted any 
suffering, at least he’d felt useful. Now if he could only find a 
way to forecast accidents and natural disasters, he’d wager he’d 
have the perfect setup. Show up in time to avert disaster before 
anyone could be hurt, then move on to the next catastrophe.

Catastrophe. That pretty much spelled the current state of his 
life. No Planet. Friends scattered to the winds. No job or 
prospects. 

No Lois.

Instantly his stomach wrenched, and he headed straight upwards, 
piercing the stratosphere in search of the space he needed to 
fend off the overwhelming claustrophobia. Whenever he thought 
about her and what was soon going to happen, he couldn’t breathe 
deeply enough, the feeling of suffocation inducing a near panic.

She was actually going to go through with it. In less than two 
months, Lois Lane would become Lois Luthor or Lois Lane-Luthor or 
Lois Luthor-Lane or whatever name she’d concocted. What she 
called herself was irrelevant. In the end, the only part that 
really mattered was the “Mrs.” that would soon precede all other 
names. Lois was getting married. And it sure as hell wasn’t to 
him.

In the weeks leading up to their heated argument during Perry’s 
retirement party, he’d tortured himself trying to find the way to 
make it all stop. There was something he should be able to say, 
some magic combination of words that would penetrate the steel 
armor of stubbornness Lois had donned. Some way he could avert 
the train wreck.

His first instinct had proven an abysmal disaster. He’d confessed 
his love, sitting on a park bench in the center of the bustling 
city. Told her in amazingly few words of the feelings that had 
stacked on top of themselves over the course of the past year. 
She’d handed them back with a polite thanks-but-no-thanks and an 
of-course-we’ll-always-be-friends. His sole consolation had been 
her lack of an enthusiastic *yes* when asked if she loved Luthor.

Next had been his efforts to discredit her fiancé. To make her 
see what kind of evil she’d be binding herself to if she didn’t 
wake up and face the truth. But without telling her how *exactly* 
he’d come to know the depth of Luthor’s vileness, he had no real 
proof. Nothing concrete a hardnose reporter insistent on three 
irrefutable sources would accept. Every accusation he’d made 
she’d countered with a canned-by-Luthor excuse. She’d chosen to 
remain blind, deliberately ignorant.

There had been some thought given to telling her who he really 
was. In fact, he’d pulled that trump card out of its locked case 
and had been read to throw it on the table when she’d summoned 
Superman to her apartment. And then it had come. The coup de 
grace. 

<*If you had no powers, if you were just an ordinary man leading 
an ordinary life, I'd love you just the same...*>

Her words had been razors, severing the last threads of his hope 
to send him plunging into hell. 

Lois loved the façade, the abilities and the cape. Even if she 
didn’t understand it herself, he’d had no more delusions to hide 
behind. Lois didn’t love *him*.

In the end, after he’d examined it ad nauseam, tore the beast 
apart trying to find the remaining inch he hadn’t covered, he’d 
finally seen clearly that there was simply nothing more he could 
do. To stop her from marrying Luthor. To get his old life back, 
her friendship better than the dissension crackling between them. 
To make Lois Lane love Clark Kent.

So denial had been evicted, a bitter gut-eating anger settling in 
for a long, extended stay. And the days became endless. The 
nights even longer. He had no purpose any more. He was a wanderer 
who’d stopped wandering but no longer had a reason to stay put.

With a harsh shake of his head, Clark tossed off the self-pity. 
He couldn’t afford such an indulgence, at least not at that 
moment. For a little while, anyway, he did have somewhere to go. 
Some fifty odd miles beneath him, the aftermath of an earthquake 
awaited.

He dove like a bullet toward the northwest coast of South 
America, pulling up just below the clouds to catch a magnificent 
view of the deep emerald jungles of Colombia where they ran right 
up to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea. Even in his 
melancholic mood, he had to appreciate the raw beauty beneath 
him, two pristine jewels nestled together in vibrant contrast of 
earth and ocean.

Passing over the capital of Bogotá, which he’d visited during his 
traveling days, he headed southwest. News reports had placed the 
epicenter of the quake near the city of Popayán. In a country 
saddled with civil unrest, open guerilla warfare, and the 
proliferation of drug cartels, he was uncertain what he might 
find when he landed.

But Popayán proved well equipped to handle the surprisingly 
minimal damage it had sustained. Emergency teams controlled the 
scene at the northern most edge of town, where less than a dozen 
buildings had been affected. Speaking with several rescue workers 
and city officials, he learned the quake’s epicenter was actually 
north and to the east, closer to the smaller village of Silvia.

After spending only an hour x-raying the few suspicious piles of 
debris and finding no trapped people, he lifted off the ground 
amidst cheers and shouted *gracias*, heading northward into the 
Andes in hopes he wasn’t too late to do some good.

The small village of Silvia was in a more dire situation. Nearly 
a third of the town’s buildings tottered precariously on shaken 
foundations or lay in ruined heaps of stucco and adobe, and his 
initial scans sadly yielded real casualties. Ignoring the gaping 
stares of the villagers, he began to dig wherever a cry or a moan 
could be heard, and soon the crowds were digging alongside him.

Darkness descended too soon, making the rescue efforts even more 
difficult. But by morning they’d searched the entire town for 
buried survivors, moving piles of shattered brick and splintered 
wood when necessary to extract both the living and the dead. The 
work was grim, and as dawn broke over the distant mountain peaks, 
Clark felt the bizarre mixture of satisfaction that he’d been 
able to help and despair that he hadn’t saved more.

With a heavy sigh, he determined he’d done all he could and made 
ready to leave. As the mayor of Silvia shook Superman’s hand 
appreciatively, a growing murmur spread through the crowd filling 
the town’s main square. The throng split, allowing a swayback 
horse to pass through. It’s rider, a boy looking to be no more 
than thirteen or so, nearly collapsed onto the street when he 
reached the center of the square. Both beast and youth foamed 
with exertion, and it took long minutes for the boy to gather 
enough strength to tell his story.

In a jumble of Spanish sprinkled with what Clark was later to 
learn was a hybrid of Guambiano and Paez dialects, the boy 
sputtered that his village, San Pablo, had been nearly decimated 
by the earthquake. Both the school and a newly built clinic lay 
in ruins as well as most of the homes. People were missing and 
many more injured.

The boy, whose name it seemed was André, had been sent to 
retrieve help, and he begged for anyone to return with him to his 
crippled village. But the weary inhabitants of Silvia had neither 
the strength nor the means to offer assistance. Located twenty 
treacherous miles down into the valley, San Pablo was simply too 
remote, and the villagers were already overburdened with their 
own losses.

When André collapsed in torrent of tears and failure, Clark 
approached him with an outstretched hand. Speaking in Spanish, he 
tried to explain that he could offer some help. 

At first the boy stared blankly at Clark, mesmerized by the blue 
suit and billowing red cape. But when the meaning of Clark’s 
word’s reached his exhausted brain, André began to nod 
enthusiastically. Scrambling to his feet, he gestured at the road 
and made to remount his horse. Clark shook his head and pointed 
to the sky. In the end, it took quite a bit of assistance from 
the mayor to explain that it would be faster for the man in the 
cape to fly to San Pablo rather than making the three hour 
journey on horseback. 

André balked at the prospect of flying anywhere with the *gringo 
loco*. Clark had to demonstrate several times that such a feat 
was even possible, and still the youth clung to his neck with an 
iron grip, keeping his eyes shut for the entirety of the flight 
down the mountain. 

Almost as disconcerting as the premise of a man flying through 
the air was the reality that André would have to leave his horse 
behind to be fetched later. Clark was not about to fly with the 
horse, no matter how much the boy pleaded or lamented about his 
father’s imminent anger. Saving a village was one thing. 
Transporting livestock through the air was another.

San Pablo sat in a shallow valley no more than a quarter mile 
wide, on a narrow strip of cleared land surrounded by fingers of 
thick forests that rose up the hills on either side of it and ran 
right up to the edge of the village itself. The center of town 
consisted of a wide dirt road lined on each side with around a 
dozen adobe buildings. Five narrow tracks forked from the main 
street at various locations, and the villagers’ homes were 
sprinkled off them like leaves splayed from the crooked branches 
of a tree. 

The entire scene reminded Clark of a movie set, white washed 
boxes topped with a variety of materials ranging from corrugated 
tin to red tiles to twisted bundles of dried grass and twigs. But 
this movie was clearly staged to be a tragedy, for the chaos that 
greeted him was a staggering jumble of noise and terror and 
destruction.

But the cacophony ceased as he touched down in what appeared to 
be the village’s main intersection. Every eye turned from the 
devastation to stare open-jawed at the flying man in blue 
spandex, carrying who looked suspiciously like André Martinez. 
Even without his super-hearing he could hear the whispers, the 
word *Diablo* hitting him particularly hard. Devil. 

With his red cape and the way he’d been feeling of late, he could 
very well be from hell, so he took no offense at their obvious 
fascination and uncertainty. More accurately, he felt disbelief 
that in the very last decade of the twentieth century, in the age 
of computers and televisions and overly pervasive media that 
reached every corner of the globe, there were still places so 
remote they’d never seen or heard of Superman. 

When no one stepped forward to present themselves as the 
village’s mayor or leader, he wasted no time, turning to the 
rubble and beginning his search. As he scanned the first pile of 
destroyed adobe, he had to stifle a small smile. Behind him the 
very angry voice of a man berated the still bewildered André, 
wanting to know exactly what the boy had done with the family’s 
horse. Soon after father and son wandered off, the people behind 
him returned to the task of being stunned by the violence wreaked 
on their homes and businesses.

The routine he’d established in Silvia proved just as efficient 
in the smaller town. First he’d scan a pile of debris to 
determine if any survivors lay trapped within. Often he would 
extinguish a fire burning hotly out of control. If he spotted no 
movement nor heard any sounds of life, he’d quickly move on to 
the next pile.

Oddly, the entire process felt remotely like an assembly line. 
He’d been doing it for so long his body operated on automatic 
pilot, freeing his mind to wander the several thousand miles back 
to Metropolis.

What would he be doing, if he wasn’t there? Well, it depended on 
how far back he was willing to look. If he thought no further 
than a week or so ago, his answer would have been that he’d have 
been doing almost the same thing as he was doing in San Pablo. 
Removing rubble, in the metaphorical sense anyway. Picking up 
pieces of his destroyed life much as these people picked through 
the debris, looking for scraps and bits even remotely 
salvageable. 

Less than a month ago, his life had been reduced to dust and 
splinters. When that bomb had destroyed the Planet, it had 
started a chain reaction, pushing over the blocks of his 
carefully constructed life as if they were no more than dominoes. 
He’d lost his dream job. He’d lost his work partner. He’d lost 
the woman he loved. He’d lost everything.

But mostly, he’d lost himself. When Lois had rejected him only to 
declare her love for his alter ego, he’d lost any desire to be 
the man who’d even lived that life. Of the three men Lois had 
held any feelings for, Clark Kent had ranked dead last. Last 
behind a murderous gangster. Last behind a two-dimensional 
cardboard cutout who could fly and bend steel with his bare 
hands.

No, much like these people, his entire life had been shaken out 
from under his feet in a matter of seconds. Except the village of 
San Pablo could be rebuilt, the buildings reformed and the town 
made new again. The damage to his world was irreparable. Even if 
he could somehow manage to salvage some of it, he didn’t really 
think he wanted to live there anymore anyway. Not without Lois.

With nearly as much force as he employed in moving debris, he 
pushed thoughts of her from his mind. He knew the effort was 
futile. She’d show up there in a few minutes again anyway, no 
matter how hard he fought it. Even after her overt rejection and 
the finality of the choices she’d made, he couldn’t stop thinking 
about her. Every day. Every minute. And it seemed the more he 
tried not to, the more impossible he found it to stop.

Instead, he focused intently on the work, the feeling of heavy 
stone rough in his hands. He imagined the large chunks of adobe 
to be Lex Luthor’s head, feeling perverse pleasure when each 
crumbled into gray dust. The morning slipped into afternoon and 
neared evening before he slowed at all.

Clark stopped a moment, passing a hand across his forehead. He’d 
been removing rubble and extracting people for nearly two days. 
While it took a lot to deplete his resources, the constant 
emotional toil was starting to wear on him. He was getting tired. 
Of smashed adobe and blood and the keening wails of the victims.

“Here. Have a drink.”

He turned toward the voice, blinking against the shaft of 
sunlight lowering on the horizon, casting the stranger in 
silhouette. As his eyes adjusted, Clark saw a reedy man with 
deeply tanned skin and a thick, dark beard extending a battered 
tin canteen toward him.

“It’s been purified. Safe enough to drink,” the man said when 
Clark hesitated. Thrusting the canteen into Clark’s stunned hand, 
he repeated his command. “Drink.”

Clark shook his head. It wasn’t his fear of the water that caused 
his pause but rather shock at finding a man who spoke English 
without any trace of the thick Colombian accent he’d heard ever 
since arriving, when he’d heard English at all. When his own 
voice failed him, he took a long draught of water. Even lukewarm 
and tasting faintly of chlorine, the wetness was still 
refreshing. He tipped the canteen back for another swallow and 
felt his strength return.

“Name’s Jeff Phillips, with the PC,” the man answered before 
Clark could ask.

“PC. Peace Corps,” Clark translated after a moment of 
contemplation. The man must be American then. That would account 
for the lack of an accent despite the dark features that marked 
Mr. Phillips as a Colombian native. “I thought the government 
evacuated – ”

“They did. Some of us didn’t listen,” Mr. Phillips offered with a 
wry smile, but he didn’t elaborate. “I’m guessing by that S on 
your chest you might be Superman? I saw a picture of you in the 
Bogotá paper.”

Clark laughed. “That or the *gringo loco*. Nice to meet you Mr. 
Phillips.”

“Oh, it’s Jeff, please,” Jeff said, taking the hand Clark had 
extended and giving it a firm shake. 

“You in charge here, Jeff?” Clark asked.

“I guess as much as anyone. I’m the teacher at the school. For 
some reason they seem to think that means I can do anything. 
Don’t know what gave them that idea,” he said with a deprecating 
chuckle.

Clark laughed along with the friendly man. “How many people live 
here?”

“There’s about five hundred that live in town. Another five 
hundred or so on the outlying farms,” Jeff guessed. “But San 
Pablo’s got the only school within walking distance. Only clinic, 
too. Services San Pablo, Peublito and Piendámo. We just finished 
about six months ago, and now it’s nothing but a spot on the 
road.”

Clark swung his gaze over the flattened town, taking in the 
partial walls and caved-in roofs, children playing in front of 
their former homes while parents stood helplessly staring at the 
wreckage. They’d had next to nothing, and now, they had nothing 
at all.

Jeff seemed to read his mind, giving voice to his thoughts. 
“These folks can’t seem to catch a break. They spend their 
morning picking coffee beans and their afternoons working their 
own farms just to scrape together enough to feed their families 
with maybe a little left over to sell at market. They don’t own 
much, and now what they do have is not a whole lot more than 
piles of dust.”

“Well, I’ve scanned each building,” Clark said, wanting to give 
this man some hope. “Good news is that everyone I found I was 
able to pull out. All of the fires are out, and what’s still 
standing seems fairly stable.”

“I don’t know how we would have managed without you,” Jeff said 
gratefully.

“You’ll have to give André the credit. He’s the one who convinced 
me to come down here.”

“Yeah, I don’t imagine you usually get this far off the beaten 
track.”

“Not usually,” Clark admitted with a grin. “And I’ll tell you, 
for about five minutes, when I thought I was going to have to 
carry André’s horse down into the valley, I kind of understood 
why.”

Jeff joined him in an appreciative laugh, and Clark felt a little 
bit better. He was tired, but he’d helped these people whom the 
world had pretty much forgotten.

“Oh, what is she doing now?” Jeff muttered, his frown directed at 
some activity happening behind Clark.

Clark twisted around, looking for the source of Jeff’s concern.

A small woman was climbing over a jumble of debris, picking up 
handfuls of adobe and tossing them aside. The two men hurried to 
assist her.

Clark couldn’t see her face, bent over as she was, but as they 
neared, he suspected that, like Jeff, she wasn’t Colombian. A 
long light-brown braid snaked down her back and the exposed skin 
of her arms was fair, Caucasian. A crimson scrap of cloth tied 
her braid and contrasted gaily with the piles of white-washed 
adobe and filmy gray dust, reminding Clark of a cardinal against 
the snowy fields of his parents’ farm.

“Gills, we went through this section already,” Jeff called out as 
he climbed the precarious mound. “There’s –” 

She held up a hand, palm out, commanding silence. “I hear 
something.”

Clark immediately floated to the top of the pile and began to 
lift large chunks of wall from the pile, tossing them lightly to 
the side. He’d gone through this particular building earlier, and 
a cold dread swept through him at the thought he might have left 
a victim buried within its destroyed innards. How could he have 
let himself be so distracted?

“No, stop!” the woman exclaimed. “You might crush it.”

Clark froze instantly at her warning.

But Jeff’s hands went to his hips, his patience clearly 
stretched. “It?”

“Yeah, *it*,” she said, gingerly removing individual pieces of 
adobe after testing the stability of the remaining pile beneath a 
prodding toe. “I heard a bark. Or more like a whine, really.”

Clark let out a heavy breath of relief at the same time Jeff 
released an exasperated sigh. “For heaven sake, Gillian. You had 
us thinking there was somebody trapped down there.”

She stood upright, brushing an errant wisp of honey-colored hair 
out of her eyes, and Clark was finally afforded a glimpse of her 
face, what little of it there was that wasn’t covered in dirt. 
His first thought was she was far younger than he’d expected 
based on the authority in her voice. His second thought was that 
she had the grayest eyes he’d ever seen.

“Hey, just because it’s not a person doesn’t mean it doesn’t 
deserve to be saved,” she accused before turning back to her 
rescue mission.

The two men watched her painstaking work for a long, stunned 
minute before joining her efforts. Clark focused and picked up a 
distinct yip. Now able to pinpoint a more precise location, it 
took only a few minutes before a sizable hole had been made. The 
woman reached her arms in and extracted a very dusty, very wiggly 
dog.

“Hey, there,” she cooed as the squirming mass tried to lick her 
face. “You’re a little one.”

“Great. Now you’ve got another critter to look after,” Jeff 
muttered as he  climbed back down to the road.

“Jeff, your compassion is overwhelming,” she said pleasantly, 
satisfied with her rescue despite his cynicism. “I’m gonna call 
him Luke.”

Clark brushed the dirt from his hands and joined Jeff back on the 
firm ground. The woman apparently named Gillian made her way down 
more slowly, examining the yapping puppy for signs of injury.

Assured Luke had suffered no harm throughout his ordeal, she 
turned her inspection to Clark. Her eyes widened perceptibly, as 
if she hadn’t noticed the man in the brilliant blue suit with the 
floor-length cape until that very moment. “Wow. Who are you?”

Jeff rolled his eyes. “Gillian, this is Superman.” Then more 
politely, he reversed the introduction. “Superman, this is 
Gillian Brooks.”

“So you must be the *gringo loco* who can fly,” she said. “I 
thought André had gotten hit on the head by some falling adobe.”

Ignoring her imprudence, Jeff turned to Clark to explain. 
“Gillian runs the clinic...well...runs what’s left of the clinic, 
anyway.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Brooks,” Clark said, but her attention had 
returned to the dog struggling in her arms. With an inward shrug, 
he turned back to Jeff, ready to go home. He needed a shower and 
a good night’s sleep, if that was even possible. “Is there 
anything else you need?”

“I think most of the heavy work is done. The rest is clean up and 
starting over. Don’t suppose you want to stick around for that?” 
Jeff asked with a hearty laugh. 

“Let him go, Jeff. I’m sure he’s got a meaty steak, a hot shower 
and a nice comfy bed with his name written all over it.”

Clark blinked. Not so much at her rudeness but because he’d been 
thinking exactly that very thing. He felt his face heat, somewhat 
embarrassed for being caught in his own selfish musings.

“Gillian!” Jeff admonished, giving Clark an apologetic smile. 
“Don’t mind her. She’s had a rough couple of days.”

“Hey, I just lost an entire year’s worth of work, not to mention 
the fact that my bed is probably buried under ten feet of dust,” 
she said despondently.

At that moment, a stooped man wearing a torn blue poncho appeared 
behind Jeff and tugged on his shirt sleeve. Bending to hear the 
man’s softly uttered words, Jeff nodded several times and patted 
the man’s shoulder. Having reached an understanding, he turned 
back to Clark and Gillian.

“Superman, this is Roberto. His was the *tienda*...um...shop...at 
the far end of the village,” Jeff explained. “He needs some clean 
water for his wife. She was caught inside.”

Clark remembered both the store and the woman. She’d suffered a 
few cuts and bruises, mild wounds considering the severity of the 
earthquake. But their home and store had collapsed to the ground, 
now nothing more than white dust.

“*Buonas díaz, señor. Siento su pérdida,*” he said, offering the 
man his condolences for the loss of his store and home.

“You speak Spanish?” Gillian asked, not bothering to hide the 
surprise from her voice.

“Yeah, a little bit,” he offered, keeping his fluency to himself. 
“When you’re in my line of work, you sort of pick things up.”

Her light eyes narrowed, and he thought he caught a glimmer of 
respect flicker over them. He had no idea why, but her approval 
pleased him. Maybe because she seemed like a hard person to 
impress.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll give Roberto a hand.” Jeff smiled, his 
strong white teeth flashing against his dark beard. “Can’t thank 
you enough for all you’ve done, Superman. Gillian, stay out of 
trouble.” 

And with that, he and Roberto walked down the road toward the 
school, leaving superhero, wiggling dog, and belligerent young 
woman staring at each other in awkward silence.

“Well, how about it?” Gillian suddenly blurted.

“I’m sorry?” he asked, confused by her question.

“Gonna stick around for the clean up?”

“Oh, uh...I don’t think...” he stammered, taken off guard. Jeff 
had joked about it, but this woman was serious. “I mean, I think 
I’ve done all I can here. Everyone’s safe and –”

She snorted. “We’ve got a clinic and a school that are just piles 
of dust. And about a hundred families without homes. Nobody’s 
safe yet.”

He glanced around at the darkening forest climbing up both sides 
of the narrow valley, now suddenly menacing. He hadn’t given much 
thought as to where these people would go once he’d pulled them 
out of their collapsed town. Guilt and something else pricked his 
conscience.

“I suppose I could...” he trailed off. What could he do? Stay and 
rebuild their town? The idea was laughable. His job was search 
and rescue, and he’d done that. Besides, he had a life of his 
own... 

Gillian was waving at him dismissively. “Oh, no. It’s great and 
all, what you’ve done. I mean, it would have taken us weeks to 
move all of this rubble. Now we’re just looking at 
months...years...to put the place back together.”

She gave him a broad smile indicating her suggestion had been 
meant only to tease. But the gray eyes held something that looked 
like disapproval. Or maybe he saw in them a challenge. Whatever 
it was, inwardly he squirmed, discomfited.

“Nice to meet you, flyboy. Thanks for helping with the dog and 
all,” she said before turning away, leaving him gaping after her. 

Did she really expect him to stick around a small, remote village 
in the middle of the Colombian Andes? Didn’t she have any idea 
who he was? How many people out there needed him? That he had 
other places to go?

Clark watched her back as she headed up the pitted dirt road. The 
long rope of her braid swung back and forth like a pendulum, it’s 
red tie hypnotizing. 

<*Had* a life.>

“I’m staying,” he called after her before his mind could register 
what he was saying. A streak of obstinate pride bubbled out of 
the dullness he’d felt for the last month and a half. He was 
tired of being a person without a purpose.

Gillian kept walking, but her pace seemed to slow a bit. A small 
boy ran from his place leaning against one of the few buildings 
that remained mostly standing to intercept her. She leaned down 
to say something, and Clark caught only the word *agua* before 
the boy nodded his dark head enthusiastically and scampered off. 
Water. Gillian moved back to the center of the road and increased 
her pace.

He wondered for a minute if she’d even heard him and was ready to 
repeat his declaration when she raised the hand that didn’t 
contain wiggling brown puppy and gestured forward, in the 
direction she was heading.

“Well, in that case, you’d better come with me.”



Chapter 2 

~§~

After winding her way down the main road and up a side street, 
Gillian stopped when she reached a path leading to a small wooden 
shack. It leaned visibly to the left, and Clark wondered if its 
skewed orientation was a result of the earthquake. But as they 
neared the ramshackle building, he suspected that, if anything, 
the severe shaking had probably tipped it closer to plumb.

Shifting Luke from her right arm to her left, she dug deep into 
the pocket of her olive green cargo pants and pulled out a clutch 
of keys strung on a braid of colored string. The bright key ring 
contrasted with the filmy layer of dust that seemed to coat every 
surface, a rainbow against the drabness of devastation.

“I can’t offer you a hot shower, but I can at least get you some 
clean...cleaner...clothes,” she said as she tried to fit one of 
three keys she’d isolated into the rusted padlock holding the 
door closed. 

“I’m fine,” he insisted immediately, crossing his arms over his 
chest. He might be dusty, maybe even downright grimy, but so was 
everyone else. There was no reason that he could see for someone 
to sacrifice what might be his only spare change of clothes just 
so Clark could freshen up. 

Gillian stopped her struggle with the recalcitrant lock, turning 
to give him a hard glare. “OK, look. In that flashy outfit, you 
stand out like some sort of ‘shoot me’ target just begging for 
the FARC to use for practice. I’d hate to get hit with a bullet 
that was meant for you just because you wouldn’t change into 
something a tad less garish...”

Her mention of the FARC, Colombia’s largest and most deadly 
guerilla force, sent a shudder down his spine. Racking his brain, 
he tried to recall what he knew of Colombia and its political 
geography from reports in the Planet. Was this an area frequented 
by the vicious rebels? He glanced into the thick tangle of 
vegetation only a few hundred feet beyond the shack, almost 
expecting to see scores of automatic weapons pointed in his 
direction. 

Self-consciously, he looked down at himself, repeating her 
evaluation. She was right. The red cape and blue suit were oddly 
surreal against the deep greens of the surrounding forests and 
the browns and tans and dusty whites of everything else. In this 
environment, he was wholly inorganic, a target that could be 
spotted from miles away. 

If an innocent bystander died from a guerilla soldier’s wayward 
bullet simply because he refused to change, he’d never be able to 
forgive himself. It was one thing to place himself in danger and 
completely another to risk innocent lives.

“All right,” he agreed, tempted to spin into his own clothes 
right there so he wouldn’t spend another second endangering her. 
But he stopped, remembering. His own clothes were...Clark’s 
clothes. And Clark hadn’t arrived in San Pablo. Superman had. 

If he changed into his own clothes, he’d have to explain why he 
even had other clothes. Which would lead to explanations about 
Clark. About dual identities and secrets and a whole lot of other 
stuff. All of that seemed very complicated, and right now he was 
very much appreciating the simplicity of the situation. Superman, 
not Clark, had agreed to stick around, so Superman would. In 
borrowed clothes. 

Satisfied with his agreement to change, Gillian had returned her 
attention to the lock, going so far as to secure Luke between 
clamped calves so she could employ both hands toward the 
operation. Clark resisted the urge to reach around  her and snap 
the lock in two, guessing she wouldn’t appreciate his 
interference. 

Just as the lock finally succumbed, the young boy whom she’d 
spoken to earlier approached, lugging a battered plastic gallon 
jug. His thin arm strained with the weight, and he shifted the 
container from hand to hand. 

“*Gracias*, Antonio.” Gillian offered him a warm smile and 
accepted the jug. 

Antonio spared a sideways glance at Clark, taking in the suit. 
His dark eyes widened when the large man gave him a friendly 
grin. Olive skin reddening with embarrassment at being caught 
staring, he took off back down the road, his small legs pumping 
furiously.

The door scraped the cement floor as Gillian swung it open, and 
releasing her pressure against the puppy’s ribs, she allowed Luke 
to scamper into the shack. She followed, leaving Clark standing 
outside. Realizing he would receive no formal invitation, he 
stepped into the dim space, his eyes adjusting to the low light. 

Not much more than fifteen feet square, there were no interior 
walls at all save a low knee wall stretching a few feet out from 
the farthest end. The single room’s framework was exposed, studs 
placed at uneven intervals and planked vertically with weathered 
boards also of varying widths. Every so often the dingy gray 
walls were broken by a lighter board, an obvious replacement for 
a slab whose time had come and gone. 

The corrugated tin roof made up the shack’s ceiling, checkerboard 
lines of orange rust delineating where one sheet overlapped 
another and water found an easy path underneath. The room’s five 
windows had no glass, only screens which were in need of repair, 
several large holes and tears thoroughly defeating their intended 
purpose. A closed door led somewhere out the back of the whole 
structure.

Here and there a crack between the warped lumber allowed a thin 
sliver of light to slip into the room, and several open knots 
provided fist-sized peep holes. A few of the holes located at the 
lower levels had been stuffed with rags, and Clark thought of 
Antonio’s fascination with the *gringo loco*.

A dozen faded posters were hung in an eye-height ring around the 
room, for decoration or additional privacy he couldn’t be sure. 
From where he stood, he could make out the logos of several 
popular rock groups, time and environment altering them in a way 
that most bands would have probably found offensive. The Rolling 
Stones’ deep scarlet lips and tongue now a girlish bubble-gum 
pink, and certainly Pink Floyd had never intended for their prism 
to rest against a splotchy gray background. Even The Boss had not 
been spared, his classic Levis even more faded as he stood 
against the unfurled pink, white, and baby blue.

“Here. These should fit you. Brian was a pretty big guy, too.” 
Gillian’s comment interrupted his inspection of the posters. “And 
they’re as clean as anything else around here.”

He turned to see her standing next to an opened trunk and holding 
a stack of neatly folded clothes, which she thrust 
unceremoniously in his direction.

“Thank you.” He accepted the tan pants and a shirt that might 
once have been dark blue but had faded to something closer to 
denim. Who was Brian, he wondered, and wouldn’t he miss his 
clothes?

“You can change over there.” She jerked her head toward the knee 
wall, which offered privacy from only mid-thigh down. He lifted 
his eyebrows warily, and underneath the dirt smudges, he thought 
he detected her faint blush. “I promise, I won’t look.” 

As if to make good on her claim, she bent her head back into the 
trunk as if inspecting its remaining contents, continuing over 
her shoulder, “We’ll have to find you some sturdy boots. Maybe 
Jeff can get a pair in Silvia...Wow, that was really fast.”

He stood in the same exact spot, completely clothed except for 
his bare feet. Thankfully the pants fit although the shirt’s arms 
hung about two inches past his fingers. He avoided her gaze by 
focusing on rolling up his sleeves, shrugging off his spin. 
“Yeah, it’s just a thing I can do.”

She nodded slowly. “Like I was saying, Jeff can get you a pair of 
shoes when he goes in to Silvia. He’s usually there every other 
week, but he’ll go back sooner considering we’re going to need to 
replace a lot of stuff. In the meantime, I’m sure he has spare 
pair of Tevas.”

Before he could ask her what exactly Tevas were and if he really 
wanted someone’s spare pair, she reached into the trunk and 
extracted a scrap of cloth. “If you want to wash your face, you 
can use the water in the jug. It’s already been purified. Don’t 
use any other water until you boil it first. I’ll get you some 
Halazone tablets. You’re in luck. Here’s some soap.”

“I don’t think I need to worry about it, the water I mean. My 
system’s pretty...resistant to stuff like that.” He took the 
cloth which appeared to be some sort of towel, holding out his 
other hand to receive a yellowed bit of soap. It seemed this 
Brian person must have left in a hurry, leaving behind his 
toiletries and all.

“Suit yourself. Just don’t come crying to me if you pick up a 
nasty case of tumbo worms.” She shut the trunk with a firm bang 
and started to right the shack’s few furnishings.

While the walls and ceiling remained unaffected by the 
earthquake, the room’s contents had not faired so well. A narrow 
pallet had been tipped to its side, a ticking-stripe mattress 
flopped beside it. The table and one of its two chairs had been 
toppled, the other stalwart chair still upright, defiant against 
the force of the earth beneath it. Mounted on the wall over the 
trunk, a narrow shelf dangled from only one bracket, several 
ancient paperbacks allowed to slide down its newly formed slope 
to land in a heap beneath it.

Clark set himself to stacking the paperbacks, noting the titles 
absently. *War and Peace*, *Don Quixote*, and *The Unabridged 
Works of Charles Dickens* lay next to more modern classics such 
as Michener’s *Hawaii* and Keillor’s *Lake Woebegon Days*. The 
books were yellowed and well-worn, pages dog-eared and covers 
creased to fabric-like suppleness. And all of them were in 
English.

“So, you got a name?” Gillian had righted the pallet to its 
correct horizontal position and replaced the mattress. She was 
rummaging inside the trunk once again, and she issued her 
question without looking up.

“Cl...” he started, then caught himself. Dressed in the suit, it 
had been simple. Now, he was going to have to remember. Clark 
wasn’t there. 

Worried she might have heard his near-miss, he straightened up, 
infusing his posture with Superman confidence and his voice with 
an authoritative casualness. “Superman.”

“No, I mean a real name.” She pulled a brightly stripe blanket 
out of the trunk and snapped it smartly to unfold it, sending a 
cloud of dust swirling through the air. “I can’t have a 
conversation with someone called ‘super’ anything.”

He paused only a second, considering his options, which numbered 
none. “Nope. Just Superman.” 

With that declaration, something inside him was liberated. Clark 
and all of his problems were abandoned. At least for a little 
while, he could live in the skin of his simpler persona. No 
glasses or unconfessed secrets. No destroyed Daily Planet. No 
upcoming wedding tragedy. Just Superman and his super abilities 
sticking around to help out those in need.

“Hmmm.” She stopped smoothing the blanket over the pallet to 
study him for a minute, her gray eyes narrowing.

Under her scrutiny, he felt a deep flush creep over his skin. 
Could she tell he was hiding something? Without the suit, he felt 
like an imposter. A man claiming to be Superman but with no real 
proof. He suddenly had the ridiculous urge to prove himself, 
maybe lift the pallet with his pinky finger or float about the 
room. He resisted it, and when she returned to her chore, he let 
out the deep breath he’d been holding. 

“So, what else can you do? I mean besides move entire towns and 
change your clothes faster than Luke there is gonna eat his 
dinner.”

Clark thought a minute. He was Superman, even dressed in the 
borrowed pants and shirt. There was no reason to downplay any of 
his abilities. Again, another surge of liberation raced through 
him. Not since he’d left Smallville and his parents’ home had he 
felt so free to just be himself. 

“I have really good hearing. And I can...heat things. With my 
eyes,” he clarified. At her bland look, he squirmed, suddenly 
feeling silly. “Plus there’s the flying...” he trailed of 
helplessly.

“I see. Bet that comes in handy,” she said, clearly unimpressed. 
“And that’s what you do all day? You just fly around lifting 
stuff and waiting for people to need you to heat up things?”

“No. I have another job.” 

As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he could draw them 
out of the air and put them back inside. She’d just painted such 
a ridiculous picture, an image of him sitting by the phone or 
something, waiting to be needed. Besides, maintaining his 
Superman front when he wasn’t wearing that damn suit didn’t come 
naturally. He needed the costume to maintain character. 

Already he’d fallen into Clark’s more relaxed speech patterns, 
the casualness slipping over him like the comfortable clothes. 
But since she had no comparisons to make, no nagging question 
about why Superman’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, he pushed 
that worry aside. After all, how often did Superman hang around 
to make extended small talk? His conversations had been pretty 
limited to “What’s the problem, here?” and “I’ve got things under 
control.” How did one infuse unwavering confidence into 
discussions about the weather and where home was?

“Really?” she asked, looking slightly intrigued, and he started 
to feel a little less stupid. But then she ruined it. “Do you 
wear your cape to work?”

“I don’t...I’m not...nothing,” he stammered, flustered by both 
her teasing and his sudden realization that this whole living as 
Superman might prove to be as difficult as living as Clark. For 
once his very normalcy made him the outsider rather than his 
superpowers. How odd it was to hide his identity in reverse.

What he needed to do was avoid talking about himself. Ever. 
Starting now by changing the subject. Quickly. “So, what is this 
place?”

Gillian took mercy on him and didn’t press. “Abandoned PCV shack. 
We use it to house visitors, those couple we get.”

“PCV?” he echoed.

“Peace Corps volunteer,” she translated. She’d moved behind the 
knee wall which concealed a cupboard and a two-burner electric 
hotplate. “They hauled it out of here when the guerillas took 
over the region. Government deemed it too dangerous. Of course, 
some of them refused to go. Jeff, for one. And Brian stuck around 
for a while until he got a job in Bogotá.”

“How about you? Did you come in with the Peace Corps?” Clark 
asked, wondering why anyone would stay in an area the government 
had rejected as too dangerous.

“Nope. Doctors Without Borders.”

“You’re a doctor?” Jeff had mentioned she ran the clinic. It made 
sense, that she would be a doctor. But she seemed far too young. 
Surely she couldn’t be even as old than he was.

“Nurse. Almost a nurse practitioner, which for these desperate 
folks is close enough. They don’t waste doctors on towns this 
small.” When he gave her a puzzled look, she explained. “My 
father’s a doctor. He came down here two years ago as a Doctors 
Without Borders volunteer, and I came with him.”

Clark blinked, wondering at a father who would bring his daughter 
into such a hostile environment. “Is your father still – ”

She shook her head. “After his tour was up, he headed back home. 
I decided to hang around for a while even though he tried to drag 
me back to the states kicking and screaming.”

His opinion of her father softened immediately. “So if you’re not 
an ex-Peace Corps volunteer and not here with Doctors Without 
Borders, who are you with?”

“Technically, I’m a member of the ICRC.” She reached inside the 
neck of her shirt and extracted a leather lanyard with a 
laminated rectangle affixed to its end. Flipping it from the 
faded identification side where he could make out a picture of 
what he supposed was her, she exposed the bright red cross on a 
solid white background. “I came to San Pablo about sixteen months 
ago with a Red Cross inoculation team and decided to stay on and 
help with the new clinic that was being built. Of course, I guess 
now I’m kind of unnecessary since there isn’t a clinic any more.” 

The puzzle started to fit together. Still, he wondered why anyone 
would choose to stay in a country so riddled with problems and 
violence. Perhaps there was some connection between her and Jeff 
that kept her in San Pablo. Or it could just be that she was 
stubborn, digging in to stay in a place others had told her to 
abandon. From what he’d seen in just that single day, Gillian 
didn’t seem to be a girl who took kindly to being told what to 
do. 

Much like another woman he knew.

Before his mind could edge too close to dangerous territory and 
the overwhelming melancholy it would bring down upon him, he 
forced his thoughts to stay in the present. 

“Why almost?” he asked.

“Huh?” Gillian grunted as she stacked a battered skillet and 
dented pan before shoving them back into the cupboard.

“Why ‘almost’ a nurse practitioner? Why not all the way?”

She shrugged as she stood up and brushed her hands together. “I 
left the masters program with one year left to go.”

“Why’d you do that?” he asked. “Seems kind of crazy to stop after 
all of that if you only had a year left.”

She stared at him, frozen. Like storm clouds rising out of 
nowhere to block the sun, her gray eyes darkened and her face 
became rigid. Even her tone had hardened, her voice wooden. “It’s 
really none of your business.”

“No, I guess not,” he said, a bit taken aback by her abrupt 
change in demeanor. “Sorry.”

An uneasy tension settled over the room, and for the next fifteen 
minutes, Clark avoided looking in Gillian’s direction. If he’d 
had another place to go, he would have left the shack all 
together. 

Instead he searched the wall for the nails needed to reattach the 
fallen shelf’s bracket. With a firm press of his thumb, he 
straightened them and then tapped them into place. While he 
replaced the paperbacks, Gillian turned on the single lamp whose 
light bulb had miraculously survived the quake, chasing the 
oncoming dusk away with a harsh, glaring light. 

Finally she broke the silence. “Listen, I think we’ve gotten you 
settled here, so I’m going to take off. Bathroom’s out that way, 
but don’t expect too much.” She indicated the closed door leading 
out the back. “And watch out for snakes.”

He recalled that she had said this shack was used to house 
visitors, and it now became clear she meant for him to sleep in 
it. But her own bed had been buried, and it wouldn’t do for her 
to remain homeless when this room could be used. 

“I think maybe you should stay here,” he said, “since your house 
was destroyed by the quake – ”

She shook her head. “Nah, my house is fine. It’s wood like this 
one, so it’s pretty tossed up on the inside, but at least it’s 
still standing.”

“You said your bed was buried under ten feet of dust.”

“I tend to exaggerate sometimes,” she admitted wryly. “So, you 
still going to be here in the morning?”

At first he thought she was joking, but the serious expression on 
her face said otherwise.

“I said I was staying,” he told her, a bit offended she’d doubted 
his intentions. Didn’t she know that Superman was all about truth 
and justice and all of that responsibility stuff?

“What about that other job?” she asked, her arms crossing over 
her chest. She still wasn’t convinced. “Aren’t they going to miss 
you after a while if you just don’t show up?”

He thought a minute, this time remembering to give as little 
detail as possible. “Let’s just say I’m on a sabbatical.” 

It was sort of true. And it sounded a heck of a lot better than 
being between jobs. Or that a ruthless homicidal madman had blown 
up the building for some twisted reason that Clark hadn’t been 
able to prove but suspected had something to do with the fact 
that he was about to marry the woman Clark loved.

“Oh, a *sabbatical*,” she repeated with a chuckle. “Well, then we 
are lucky. Instead of studying the mating habits of daytime TV 
soap stars and consuming copious amounts of fine wine and cheese, 
you’re going to grace us with your precious time.” 

“You don’t really have a very high opinion of people who just 
want to help out, do you? Or is it just me who brings out your 
good side?” 

“No offense,” she said without rancor. “I’ve just seen it happen 
before. Some glory hound swoops in for all of the initial drama 
and photo ops, then leaves with the media while the rest of us 
stick around and get our hands dirty.”

He supposed he should take exception to her subtle dig. In truth, 
he found her skepticism far more curious than offensive. She 
obviously had no idea who Superman was. “Are you implying I do 
this kind of stuff just for media attention?”

“Of course not,” she told him with no hint of apology. “But when 
was the last time you stuck around after the last interview was 
finished?”

“If I stayed after every disaster, I wouldn’t be able to help 
very many people,” he stated pointedly.

She nodded slowly, as if accepting his rationale for hit-and-run 
rescues. “That sounds reasonable. I’m just wondering, how many of 
those people you help would you be able to pick out of a crowd 
today? And are you sure, after you left, that they were really 
all right? Sometimes it’s more about quality than quantity.”

He’d never thought of his efforts to help people in quite that 
way. True, he did appear for the immediate rescue, but he’d never 
stuck around long enough to face what came after the catastrophe. 
The rebuilding of destroyed homes and schools and clinics. 
Destroyed lives.

The same obstinate pride that had offered up the “I’m staying” 
poked him in the ribs, pushing him to accept her implied 
challenge.

“All right, I’ll stick around this time. As long as you need me. 
Or at least until we get things up and running again,” he 
qualified. Her definition of need and his were probably two 
entirely different things.

“Yeah, well it’s easy to make that kind of promise when you can 
just fly out of here any time you want. Slip home to take a 
shower. Catch a ballgame on TV. Maybe you ought to hold off on 
any kind of long term commitments.”

He laughed at her cynicism. “What if I promised not to leave? Not 
to fly anywhere unless I had to handle some kind of an 
emergency?”

She shrugged. “I give you two days. Week at the outset.”

“Is that a challenge?” he asked, arms crossed over his chest in 
his most responsible Superman pose.

“No, it’s reality,” she answered pragmatically. “Listen, flyboy, 
around here, you learn pretty quick what it’s all about. People 
don’t just drop out of the sky and solve all of your problems. 
I’m not counting on anything.”

He wasn’t sure what to say. In his year of being Superman, he’d 
never met anyone so immune to his presence, so unimpressed with 
his abilities or unassuming in their expectations of him. Just by 
arriving on the scene, he’d always commanded respect and 
admiration; he’d never had to prove his good intentions. Maybe as 
Clark he had, especially to one certain person. But never as 
Superman. Even she – he let himself think her name, steeling 
himself against the twinge it would inflict inside his chest – 
even Lois had instantly admired the superhero. He’d had to earn 
nothing, his mere existence inspiring her love and devotion. The 
irony was almost laughable.

But that’s what this woman needed. He was going to have to earn 
Gillian’s respect the hard way. Her way. 

Before she walked out the door, Luke scrambling around her heels, 
she turned to give him a wry smile. “Welcome to Colombia, Sam.”

“Sam?” Clark glanced around the room, confused. Who the heck was 
Sam?

“Yeah. You didn’t really expect me to call you Superman?” And 
with her explanation, she was gone.

Now alone, Clark sat down at the table, taking in the small space 
that had just become his temporary home. The light from the 
single lamp cast his shadow long on the walls. Outside, the chirp 
and whine of insects was almost deafening, far louder even than 
he remembered ever hearing in Kansas. 

Still, there was an over presence of peace. The calm was strange 
after the chaos of the past two days. He rubbed the back of his 
neck. How had he managed to get himself into this mess?

He’d stay a week. Get some homes built so the people in San Pablo 
would be safe from the elements and the guerilla factions. Then 
he’d go back to Metropolis. Where he belonged.



Chapter 3

~§~

“*Hola, *señor* Sam!”

The greeting followed him as he made his way down the washboard 
road, every dark face calling out a hello with the addition of a 
wide smile. Clark lifted a hand in friendly salute. After a 
month, he was almost able to greet each person by name.

“Sam” had caught on immediately. The natives of San Pablo found 
the common name far easier to use than “Superman”. For his part, 
Clark didn’t mind. It actually helped him remember that in San 
Pablo, he wasn’t Clark Kent but rather Superman, despite the fact 
that he wore normal clothes and walked most places rather than 
flew.

Besides, it also meant they no longer referred to him as *gringo 
loco*, except on occasion when he’d do something particularly 
peculiar. Like the time after the first big rain, when he’d waded 
into the middle of the small river flowing past San Pablo so that 
he could wash his red boots of the thick mud caked nearly all the 
way to their tops. Since then, he’d acquired a pair of waterproof 
boots, an absolute necessity when the rain turned roads and paths 
to a dark, viscous muck. The red boots had joined his cape, 
stashed in the trunk in his shack.

But morning the sun shown warmly on his back, allowing him to 
forgo any boots. He now owned his own pair of Tevas, having 
learned first hand that the open-strap sport sandals proved 
extremely comfortable and surprisingly durable in the mild 
climate. 

As he made his way to the day’s work site, he passed by rows of 
wooden molds packed tightly with the precise mixture of clay, 
sand, water and straw necessary to make adobe bricks that 
wouldn’t crack or crumble. Each row was marked, the exact number 
of days the bricks had been curing in the shade of the banana 
trees carefully accounted for. 

Clark had quickly learned what generations of experience had 
already taught the villagers of San Pablo. Adobe bricks required 
a good ten days to cure. No amount of heat-vision or speed-drying 
could change that. In fact, any forced drying made the bricks too 
brittle and prone to crumble. He’d found it humbling to learn 
that despite his powers, there were still many things Mother 
Nature held firmly in her grasp and refused to allow to be 
improved.

So Superman, the world’s strongest, fastest being, had set 
himself to learning the fine art of brick laying. And after four 
weeks, he now moved about the grounds comfortably, taking up the 
tools he’d learned to wield if not expertly, at least with a 
modicum of skill. The six other men working along side him gave 
him hearty nods and wide grins, their acceptance of “Sam” 
complete and well earned over the past weeks.

He made quick work of stacking bricks onto the wall he was 
building, closely scrutinized by the men who happened by the site 
and felt perfectly at ease pointing out flaws or potential 
problems with his work. He took their criticism seriously, 
removing poorly placed bricks when necessary in order to make the 
walls sturdy and straight. 

Their input hadn’t always been so welcome, and as he worked, 
placing layer upon layer with careful precision, he thought back 
over those first few days. They’d been incredibly hard, the 
clean-up effort not so much physically taxing as mentally 
draining. Each pile of crumbled adobe represented a family’s 
home, a life’s worth of belongings destroyed. 

The rubble had been diligently sorted before being removed. Large 
chunks of stone and bricks were carefully set aside to be 
recycled in new buildings or to repair those suffering less 
severe damage. While the men picked through the ruins, the women 
rummaged through as well, extracting personal possessions that 
retained usefulness despite their dusty condition. Clothing, 
beautifully woven baskets, the few precious family heirlooms, and 
more mundane items such as pots and pans were carried away to be 
cleaned and put to good use once again.

And what was left after every useful item had been culled from 
the destruction was dumped into the deep ravine a quarter of a 
mile beyond San Pablo’s western edge. Wagon load after wagon load 
of crumbled adobe was carted away, and slowly the damage of the 
earthquake was cleared to make room for a fresh start. 

The whole process certainly stood as a metaphor for what Clark 
felt he had gone through, albeit with less success. Nothing much 
of value had been scavenged from the wreckage of his own life. 
But at least for a little while, he’d been afforded a chance to 
make a fresh start.

He wasn’t sure if he found it an absolute relief or amazingly 
depressing that once his decision had been made to stick around 
for a while, it was a simple matter of making it so. With the 
destruction of the Daily Planet, so much of his life had been 
wiped away that not much was left for cleaning up. With not much 
more than a phone call and the price of a few air mail stamps, 
he’d neatly sewn up the loose ends of Clark Kent’s life in 
Metropolis.

From a phone kiosk in Silvia, he’d called his parents. 

“Mom?”

“Clark?” His mother’s voice slid from worry into reprimand 
without pause. “Honey, I was starting to get worried about you!”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized instantly.

“I saw about that earthquake in Colombia on the news, but I 
though for sure you’d be back by now. I left a couple of messages 
at your apartment.”

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I haven’t been home yet,” he explained.

“Haven’t been home...?” she exclaimed, her worry for her son 
shifting to the unfortunate victims of the earthquake. “Heavens, 
is it that bad?”

“No, I just got...sidetracked a bit.”

“Oh, well that’s good. And anyway, we’ll see you on Sunday – ”

“Actually, that’s why I called,” he interrupted, steeling himself 
for her reaction. “I don’t think I’m going to make it on Sunday. 
I’m going to stick around here for a while.”

“Where?” she asked, and less than a second later, exclaimed, “In 
Colombia?”

“Yeah.”

“Clark, drug dealers live in Colombia. It’s such a dangerous 
place...”

He rolled his eyes. “Mom.”

“I know. I know.” Her chuckle over her own irrelevant concern 
made him smile. “But I’m still your mother, and I worry you 
know.”

A sharp hiss of static distorted the line for a second, and 
afraid that his connection might end, Clark got down to business. 
“Listen, I’ve sent Perry and Jimmy and Jack your phone number. 
Told them that if they need to reach me they should just call 
you.”

“Perry and Jimmy?” She paused a moment, the significance of that 
comment sinking in. “Just how long are you planning to be away?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted “A week. Maybe a few.”

“Oh no,” she groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re going to start living 
out of that old suitcase again?”

“Mom, I’m not roaming around. This isn’t like the days before the 
Planet.” He rushed to assure her, knowing how happy his parents 
had been when he’d finally decided to stay put in Metropolis 
after his years of wandering. “I’m staying in a small village. In 
a real...house...not some seedy hotel.”

It was sort of true. His shack was dilapidated but not seedy.

“What about Lois?”

He paused, just long enough to let the wave of pain subside. 
“What about her?”

“Does she know how to reach you?”

“Lois won’t need to reach me,” he stated firmly, the pain making 
way for the anger that always seemed to follow close on its 
heels. “She made her feelings pretty clear. She’s Lex Luthor’s 
problem now.”

“Clark,” his mother admonished, “Lois is your friend...”

“*Was*, Mom. Lois *was* my friend,” he clarified. “I don’t really 
want to hear about her wedding plans or where she and Luthor plan 
to live. And since we don’t work together any more, we don’t have 
that much in common anyway.”

She didn’t say anything, and he could imagine her disapproving 
frown. He knew he sounded petulant and selfish, but for once he 
needed to look after his own heart for a while. Besides, he had 
nothing to say to Lois. Not any more.

“Well, you can still come home, can’t you?” Martha asked.

Clark thought of Gillian’s jibe. Sure, it was easy to stick 
around when you could always pop home for a shower or a hot meal. 
Between wanting to prove her wrong and needing to isolate himself 
from anything he might inadvertently hear about the upcoming 
Luthor nuptials, he found himself shaking his head.

“I don’t think I’ll be home for a while. Unless you and Dad need 
me, of course. It’s just a lot easier this way.”

“Oh, Clark,” Martha started, and Clark could hear the sympathy in 
her voice.

“Listen, can I talk to Dad?” he asked, before she could launch 
into a lecture about needing to be with family. He really didn’t 
want to hurt her feelings, but for the moment, his mind was made 
up.

There was a long pause before she agreed. “Sure. Honey, you take 
care of yourself, OK?”

He promised her he would, and after an exchanged “I love you,” 
waited until his dad’s voice came on the line.

“Hey, Dad.”

“So, son, what’s this I’m hearing about you not coming home?” 
Jonathan Kent asked.

“I need a breather. Some time away before I decide what I want to 
do next. I’m going to stay here and help out for a while,” he 
explained again, knowing that after they hung up, his parents 
would analyze everything he’d told each of them, cross checking 
notes and deciding if they needed to panic over their son’s 
wayward tendencies.

“What about Metropolis?” his father asked. “Don’t you think 
they’re going to miss Superman?”

Clark had given that some thought and hadn’t been able to 
completely evade the guilt in abandoning his adopted city. Still, 
he didn’t plan to be gone forever, so he shoved it aside, giving 
his father all of the rationalizations he’d given himself. 

“I’ve sent a letter to the Metropolis Star. From Superman, just 
saying that he’s been called away on some urgent business. After 
a year, I figure I’m entitled to a vacation. Besides, Metropolis 
managed to stand for a couple hundred years before I showed up. I 
imagine it’ll be there when I get back.”

“I suppose,” his father said noncommittally.

“Listen, I don’t have easy access to a phone,” Clark said, “so I 
don’t want you to worry if you don’t hear from me. I’ll give you 
the number of the Red Cross headquarters in Popayán. They’ll know 
how to reach me if it’s an emergency.”

He gave his father the appropriate phone number and the address 
for good measure. During his travels, there had often been times 
when he’d been unreachable for several weeks on end, so he didn’t 
worry too much about the lack of contact. The Kents relied on the 
“no news is good news” philosophy, so unless a true emergency 
cropped up, his remoteness shouldn’t pose a problem.

“Clark, do you know what you’re doing?” Jonathan asked, and Clark 
thought he detected a note of concern in his father’s voice.

“No, Dad, I don’t,” he admitted with a sigh. “I just know that 
right now, staying here makes about as much sense as anything 
else in my life. At least here I can be of some use instead of 
moping around waiting for Lois’s wedding."

Then, feeling the need to lighten the mood a bit, Clark pushed 
aside his maudlin thoughts and forced a brightness into his 
voice. "Besides, I’m learning a new trade. The fine art of 
bricklaying. Did you know that adobe bricks take ten days to cure 
and no amount of super-heating can speed it up?”

“What?” his father exclaimed with a booming laugh. “The boy who 
practically had to be tied down to do chores around the farm is 
now working construction?”

Clark laughed. “Pretty much! It’s hard though. A lot of the stuff 
I can do isn’t much good around here. It’s pretty humbling, but 
it’s also kind of nice. I feel almost normal.”

“Clark, you are normal,” his father reminded him.

He thought a moment, understanding for the first time the appeal 
of staying in this tiny, remote village where no one had ever 
heard of Superman. “Well, to these people I am, anyway.”

~§~

But being normal had its down side, Clark had come to find out. 
Especially when he steadfastly determined to tough it out no 
matter how bad things seemed.

The first two weeks had been difficult at best, miserable at 
their worst. Trying to communicate with the locals proved hard 
despite his fluency in Spanish. They used a dialect that 
contained much of the native Indian languages of the region. For 
nearly a full week, they seemed almost afraid of him despite the 
fact that the *Diablo* cape lay folded neatly in the trunk in his 
room. And the children still kept a wide berth as he wandered 
about the town.

Also frustrating was his inability to really use his powers to 
their fullest extent. Yes, his strength made the removal of 
debris a fairly easy task, but he was limited by the narrow, 
twisting road and thick vegetation covering the ravine. He 
couldn’t just fly in with a wagon load and dump it. Much like the 
rest of the men, he could do not much more than help load the 
wagons then assist the horses as they made their slow journey 
back and forth to the ravine. And like everyone else, he had to 
simply wait for the adobe bricks to cure in their own due time.

Several times he’d thought of forgetting his promise to Gillian 
and heading back to Metropolis. He hadn’t seen much of her while 
the majority of the clean-up had occurred, her own work attending 
to injuries keeping her tucked inside the temporary clinic set up 
in one of the few buildings that could be made stable with 
minimal repair. Sometimes she would pass by the work site to 
speak with Jeff, lifting her eyebrows in surprise when she’d 
glance at Clark, as if she couldn’t believe he was still there. 
That look was what caused him to stagger back to his shack at the 
end of each day rather than take off straight into the sky.

Jeff Phillips, on the other hand, had proven indispensable in 
showing Clark the ways of village life. After he had gotten over 
the shock of learning that Superman himself was going to help in 
the recovery of San Pablo, Jeff had nearly tripped over himself 
to accommodate their celebrity guest. 

As they worked side by side, Clark learned that Jeff was the 
product of a marriage between a Colombian school teacher from 
Cartagena and an American DEA agent. His family had left Colombia 
when he was very young, and he grew up in the United States. 
After attending law school, he’d wanted to return to his mother’s 
native home and try to assist the impoverished farmers who often 
found themselves victims caught between Colombia’s drug cartels 
and its government.

But after years of frustration, he’d abandon the system, deciding 
he could do more good if he actually rolled up his sleeves and 
went out among those he most wanted to help. He’d joined the 
Peace Corps, refusing to leave when the US government pulled the 
program out of Colombia. Instead he remained in San Pablo 
teaching at the school and doing whatever else the village 
required of him, often acting as liaison between the people and 
the government officials in Popayán.

Clark instantly liked the sincere, easy-going man. Although 
supremely well-learned, Jeff certainly didn’t hold himself above 
the uneducated folks in San Pablo. Not even the most menial task 
was beneath him, and Clark noticed that nearly everyone in the 
village looked to Jeff for assistance and wished to please him in 
return.

In fact, Clark was sure that it was Jeff who arranged for the 
daily visits by the women of San Pablo, all bearing large 
platters of food just as Clark was sinking wearily onto his 
pallet, his stomach complaining loudly. Where they managed to 
cook it he never figured out, but it seemed they were on a 
mission to be sure he didn’t starve.

Even as his days became a bit easier, Clark’s nights remained as 
torturous as they had been in Metropolis. Tossing and turning on 
the narrow pallet, his head unsupported by a pillow, he found it 
nearly impossible to find rest despite the hard work of the day. 

Once he slipped into a fitful sleep, images of Lois and Lex 
Luthor as he had last seen them together floated through his 
dreams. Lois’s agreement to marry the villain, her warm reception 
of the kiss Luthor had given her upon her acceptance. And as if 
he watched it all for the first time, he could feel the agony of 
his shattering heart through the veil of unconsciousness, the 
pain so real and sharp that it pulled him awake

Even worse were the dreams where Lois declared her love to him, 
vowing that she would love him even if he were an ordinary man, 
only to turn against him when she learned that her hero was none 
other than Clark Kent. Her fists pounded against his chest as he 
tried to hold her, her words of love becoming shouts of hatred. 
The only difference now was that sometimes she shouted at him in 
Spanish.

It had been after one such fitful night, somewhere around his 
fifth or sixth day in San Pablo, that he’d hit his lowest point 
and had considered abandoning the place, promise to Gillian be 
damned. He was tired. He was frustrated. But mostly, he was sick 
of feeling incompetent.

He’d taken to purifying his water, not so much because he worried 
for his own health, but if someone were to actually visit his 
shack, he needed to have clean drinking water. Heating the water 
to boil for fifteen minutes wasn’t always convenient, so he 
determined it would be a good idea to have on hand some of the 
Halazone tablets Gillian had mentioned. 

Rubbing his stiff neck with a harsh scowl, he headed toward her 
place to fetch a supply. 

Her house stood down the hill from the flattened clinic. Made of 
wood, it had survived the earthquake relatively unscathed and 
indeed looked quite a bit more sturdy than Clark’s. In addition 
to the vertical planks that lined the interior, horizontal boards 
encircled the entire structure, offering a sense of solidness 
that Clark’s shack lacked. While his looked as if a strong breeze 
might blow it over, hers had a permanence to it, only one step 
removed from an actual adobe house that spelled a long term stay.

As he approached, a young boy darted out the door and ran toward 
the main street. Clark recognized him as the same kid who’d 
fetched the water that very first day.

Gillian was shaking her head, her hands akimbo on her hips as she 
surveyed the room. “That boy. He’s going to be the death of me. I 
think this place was cleaner before he showed up to clean it. 
Come on in.”

The puppy she’d named Luke scampered over to Clark to give his 
hand a friendly lick while Clark took in the room with a cynical 
frown. His general bad mood and lack of sleep cast his view of 
pretty much everything in a negative light. It looked clean 
enough to him.

“Bit...imperialistic, don’t you think?” he noted bitingly, 
slightly disgusted that she’d take advantage of a kid by making 
him clean her house. “Having locals clean your room. Fetch your 
water.”

She fixed him with a hard stare. “I pay Antonio to do this to my 
house.” Her arms made a broad sweep of a poorly made bed and 
piles of dust scattered across the stone floor. “And then I pay 
his sister, Alicia, to come in and undo it. They make more money 
cleaning for me for a half an hour once a week than they would if 
they dropped out of school to pick coffee beans all day. So I 
don’t quite see it as imperialistic.”

Firmly embarrassed by both his misunderstanding and his blatant 
rudeness, Clark shifted his gaze away from her pointed glare and 
made a show of inspecting her house. Despite the shabby job 
Antonio had done, it actually looked quite inviting.

Larger than his own shack, it still consisted of but one room 
minus the posters and the gaps and peep-hole knots. The walls had 
been painted, so instead of weathered gray, they were white 
giving the entire space a clean, open feel. A braided rag-rug in 
a riot of colors covered a healthy portion of the stone floor. 
Printed curtains hung at the windows, all of which had screens 
free of any tears or holes, their obvious patches evidence of the 
care taken to keep them in good repair.

Adding to the entire sense of permanence, Gillian’s home 
contained real furniture, albeit pieces that had a very hand-me-
down feel. Instead of a pallet, she possessed a genuine full-
sized bed tucked into the far corner. Covered with the same 
native-style wool blanket as his own pallet, he noted wryly that 
she had pillows. And not just one, but two. Mosquito netting 
cascaded from the beams above the bed, providing backup 
protection for those pests the screens failed to keep out.

A low shelving unit against one wall contained both paperbacks 
and hardback books stacked haphazardly as if she had never gotten 
around to actually putting them away. On top of the shelf sat a 
shortwave radio, and angled near it was a battered recliner that 
looked far too nefarious to actually sit in. A dresser leaned 
against another wall, a jar of flowers sitting atop it lending 
both fragrance and bright colors to the room. 

Like Clark, she possessed a table, but her elevated status 
afforded her four chairs instead of his mere two. And she had two 
lamps, both with lampshades. Truly a sign of luxury.

Most intriguing of all was what appeared to be a disemboweled 
motorcycle of some sort resting in the corner. Spread over a 
tattered rag that looked as if it might once have been a tee 
shirt were springs and gears and other parts unknown. The 
amputated wheels leaned against the wall, and the bike’s frame 
rested on its kickstand like some kind of skeleton hanging in a 
physician’s office.

“What’s that?” he asked, hoping that if he acted as if he hadn’t 
done it, she would ignore his rudeness of moments earlier. 

She followed the line of his gaze. “A motorbike.”

“Bet it’s kind of hard to ride like that.”

“I’m cleaning it.”

“Cleaning it?” He snorted. “Looks like you killed it.”

“Hardly. She’ll be purring like a kitten soon enough.” When he 
continued to look at her skeptically, she shrugged. “I just got a 
little sidetracked with, you know, stuff.”

“*You’re* going to put that thing back together?”

“Yep.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head 
slightly, giving him a broad grin. “Let me guess, you’re a big 
time Harley biker who can’t believe that a little girl like me 
might actually know something about motorcycles?”

“Hey, I’m not saying anything,” he said quickly. “That just looks 
like an awful lot of parts.”

“It’s amazing what you pick up once you leave Grosse Pointe, 
Michigan,” she said with a laugh. “If you stick around long 
enough, I may even give you a ride.”

He nearly choked on his laughter, the thought of riding the 
twisting roads of the Andes on a motorbike that currently lay in 
about a thousand pieces a hard concept to imagine. “I think I’ll 
stick with flying.”

“Now who’s challenging who?” she asked. But he noticed a distinct 
twinkle in her gray eyes.

Pulling himself up to his full height, he crossed his arms over 
his chest. “I tell you what, if you ever get that thing to run 
again, I’ll let you give me a ride on it. I have a feeling San 
Pablo will have a few skyscrapers by then.”

She laughed. “OK, it’s a deal.”

He grasped the hand she extended, giving it a firm shake to seal 
the promise. For a long minute they stood there, looking at each 
other expectantly. 

“Did you need something?” she asked finally. “I mean, I love to 
have company, but I’m sure you didn’t just drop in to discuss 
motorcycle repair.”

“Um, yes,” he said, his mind coming back to the reason for his 
visit. “You mentioned some Halazone tablets. I was wondering if I 
could have a few.”

“Oh, sure.” She moved to a mounted cupboard in her small 
kitchenette, calling over her shoulder as she fetched the 
tablets. “Decided to heed my warning, huh? I’m telling you, I’ve 
never had them, but I’ve seen the results. You don’t want to mess 
with those tropical parasites and worms.”

While she rummaged for the tablets, he moved across the living 
area to a desk where a dusty CD player sat surrounded by stacks 
of CDs. Absently, he shifted through a pile, finding quite an 
eclectic mix. Van Morrison. Garth Brooks. Prince’s *Purple Rain*. 
Two framed photos smiled out at the world, one of an older couple 
he guessed must be Gillian’s parents. The other showed a teenage 
Gillian standing arms linked with a teenage boy and two older 
men. She wore a cheerleader’s uniform, and he lifted the picture, 
trying to imagine what would bring a girl like her to this remote 
part of the world.

“I’m the only girl.”

“What?” he said with a flush, a bit embarrassed to be caught 
snooping.

“Those are my brothers.” She indicated the picture with a nod of 
her head. “I’m the only girl in the Brooks family.” 

“They teach you about motorbikes?” Clark asked, placing the 
picture back on the desk.

She laughed. “No. I think between the three of them they might 
have been able to figure out where to put the gas. They’re what 
I’d call intellectual types. Here’s the tablets.”

"Thanks." He accepted the tablets that she handed to him, then 
shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “Um, I guess I’d better get 
back to work.”

She nodded and gave him a smile. “Ok, see ya then. Stop on by any 
time.”

Shaking his head, he pocketed the tablets and headed for the work 
site. She certainly was an odd mix. He just couldn’t determine 
what she thought of him. Nor exactly what he thought of her.

Enough adobe bricks had been cured that building had started on 
the destroyed home and cantina of a woman named Rosita. Since 
Rosita didn’t have a husband and relied on the income from the 
cantina to feed herself and her two children, it had been deemed 
a priority. 

The debris had been cleared to reveal a cement slab on which the 
adobe walls were to be built. Clark eyed the stack of pale 
bricks, thinking that surely it couldn’t be too difficult of a 
job. He imagined that by the end of the day, they’d have all four 
walls standing since he could speed the process along. Grabbing a 
brick in each hand, he turned to the man named José, indicating 
that he was ready to start.

After many exaggerated gestures and a few rows of demonstration, 
José backed away, motioning for Clark to give it a try. 
Determined to prove himself competent at something, he carefully 
but quickly stacked row after row of bricks, making sure to put 
just the right amount of adhesive mud between each layer. The 
morning passed quickly, and by mid afternoon, he stood back to 
admire the head-high wall he’d constructed. 

But as the other men stopped to examine his work, Clark noticed 
that the wall seem to waver back and forth, the sway picking up 
intensity until, with an ear-splitting crash, the whole thing 
flopped away from him as if he’d placed his hands against it and 
shoved. An entire day of work now lay in ruin.

When the dust settled, the loud riotous tumble of falling adobe 
made way for silence. For an extended minute, everyone stared at 
the pile of broken bricks that had almost become a wall, the 
horror on their faces turning into one of amusement. Their shock 
turned to smiles, which turned to barely concealed chuckles and 
then full-out laughter.

Clark turned on his heel and strode directly to his shack with 
the sounds of hilarity ringing behind him. 

The wooden door ricocheted back open after he slammed it shut. He 
looked around in distaste at the dingy shack, the gray walls and 
faded posters that were long overdue to be tossed into the 
garbage can.

“Don’t even have a blasted pillow,” he muttered angrily. “What I 
would give for a decent shower. Or a blasted slice of pizza.”

He turned to see Gillian, her arms crossed over her chest as she 
leaned against the door frame. A bemused smile twitched on her 
lips.

“What’s the problem, flyboy? Hard work getting to you?” she asked 
cheerfully.

Clark scowled, in too foul of a mood to take her bait. He really 
wanted to be left alone. Or better yet, to fly away from this 
place and just forget about it. If he never saw another adobe 
brick, it would be too soon.

Releasing a breath, Gillian ignored his obvious signal and 
continued. “I just came to tell you that Jeff and I are heading 
to Popayán tomorrow. We need to file a disaster report so we can 
get some aid. All of this work will be for nothing if we can’t 
manage to get some stucco on these buildings before the next 
rainy season – ”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he interrupted. “I don’t mind hard work. 
It’s just infuriating when I can’t use the abilities I have to 
make a difference. To speed things along.”

“We’ve been over this, Sam. You know it takes ten days at least 
for the adobe to set up – ”

“It’s not just the adobe. It’s everything else. Do you know how 
much faster it would be if I just flew supplies down here instead 
of waiting for horses to haul it all down the mountain side?”

“And just what do you think would happen when folks started 
noticing that Superman kept flying back and forth over this 
area?" she asked pointedly. "Guerillas would be all over this 
place, not to mention the paramilitaries and the Colombian army, 
wanting to know why Superman had set up shop in some small 
backwater town.”

“Then why am I here?” he asked, disgusted with the rationale she 
and Jeff had given him those first days when he’d wanted to fly 
supplies in. “What can I do for these people? Lift tons of bricks 
and haul rubble to the ravine? That’s pretty much all I’ve done 
since I arrived.”

“Sorry, right now we just don’t need anything heated up.”

“You know what I mean, Gillian,” he said, thoroughly exasperated 
with her refusal to see the obvious. “I’m nothing more than a 
common laborer. And I can’t even manage to do that very well.”

He’d thought he could make a real difference. That as Superman, 
he’d be able to put these people’s homes back together quickly 
and efficiently. But it was proving to be much harder than he’d 
ever expected. These people didn’t need a superhero. They needed 
masons and supplies. Heavy construction equipment.

“Sometimes that’s what it takes to rebuild lives. A lot of 
unglamorous, backbreaking labor,” she said, giving him a 
thoughtful look.

“Yeah, but I’ve done nothing a couple of bulldozers couldn’t do,” 
he said, unable to keep the defeat from his voice.

“These people don’t have bulldozers,” she reminded him. “You’re 
doing a lot of good here, Sam. The work of fifty men at least. 
Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

It was the first compliment she’d offered him, and it appeased 
him slightly. Still, he just didn’t know if he could really help 
these people at all.

~§~

Later that evening, a soft tapping sounded on his closed door, 
and he opened it to find the boy Gillian had called Antonio 
standing several feet away, partially hidden in the shadows cast 
by the oncoming night. He clutched a bulky sack, but when Clark 
extended a hand to welcome him inside, the boy took a hesitant 
step back.

“Come in, Antonio,” Clark invited in Spanish. While he’d been 
readily accepted by most of the adult villagers, the younger 
children still looked at him fearfully, remembering clearly the 
day when Superman had landed in the middle of San Pablo with the 
bright red cape of *el Diablo* billowing about him, a terrified 
André cradled in his arms.

Mustering up his courage, Antonio stepped out of the shadows, 
only continuing forward when Clark matched the boy’s steps with 
backward steps of his own. In this manner, he entered the shack, 
but he wouldn’t come in more than a foot from the door.

When at last he spoke, Clark nearly had to use super-hearing to 
catch the softly muttered Spanish. “*Señorita* Gillian sent me. 
She said you would pay me to clean your house, yes?”

Clark chuckled to himself, eliciting a puzzled expression from 
Antonio. Before the frightened child could bolt from the shack of 
the *gringo loco* who not only talked to himself but laughed for 
no good reason as well, Clark nodded. “Sure, Antonio. How about 
you come once a week? On Tuesdays, after school.”

Antonio nodded slowly, then smiled when Clark extended a large 
hand to cement the deal. He placed his tiny hand in Clark’s, even 
allowing it to linger once the ceremonial shake had been 
completed. Clark felt a surge of accomplishment in earning the 
boy’s trust. It was a small move, but in his disheartened state, 
it was something.

“Also, *señorita* sent this. She told me to tell you that she 
does not have pizza or hot shower, but this maybe will make you 
feel better after much hard work.” With that carefully worded 
recitation, Antonio thrust forward the sack he held in his other 
hand, offering it and its contents to a bewildered Clark.

Before Clark could open the sack, Antonio had slipped out the 
door and down the road. 

Whatever she had sent was incredibly light, and more curious than 
ever, he turned on the lamp, blinking against the glare of the 
bright bulb. One of these days he was going to have to fashion 
some sort of lampshade.

Reaching into the sack, his hands closed around a soft bit of 
fabric.

It was a pillow. Pancake thin and grayed with frequent washings, 
it smelled faintly of shampoo.

Clutching it to his chest, he smiled softly. No more excuses.

~§~

That day had proven to be a low point before he fell into the 
comfortable rhythm of San Pablo. Now, after four weeks, enough 
homes had been constructed that all of the women and children 
could be housed at night. The pressure to secure the villagers’ 
safety had lessened significantly, and with it a heavy weight was 
lifted from everyone’s shoulders, most of all Clark’s.

Work took on a joyous tone, jokes flying fast around the building 
sites. Clark started to see the humor in his ignorance, laughing 
at himself when his walls sloped visibly and taking the good 
natured ribbing from the other men as a sign that he belonged. 
That he was accepted and his efforts, no matter how unskilled, 
were appreciated. 

Two weeks after they’d left for Popayán, word reached the village 
that Gillian and Jeff were back in Silvia. They’d received enough 
aid from the Colombian government’s disaster relief division to 
procure much of the cement needed to make the heavy stucco used 
to coat homes and buildings, giving the porous adobe bricks much 
needed water-proofing. 

Ignoring their small committee’s decision that he refrain from 
flying, Clark did so under cover of night to meet them in Silvia 
and escort them on the three hour journey back to San Pablo. His 
presence not only offered protection against wandering bands of 
guerillas, but he was also able to supplement the efforts of the 
horses hauling four heavy wagons over the deeply rutted and 
sometimes impassable roads. It was brute work, pure and simple, 
but it needed to be done.

When they finally arrived in San Pablo, the three exhausted 
volunteers staggered to their individual houses, bone tired but 
pleased with a job well done. Instead of drafty and inhospitable, 
Clark’s shack, still leaning to its left, looked welcoming. It 
was becoming home.

Clark sat quietly for a minute on the edge of his pallet, trying 
to pinpoint the odd sensation that squeezed at his temples and 
filled his head with heavy, wet rags. Everything about him 
weighted, his very skin heavy and drawn. As he passed his hand 
over his eyes, his thumb and finger joining in a firm pinch at 
the bridge of his nose, it came to him. The gesture was one his 
father had often made after a dawn to dusk day spent wrestling a 
frozen field. It was one of great weariness. 

He felt weary. It settled over him, wrapping him in its muted 
blanket just as his cape enveloped him in folds of crimson. 

Had he ever felt purely exhausted? And not just a tiredness of 
well-used super muscle or depleted reserves of nearly 
inexhaustible energy. No, never anything like this. Swooping in 
to perform heroic feats took nothing compared to dealing with the 
aftermath. It was in the rebuilding that true heroes were 
revealed. 

And with each adobe brick he laid, each home finished and filled 
with a grateful family, he felt his own injured heart slowly 
stitching tight. With exhaustion, he found peaceful sleep.

As he sank down on to the narrow pallet and pulled his wool 
blanket over his shoulders, his last coherent thought was that 
he’d never felt anything so good as his pancake thin pillow 
rising to meet his cheek.

~§~

Chapter 4 

~§~

“Sam.”

“Mmm.” Clark snuggled deeper into the warm hollow created by his 
large body in the too-lumpy mattress.

“Sam, c’mon,” the persistent voice hissed. It sounded 
suspiciously close to his ear. 

“Wha?” he muttered, opening one eye just enough to notice the 
paling sky beyond the torn screen of the window right above his 
pallet. The crack of dawn, it was. No, not even that. Before the 
crack of dawn. 

One of the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere with 
people who had no plans of going anywhere anytime soon was the 
luxury of timelessness. He hadn’t glanced at a watch in weeks, 
letting the turning of the earth guide his waking and sleeping. 
And he could tell already that the earth hadn’t turned far enough 
for him to be awake yet.

Rolling his head away from the wall, he opened the other eye to 
find Gillian bending over him, her finger poised to inflict a 
physical bit of incentive. “You gotta get up.”

“Why?” he grumbled, then noticed a slightly panicked look in the 
gray eyes peering at him through the pre-dawn dimness. “What’s 
wrong?”

Satisfied that she had his attention, she moved to the chair 
where he’d dumped his shirt and pants before falling into bed the 
night before. She scooped them up and held them out to him as she 
explained. “Henriqué spotted a FARC convoy headed this way. We’ve 
gotta leave before they get here.”

The mention of guerilla soldiers worked better than a bucket of 
ice water to bring him to full alertness. Swinging his legs over 
the bed to sitting, he kept the striped blanket draped over his 
boxers. Her eyes widened at the site of his bare chest, and she 
glanced away quickly, although he couldn’t be sure if it was 
embarrassment or nervousness. 

“But you’re Red Cross,” he said, trying to understand the reason 
for her apparent panic. “I thought that meant – ”

“Yeah, you’d think. But I guess the FARC isn’t quite up to speed 
on the articles of the Geneva Convention. Even if they were, I 
don’t think they believe it applies to them so much. Here.” She 
thrust the clothes in his direction again, more insistent as she 
glanced toward the door.

Raking a hand through his hair, he yawned as he accepted his 
pants and shirt. She still didn’t get it. What he was capable of 
doing. That he’d made a career out of saving people. Protecting 
people. That he was bullet proof. 

“Gillian, you don’t understand. I can stop them.”

With a vertical twirl of his finger, he motioned for her to turn 
around, and after a startled blink, she quickly complied. Assured 
that she couldn’t see anything they both might regret, he stood 
and began to dress. He didn’t bother spinning. He never bothered 
spinning anymore. Part of the whole timelessness thing.

“There are something like 15,000 men in the FARC army,” Gillian 
said over her shoulder. “You gonna round up all of them? Besides, 
unless you’re planning on building yourself a cozy little 
hacienda and sticking around for a good long time, they’d just 
come back after you’re gone. And believe me, they’d punish the 
villagers a hundred fold for anything you do to stop them today.”

Her dire prediction stopped him cold, his fingers frozen on the 
button he’d been about to shove through the button hole. “So what 
will they do? The villagers, I mean.”

Not checking to see if he was decent, or maybe just not caring, 
she turned around to face him with a shrug. “Lay low. Stay inside 
their homes. If the soldiers stop, they’ll give them some food. 
Any money they have.”

Clark glanced around the room, his eyes landing on the low trunk 
now housing his Superman suit and the Clark clothes he’d never 
worn. He strode to it purposefully. “I have some money.”

Thrusting his hand into the pocket of his folded khakis, he 
pulled out about a hundred dollars worth in twenties and turned 
with them clutched in his fist. Not much, but in Colombia, a 
fortune. “Here. Take this.”

She stared at the wad of green bills, her expression softening 
considerably. “That is so...incredibly generous, Sam. But those 
are US dollars.”

“So? I thought they liked US money?” he said, confused. From his 
travels, he knew well how much US currency was valued, especially 
in underdeveloped nations with thriving black markets.

“People around here don’t usually carry around twenty dollar 
bills,” she pointed out, then continued when he looked at her 
with a frown. “If those soldiers see US money, they’ll want to 
know where it came from. And they’ll do anything it takes until 
they find out.”

Clark felt his heart sink. Once again, Superman was of no use in 
this place. And now even his superficial value as an American 
could do these people no good. In fact, his very existence could 
cause the village more grief.

Gillian didn’t give him any time to ponder the irony of the 
situation, heading for the door. “C’mon, Sam. We’ve gotta go.”

He snatched up his Tevas sandals and followed her down the path 
to the main road. They were half way through the village before 
he had the presence of mind to ask her where exactly where they 
were going.

“Underneath Roberto’s store is a *sótano*...a cellar, of sorts,” 
she explained, slightly breathless from running up the hill. “Of 
course, it’s going to be a little harder to get to since the 
quake buried it. But it’s all we’ve got.”

“I still don’t understand why we have to hide.”

“Because I don’t have brown eyes, and you don’t look Colombian,” 
she said grimly. “We’re perfect targets for a kidnap for ransom.”

He was very familiar with that scenario, a story of a kidnap for 
ransom victim appearing in the Planet’s international section 
almost weekly. But never in his wildest thoughts would he have 
imagined himself in danger of such a horrific practice.

They reached Roberto’s store where Roberto himself was digging 
beneath the remaining rubble with one hand, a small oil lamp held 
high in his other. Clark stepped in to take over, and in no time, 
a wooden trap door thickly coated with grey dust came into view.

By then, several other men had appeared on the scene, and they 
quickly discussed how the trap door could be re-concealed once 
Gillian and Clark had disappeared down into the cellar. Clark 
positioned a sizeable chunk of adobe next to the door, it being 
an easy enough feat for two or three men to roll it on top of the 
wooden planks. They would toss on additional debris to camouflage 
it further, and when the danger had passed, Clark would be able 
to force his way out with minimal effort.

Gillian wasted no time scampering down into the dark, damp hole. 
But Clark hesitated. He had no real fear of small places, but 
something about the cellar reminded him of a grave. After Roberto 
handed the oil lamp down to Gillian’s waiting hand, Clark felt a 
little better when he could see the small flame dancing away the 
pressing darkness, and he jumped down to land beside her.

Once in the cellar, it didn’t seem quite as morbid as he’d 
imagined. Although he almost had to stoop to keep from brushing 
the ceiling with the top of his head, the room itself stretched 
bigger than his own shack. The walls and floor were tightly 
packed dirt, cool to the touch, and the whole room smelled very 
much of wet soil and roots.

The wall farthest from the trap door was lined with shelves, 
dusty jars and rusting tin cans stacked haphazardly along its 
length. In the darkness, Clark couldn’t tell what the jars and 
cans contained, and he wondered if any of it was edible. He 
hadn’t had breakfast yet.

In another corner was a wooden box with a loose lid, and Gillian 
went to it as the men above them slid the trap door back into 
place. Clark sucked in his breath, trying to still the sudden 
thudding of his heart. Why was he finding it so hard to remember 
that he didn’t have to hide his abilities, and if necessary he 
could just tunnel his way out of the earthen chamber? 

He glanced at Gillian to see if she were suffering from any of 
the same claustrophobic tendencies, but her attention was inside 
the box. From its innards she extracted another oil lamp, a thick 
woolen blanket, and a deck of playing cards. Obviously this 
wasn’t the first time this cellar had been used to house humans. 

And when she spread the blanket over the floor, plopped down upon 
it and started shuffling the cards, it became clear that it 
certainly wasn’t the first time Gillian had spent time in hiding. 
The panic had left her gray eyes, her manner relaxed if not 
downright convivial. Torn between admiration for her calm 
acceptance of the situation and horror that she accepted it so 
calmly, he stared down at her.

“Does this happen a lot?” Clark asked.

“Depends on what you mean by a lot,” she stated matter-of-factly. 
“Before the quake, it’d happen about once a month or so. 
Sometimes more. Sometimes less. After the quake I think everyone 
was so caught up in just surviving that even the guerillas stayed 
put.”

“And every time they show up, you come running to hide out in 
this cellar?”

She thought a minute. “I suppose I could stay outside and take my 
chances. But I wouldn’t put my parents through that.”

He could easily imagine what she meant, but some perverse part of 
him asked the question anyway. “Put them through what?”

“My kidnapping. Being told they had to cough up a few million 
dollars if they ever wanted to see their daughter alive again. 
Maybe having a tape sent to them showing what I was suffering 
just to give them a little incentive to make it snappy.”

Clark gaped at her, her detached observation shocking. “You’re 
not worried about what would actually happen to you?”

“Sam, if I thought about what could happen to me out here, I’d go 
*loco*. When you decide to hang around the wilds of Colombia, you 
gotta expect a little danger.” She started to deal two piles of 
cards. “Why don’t you sit down and play some cards. You any good 
at poker?”

Wordlessly, he sank to the floor, trying to digest the casualness 
with which she accepted the danger inherent around her. It made 
him shudder, an icy coldness racing through his blood at the 
thought of Gillian in the hands of those who would harm her just 
to get her parents to pay huge amounts of money. Although he’d 
felt compassion for the victims and their families, the stories 
he’d read about kidnaps for ransom had always involved faceless 
people. 

Gillian had the grayest eyes he’d ever seen, a quick, bright 
smile, and a long, honey colored braid running down her back. She 
had a face.

Whether she could sense his continued nervousness and wanted to 
soothe him, or perhaps because she just liked to hear herself 
speak, Gillian gave him a brief history of the FARC while they 
alternated between seven-card-stud and Black Jack. He already 
knew quite a bit about the guerilla groups and their origins, as 
well as the drug cartels and their stranglehold on the Colombian 
government, but he’d never imagined how the whole mess affected 
tiny towns like San Pablo.

“A lot of subsistence farmers are forced by the guerillas to grow 
coca plants on their land,” she explained, munching on a large 
green olive pulled from the jar she’d selected off the shelf. 
“They’re allowed to plant only enough food to get them through 
the year, but the rest of their crops have to be coca and they 
have to give the money it makes to the FARC. Kind of a medieval 
extortion.”

Clark shook his head sadly, helping himself to another olive. It 
made an odd breakfast, but he enjoyed the unique flavor on his 
tongue all the same. He’d felt some additional relief to know 
that there was edible food in the dark cellar should their stay 
become extended. “And the government can’t do anything about it?”

“What are they going to do? Most of these towns are so remote, 
there aren’t even roads leading to them.” She snorted derisively. 
“Besides, some of the thugs hired by the Colombian government are 
more feared than the guerillas themselves. I’ve heard horror 
stories about what these paramilitaries have done to civilians 
even suspected of sympathizing with any guerilla factions. 
Torture. Rape. Mass executions.”

“Has anything like that ever happened in San Pablo?” Clark asked, 
holding his breath. In just the short time he’d been there, these 
people had come to be his friends.

She shook her head as she gathered up the last hand and started 
to reshuffle the cards. “Thankfully, San Pablo is too small. 
There’s not enough farmable land to grow anything substantial.” 
She chuckled at the irony. “It’s kind of sad, but the very fact 
that these people are so poor is what keeps them free of 
interference.”

“So why do the guerillas come here at all?”

“San Pablo is a pass through pit-stop. At least before the quake. 
Between Roberto’s store and Rosita’s cantina, it’s about the only 
place they can buy cigarettes or replenish their stock of José 
Quervo for miles.” She finished shuffling. “So, seems you’re not 
so good at poker, and since you don’t have any money I can win, 
how about we switch to gin rummy?”

They played several hands in silence while Clark absorbed what 
she had told him. Every day he came to see the forces that these 
people struggled against, both in the physical world and the 
human world. It amazed him that they had the strength to not only 
persevere but actually thrive. 

And it humbled him, putting his own circumstances into sharp 
perspective. In his life, food was plenty, the water safe to 
drink, and hardship was an electrical storm that knocked power 
out for an hour or an inconsiderate neighbor who hogged the hot 
water supply. He could walk down the street without fear of being 
kidnapped. He’d lost his job, but his was a country where jobs 
were plentiful and there was a government to support him if he 
found himself on hard times. 

“Since we’ve got some time to kill, do you want to tell me about 
that other job you have? Or maybe had, now that you’ve been gone 
so long,” Gillian speculated, breaking the silence.

Clark blinked, a shiver running down his neck at the eerie 
coincidence of her asking such a question just as he'd been 
thinking of the Planet and his employment situation. That was the 
second time she’d spoken out loud thoughts that had been running 
through his brain, and he started to wonder if she had a gift. 
With a shake of his head, he dismissed the thought. He didn’t 
believe in stuff like that.

“Nope, I don’t want to tell you about it,” he stated firmly. So 
far he'd avoided talking about his life as Clark, and he saw no 
reason to do so now. Instead, he changed the topic, wanting to 
know more about her. “But I’d love to know how you came to be 
here.”

“Like I said, I came down here with my father when he was a 
Doctors Without Borders volunteer. Well, not actually San Pablo. 
But another town a lot like it.”

He took up the seven cards she’d dealt him and ordered them into 
sets and runs. Only a pair of fours to start with. Another lousy 
hand. “So they accept nurses into their program?”

She laughed out loud. “They do if a certain doctor who has some 
pull with upper level decision makers requests it.”

“I see. Your dad’s a bigwig, then?”

Gillian thought a minute, her lips pursing before she grinned 
mischievously. “Not so much a bigwig as more like very 
persistent.”

It was his turn to laugh out loud. “So you were adopted?”

She joined in the laughter, accepting his easy teasing. As they 
shared their amusement at her expense, Clark felt much of the 
gloom of the dark cellar disappearing even though the two small 
oil lights gave little illumination. 

When their merriment lessened, she took a deep breath. “Actually, 
I think my dad was shocked when I told him I wanted to come down 
here with him.”

“Why’s that?” Clark asked. 

“Because when I was sixteen, he used to drag me down to the free 
clinic where he volunteered once a month. I’d complain for days 
before we had to go, then every second of the forty-five minute 
commute to downtown Detroit.” She shook her head, as if she 
regretted the hell she’d put her long-suffering father through. 
“I made it like pulling teeth for him.”

Clark had a hard time imagining Gillian complaining about 
anything. In the last five weeks, he’d seen her accept a lot of 
discomfort and inconvenience, rolling up her sleeves to do the 
most menial of jobs. Still, there was a big difference between a 
grown woman and a teenager, so he gave her the excuse of youth. 

“I’d imagine most sixteen-year-olds would rather sleep in on a 
Saturday than volunteer.”

“No, I took complaining to a new level,” she clarified with a sly 
grin, not letting her sixteen-year-old self off the hook. “I 
hated it. The dirty people, the screaming kids, all lined up 
waiting to see the doctor. The smell. It disgusted me. I once 
told my father I’d rather work in a gravel pit than spend another 
minute in that clinic.”

“But you became a nurse?” he asked, puzzled. 

“Yep,” she said. “Just goes to show you that miracles really do 
happen. Gin.”

Gillian laid down her cards, the five, six, seven and eight of 
clubs joined with the ace of hearts, diamonds and spades to 
create a winning hand.

“What really happened, to change your mind, I mean?” he asked, 
very much wanting to know how a sixteen year old who hated being 
around underprivileged people came to serve as a ICRC volunteer 
in a Colombian village so poor that it didn’t have running water. 

She shuffled the deck absently, as if her mind was traveling back 
in time. “One Saturday, I was giving my dad even more than the 
usual grief. My friends had all gone on an overnight trip to 
Chicago, but I had to stay behind because it was a volunteer 
weekend. So as you can imagine I was pretty pissed.”

Clark nodded for her to continue, leaning back against the cold 
wall but oblivious to any discomfort. 

“I was sulking in his office when this woman came into the 
clinic. She’d walked, like, twenty blocks to get there, and it 
was freezing outside. I remember her coat didn’t have any buttons 
on it.” Gillian shuddered, as if she herself felt the icy chill. 
She’d stopped shuffling the cards, holding the deck loosely.

“Come to find out this woman was pregnant, and she was in labor. 
But the only nurse at the clinic had gone out to get lunch for 
us. There wasn’t any time to call an ambulance, so my dad made me 
scrub up so I could help him. 

“Man, it was awful. The woman was screaming, there was blood all 
over the place. I kept asking my dad if we could give her some 
drugs or something, but he said it was too late for that. It 
seemed like it took forever but I guess it really didn’t, because 
all of the sudden this baby was coming out of her. I’d never seen 
anything like it. A whole person, right there in my dad’s hands. 
It just blew me away.”

She stared off to a point past his shoulder, and Clark guessed 
that she was remembering that life-altering moment. He had a few 
of those himself. Memories that he could recall as if they were 
still happening. Some of them he held onto tightly. Others, he 
wished he could erase.

“So you decided to become a nurse,” he concluded when she 
remained silent, her story apparently finished. 

“Yep. Nurse practitioner actually. So I could deliver babies if I 
wanted to.”

If he remembered correctly, that meant she had advance training 
and could do some of the things that a doctor could do, which 
made him wonder. “Why not a doctor?”

Gillian shook herself back into the present. “I thought about it, 
but then I realized that the nurses are the ones who get to be 
with the patients. Get to know them and really make a difference. 
The whole time that lady was having that baby, she held on tight 
to my hand. Wouldn’t let it go for anything. I think it meant a 
lot to her that I was there.”

“Did you keep complaining? I mean after that day. About going to 
the clinic?” he asked.

She smiled and looked down at the cards in her hands. “Yeah, of 
course. I mean, come on, I was sixteen. What sixteen-year-old 
would rather work at a walk-in clinic than hang out at the mall 
with her friends? Still, I didn’t hate it so much after that. The 
people had stopped being these horrible slackers who should have 
just gotten jobs. They became real people, with names and 
stories. Kids and moms and grandpas.”

Looking up, she caught him staring intently, amazed. She flushed. 
“Yeah, I know. Pretty sappy. What can I say, I’m the original 
spoiled rich girl turns hippy do-gooder.”

“No, that’s a great story,” he said, meaning it. The kind of 
story that made wonderful movies and great biographies. He 
imagined that someday, Gillian’s life story would make a great 
biography. And she was still so young. Jeff had told him she was 
only twenty-six.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t end up so great,” she remarked dryly as 
she started shuffling the deck again.

“Oh yeah?” He leaned forward, wanting to know more. A lot more.

“Turns out the lady was a crack addict, and her baby was born 
already dependent. He had to be ambulanced to the Detroit 
Children’s Hospital, but he ended up dying because he was too 
small and his lungs were underdeveloped. I was crushed when my 
dad told me what happened to him.”

Clark gaped, depressed that something so wonderful could end so 
tragically. “That is terrible.”

She was no longer listening, lifting a hand to silence him. “Hey, 
did you hear that?”

“What?” he said, tensing. Was it possible the guerillas might 
find the trap door?

“That knocking. Listen again.” They listened for a moment, then 
Gillian whispered, “Jeff always knocks on the door three times 
when it’s safe to come up.”

He turned his ear to the ceiling. Although his super-hearing 
could pick up taps happening on the other side of San Pablo, he 
knew that Jeff’s would be distinct enough for Gillian’s normal 
ears to hear.

Suddenly, as clear as a bell, three sharp raps sounded on the 
wooden door above their heads. 

Gillian beamed. “Yep, that’s it. The signal. We’re free.”

As if it had been the most normal way to spend the morning, she 
bent down to collect the scattered cards, then folded the blanket 
after shaking the dirt from it. Both of these she tucked back 
into the box, along with one of the extinguished oil lamps. 
Replacing the lid, she turned to Clark expectantly.

“OK, Sam the superman, I think this is your cue.”

He stood fully upright, placing his palms flat on the trap door. 
With a slight heft, the door and its disguise slid away from the 
entrance, and he blinked against the sudden onslaught of sunlight 
hitting his light-deprived eyes.

Taking the hands that were thrust down into the hole, he allowed 
himself to be hoisted to the surface. Before anyone could offer 
Gillian the same courtesy, Clark turned, extending his own hand 
down to grasp her wrist firmly. She clasped her hand around his 
forearm, and he drew her lithe frame out of the darkness.

For some reason that he couldn’t explain, he didn’t let go of her 
arm right away. Instead, he pulled her in front of him and to the 
side so that he could place his other hand on the small of her 
back and guide her down the heap of rubble. He’d seen this woman 
scramble over piles of adobe ten feet high and bully reluctant 
horses down steep inclines. Still, he released his grip on her 
only when they stood firmly on the road.

Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, they’d been 
hiding well into mid-morning. As Gillian headed toward the 
temporary clinic and Clark toward the school where they’d begun 
to clear the site, he realized with a start that for the first 
time in over a year, he’d gone almost three whole hours without 
obsessing about Lois Lane.

~§~


Chapter 5

~§~

Two days after the visit by the roving band of guerillas, San 
Pablo came to life. All work was forgotten as the villagers made 
preparations for the St. Mary’s Day fiesta. Always full of noise 
anyway, now an almost electrical current seemed to run through 
the air. Clark likened it much to the atmosphere at the Daily 
Planet the day before Christmas, when work was pushed aside and 
anticipation put everyone in an exceptionally good mood.

Everywhere he went, the aroma of grilling meats and other savory 
dishes wafted out of homes. Flashes of brightly colored silk 
shawls and billowing skirts filled the roads as women made their 
way about San Pablo dressed in their very best. Children were set 
to the task of gathering wild flowers and watching their younger 
siblings as their parents readied for the night’s festivities.

The grassy area behind Rosita’s cantina, a place normally 
reserved for the daily matches of *tejo* and impromptu games of 
*fútbol*, had been decorated for the fiesta. Tables and battered 
folding chairs had been set about, and boards were laid side by 
side to create a dance floor of sorts. Colorful banners made of 
scraps of cloth were hung from the surrounding buildings, and the 
children’s hand-picked flowers filled bowls set on every table. 
Clark could barely believe the transformation.

When he arrived, the party was already in full swing. Henriqué, 
Luis, and Daniel, men whom he knew as expert brick-layers and 
farmers, sat near the dance floor playing a variety of 
instruments, only one of which Clark recognized. Two long tables 
were covered with food, and nearly everyone in San Pablo either 
ate, danced, drank or played in the small field. Children ran 
underfoot, the women keeping a running stream of chatter as they 
talked to each other and to themselves.

Standing slightly off to the side, he felt a bit awkward, once 
more an outsider intruding on the lives of these people. While 
they’d never made him feel anything but welcome after those first 
few days, his efforts always appreciated, still he knew that he 
was a foreigner, not really one of the laughing crowd. 

“You beat us here. Just couldn’t wait to party, huh?” Jeff’s 
booming English teased from behind his back.

Instantly more at ease, Clark turned with a grin to see his 
compatriots approaching. He noted Gillian’s arm hooked 
comfortably into the crook of Jeff’s bent elbow and looked away 
purposefully. He’d never asked outright if theirs was a 
relationship deeper than friendship, not really seeing it as any 
of his business. Still, he’d often caught himself watching 
carefully, trying to detect something in the warm hugs they 
bestowed upon each other and the casual touches and looks. 

Instead of his normal work clothes, Jeff wore light tan pants and 
a white shirt that was intricately embroidered, probably by one 
of the village women, who took great pride in their skill at such 
a craft. A plaid *ruana*, the mainstay of a Colombian’s wardrobe, 
was draped over his shoulder, and his beard looked neatly 
trimmed.

“Wow, I don’t recognize you without a coating of stucco,” Clark 
teased his friend in turn. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think 
you might even have gotten your hair cut.”

“Hardly,” Jeff snorted. “Last time I let Rosita take a stab at 
it, I nearly lost an ear while she chattered away.” 

The two men laughed as Clark turned his attention to Gillian, 
ready to compliment her on her fiesta finery. She almost glowed, 
reflecting the infectious gaiety around her. Like the other 
women, she had donned a skirt for the celebration, full and 
brightly colored. Her white peasant blouse contained the same 
delicate embroidery as Jeff’s shirt, and instead of Tevas, she 
wore sandals with thin leather straps. The look was altogether 
feminine, so different than the far more practical cargo pants 
and work shirts she normally wore. 

She looked very fetching, and he thought to tell her so when he 
realized why exactly she look so different. 

For the first time since his arrival in San Pablo, the thick 
brown braid was gone. In its place cascaded waves of honey-
colored hair, curling and rippling clear to the small of her 
back. Swept back from her face and caught with a silver clip, it 
was breathtaking in its shear volume and luxuriousness.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a bit much. That’s why I keep it tied back,” 
she remarked, and he realized with an embarrassed flush that he 
was actually staring at her.

“No, it’s really nice,” he stammered, feeling himself blush to 
the roots of his own hair. Trying to recover, he glanced around 
at the other people nearby who were thankfully oblivious to his 
discomfort. “You’re the only person here who doesn’t have black 
hair.”

Even as he spoke, he heard how stupid it sounded. Gillian, for 
her part, ignored the inane comment and laughed. “Another reason 
I keep it back. These Latino men. For some reason, they seem to 
find light hair exotic. I learned pretty quick if I didn’t want 
to be machismo-ed to death, I’d better just keep it braided 
back.” 

He frowned. “Machismo-ed? Doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Naw, it’s pretty harmless. I take it as a compliment,” she 
dismissed with a wave of her hand. “Speaking of, you look quite 
dashing. Just like a Colombian. I thought maybe you’d drag out 
your super suit and the *Diablo* cape for the party.”

He had to laugh at the image of himself standing in the midst of 
the party in his suit. While the bright colors would have added 
to the festive atmosphere, the red cape would have sent the kids 
running. Since he’d removed it the day he’d decided to stay in 
San Pablo, the suit had remained folded and tucked in the bottom 
of the trunk in his shack. Almost forgotten.

Over the course of the past six weeks, he’d managed to purchase 
some of his own clothes when visiting the larger town of Silvia, 
no longer wearing the borrowed pants and shirt. Adopting the 
uniform that Jeff assured him was the de rigueur of volunteers 
all over the globe, he now owned a few pairs of cargo pants and a 
several cotton work shirts, as well as his own Tevas sandals and 
boots. 

In addition to the cleaning services of Antonio and later, his 
sister, Alicia, Clark had employed another woman, Ines, to wash 
his new clothes. He assuaged his guilt by paying her at least 
what she would have made in a week by picking coffee for four 
hours a day, still a paltry amount to his American wallet. 

Upon learning what he’d arranged, Gillian had approved heartily, 
helping to aid his acceptance of such a practice by telling him 
that Ines used her special position with *señor* Sam to elevate 
her status among the other women. Ines felt it an honor, Gillian 
explained to him, that she was trusted with the care of the 
*gringo’s* store-bought clothes.

Supplementing his own purchases were the gifts bestowed upon him 
by the villagers of San Pablo, an astounding thing given the 
poverty they lived in. With the completion of each house, 
grateful women came forward bearing baskets and food, embroidered 
shirts, a finely woven straw hat, and other items they thought he 
might find useful. Again Gillian was instrumental in helping him 
accept the embarrassing bounty, giving him a lecture on pride and 
how even a person of the meanest circumstances wouldn’t tolerate 
charity. He drew the line at livestock, turning away countless 
chickens, three pigs, and even once a tamed monkey on a leash.

Among his favorite gifts were two wool *ruanas*. Hanging to mid-
thigh and surprisingly waterproof, they proved to be his most 
practical garments. One was a rather plain tan with brown plaid 
stripes and therefore used for everyday wear. The other, which he 
had donned in honor of the festival, was dark blue with cream 
stripes placed symmetrically on ether side of the slit where his 
head protruded through. When he wasn’t wearing it, he draped it 
over his pallet blanket style, appreciating the warmth it offered 
when the clear Andean nights brought a crispness to the air.

Actually, Gillian was right. In his navy *ruana*, tan pants and 
clean white shirt, he did look much like a Colombian. His dark 
eyes and dark hair, grown a bit since his arrival, added to the 
illusion, along with the deep tan his skin had acquired through 
his many hours working in the Andean sun.

Even Luke had dressed up for the occasion, a bright red bandana 
tied smartly around his furry neck. They’d decided that the he 
looked most like a German Shepard, despite the fact that his ears 
failed to stand at attention, instead folding over in a comical 
wink. His enormous paws and rapidly growing body demonstrated 
that someday he’d be quite a force to contend with. Knowing to 
whom he owed his rescue, he could always be found within shouting 
distance of Gillian, sleeping in her shack at night when the 
other San Pablo dogs were wont to roam more freely. He stood next 
to her, watching the antics of the humans until Antonio issued a 
shrill whistle from across the field and waved a bit of food as 
added enticement. 

After watching Luke scamper off and their compliments duly 
exchanged, Clark, Gillian and Jeff joined the party.

The food was abundant, nothing held back in honor of the 
celebration. Chicken and beef in a variety of forms covered 
chipped platters. Piles of thick *arepas* threatened to topple 
onto the tables, and as if the rich cornbread didn’t offer enough 
starch, potatoes and rice were heaped into bowls. A staggering 
array of vegetables picked just that morning and prepared with 
local flair, lent their rich colors to the table and made Clark’s 
mouth water.

They filled their plates and took seats at one of the unoccupied 
tables. Eating while a steady stream of villagers stopped by to 
chat with the Americans, Clark hardly noticed as the afternoon 
turned into dusk. If asked, he would not have been able to say 
when last he’d felt so carefree, so unfettered by worries or 
doubts.

Night had fallen in earnest, but the party showed no signs of 
slowing. Candles and oil lamps twinkled on all of the tables, the 
small band hitting its stride shortly after the bottles of 
*chicha* were passed and shots shared by all old enough to hold a 
glass. Clark, trying to be a good sport, slugged back his own 
small portion of the home-brewed liquor and nearly choked as the 
potent alcohol seared down his throat. Hearty smacks on the back 
and guffaws about the sure manliness of the *gringo loco* did 
little to convince him to try another shot.

In his travels, Clark had experienced many kinds of local music, 
but he never ceased to be amazed at what a grand amount of sound 
could be generated by a few simple instruments. With only a 
*flauta*, *tiple*, guitar and a pair of maracas, the small band 
filled the valley with joyful sound, and soon only he, Jeff and 
Gillian and a few of the eldest villagers remained seated.

Gillian explained to him the intricacies of the *bambuco*, how 
the goal of the dance was for the man to maneuver his way through 
various partners to end up with the woman of his choice. Another 
dance that he admired was called the *chirimia*, and Gillain told 
him he should appreciate it because he’d likely never see it 
outside of the lower Andes.

He watched, enraptured, as the people of San Pablo danced and 
laughed, looking for all the world like they had nothing to care 
about but the music and the food and the party. Skirts twirling 
and boots stomping, they were lost in the music and the magic of 
the warm night, their bellies full and friends at hand.

“Amazing,” he muttered, feeling such a warmth for these people 
that up until a month ago he’d never known at all.

“What’s so amazing?” Jeff asked.

“These people,” Clark clarified with a broad sweep of his arm, 
indicating the merriment swirling about them. “They have nothing 
to celebrate. Their homes were decimated by an earthquake. 
Guerilla soldiers wandered into town not two days ago and took 
what little money they had. But still, they don’t seem to have a 
care in the world.”

“*Aquí y ahora*.” Jeff said simply. When Clark continued to look 
at him blankly, he explained. “Here and now. It’s their 
philosophy of life. Nothing matters but what happens right here, 
right now. They don’t dwell on the past, and they don’t worry 
about the future.”

“Isn’t that awfully short-sighted of them?” Clark wondered. “Not 
to think about the future and prepare for it?”

“Maybe,” Jeff conceded. “But really, what exactly could they 
prepare for? I mean, you’ve seen how unpredictable things can be. 
It takes all these people have just to make it from day to day. 
There’s not much use in wasting energy getting ready for 
something you don’t even know will happen.”

“I guess,” Clark admitted. Just managing to cull enough food from 
the garden for the evening’s meal was a big enough concern in San 
Pablo. A problem that could happen a week from now was 
unfathomable.

At that moment, a well-endowed woman name Lourdes swept up to the 
table. Clark cringed, sinking back into his chair. On several 
occasions, Lourdes had made it clear that she wouldn’t mind 
getting friendlier with the dark-haired, dark-eyed *señor* Sam, 
and Clark always felt slightly unclean after encounters with her. 

But he was in luck, Lourdes’s target not him but instead the lean 
and bewildered Jeff. Clark gave him a sympathetic smile as 
Lourdes hauled him off to the dance floor. 

“Poor guy,” Gillian said with a giggle as Lourdes manhandled Jeff 
into a tight embrace. “He’d better hope she hasn’t had too many 
shots of *chicha* or he may find himself pinned to the wall.”

Clark laughed out loud at the image of an ensnared Jeff 
sandwiched between a slab of adobe wall and Lourdes’s ample 
chest. “Better him than me.”

She laughed along with him, the sound rising above the music in a 
delightful counter beat. “Well, your time might be coming, so 
don’t be too smug.” 

After they’d watched Jeff and Lourdes take a few spins around the 
dance floor and their laughter had dwindled to coughs, she turned 
to him expectantly. “So, you ready to try it?” 

Clark choked. “What? Lourdes? I don’t think so!”

His panicked response sent her into peals of laughter once again, 
and she could barely manage to speak. “Not that...” she sputtered 
between convulsions. “I meant *aquí y ahora*.”

“Oh.” He relaxed visibly, grinning as she tried to compose 
herself. “Do you need another shot?”

She shook her head. “That’s the last thing I need. But help 
yourself.”

“I don’t think so,” he demurred. “Alcohol really has no affect on 
me. I’d rather just enjoy the wine.”

What he was really enjoying was watching Gillian have such a good 
time. While she was always fairly easy-going, he’d never seen her 
laughing with such unbridled merriment and teasing so 
mercilessly. The reserve that always seemed to hold her in such 
calm control was gone, and whether it was the free flowing 
*chicha* or the party or just the fact that they’d all survived 
another day, he didn’t know. If he had to guess, he’d probably 
say a little bit of all of it.

“You didn’t answer the question. How does it feel to be a part of 
the here and now?”

What was it that they’d joked about? Oh yes, her lack of 
persistence. Clark took a drink of wine while he formulate an 
answer that would satisfy her without opening a bunch of painful 
things he’d rather avoid discussing. 

“I guess it’s nice. For a while, anyway,” he added skeptically. 
“It doesn’t seem very realistic.”

What he didn’t say was that he couldn’t imagine living without 
any regards to what might happen next, even if he no longer had 
any idea what that might be. Just because he was too busy and too 
tired to think about it much didn’t mean he didn’t want to think 
about ever.

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing? For the last six weeks, 
staying here in San Pablo?”

Unnerved by her insight into his thoughts, he hesitated only for 
a second before answering her. “No.”

She turned to face him directly, her flinty eyes unblinking and 
curious as they held his. “Are you sure about that? You don’t 
seem to have a past, and I’ve noticed that you don’t talk much 
about your plans for the future.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t have a future,” he speculated with 
a broad grin that masked the uncertainty her observation had 
dredged to the surface. 

“Everyone has a future, Sam,” she said, reaching across the table