Strong
By Shayne Terry <byron212@yahoo.com>
Rated: PG-13
Submitted: September 2007
___________________


DISCLAIMER: I don't own the characters or the worlds they live
in. They belong to a lot of people who aren't me. I don't own
Buffy, or Lois and Clark or any of their friends.



Scrubbing at the blood on her hands, Lois stared at herself in
the grimy bathroom mirror. In the harsh neon glare of the
bathroom light she looked pale and washed out. The bruises on
her face were already fading and the swelling was slowly going
down.

She closed her eyes for a moment and flinched as a flash of
memory came over her. The sensation of her hands crunching bone
was something that was going to haunt her nightmares for a long
time.

Lois Lane had been sure she was going to die tonight. In a way,
she almost wished she had.

Of all the risks she'd taken, this one shouldn't have been any
different. Than the others. Somehow it had.

She never would have gotten out alive if it hadn't been for the
voice.

"Are you ready to be strong?" The voice had rung out in her ear
even though no one had spoken the words. Somehow, they'd
compelled her, drawn her in, given her strength that she never
would have imagined her having.

That strength had kept her alive, but it had come with a price.

She was going to have to live with what she had done for the
rest of her life.

***********

Lois felt as though she was walking through a dream. She'd
double checked her makeup and the swelling of her right eye was
barely noticeable. The bruises had already faded with an
unnatural speed.

She looked professional as always, and she held herself erect.
There was no reason that anyone else had to know about her own
personal hell. They already avoided her. The people at the
office only tolerated her because she got results.

Risks had carried her to three Merriweather awards, and her
current story might get her nominated for a Pulitzer. For
someone who was only twenty six, it was an impressive resume.

Risk had carried her to the top, and it was only now that Lois
found herself wondering if it had all been worth it.

The story she had in her hands might win her a Pulitzer, and the
thought of it should have filled her with joy. Instead, all she
felt was numb.

Her hands still shook when she wasn't paying attention.

She walked through the Bullpen, wondering when everything had
gotten so quiet. The place was almost deserted, although she
could hear the television blaring from the conference room.

She stepped through the door, to find a crowd of people who had
their eyes glued to the television.

The picture of a massive crater, dwarfed by the tiny trucks and
vehicles parked by the rim was stark, as were pictures of
refugees huddled in busses.

She saw Perry White, her editor get up silently and slide around
the periphery of the room. He stepped outside the conference
room and said in a low voice, "Where have you been honey? I've
been worried about you."

He stared at her, and Lois had a sense that she wasn't fooling
him with all the makeup.

"I've got the gunrunning story. I just got back from the
airport."

"From the Congo?"

"I flew through London."

She hadn't bothered to try to sleep, knowing that it would be
useless. Instead, she'd used her time productively, writing
story after story that would be the end of these men.

What they did to people was a crime.

"I have the proof to nail them to the wall. I'm going to have
the story that's going to..."

"Give me what you have. The rest you'll have to finish up on the
plane," Perry said. "I almost sent the new hire out on the
Sunnydale story by himself."

"Sunnydale?"

"The crater back there. It was a town in California with a
population of thirty eight thousand. Nobody seems to know what
happened."

"Terrorists?" Lois asked. The only thing she could think of that
would do that kind of damage was a meteor impact, or an
underground nuclear detonation. The Meteor strike would have
been observed.

Perry shrugged. "Keep your traveling clothes together, and I'll
have you on a flight with your new partner."

"Partner?" Lois scowled. She'd tried having partners in the
past, but it had never worked. She'd always ended up driving
them away.

In the end it had become clear to her that she worked better
alone. No one else was willing to take the risks she did.

"He's just the man we need for this." There was a strange
certainty in Perry's voice that worried Lois.

Perry gestured, and a handsome man smoothly rose from his seat
and smiled at her.

Lois fought to keep from scowling again. She hated handsome men.
They were full of themselves and they generally weren't all that
bright either.

"Clark Kent, I'd like you to meet Lois Lane."

*************

"Let's get things straight before we go any further," Lois said
as he packed the last of the suitcases in the back of the taxi,
making it look effortless. With her newfound strength, which
seemingly hadn't gone away, Lois could have matched that feat,
but she was still impressed.

"You like to be top banana," Clark said, interrupting her. "You
call the shots, and I look and learn."

Lois frowned. "You've been talking to people at the office?"

"I watch people," he said. "Sometimes I can be a pretty good
judge of character."

"Well, I also don't like being interrupted. I'm the top banana,
and I'm the lead reporter on this. You are the new man here, the
low man on the totem pole. Where did you say you were from
again?"

"I didn't." Clark opened the door for her, and gestured for her
to get in. The cabbie inside looked bored.

"Let me guess. You come from one of the red states in the middle
of the country. You are a country boy, and you still think it's
polite to rise when a woman enters the room."

Clark nodded. "I can square dance too." He slipped into the taxi
beside her. Closing the door, he leaned forward and said, "The
Airport please."

"Where are you from?" she asked.

"A small town named Smallville."

Lois smirked and looked away for a moment. The handsome man was
nothing more than a good looking farmer.

She could work with him, if he was as naïve as he pretended to
be.

Now all she had to worry about was this collapsed city, and the
source of her mysterious new strength.

And she'd have to come to terms with her own guilt. Luckily,
Lois Lane could achieve anything if she set her mind to it.

She was asleep a moment after she found her seat on the plane.


Startled, Lois jerked awake. She had fading memories of dreams
of men with demonic looking faces, of fighting, blood and
death.

She'd had enough of that in real life to be surprised that it
followed in her dreams.

It took her a moment to realize that she was lying with her head
on her partner's shoulder. She glanced up at him, only to see
that he was looking down at her with amusement.

Pulling herself quickly to an upright position, she said, "How
far are we from Los Angeles? "

"You've been asleep for almost nine hours," Clark said. "We had
a layover and the stewardess thought you were drunk."

Lois stared at him, wondering if he was teasing her. It was hard
to tell given his bland expression. She had a feeling that he'd
practiced fading into the woodwork. It was a good skill for an
undercover reporter.

"We've got about thirty minutes before we land." Clark said.
"The good news is that we've got a vehicle. The bad news is that
there aren't any places to stay within a two hundred mile
radius."

Lois frowned.

"Thirty five thousand people or so have flooded every hotel,
motel, bed and breakfast and private home willing to rent in the
area."

"So what are we going to do?"

Clark looked embarrassed. "I have friends in the area; we'll
stay with them."

"Of course you do," Lois said.

"They live about an hour out from the crater," Clark said.
"It'll be fun."

***************

Lois stared at the small collection of Spanish style houses
covered in red tile roofs. They were clustered together among
the rolling hills, but the weather was hot and the countryside
was brown. There had been a drought here, she remembered.

Smiling widely, Clark Kent was embraced by the large family.
They were well dressed Latin-Americans, who seemed genuinely
fond of Clark. They spoke to him in rapid Spanish, and he
replied to them in the same language.

The children didn't seem to have any concept of boundaries, and
Lois found herself involuntarily pulling away as they attempted
to hug her as well.

She was soon pulled to her room, an airy room with an old
fashioned ceiling fan and an old fashioned bed.

Dropping her suitcases to the hardwood floors, Lois winced at
the heavy thump they'd made. She was carrying several of them,
and she'd forgotten how heavy they were. Luckily, Clark hadn't
seemed to notice.

There were lovely Spanish rugs on the floor and pictures of
laughing children covered the walls, which were painted brightly
in reds and pinks.

The window opened out into a view of the hills and it was large
enough that she could have crawled out of it. She would only
have a little drop. She wondered how they managed without bars
on the windows, or any of the other little protections that she
had come to be used to in Metropolis.

Small town people were too trusting. Here they were accepting
her into their home, a woman they knew nothing about.

For all they knew, she could be an axe-murderer. She closed her
eyes at the sudden image of blood on her hands.

**************

The motor homes and RV's had already proliferated into a sort of
shanty town at the edge of the crater. None of the vehicles
belonged to the former residents. Instead, they'd all been
rented out by news networks. Satellite dishes sprouted from the
roofs of the vehicles, and helicopters flew over the rim of the
crater.

The crater was vast. More than five miles in diameter, and
several hundred feet deep, it was already the focus of a massive
rescue operation. Deep in the crater, men were combing the
rubble for any sighs of survivors, or failing that, any evidence
of what had happened here.

"There is no evidence that this is the result of a terrorist
attack, but we are investigating all possibilities." Carl
Braithwait was a mid level FEMA employee who looked more like a
heavyset accountant. In all likelihood that was exactly what he
had once been.

He was sweating at the podium, and to the gathered crowd of
reporters, it was like chum in the water.

"So there is no sign that this was the result of an underground
nuclear detonation?" One reporter asked quickly.

"Radiation readings are normal at every place in the crater we
have measured so far. The size of the detonation needed to
create a crater this size would leave evidence that we just
don't see."

"What's the working theory then?" Another reporter stood up and
asked the question.

"We believe that the town of Sunnydale was built on top of an
unstable system of caverns that eventually collapsed in on
itself."

"Who warned the citizens of Sunnydale to evacuate the city?"
Lois asked. "And if they had several days warning, why wasn't
anyone else informed of the dangers?"

"You'll have to ask the citizens themselves why they all decided
to leave at the same time. As far as we can tell, there was no
government involvement in the evacuation at all. This came as a
surprise to us as much as to anyone."

Lois scowled as the next woman stood up to ask her question.
There was something rotten here, and she knew it.

A young man in a black t-shirt and with several piercing stood
up and said, "What about the weirdness that was the city before
the collapse? Is anyone ready to talk about the truth about the
city of Sunnydale?"

"I'm here to focus on the crisis at hand. We are doing
everything we can to rescue any possible survivors, and trying
to find a solution as to the relocation of the people who lived
here. This is an insurance crisis as well as a humanitarian
one."

Neatly sidestepping the question. "Have there been any survivors
found?" Lois asked.

Braithwait shook his head. Before he could ask anyone else, she
followed with another question. "How many bodies have you
found?"

"At last count, thirty seven," he said. "Seventeen were seniors
trapped in a nursing home. It is a national chain and there will
be an investigation."

"Is there fear of looting?" The reporter who asked this was
particularly stupid looking.

"It takes special equipment just to get down into the crater."
Braithwait wiped his head. "And whatever treasures might be left
are buried under tons of rock and rubble. Worrying about looters
is a low priority at the moment."

As he spoke, Lois pulled out her cell phone and quickly sent a
text message to Jimmy.

"Research Sunnydale. Full background, esp. weirdness. Lois."

A moment later there was a reply.

"Already on it. Information tonight."

The rest of the press conference was a bust.

**************
"There aren't any survivors," Clark said stubbornly.

"I covered the earthquake in Mexico and they were still finding
people weeks later."

Shaking his head, Clark said "I looked....there's nothing that
could have survived all that. It's a waste of time."

"Tell that to the families of the dead," Lois said.

At least a list of the dead was going to be released. How long
it would be was an open question. With so many people displaced,
there wasn't any good way to contact relatives beforehand.

Lois grabbed one of Clark's fries, already regretting her choice
of a salad and tuna sandwich. She was ravenous, more than could
be accounted for by what she'd eaten.

It felt as though she could eat her meal and his too, and Clark
Kent ate like a teenager.

"How do you eat like that?" she asked. Full cream in his coffee,
fatty hamburger, double order of fries, milkshake, pie. Kent was
a fat man in a fit man's body, and she envied him.

He pushed the basket of fries in her direction, and she smiled
at him gratefully before shoveling most of them onto her empty
salad plate.

"Jimmy is going to investigate the town, so our next step is to
find people who were in town the day it fell."

Clark got a sudden far off look in his eyes. He turned to her
and said, "I'll get started on that. I'll do some leg work and
meet you back at the villa."

Tossing her the keys to the rental, and throwing some money down
on the table, Clark stood up and quickly left the building.

He didn't even have a vehicle.

****************

Stepping out of the café, Lois scanned the street outside. She'd
grabbed the keys almost as soon as he'd left, and there
shouldn't have been time for him to get very far.

It was a narrow street filled with closely parked cars. There
wasn't anywhere for her partner to have gone in either
direction; there weren't any alleyways or intersection streets
for most of a city block.

Lois scowled as she walked quickly down the street toward the
rental. Ditching her was unprofessional, and she was going to
let Perry know exactly what she thought of her new partner. She
was Lois Lane, and she would be treated with respect.

It felt good to be angry. Anger was a familiar emotion, one
she'd had a great deal of experience channeling into positive
outcomes.

It had only failed her once. Lois suppressed a shudder, and then
stopped as she came to the rental.

Someone had parked barely a foot away from the front bumper, and
someone else had parked almost as close from the back. There was
no way she was ever going to be able to squeeze out of the
parking space as it was. Worse, Perry had already read her the
riot act about damaging rentals, after a few unfortunate
incidents involving car chases.

People were so rude. It had always irritated her, but the longer
she stood and stared at it, the angrier it made her.

She glanced over at the business the car was parked in front of.
The beat of loud music played from inside, and there was some
sort of cheesy gothic design on the front sign.

The street was deserted though.

Slipping her keys into a front pocket, Lois reached down and
grabbed the rear bumper of the car in front of her. Although
she'd seen some of what her strength could do, she had never
really tested it.

The rear of the car came up, and a moment later, the tires came
up as well. It was a strain, but Lois didn't feel as though she
was hurting anything important.

She shoved the car a few inches out in the street. She then
moved to the front and shoved that a few inches forward.

Lois Lane had always hated rudeness.

***********

Lois smirked as she stared in the rear view mirror. She'd called
to report a car parked out in the middle of the street, and the
tow truck had already arrived. It was petty of her, but somehow
she felt a little better.

She pulled into drive and headed back for the villa. She was
grateful that she'd driven on the way out to the conference, or
she would have missed the turn onto the dirt road leading to the
Cortez home.

Pulling up next to a seeming fleet of cars, she put the car into
park and sat for a moment. The sun had long ago gone down, and
Lois could feel the wind turning cooler.

She got out of the car and headed for the back. Their rooms had
their own doors, so they wouldn't have to interrupt their hosts.
Another door led to an interior courtyard with a beautiful
garden.

Lois needed access to her computer to see what Jimmy had come up
with. Maybe then she could start writing up a preliminary story
for the Planet.

As she approached her door, she saw the patriarch of the family
leaning against the wall. He was lighting a cigar and staring up
at the sky.

"Senor Cortez," she said. Under ordinary circumstances, she
would be wary about being alone at night with a man she did not
know, but since the change, she knew the truth.

He should worry about being alone with her.

"Senorita Lane," the man said, nodding in her direction. He was
a man in his sixties, and gray was just beginning to creep into
his moustache.

She hesitated, and then asked, "How does your family know Mr.
Kent?"

"He saved the life of my granddaughter," the older man said. "In
my culture, we do not forget such things."

"How did he...?" Lois frowned. She hadn't pegged Clark Kent as
the physically brave type.

"He was a drifter...he found work with us on the ranch. When
Anna went missing, lost in the hills, he found her and brought
her back after she'd been bitten by a snake."

So he had just been part of the rescue effort. It didn't help
much in getting a better picture of who her partner was.

"Anna thought he was an angel come to take her." The older man
chuckled. "She was delirious at the time. It was a miracle that
he even found her in the first place. She was miles away from
where any of the rest of us thought to look."
"Thank you, Mr. Cortez." Lois hesitated. "Do you know anything
about Sunnydale?"

The old man spat on the ground. "La Boca del Infierno. The
Spanish always had sense enough to avoid that place. Only the
gringos were stupid enough to move there."

"There was something wrong with it?" Lois asked. She'd felt
something the first time she'd seen the crater, a sense of
slowly fading evil, but she'd dismissed it as jet lag.

"It was a cursed place. My Maria drove an extra thirty minutes
just to avoid shopping there."

The old man extinguished the cigar with a small brass device
from his pocket. "I'm going to bed. If you know what's good for
you, you will as well. Things escaped when the city collapsed,
and the hills aren't as safe as they once were."

Before Lois could ask another question, he slipped around the
corner and was gone.

Frowning, Lois found her key and stepped inside her room. A few
moments allowed her to connect her laptop to the telephone
line.

A few moments later she was inside the US census database.
California as a whole was racially diverse. Latinos, Asians,
African Americans...it was an ethnic and cultural melting pot,
more so than in most parts of the country. Only half the
population was Caucasian.

Sunnydale had been almost ninety eight percent Caucasian. Lois
frowned. Something definitely wasn't right here, especially as
housing prices in Sunnydale were a third of the price anywhere
else in the state. Those prices had kept dropping over a period
of several years even as the rest of the state had skyrocketing
property prices.

Lois checked her e-mail. Jimmy hadn't sent her an attachment
yet, and all of a sudden she was waiting anxiously. She could
tell that she was only hitting the tip of the iceberg with this
story, and there was something desperately wrong with that
town.

Cursed. It was how she had been feeling about herself since
she'd begun changing.

She jerked compulsively as there was a knock at the door.

Her partner stepped into the room, and Lois said, "Where have
you been? I looked all over for..."

"They've found more than a hundred bodies." Clark said. "Buried
by a gas station just past the edge of the crater."

He handed her a photo. It was an aerial photo of ambulances
gathered to collect bodies, even as police were digging up a
mass communal grave.

Lois was already gathering her coat.

***************

Trees flashed by rapidly as Clark made his way expertly through
the winding, unlit path. There had been a time when Lois would
have been almost blind; it was a moonless night and the only
light came from the headlights, which didn't reach that far in
front of them.

Since the change, the darkness didn't seem as all encompassing.
She could see all around them, and for a moment she thought of
asking Clark to drive. Apparently, he also had very good night
vision, because he never seemed to make a mistake, slowing even
before she saw the deer which tried to run out into the road.

For some reason, the bodies were being transported by
refrigerated trucks to the San Louis Obispo county morgue
instead of further up or down coast. This required a trip
through the Los Padres National forest, something that didn't
make sense to Lois, but which Clark explained as being due to
overcrowding in the Los Angeles morgues.

"How did you get the aerial photo?" she asked, not looking at
her partner. He'd certainly come through professionally, but she
was still angry about being ditched.

Clark Kent coughed and said "I have a friend who is a helicopter
pilot."

He was lying. Lois wasn't sure why, but she filed it away for
another time. There would be time enough o teach him the error
of his ways.

"How are we going to get the coroner to talk?" she asked.

"I know the Assistant Coroner," Clark said. He stared at the
road and didn't look at her.

So there were reasons Perry had sent Clark on this assignment.
He knew the area, he had connections. Lois was beginning to feel
like the third wheel. She hoped she didn't have to get between
the man and his ego.

"So we won't be using her name in the story."

It was a shot in the dark, but his slight flinch told her she
was correct. Lois pursed her lips. She should have known that a
man who looked like her partner would have a checkered past.

Glancing at her, Clark said, "She's a member of the Cortez
family."

The same family that loved Clark for having saved their little
girl.

"They certainly get around," she said.

Clark shrugged. He tapped the brake sharply and a moment later
Lois saw a deer dart out in front of them. This one didn't stop,
and Clark smoothly missed it.

"You're pretty good at this," she said.

"I had some training driving as a bodyguard for a Nigerian
princess," he said. He glanced at her and smirked. "She taught
me to dance."

Lois had taken the combat driving course before going to the
Congo. It hadn't done her much good, and she wasn't sure how it
would apply now. Before the change she would have hit the deer
almost certainly.

Now she wasn't sure. She doubted that she would have been able
to do it as smoothly as Clark Kent had.

"You missed your profession, Smallville," Lois said uneasily.
"You should be at the Indianapolis 500."

He smiled at her. "Who says I haven't?"

"What, you're a world traveler?"

"I've been traveling the world for the past five years, and I
did some traveling in college."

"Trust fund baby?" Lois asked.

Clark shook his head. "My parents are farmers in Kansas. I just
discovered that it's possible to go anywhere if you are willing
to undergo a little hardship."

Mr. Cortez had described him as a drifter.

"You never wrote for any major paper?"

"The London Times, the New York Times...I've written a few
things for the AP. Mostly I did freelance work for smaller
papers. I did an article for the Borneo Gazette about the mating
habits of..."

Lois gestured irritably. "I'm not interesting in mating habits.
I want to know about this case."

"They've found eighty nine bodies so far, most were buried about
three feet underground in shallow graves. One of the graves
intersected with the Sunnydale pit, and a searcher noticed an
arm hanging out. There's no telling if more bodies are inside
the pit, although the searchers don't seem to think so."

"I just don't see how someone could kill eighty nine people
without it being noticed."

"There are a hundred thousand missing persons' cases active at
any given time," Clark said. "People like Gacy, Dahmer,
Bundy...sometimes they get away with it for years."

Lois scowled and stared out the window again.

The rest of the trip was silent.

*************

Lois had always hated morgues. They had the usual hospital smell
to them, of disinfectants and other chemicals, and underlying
that, she'd always thought she could sense an underlying smell
of rot.

They were purposefully isolated, and often underground. It was
probably easier to insulate the cadavers.

There were refrigerated trucks pulled around the back of the
building. Lois could hear the sound of humming coming from the
trucks, and the sounds of a gasoline generator somewhere farther
behind.

There were too many bodies for the facility, and some of them
were going to have to stay in the trucks.

Lois felt nervous. Someone was going to have to check on the
generators and the refrigeration equipment fairly regularly, or
a mistake could be disastrous.

There was a double set of large metal doors in the back, with a
smaller door off to the side. The door clicked open, and an
attractive Latino woman gestured for them to come in.

A moment later they were walking quickly down a long hall toward
an elevator.

The woman, who was wearing a lab coat, quietly went to the door
next to the elevator, and they slipped down the stairs.

"My boss is upstairs," the woman said finally when they reached
the bottom. "He gets curious when he hears the elevator
moving."

She pushed open another set of double doors, and they were
inside the morgue.

There were five bodies draped in sheets. On one wall were row
upon row of metal drawers, which held bodies. To the right was
the door to the freezer.

A large African-American man was scrubbing his hands at a sink.

"This is Marcus, my Diener," the woman said.

The man looked up at them and nodded curtly before going back to
scrubbing himself.
As a Diener, he was the man who actually manhandled the bodies,
moving them from place to place and assisting the coroner.

The woman turned and said, "My name is Angela Cortez. I don't
normally make a habit of speaking with the press."

There would be legal problems if she did speak about ongoing
investigations. The implication was that she wanted her name out
of the paper.

"We won't implicate you," Lois said. "Can you tell me what
you've found?"

"I've only done five autopsies," Angela said, "but I've had a
preliminary look at thirty other bodies. My boss is upstairs
doing other autopsies, and I suspect he won't find anything
different."

Lois didn't say anything, and Angela stepped over to the nearest
body. Pulling the cover carefully aside, she showed the decaying
face of a mustachioed man.

Putting one hand to her nose because of the smell, Lois leaned
forward. The man had a tattoo on his head. She couldn't make out
the design due to the discoloration of his face.

"If they'd been buried any more shallowly, we'd be looking at
bones. As it is, the estimated time of death is approximately
two to three years ago."

"You can't pin the time down any more closely," Lois asked.

"These are preliminary results," the woman said.

"All the bodies were killed at the same time?" Clark asked.

The woman nodded. "All the ones I've examined so far, anyway.
What I've seen of my bosses results show the same thing."

"How did they die?"

"Blunt force trauma, mostly. Broken bones, crushed skulls,
occasional puncture wounds that weren't made by anything sharp.
Some of them had limbs torn completely off."

Lois frowned. "Somebody stabbed them with something blunt?"

"I found this in the back of one man's eye socket." Angelica
turned to a nearby drawer and pulled out a clearly labeled
evidence bag.

Inside was a single, broken red fingernail.

"Someone dropped that in while they were burying the bodies?"
Clark asked.

Angelica shook her head. "It was buried in the back of the eye
socket."

Lois stared at the coroner for a long moment, feeling nauseous.
She could remember the feeling of bone shattering under her
hands, and it took her a moment to realize the full
implications.

The coroner began to drone on about blunt force trauma, about
crushed skulls, about impact points and pre-mortem injuries.

This was something Lois was capable of doing. As she hadn't, it
meant that she wasn't the only person to have changed.

She didn't wonder why Clark had the same look of sick
realization on his face as she did.

**************

Angelica droned on and on about the causes of death. Blunt force
trauma, the occasional piercing wounds, limbs ripped off. The
litany of death went on and on, and Lois found herself becoming
more and more nauseous.

"Were they wearing anything that would give some clue to their
identities?" she asked, interrupting. Anything would be better
than listing all the possible ways a human being could be killed
by someone else with their bare hands.

"They were wearing custom made armor," Angelica said. "Helmets,
mail shirts, armored gloves...the full regalia."

"Movie props?" Clark asked.

Angelica shook her head. "Well made and useable. No recognizable
armorer's mark. They were armed with swords, maces, and
crossbows...all medieval weapons without a single modern pistol
or rifle among them."

"Could they have done this to each other?" Lois asked, hoping
for an alternative explanation. "Some of these wounds could have
been made by a hammer or mace..."

"The heads of the weapons are too large for the impact areas. I
haven't seen any of the maces with a small enough head to have
done the sort of damage we've seen, although some of the crushed
skulls might have been."

"Anything else?" Lois asked.

Angelica nodded. "I haven't done the autopsy on this last fellow
here, and Marcus just pulled his armor off before you got
here."

She pulled back the sheet to reveal a desiccated corpse wearing
some sort of strange cotton undergarment.

"Do you recognize this?" Lois asked.

Both Clark and Angelica shook their heads.

Marcus, the morgue attendant spoke up for the first time. "It's
a Vestis Angelica."

"What?"

"I took a class at UC Sunnydale," the man said, sounding
embarrassed. "A Vestis Angelica is a monastic garment that
laymen wore shortly before their death, that they might have the
benefit of monks' prayers."

"So these men thought they were going to die soon." Lois glanced
at Clark, knowing he was wondering the same thing as she was.
Was this some sort of suicide cult?

"I think it was a custom in Europe back in the middle ages.
Today it's mostly continued in Italy and Spain. I don't
recognize the religious order these things are dedicated to. If
you get much past the Dominicans or the Franciscans, I'm lost."

Lois leaned forward. There was a small design on the
undergarment that looked like the same design on the tattoos.

"Are all the tattoos the same?" Clark asked.

"All the ones we've seen so far anyway." Angelica said quietly.

"Were you in Sunnydale when it...?" Lois asked, staring at the
man. They needed interviews with survivors, but from what she
was hearing from Perry, the survivors were uncharacteristically
silent, even to the television reporters.

The day a Californian didn't want to be on television was the
day something was wrong.

"I had the sense to get out three years ago," he said. "It meant
transferring schools, but it was worth it."

"What can you tell me about Sunnydale?" Lois asked.

The man scowled and turned away to wash his hands again. This
time he seemed to do it compulsively.

"I worked at the coroner's office in Sunnydale for a month
before I got out. It was the biggest mistake of my life."

"Why?" Lois asked.

"Check the death statistics," he said. His face was closed, and
she could tell she wasn't going to get more out of him without
extensive prying.

Lois stiffened, and she noticed that Clark did as well. She
could hear the sounds of stealthy movements in the hallway
outside.

Angelica and Marcus didn't appear to have heard anything.

Lois gestured toward the door, and Angelica's eyes widened. If
her boss found her in the morgue with two reporters, her career
could be over.

Angelica gestured toward the vault, and Lois nodded, as did
Clark. They hustled toward the refrigerated vault, the door
closing behind them just as Lois heard a muffled voice on the
other side of the door. She couldn't make out the words, but it
seemed to go on and on and on.

It was bitingly, freezing cold, and Lois wasn't dressed for it.
She began shivering, and Clark pulled off his suit jacket and
gave it to her.

Lois would have protested, but she was too cold to care. She was
wearing a skirt, and her legs were starting to feel numb.
Luckily, his jacket covered her to the knees, and it was
amazingly warm and comfortable as it enveloped her.

Clark looked at her, and a moment later. Lois thought the cold
seemed to recede a little, and the jacket seemed to feel warmer.
She huddled against a wall, and Clark huddled close to her.

Lois ignored the bodies laid out on the shelves behind her.
There wasn't anything she wanted to see.

A moment later she jerked as the door to the vault opened.

"I'm sorry," Angelica said. "You have to get out of here. He's
bringing some observer's down for the next autopsy."

Lois nodded, and the two of them stepped out into the autopsy
room.

Slipping her heels off, she and Clark dashed down the hall. She
heard the sound of the elevator door opening, along with the
chime that usually accompanied it.

She sprinted down the hall, with Clark right behind her. They
both slipped through the door to the stairs a moment before the
elevator opened. Clark had the door in his hand, and he held it
slightly open, so the noise of the door closing wouldn't alert
whoever was coming out of the elevator.

Three men in black suits followed a heavyset man in a green
operating gown.

Clark allowed the door to click shut only after the men were
halfway down the hall.

**********

The identical Crown Victorias with government plates parked in
front of the building were only conformation of what Lois
already expected.

"FBI?" she asked Clark quietly.

He nodded, staring intently over his glasses into the car. Even
with her improved night sight, Lois couldn't make out anything
incriminating, and even she wasn't about to break into an FBI
vehicle.

Clark glanced behind him and said, "Let's get out of here before
they get back."

Lois nodded, and they quickly headed for the rental car. They'd
parked it a moderate distance away in accordance to Angela's
wishes.

"Do you really think they were a suicide cult?" Lois asked.

"Or they knew that something out there might kill them," Clark
said grimly. He looked at Lois for a moment and said, "I'm
getting the feeling that we're just hitting the tip of the
iceberg here."

"Jimmy should have the information for us. I'll check it online
when I get back."

As Clark slipped the vehicle into drive, Lois wondered if she
should have insisted on driving. At home, she never would have
let anyone else drive, but Clark was familiar with the area, and
she was always so tired. She hadn't felt rested, no matter how
much she slept.

She realized she was still wearing Clark's jacket, but she felt
warm and comfortable. A few minutes into the trip she began to
drift off.

******************

She was surrounded by rock walls, the only light coming from a
cave entrance. Three men stood before her, and when she tried to
move she discovered that she was somehow chained down.

They spoke in a language she didn't understand, and she screamed
as darkness began to rise from the walls and the floor. It woke,
and began to pour toward her, an inexorable tide of evil.

It flowed over her, and a moment later she was choking on it.

*******************

Lois jerked awake, dismayed to realize that she was sweating
profusely. Clark had turned the heater on full blast, and inside
his coat she'd been too warm.

She could still taste the darkness, smell it. Instinctively she
knew that it tainted everything it touched.

It would explain why she'd done what she'd done.

The car pulled to a stop, and Lois stepped out quickly. She was
exhausted and looking for something to blame on her own bad
choices.

She'd made the choice to kill, and now she was going to have to
live with it for the rest of her life.

Mysterious strength or no, there had been nothing forcing her to
make the choices she had, other than the circumstances.

There was an unfamiliar car in the Cortez parking lot, and Lois
wondered who might be coming here at this hour of the night.

She headed for the front entrance way instead of the back, and
Lois was surprised to see a familiar face.

"Jimmy?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"

"I was originally assigned to your seat on the plane," he said.
"After the things I found out about Sunnydale...and didn't, the
Chief wanted me to come down here and see if I could find out
anything more concrete."

"What's going on?" Lois asked.

She gestured for him to come inside, and he did.

Several of the Cortez family were watching from a common living
area, and for some reason, the moment Jimmy stepped over the
threshold, they visibly relaxed.

"The records online have been tampered with," Jimmy said. "But
there's a lot of evidence from home web sites that disagrees
with the official record. I'm going to look at copies of the
paper they have in Los Angeles to see if I can find out
anything."

Lois led Jimmy through the courtyard and toward her room. She
gestured for Clark to come in as well.

As soon as the door closed, Jimmy said, "There's a massive
conspiracy around this place, and I have proof."

Jimmy had brought a small suitcase and a larger computer bag
with him. He dropped the suitcase on the floor, and pulled a
thick file folder out of the bag. He opened it on the table and
glanced through it, flipping through several pages.

"I was investigating Sunnydale like I was asked, and I didn't
find anything out of the ordinary. Everything seemed pretty
standard for a California town of thirty eight thousand people
and change."

Lois sat slowly on the bed, certain that there was more to the
story.

"There were a few anomalies...Sunnydale had a college campus, an
airport, a train and bus station...too much for a town of that
size. Someone had to have some heavy political clout over the
years to attract all of that business."

"Well, it's a county seat..." Lois said slowly.

Jimmy shook his head. "I found personal blogs and web pages from
people who had been living in Sunnydale at the time, and what
they say is a lot different than the official line. Some of it
is pretty far out there...accusing the government of
conspiracies, talking about the supernatural..."

"Well, the internet isn't exactly the most reliable source for
information," Lois said.

Giving her a sour look, Jimmy grabbed a sheet from the folder.
Glancing at it, he said, "In June 1999, someone bombed one of
the Sunnydale High schools, completely destroying it during the
graduation ceremony. In the process, more than forty people were
killed. Survivors talked about giant snakes and monsters
attacking."

Lois glanced at Clark. That should have been national news, the
sort of news that ran for months as CNN and MSNBC tried to
decide who was to blame. Although she had been in her first year
as a reporter, she should have heard about that. She hadn't
heard a word.

"Earlier that year, a group of vigilantes attempted to burn
several people at the stake, accusing them of witchcraft."

Jimmy shifted uneasily in his seat and pulled another folder
from the computer bag. He glanced at several papers inside.

"In December 1999, the entire town of Sunnydale came down with
laryngitis, all at the same time. Yet somehow, the CDC denies
any knowledge of this, and no one was sent to investigate."

"I heard something about that," Lois said. "Wasn't it dismissed
as a hoax?"

Jimmy hesitated and said, "What the reports that did come out
didn't mention were that there are reports of gangs of men in
straitjackets being followed by ‘floating men' through the
middle of town, as well as several murders where victims had
their hearts surgically removed."

Lois saw Clark flinch at the mention of floating men. She
resolved to ask him about it later.

He continued. "In February 2001, someone murdered thirty people
on a train car entering Sunnydale. Yet it never made the news."

"That should have been national news," Lois said. "And nobody
reported on it?"

Jimmy shrugged helplessly. "In November 2001, there are reports
that people in Sunnydale were singing and dancing maniacally in
the streets."

Clark said, "I've heard reports of that happening back in the
middle ages. It's been attributed to ergot poisoning, and
hallucinogenic molds."

"On their web pages and blogs, these people were talking about
classmates and neighbors dying every day, and yet very few
people seemed to ever leave."

"Is there any evidence of that?" Lois asked.

"As far as I can tell, the death rate in Sunnydale was more than
thirty times higher than Washington D.C. on its worst year. They
disguised this by attributing the deaths to barbeque accidents,
animal attacks and gang violence."

Jimmy shook his head. "I'm going to the library tomorrow. For
some reason, all issues of the Sunnydale newspaper dating after
1992 are not available online, but I understand that the L.A.
Country library has copies. I'm going to try to get all the
corroborating evidence I can."

"Is that all you've got?" Lois asked.

"So far," Jimmy said. He looked tired.

Clark stood and told Jimmy, "You'll be rooming with me."

He grabbed Jimmy's bags and headed out the door. Jimmy glanced
at the clock on the mantle, and stood as well.

As he was leaving, Lois stood up and spoke. "What were you
planning on doing tonight?"

"Well, it's kind of late. I was hoping to find a room, maybe
meet one of the senoritas..."

"This is work, not a single's bar. We don't exactly have time to
go surfing."

"Well, I wouldn't mind a little time at the beach," Jimmy said.
"Maybe after all this is over we can all delay the flight back a
few days and go windsurfing or something."

Lois rolled her eyes at Jimmy. "You're living in fantasyland if
you think we're getting a free vacation out of this."

Jimmy shrugged. "It never hurts to try."

"I need you to do something for me," Lois said quietly. "Try to
find any stories out there that you can about feats of
superhuman strength."

She briefly described what they'd discovered at the coroners.

"So I should focus on female feats of strength?"

"If you find things about males, I'll take those too," Lois
said. "But I'm mostly interested in finding out who this woman
was."

"I'm sure you are just the first in a long line of people,"
Jimmy said. He smiled wanly. "I think I'm going to be a little
more polite to the girls I date from now on."

Lois patted him on the shoulder. "I'm sure most girls don't want
to stick a finger in your eye or rip your arms off. If they
do...you really ought to be nicer."

A moment later, he was gone.

***********
Lois sat on her bed, her eyes burning. She'd been going through
the folder Jimmy had provided, and it wasn't painting a pretty
picture. If anything, Jimmy had understated the problem.

In 1992, Sunnydale had a population of 38,500. By 2002, the
population had dropped to 32,900, and there was no indication
that people were leaving Sunnydale in great numbers.

If someone had built a nuclear plant in the middle of a toxic
waste dump, the people of Sunnydale would have been safer living
there.

There was a knock at the door, Lois could hear a quiet murmuring
from the other side of it, and one of the voices sounded like
Clark's.

She glanced at the old fashioned clock on the mantle. It was
almost two in the morning.

Grabbing a robe, she headed for the door.

There wasn't a peephole, so she opened the door cautiously.
Years of living in Metropolis had taught her that it was batter
to be safe than sorry.

Clark stood impatiently on the other side of the door with
Marcus, the Diener.

"Is everything all right?" Lois asked.

Marcus stepped forward until his toe was over the threshold. "We
had a visit from two FBI men tonight. They are going to try to
cover everything up."

Lois opened the door and let the two men in.

"I did enough of that in Sunnydale. I can't do it anymore."

Lois gestured toward the chair. "Why don't you tell us a little
bit about Sunnydale?"

Marcus sat on the chair, which seemed to groan a little under
his weight. He leaned forward and closed his eyes for a long
moment.

"It's not easy to talk about, Sunnydale. It looked so good in
the brochures. The houses there cost a third of what a similar
house cost in L.A. We'd just gotten married, and it seemed like
the perfect place to raise a family."

"I transferred to U.C. Sunnydale, and I got my first job as a
Diener. For some reason, the county paid its morgue attendants
better than any other place I've ever heard of. My wife was
going to school and it seemed perfect. We were going to live the
American dream."

Marcus shook his head and chuckled bitterly. "We should have
known there was a reason the houses were so cheap, why handling
bodies paid so much, but at the time we weren't asking any
questions. It was a beautiful town, and it was a beautiful
house, and everything seemed perfect."

"Things changed?"

"There were rumors," Marcus admitted. "Morgue attendants and
coroners disappeared. Some were murdered. Sunnydale had three
different city morgues, and most of them were filled nearly to
capacity."

He shifted uneasily. "It wasn't until the night of the train
massacre that things started to change."

"There really was a train massacre?"

Marcus nodded grimly. "Forty two men women and children. Even
split among the other morgues, it was a horribly busy night,
because we still had out usual load of dead people on top of the
victims."

"How were they killed?" Lois asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Marcus said. "Legally, I guess
I can't. People from the mayor's office came down to talk to us
about it. We weren't going to talk to the press, especially out
of towners. There was an article in the local paper, but I don't
think it ever got picked up."

"What happened next?"

"They wheeled a Jane Doe in. They'd already photographed the
body, and I was sent in to set it up for the coroner to take a
look. When I pulled the sheet away and saw that it was my
Rachel..."

He stared at the floor and didn't speak for a long moment.

"Well, that was it for me. I don't remember much of the next
couple of days. I went through the funeral in a haze."

Clark nodded sympathetically.

"It wasn't until that night that I realized just how wrong
things were." Marcus looked up, looking Lois directly in the
eye. "That was the night Rachel came back."
"I'd been telling myself it was all a dream," Marcus said. "And
here she was at my doorstep."

Lois glanced at Clark. She wasn't sure where Marcus was going
with this, but she found it hard to believe that the dead had
been rising in Sunnydale. There had to be a more mundane
explanation.

"I was so stunned that I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I
think that's what saved my life." Marcus stared down at the
floor again. "She smiled at me, and it was the most beautiful
thing I ever saw."

"So what happened?" Clark asked quietly.

Lois was impressed. There was no hint of disbelief in his voice.
Clark was more of a professional than she'd imagined.

"She asked me to invite her in," Marcus said. "That's when I
knew something was wrong."

"You weren't blocking the door?" Lois asked.

Marcus shook his head. "It was wide open. All she would have had
to do was step inside."

"And as your wife, she shouldn't need an invitation to come into
her own home," Clark said.

"It just struck me as wrong, somehow. It wasn't like her."
Marcus scowled. "I started to wonder if it was really her, or if
it was something else wearing her face."

That struck a chord with Lois for some reason, and she had a
flash of memory, as though from a dream. Monstrous figures
moving in the darkness, former friends...evil.

"It was a hell of a thing, standing there with the woman I loved
on the other side of the door and not being able to speak."
Marcus grimaced. "She asked me again."

"You didn't let her in."

"I'd heard stories from some of the other coroners...warnings
never to invite anyone into your house at night. I'd thought
they were just paranoid ramblings, but when she started asking
and asking, I knew something was wrong."

Marcus closed his eyes. "All she had to do was step through the
door. If it had been my Rachel, she would have come in and if
she was really mad, she might have yelled at me a little."

"But she didn't." Lois had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her
stomach.

"She started cursing at me, telling me that I had never been a
good husband to her...that I was less than a man. She said
things....horrible things. The sort of things that you can't
take back."

Marcus coughed uncomfortably, and he looked away. "I haven't
been able to think of Rachel the same way since...and I'm bitter
about it." He looked back up, and Lois saw that his eyes seemed
a little moist. "I loved that woman, and I feel like something
precious was stolen from me."

"What happened then," Lois said.

"She started crying. I've never been able to stand seeing her
cry. So I stepped outside the door. That's when she changed."
Marcus shook his head. "Her face twisted and turned into
something monstrous and ugly, and she lunged at me. She was
fast, and if I hadn't fallen backward she would have gotten to
me."

"All night she prowled around the windows, looking in and
calling out to me. She cried, she begged...she did everything
she could to trick me into coming out. She left just before
dawn. "

"You didn't call the police?" Lois asked.

"What was I going to tell them, that I was being stalked by my
dead wife?" Marcus shook his head again. "What if she was there
when they showed up? If she was some sort of spirit, guns
wouldn't work on her. If she was some sort of zombie, it was the
same thing. Either way, I wasn't going to endanger some poor
cop."

"I packed as much as I could, and on my way out of town, I drove
by the cemetery. It was foolish of me, but I was hoping it had
all been a dream. The grave had been disturbed."

>From somewhere, Clark had found a bottle of water. He handed it
to Marcus, who opened it and took a deep drink.

"It wasn't until I tried to sell the house that I found out why
most people never left Sunnydale." He laughed bitterly. "As
cheap as I'd bought the house, you'd think someone would have
snapped it up. But the prices just kept dropping, even while
housing prices in the rest of the country kept going up and
up."

"I ended up owing fifty grand, having to quit school, and having
to work for a third the pay."

"I'd have thought you'd have ended up on the other side of the
country," Lois said. "Instead of just a couple of hours away."

"I just couldn't leave. The thought that there might be some
part of Rachel trapped in there with that thing....it torments
me. I keep feeling that there is something I should do, some way
to give her peace."

Marcus sighed. "I know there isn't much here that you can use.
People won't believe any of it. All I can tell you is that if
you want to get the story out about the monks, you'd better
hurry. They plan on moving the bodies in two days."

He stood up, and said, "It's getting late."

"Thank you," Lois said, as warmly as she could manage. Something
about his story had seemed familiar to her, although she wasn't
sure where she'd heard it.

She ushered both Marcus and Clark out the door. This left her
alone with her thoughts.

*************

Her dreams were troubled, filled with monsters, men in armor
fighting, people dying. Always in the center, there was a girl.
As the times changed, so did her face, but somehow, it was
always the same girl. Whether she wore a hoop skirt, a loincloth
or dressed in medieval armor, she was always the focus of evil.

Lois woke in a cold sweat, fading memories of monstrous faces
disturbing her.

She heard a knock at the door and rose as quickly as she could,
which wasn't very fast. A glance at the clock showed that she'd
only had three hours of sleep.

Grabbing her robe, she wrapped it around herself and headed for
the door. She opened it.

On the other side stood Jimmy, looking exhausted. "I did the
search you wanted," he said.

He handed her a thick stack of computer printouts. "This is
everything I could find. I'm going to get a little shut eye
before heading for the library today."

"Thank you," Lois said. She took the stack of papers and closed
the door behind her.

*************

By the time Clark was up, Lois had already had a shower and had
been studying the news reports for two hours. She hadn't even
had coffee yet, but somehow she was feeling reenergized.

He knocked at the door, and Lois absently said come in.

"After last night, I'd think you wouldn't be inviting people
in," Clark said. He stepped in the room with a large tray. "Mrs.
Cortez made breakfast."

"Jimmy did that search on freakish feats of strength," Lois
said. "There are a lot of stories here. A fifteen year old girl
beats her kidnapper almost to death...a nine year old girl pulls
both her parents out of a building...a twenty year old mother
pushed a car off her boyfriend after a car accident. Jimmy found
more than thirty stories of freakish feats of strength by young
girls and women; all dated May 20, 2003."

"The day Sunnydale collapsed."

"There were older stories," Lois said, "But most of them tended
to be about a mysterious man saving people from train wrecks,
burning cars and boat accidents. They date back for the past
eight years, but I don't think they really apply here."

"I'm sure you're right," Clark said.

Lois thought Clark paled a little, but she wasn't sure.

"I wanted to focus on the ones that happened when Sunnydale
collapsed, since they seemed to have the most in common."

It wouldn't help with the case of the murdered dead men, but
Lois had her own reasons for investigating.

"I made some telephone calls," Lois said. "Confirming a few of
the times. Some of the other times were noted in the articles."

She'd written a list, which she handed Clark. On each was a
time, a state and a synopsis of what had happened."

He glanced at it, and said, "I don't see anything in common. The
times are all within a two or three hour period, but..."

Lois handed him a second list. "It struck me as curious that the
times were so close...and then I had an idea."

"Time zones," Clark said. "There are stories here from as far
away as China."

Lois nodded. "And as far as I can tell, all of these girls and
women had a sudden surge of unusual strength about ten minutes
before Sunnydale collapsed."

There was one name she'd kept off the list, but it fit the trend
perfectly. She'd been in the Congo, where it was nine hours
later than California, and as far as she could recall, her
change had happened at exactly the same time as the others.

She wasn't alone.

*****************


Special Agent Thomas Kincaid was a heavyset man, with eyes
sunken into his skull. He looked like he hadn't been getting
much more sleep than Lois had, and that wasn't much.

"There is no conspiracy," he said. "We're issuing a general
press statement this afternoon."

"So what do you know about these bodies?" Lois asked the
question after glancing at Clark. Although Marcus's story had
been fantastic, he'd seemed certain that the coroner's office
was being coerced. It was the one part of the story she was
prepared to believe.

Of course, the changes in her own body were starting to make her
wonder just what else was possible.

"They seem to be members of an obscure Serbian religious
organization. They are considered terrorists by the United
States government, but they have been considered a low priority
threat."

"Why?" Clark asked.

"Imagine the Amish going on a holy war. These people refuse to
use modern weapons, and they don't get involved in politics.
They have obscure aims and frankly, nobody knows much about
them."

"Why is anyone interested at all?"

"Members are wanted in the murder and kidnapping of several
antiquities dealers and dealers of rare books."

"So why were they here?"

"We don't know." The special agent shook his head. "If they
hadn't somehow managed to get a hundred men and three thousand
pounds of metal armor and weapons on U.S. soil, I'd be inclined
to dismiss them as just another group of religious nutcases."

Lois glanced at Clark. "Do you have any idea how they managed
that?"

"So far, we are investigating leads relating to a cargo ship
from Russia. We suspect that someone may have been bribed to
look the other way, although we aren't sure. They might have
been able to slip onto U.S. soil even without collusion."

"So you don't take them seriously?"

"The bodies were buried in accordance to their religious
customs. Unless this was some sort of inter-organizational
schism, I doubt that the perpetrators would have bothered to do
more than throw them in a mass grave. Our profile of the killers
indicate that they are disorganized, and utterly without
mercy."

Lois nodded and made a note on her notepad.

"I don't suppose you have any agents here who come from
Sunnydale," she asked casually. She wasn't sure that she
believed him about the conspiracy angle, but he had been more
open than she'd expected.

He shook his head. "We didn't have a field office in
Sunnydale."

"What about former police officers?"

He laughed sharply. "Former Sunnydale police officers are
notoriously bad police officers."

"Bad as in violent?" Clark asked.

"Bad as in incompetent." Kincaid shook his head. "I don't know
what they were doing down there, but anyone with a Sunnydale
P.D. job on their resume is going to end up flipping burgers
before they get a job within a thousand miles. They just aren't
cut out for it."

"Almost as though they were purposefully hired for being
incompetent?"

"If I was a cynical man, I'd think that," Kincaid said. "More
likely it was just a bad system combined with some sort of
nepotistic hiring practices."

"What else can you tell us about the case?" Lois asked.

"I can tell you it's an ongoing investigation, and that there is
only so much information I am allowed to disclose. That's not a
sign of a cover up, by the way. That's standard police
procedure."

"So if I ask for details about how the victims were killed, you
wouldn't be able to help me."

Kincaid said, "Sometimes entire cases turn on what information
is disseminated."

Lois nodded. "I have a source who seems to believe that two FBI
agents were out trying to coerce witnesses into keeping quiet
about what they'd seen."

The special agent frowned. "The Bureau is not in the business of
conspiracies. I could see Homeland Security wanting to cover up
leaks in our defenses."

Lois pulled out her notepad.

"I saw two government issue crown Victorias with these license
numbers outside the morgue they are using to autopsy the
bodies."

Agent Kincaid's eyes widened, and he said, "When did you see
this?"

"Last night at approximately ten," Lois said. "Why?"

"We've had two special agents who have been missing for three
days. Their vehicles had these plate numbers." Agent Kincaid
picked up the telephone.

"I'm going to have someone come down and take your statements.
Don't leave anything out. Even the smallest detail might be
crucial."

***********

Lois stretched. She'd been locked in a small room for several
hours.

Normally, she would have railed against abuses by the system,
but everyone seemed sincere in their worry about the two agents
and the coroners. They were polite and professional.

When it finally ended, Lois was escorted back to Special Agent
Kincaid's office.

"You've both been very helpful," Kincaid said. "Feel free to
call me if you find out anything else related to this matter. In
fact...I insist that you do."

An agent was at the door to escort them out.

"Would it be all right for me to use the ladies' room?" Lois
asked.

The agent nodded. Lois slipped inside and stared at herself in
the mirror for a long moment. She stiffened as she heard the
faint sound of a voice coming through one of the vents.

Over the past few days her hearing had sharpened. She doubted
that she would have heard anything at all before.

She approached the vent quickly and stood as closely as she was
able.

It was Special Agent Kincaid's voice. Lois could barely make it
out.

"I told them the truth. WE haven't been covering up anything."

Lois couldn't make out another voice, and she wondered if he was
on the telephone.

"Jesus. They were that close to launching? Are they crazy? We're
downwind...the fallout would have killed millions of people."

Lois scowled and tried to stand on the tips of her toes. She was
normally fairly pleased with her height, but today she would
have given a great deal to be just a little taller.

"You military types are always trying to shoot a fly with a
bazooka. It couldn't have been that bad."

There was silence for a long moment, and then Kincaid said, "Oh.
I guess I can see why..."

Lois heard the sounds of footsteps from the hallway outside, but
they passed.

"I just want my people back. According to the Lane woman,
someone is out there trying to play spin control on all of this.
I want to know who that is, because they have two of my agents.
I don't care what you have to do, just get me the list."

Lois grimaced as she heard the sound of a telephone being
slammed down on the receiver.

She finished her ablutions quickly, but although she listened,
she didn't hear anything else.

*******************

"I don't know who to believe," Lois said. "Marcus seemed sincere
last night, but he had that story about his wife. Agent Kincaid
seemed pretty open."

She couldn't explain about what she'd overheard from the
bathroom. Clark had been close enough to know she hadn't snuck
out, and it was too convenient that she could hear what was
happening on the other side of the wall.

She wasn't about to explain her new found abilities, not to
anyone.

"Maybe they weren't actual FBI agents," Clark said slowly.

"You think someone would kidnap federal agents for their
badges?"

"I've seen worse," Clark said.

Lois had to admit that she had too. She'd been working at the
Planet for the past five years, and she'd thought she'd seen
every level of human depravity that existed.

She'd been wrong, although whether it was human depravity was
still undecided.

Lois shuddered at the though that she might no longer be human.
What was happening inside her? She could feel herself changing,
and it terrified her.

It wasn't just the strength and the hearing. Every night she had
nightmares, and every morning she woke feeling as though she
hadn't slept at all. Yet she had more energy now than she had in
the days when she'd been a six cups of coffee drinker in the
morning.

Come to think of it...she hadn't been drinking coffee at all.
The Cortez family didn't supply it. They'd been too far out of
town to get any, and she'd barely noticed.

Lois had fueled her career on coffee, and it was a little
disturbing to realize that she'd barely noticed.

She wondered what else was going to change. Lois hoped fervently
that she wasn't going to start spitting up stomach acid to
digest her food. Seeing "The Fly" with her sister had seemed
like a good idea at the time, but now it left her with a host of
images she didn't want to think about.

They reached their destination.

"They put everyone in a stadium?" Lois asked.

"It's air conditioned, and there are bathrooms equipped to
handle thousands of people," Clark said. "There are several
places like this set up in Los Angeles. Of course, the wealthier
residents have taken hotel rooms."

Lois nodded. Together they headed for the entrance. It was time
to talk to the citizens of Sunnydale.

***************

It was dark as they left the stadium, and the parking lot was
filled with a sea of cars, yet it felt curiously deserted.

This wasn't the best neighborhood after dark, Lois supposed.

They had enough information for a dozen human interest stories.
Lois planned to get working on them as soon as they returned to
the Cortez family home. Perry would be expecting a number of
stories to be coming over the wire to justify the expense of
taking two of his reporters and a photographer out of
circulation at home.

Yet every time Lois had asked a question about the dark side of
Sunnydale, people had flinches, and they'd quickly changed the
subject. The whole evening had been a bust from the perspective
of finding out what she really wanted to know.

"Are we supposed to pick up Jimmy?" Lois asked.

"He drove his own car," Clark said. "He should be..."

Lois could hear Clark's cell phone ringing from inside his
jacket. Clark turned away for a moment as he spoke.

"Jimmy's at the Emergency Room," Clark said. "He's been
attacked."

***********

Lois hated hospitals almost as much as she hated morgues. They
both had the same universal disinfectant smell, and sometimes
they had the same underlying smell of rot. Unlike the morgue,
however, hospitals were filled with people in pain.

She'd been forced to sit in too many waiting rooms as a child,
forced to wait on her father to finish with one patient or
another to ever want to step foot in another hospital.

This one didn't impress her. The walls were fading and poorly
maintained, the equipment looked heavily used, and the whole
place looked like it needed to be renovated.

Clark spoke quietly to the woman at the information desk, and
she smiled.

As busy as she had been, Lois had almost forgotten how handsome
Clark was. It wasn't something she would have expected. There
was a certain arrogance most handsome men had that never let
anyone forget that they knew just how good looking they were.

Clark was much more humble than that. He was quietly competent,
and he didn't pretend to be anything he wasn't. He'd managed to
work with her all this time without any problems.

Of course, she hadn't been herself. She'd been subdued and
distracted, and she hadn't really been up to her full "Mad dog
Lane" persona.

Maybe she was just spooked by this case. Fingernails in
eyeballs, disappearing cities, murdered monks...it was all a
little much to take in at once.

Clark smiled at the woman again and said, "He's on the second
floor."

He led her to a set of elevators nearby, and a moment later they
were alone.

Lois found herself staring straight forward. "You aren't what I
expected, Smallville."

"You aren't either," he said. "People kept talking about Mad Dog
Lane, and how I'd have to keep up or eat your dust."

She glanced at him. "If you couldn't keep up, that's exactly
what you'd be doing."

His lips quirked and she found herself smiling in return. She
was more comfortable with Clark than she had been with anyone in
a long time. He was quiet, sure, but she suspected that was
because he was responding to her need for a little space.

She couldn't have tolerated a clingy, talkative partner, not
with everything she was going through.

"Do you think Jimmy is going to be all right?" she asked,
staring back at the elevator door again.

"He's not in intensive care," Clark said as the door opened. "I
take that as a good sign."

Lois nodded, and followed him down yet another drab hall tiled
in 1950's style linoleum. They passed several rooms, and in one
Lois could hear someone coughing convulsively. She grimaced.
She'd done a story on hospital infections in the past, and she
didn't like the odds of catching a drug resistant strain of
something nasty.

Clark knocked politely at the door, and then pushed it open.

Jimmy was lying on the bed, his face pale and his eyes slightly
glazed. The left side of his face was a massive bruise.

Lois slipped by Clark and sat on the chair by the bed. There was
an electronic monitor by the side of the bed that kept track of
pulse, respiration, and blood pressure.

"What happened?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

Jimmy glanced over at Lois and said, "I'm feeling fine." He
struggled to focus on her. "I think they have me on some pain
medications."

"You were attacked? By who?"

"I was coming out of the library and these two thugs grabbed me
and tried to drag me down the alley." Jimmy grinned and stared
off into space.

"Jimmy?" Lois asked.

"There was this girl in leather pants..."

"Try to focus on what happened after they grabbed you," Lois
said, irritated. Jimmy was a little too focused on women for her
taste, even if he reminded her of a younger brother some time.

"I am!" Jimmy said. "These guys were really strong. I couldn't
budge them at all."

"So you fought them off," Lois said, trying to prompt him.

Jimmy shook his head slightly, and then winced. "No. It was this
girl in leather pants. She said something to them...I can't
remember what it was, but it was pretty clever."

"She had a gun?" Clark asked. "A Taser maybe, pepper spray?"

"She had a stick." Jimmy said. "I've never seen anybody move
like that in my life. She was really fast....and she looked
great in leather pants."

"I'm sure her pants were really nice, Jimmy," Lois said
irritably. "But did you happen to get a name, or see which way
the guys went?"

"One of them threw me into a fall face first, and that was all I
could remember." Jimmy hesitated. "I'm told that a girl brought
me into the hospital though. Maybe they'd know who she was."

Clark stood and said, "I'll go see if I can ask the admitting
nurse if she has any idea who brought him in."

Lois nodded slightly.

Jimmy gestured toward his bag, which was visible in the open
closet. "Take my bag. I don't trust that somebody won't steal
it. I got copies of all the articles," he said.

Lois grabbed the bag and pulled out several file folders. One
was thinner than the other. She opened it. Inside was the
picture of an older man. It was an old daguerreotype, a photo
from the eighteen hundreds.

"Richard Wilkins," the caption said. "1898."

She flipped to the next picture. It was a picture of the same
man, but clearer. The caption said "Mayor Richard Wilkins the
second, 1938."

The third picture was from a newspaper at a ribbon cutting
ceremony. It was of the same man, but the caption said "Mayor
Richard Wilkins the third." The date of the paper was 1997.

There wasn't anything else in the folder, but what Lois had seen
was enough. Three men who looked exactly the same had lived in
the same town for a hundred years without ever seeming to age.

She glanced over at Jimmy, who was already dozing off. Lois went
back to her seat and began going through the newspaper
articles.

It only seemed like a short period, but she soon heard the sound
of footsteps coming down the hall. They seemed lighter than
Clark's, and more quickly paced together. They were uncertain,
hesitant, like the stride of someone who wasn't sure whether
they were where they needed to be.

Lois stood and headed for the door.

A woman was leaning against the wall outside. She was wearing a
black denim jacket, black tank top and black leather pants. She
was a little shorter than Lois, but more muscular.

"How's the kid?" she asked. Her voice was a little deep for a
woman's, husky, with a pronounced Boston accent.

Lois guessed that the girl wasn't that much older than Jimmy
was. She was somewhere in her early twenties.

"He's sleeping now," Lois said. "Are you the girl in the leather
pants he keeps going on about?"

A slight smile from the woman, "Maybe."

"Thanks for helping him," Lois said. "He's a friend."

"No big," she said, looking down at the floor. She seemed
embarrassed by the compliment. "I just did what anybody would
do."

"Not everybody," Lois said. "I guess you must be pretty good in
a fight."

"I know a few things." The woman didn't look at Lois.

"You have a name?" Lois asked.

"Why?" The woman's reply was suspicious.

"I think Jimmy would love to be able to put a name to a pair of
pants," Lois said.

"Faith," The woman's eyes narrowed. "What about you?"

"Lois Lane," Lois said. "I'm a reporter."

"You the one who's been asking all the questions about
Sunny-D?"

"You know about that?" Lois asked mildly, even as her mind
raced.

"I've got friends down at the shelter." Faith hesitated. "What
are you going to do with what you find out?"

"Write a story," Lois said. "Maybe several. Expose the people
who caused all this."

Faith smirked. "No you won't. Not unless you want to work for
the National Enquirer. Nobody ever believes this kind of
sh...stuff."

"So tell me," Lois said. "If you don't think I'll ever be able
to tell anybody. What harm can it do?"

"You aren't ready for the truth."

"Try me," Lois said flatly.

Faith shrugged. "It's your funeral. Most people don't want to
know, not really. They live in this safe little bubble where
nothing bad can happen to them. They don't want to believe in a
world where the monsters are real."

"That's why nobody will talk about it?" Lois asked.

Faith nodded. "As long as they don't talk about it, it's not
real. That bubble is there for a reason. People are happier
feeling safe. It's pretty crappy realizing that there are things
out there that are ready to get you."

"Things?" Lois asked.

"Every nightmare you ever had. Monsters are real," Faith said.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette. She
froze at Lois's look, and then put it back into her pocket.

"Where did they come from?" Lois asked quietly. The hallway
seemed to dim a little, and she realized just how isolated this
ward actually was. Most of the rooms were empty, and the
coughing patient from before was silent.

"Some people say they were always here," Faith said. "I'm not
sure I believe that."

"So Sunnydale?"

"There are places where the world wears thin, where it's easier
to cross the divide from here and...someplace else." Faith
sighed. "Most times these places are pretty small and don't last
very long."

"Not Sunnydale though," Lois said.

"Sunnydale had a place like that. It was big, thin, and it led
to someplace pretty nasty. It just about radiated evil, and that
was like a beacon to the sorts of things that people don't want
to think about."

"So why would anybody move here?" Lois asked.

Faith sighed. "You ask too many questions."

"You promised to tell me a story," Lois said. "So spill it."

"Someone made a deal with the devil. Well, a deal with demons
anyway." Faith shook her head and looked pensive. "He made a
deal...in return for a hundred years of staying young and a
chance to turn into something more powerful at the end of that
time; he built a city right on that spot of concentrated evil."

"The mayor, Richard Wilkins," Lois said.

Faith looked surprised. "You HAVE done your homework."

"So he got immortality for a while...what did they get out of
it?"

"A twenty four hour a day all you can eat buffet." Faith
shrugged. "I'm guessing the local Chumash Indian tribes were
pretty canny and hard to catch. White guys in suburbia are
pretty slow by comparison."

"So the whole place was designed to be a...what?"

"A feeding ground," Faith said. "It was a playground for the
monsters, and the mayor did everything he could to keep it that
way."

"Including corrupting the police," Lois said.

Faith nodded. "The ones who weren't on the payroll were the
worst people they could find. They actively looked for Barney
Fifes."

Lois frowned. "Who?"

"Andy Griffith?" Faith looked disgusted. "I guess you sat home
all day reading maps when you were a kid."

Lois shrugged uncomfortably.

"So what happened?"

"The mayor blew his chance and croaked. The people he'd hired
stayed in office, and it was business as usual."

"Covering up the biggest story since....anytime?" Lois shook her
head. "People talk about government conspiracies all the time,
but it's impossible. Somebody is always going to talk."

"Who would believe them?" Faith asked. "Dick...he had a hundred
years to set everything up. He had help from things that weren't
natural. And he told people what they wanted to believe."

"They just needed somebody to blow the whistle," Lois said
stubbornly. "Maybe put it in the paper put it on CNN. If it's on
television people will believe it."

"Not to sound paranoid, but what are the chances that you'd get
that far? You'd end up in a padded room somewhere."

Lois shook her head stubbornly. "People have to be warned. If
there are things out there..."

Faith said, "There are things out there. But people don't want
to know about it. They want to sleep in bed at night and feel
safe."

"I think you don't give people enough credit," Lois said.
"People can handle the truth."

Faith sighed. "Let me ask you a question. After all this...all
the research you've done, everything you've heard from
people...do you believe it?"

"Yes," Lois said.

"Deep down?"

Lois hesitated, and then said, "No." Deep down she kept hoping
it was all a dream and that it would all go away. Despite
everything she'd seen as a reporter, she'd had that bubble, that
security blanket. She'd known that there was evil in the world,
but somehow, it never seemed to affect her, even when she had
guns in her face. She'd felt invulnerable.

She missed that feeling.

There had to be a reasonable explanation to everything.
Terrorists, some sort of genetic engineering.

Wasn't it more likely that she'd been given some sort of virus
that was changing her, maybe a test run for something worse? It
made more sense than magic and monsters and deals with the
devil.

"So that's where you come in. You keep people safe."

Faith's face brightened, and slowly she smiled. "Yeah. I guess I
do."

A beeping sound from inside her jacket caused Faith to start.
She reached inside her pocket and pulled out a cell phone.

"Yeah," she said. She listened to what was said on the other
end, and Lois was disgusted to realize that even with her new
hearing, she wasn't able to catch the other side of the
conversation.

"I'll be right there," she said.

She closed the phone and looked at Lois. "Give the kid my
regards."

The younger girl hesitated, and then stared at Lois for a
moment. "Did you ever do any fighting?"

"Brown Belt in Tai Kwon Do," Lois said.

"That must be it," Faith said. "You move like a fighter."

Lois shrugged. She didn't think she moved any differently than
anyone else, really. It was meant as a compliment, so she'd
accept it as one.

"Watch yourself," Faith said. "It wasn't just the people that
came here to L.A. before everything went down."

Lois heard Clark coming down the hallway. She glanced back at
them, and then stiffened.

"Before what went down?"

Faith was already gone.

*************

"I'm going to stay," Clark said. "The nurses think he needs to
be observed for a while, and I'm not comfortable with the
thought that those guys might not come back."

Lois nodded. Despite regulations, it wasn't that hard for a
determined person to find out where a patient had been shipped
off to. All they had to do was start with the nearest hospital
and work their way out.

"Do you think it was just a random mugging, or...?"

"If it had been a deliberate attack, that implied that someone
was either watching them or had been tipped off that someone was
investigating Sunnydale. Either way, Jimmy might be in danger."

Clark shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't know. I just think it
might be better if I watch over him until we can get him up and
running."

Lois nodded. "I'll take his bag and go over the rest of the
things he found out."

"And send the story to Perry?" he asked.

Lois flushed. He HAD been warned about her. "I don't steal
stories Clark. We're sharing a byline on this one."

He smiled slightly, as though she'd confirmed something he'd
suspected about her.

Lois found herself flushing a little. Other than Perry White, it
had been a long time since a man she'd respected had approved of
her.

It was surprising how much she enjoyed it.

"I've already got enough to write a few stories," Lois said.

"And the supernatural angle?"

Lois shook her head. "All we've got is rumor and hearsay.
Something this major is going to take ironclad proof. Otherwise
they'll laugh us all the way into the tabloids."

In the meantime, she was going o look for alternative
explanations. All of this just seemed too convenient. Wrap
everything under the aegis of the supernatural, and say that the
world won't believe it.

You couldn't get a hundred people in a room and get them to
agree to anything. There were always dissenters, people who
would speak out against things even the rest of the world
commonly believed as good.

So getting thirty thousand and more people to agree not to talk
was an impossibility.

There had to be a few people in the crowd who were ready for
fame and fortune, people who wanted to sell their story and make
money in Hollywood. She just had to get to them before the rest
of the reporters did.

All together, Lois hoped the explanation was simpler, like
aliens.

************

Lois opened the bag and pulled out several files worth of
research. The first few were the files she'd already seen. The
pictures of the mayor, stories confirming at least the bare
bones of the rumors Jimmy had come to them with.

Lois frowned as she pulled a large book from the bag. It was
hardback, bound in red, with the inscription, "Sunnydale High:
The future is ours."

Irony was sometimes cruel.

This was a copy of the Sunnydale High School yearbook. Lois
suspected that the library didn't lend these out and she smiled
a little at Jimmy's initiative.

She frowned a moment as a thought struck her. Lois began
flipping pages quickly, searching for one particular face.

There were no pictures of a brunette who looked like the woman
Lois had seen in the hall of the hospital. Lois sighed. She'd
hoped that there might be some connection, even if the name
Faith was probably a pseudonym.

There was only one picture in the page after page of student
pictures that was missing. Buffy Summers.

Lois flipped through the pages until she came across a picture
of a blonde girl in a tiara.

Buffy Summers, Class protector.

This girl was a classic California blond, not at all like the
brunette Lois had met.

Faith had not been a student at Sunnydale High School, at least
not in 1998.

The "In Memoriam" section was shocking. Over twenty dead on the
first page alone, including four teachers and one school
Principal. Each had a short phrase describing how much they
would be missed, but as Lois turned the page five more times,
she wondered how anyone had gone to that school at all without
suffering post traumatic stress.

Lois cross referenced the list of the dead with those killed on
graduation day. Those weren't even included in the list, which
had likely been published before the school had been destroyed.

The inscriptions on the back page were revealing. "I'm glad to
see you coming out! You've been great this year!"

"You survived all four years! You should get a shirt."

"I'm glad you aren't trying to look up my skirt anymore, or I'd
have to kick your *** again. Buffy."

Lois frowned and flipped back through the pages. Buffy was
listed as the class protector, but she'd also been voted most
likely to go to jail.

She studied the only picture of the girl in the book. She was
smiling brightly in the picture, and she looked happy.

It was odd how happy the kids looked in all the pictures. You'd
think that with the specter of death hanging over everyone's
heads that that stress and fear would show in the pictures. With
the exception of a few anomalies, these kids didn't seem any
different than anyone else.

The surface seemed bright and sunny, but what was underneath was
much more dark and sinister.

It reminded Lois of the first vacation after her parents'
divorce. Everyone had tried so hard to have fun, to smile and
pretend they were having a good time, when in reality they were
all miserable.

She rose and headed for the bathroom mirror. She stared at her
reflection, trying to see if she looked any older.

It should change you, being a murderer. But she couldn't see any
difference at all.

**************

There was movement in the underbrush, and all Lois could feel
was an overwhelming sense of danger. It was oppressive, and it
was all around her.

It was hot and dry. Lois was in some sort of gully, with a small
stream beside her feet. All around her were patches of brambles
and thorns.

She saw movement from the underbrush near the cavern wall. It
took a moment to focus, to understand what she was seeing.

The figure was vaguely human. Slathered in white mud that gave
it the appearance of mottled white earth, it moved slowly,
deliberately.

Its movements were those of a predator.

It crouched unnaturally low to the ground, sliding closer to her
with a horrific noise rising from its throat.

Its eyes snapped open and it stared at her for a long moment. It
stilled and was completely silent.

It took her a moment to realize it was female. In that instant
it leapt toward her. Moving out of the brush with blinding
speed, it slashed out at her, and Lois was barely able to move
in time. As it was, she gasped as she felt pain in her
shoulder.

She staggered back, trying to remember every bit of martial arts
instructions she could recall. She'd insisted on drilling each
move over and over so that she wouldn't forget at times like
this.

It didn't seem to matter. The creature lashed out at her again,
and this time it grabbed her by the arm.

Lois fell backward, trying to flip the thing, but somehow it
held on to her with a grip of iron.

She tried to force its face back from her.

It spoke.

"Your strength is death."

Lois shoved it away, and struggled to stand.

It was dark and she froze as she realized that there was a
single dim and dirty light shining feebly from a single bulb.

"No." Lois felt the blood draining from her face.

It hadn't changed. The dingy walls, the single toilet in the
corner. A single bunk covered in a filthy mattress, and an even
filthier blanket. >From where she was, Lois could see the
blanket moving slightly. From experience, she knew it was the
vermin underneath.

There were bars on one wall, and across from that, Lois could
see another cell. Its single occupant stared at her dully, a
female face that had lost its femininity to pain and
uncomprehending loss. This was a face that did not remember
hope. All it knew was unrelenting pain and anguish.

It was a look that was on every other face on the block.

Lois had thought she'd stumbled on a simple gunrunning story.
Instead she'd found something worse than she'd ever imagined.

There was a hallway filled with cells on each side. Lois could
hear muffled sobbing coming from one of the cells. She could
smell old urine and stale sweat.

She'd been such a fool, believing she was invincible. She'd
always escaped before. She was Lois Lane. She was better than
everyone else.

With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Lois heard the sound
she'd been dreading all along.

Screaming and sobbing, the sound of a woman being dragged. The
sounds of dozens of boots hitting the concrete floor of the
hallway in unison.

Marta had been a girl just out of womanhood. As they dragged her
around the corner, Lois didn't recognize her.

The things they'd done to her made her stomach cramp.

She felt sick, and she knew they were coming for her next.

As they opened the cell door, she lunged for the first of them.
She elbowed him in the face and managed to wrench his nightstick
out of his hands.

She then used it to hit one of the men who had been abusing the
girl.

They were all around her, crowding her, not letting her have any
room to move. There were too many of them, and the moves she'd
learned in martial arts class had never been meant to work
against twenty men.

It angered them that she'd fought back, and she could see it in
their swarthy faces. They began to hit her over and over again.
Although Lois never gave up, at some point she realized she was
on the floor.

Her rage never faltered, even though her body did. As the blows
fell, all Lois could hear was a single voice.

"Are you ready to be strong?"

She'd accepted without thinking.

A moment later, the blood began to fly, and the walls turned
red.

*************

Lois woke retching. She staggered to the bathroom and dry
heaved. Whatever had been in her stomach was long gone.

She felt an oppressive, overwhelming presence. It wasn't simply
the sense of a predator, like she'd gotten in her dream.

This was the feeling of pure evil.

Feeling weak, Lois wiped her mouth and stepped back out of the
bathroom. The feeling was still there in her gut, a sense of
terrifying wrongness.

There wasn't any way she was going to be able to get back to
bed.

Lois slipped over to her window and cautiously pulled back the
drapes.

She couldn't see anything outside. The hills stood in the
moonlight as they'd doubtlessly stood since before mankind had
ever come to this place.

It was a beautiful view, but the sense of evil still remained.

Lois grabbed her robe. She hesitated a moment, then grabbed her
cell phone off the table. She had an odd urge to confide in
Clark. More realistically, Clark would be able to confirm that
Jimmy was doing ok, and she'd be able to go over some of the
details of the stories she'd sent in.

Hearing another human voice would be a relief. Something had
Lois spooked and she wasn't sure what it was. She headed through
the back door through the courtyard.

The evening was dead silent. The usual sounds of the evening,
crickets and other insects were entirely absent.

The place was ominously quiet.

She slipped through the door into the main living area.

She heard voices at the door.

"Pepito, let me in."

It was Angela's voice.

A child stood at the open door, with only a locked screen door
to keep the insects out between him and the outside world.

Lois frowned. From what she'd gathered, Angela no longer lived
here with most of her clan. She lived in the city, near her
work.

"Angela?" Lois asked.

Angela looked terrible. There was blood all over the front of
her shirt, and she looked as though she'd been in a fight.

"Lois?" she said. "Let me in."

"Are you all right?" Lois asked, rushing to the door.

The woman looked like she'd been in an automobile accident.

Lois unlatched the door and pushed it open. "Come in."

The woman lunged for her, and it was only Lois's newfound speed
that allowed her to avoid having her arm grabbed.

Her face was changing into something horrible, and she lunged
forward, only to howl as she pushed up against some sort of
invisible barrier.

Lois staggered back.

>From behind her, she heard a quiet voice. "The invitation has
to be from someone who actually lives here." It hesitated. "Come
away from there Pepito."

Lois felt ashamed that she'd barely paid attention to the child
who was staring at his sister with undisguised horror.

The head of the family stood behind her, his eyes red rimmed as
he stared at the thing that had once been his daughter.

His daughter was dead. That her corpse was still talking didn't
change that incontrovertible fact.

Lois started as her phone rang.

She flipped it open.

Clark's voice was terse on the other line. "They found Marcus's
vehicle near his apartment two hours ago. Angela Cortez is
missing too. Are you all right?"

Lois imagined that she could almost feel the alien presence
lurking behind Angela's eyes.

The thing smiled as behind her two good people wept.

"Angela is here," Lois said curtly into the phone. "She isn't
herself."

She clicked the cell phone shut and tossed it into the pocket of
her robe.

The thing that had been Angela stood outside grinning. "Oh, I'm
myself all right. I'm just better. I'm not the meek little girl
who was always so desperate for daddy's approval."

She leaned forward until her face was up to the threshold. "It
feels so good. No guilt, no pain. Just strength, power."

Her face was back to normal now, and she smiled. If Lois hadn't
known what she was, she might have been fooled.

The blood stains down the front of her dress might have clued
her in.

"There's the hunger, of course. They say most of us that are new
are stupid with the hunger. That's why I made sure to get a bite
to eat on my way out here. I wanted to be sharp." She smirked.
"How long has it been since you heard from Uncle Carlo anyway,
papa?"

"Madre de Dios," the older Cortez said under his breath.

"Such a good little Catholic. You know what happens to the souls
of those like me? They don't get to go on. They are just
waiting...how will it be to get up to the pearly gates and
realize your precious daughter isn't there? She was losing her
faith anyway. Maybe she'll end up in hell and I'll get to meet
her there someday."

"Leave them alone," Lois said. She was surprised at how strong
she sounded. Despite the palpable feeling of evil, she was
surprised to realize she wasn't afraid.

"Oh, a hero. I shouldn't be surprised. That's the only kind of
woman Clark would hook up with." The thing scowled.

"We're partners," Lois said defensively.

"You're just his type. Strong, assertive, a little abusive. All
the things meek little me wasn't." The corpse glanced at
Angelica's parents slyly. "I'll bet you didn't know that I threw
myself at him that summer. He's seen your little girl naked."

"And he rejected you," Lois said, suddenly certain.

"Clark's too much of a boy scout to deflower his boss's
daughter...even if I wasn't exactly a virgin." The thing grinned
slyly. "Do you remember that ranch hand the year I was sixteen?
I never told you, but he forced me to do all sorts of things. I
never told you because I knew you would kill him."

The older Cortez paled even further. His wife began crying
softly.

"It doesn't matter whether Clark rejected me back then or not
anyway. I'm going to have him now," the creature said. "Once the
rest of you are dead, I'll be the only one left. I'll be the
grieving daughter..."

"Clark isn't stupid," Lois said. "You think he won't notice?"

"He won't have to for long," she said. She stared dreamily into
space. "We'll be together until the stars turn to dust, for
eternity."

"I have a feeling you won't survive as long as you think," Lois
said, her mind racing.

"Oh, I'm a modern thinker. The rest of them are stuck in the
past. That's the downside of being hundreds of years old, I
guess. They don't seem to realize that it's a new day. It's the
twenty first century and we have to learn to change with the
times. This whole threshold thing...the rest of them thought it
couldn't be got around, at least until I set them straight."

Suddenly Lois was aware of movement from one of the windows. She
could see several figures approaching from the woods.

"People think they are safe, all holed up cozy in their beds.
Me, I had a thought."

The corpse reached down to the ground outside of Lois's view and
came up with a crossbow.

"I can't go in there, but I hardly have to."

The snap of the bow was shocking. Mr. Cortez gasped and fell
back as the bolt sprouted just in front of his eye.

Lois stood beside him with the bolt in her hand. Somehow she'd
grabbed it in mid-air.

She gaped, as shocked as he was.

"Wow," the corpse said. "I thought it was just a legend. Killer
of my kind, eh? The big bogeyman that's supposed to make me
tremble in my boots...."

It pulled something from the back of its pants.

"Try catching this."

The world slowed around her as Lois saw the long metal barrel of
the gun rising and pointing toward them. The sound of the shot
was deafening, and Lois found herself flying through the air.

She hit the older couple, and they fell to the ground as Lois
landed on top of them. She'd pushed them out of sight of the
door, although all the creature had to do was move around to the
large picture window in the living area and shoot from there.

Already to her feet, she rushed toward the door. She dodged the
first bullet and the second. The third hit the door beside her
as she shoved it closed with enough force to cause it to crack a
little.

"Get inside," Lois shouted at the older couple. "Get the others
to an interior room."

The gunshots had woken everyone. She could hear the sounds of
movement from deeper inside the building. Some of the children
were crying.

"Get everybody away from the windows!"

The older couple staggered to their feet and rushed to do as
she'd asked.

Lois locked the door and winced as she heard the sounds of
several more shots hitting the door. This was a heavy, thick
exterior door however, and it held.

The gun from outside went silent, and Lois moved as quietly as
she was able to the room to the left, a small entryway leading
off to the kitchen. There was a small circular window that lit
the room.

Lois was surprised to realize that she was still clutching the
crossbow bolt.

A group of men had gathered near Angelica, and she was gesturing
toward the house. Six of them were carrying three bright red
coolers. At her command, they sat them down and opened them.

They began pulling wine bottles out of the coolers and passing
them around. Lois doubted that they were filled with wine. The
bottles each had a rag sticking out of them.

She grimaced. They were going to try to burn the family out of
their home.

When the Cortez family finally had to leave the burning remnants
of their home, they would be easy victims for whatever those men
really were.

One of the men approached. He tried to light the rag with a
lighter and instead managed to spill some of the fluid on
himself.

A moment later he was an inferno, screaming and staggering
toward the building. A moment later, he disintegrated, turning
to ash.

Angelica looked disgusted.

The others weren't nearly as stupid. They began to run around
the perimeter of the house, and a moment later, Lois heard the
sounds of crashing from the windows as lit bottles were thrown
through the windows.

She raced toward the kitchen, where she saw that one of the
bottles hadn't broken. She scooped it up and threw it out the
window, hitting the man that stood outside.

There was a flash of light as he caught fire and a moment later,
silence.

She ran again, and in the second room, she hadn't been as lucky.
This was someone's bedroom, and the carpet was already on fire.
Lois scanned quickly for any survivors and then she closed the
door quickly.

She had to find the family. The only way they were going o
survive was to make it to one of the cars and force their way
through as a group, preferably while most of the men were
chasing after a distraction.

Her mind flashed back, and she felt bones crunching under her
hands. She'd never wanted to face something like that again, but
she didn't see any other way.

Lois had a sick feeling as she realized that part of what she
was feeling was anticipation.

She'd been accused of being an adrenaline junkie by jealous
reporters, people who said she risked her life time after time
on purpose. She was chilled by the thought that they might be
right.

Lois found all twenty members of the Cortez family huddled
together in the central courtyard.

Lois approached the patriarch.

"Senor Cortez," she said. "Are you all right?"

His face was pale, but he nodded. She noticed that his hands
were clutched around a crucifix, and that several other members
of the family had them as well.

"I don't know if those will work, but we're going to have to get
out of here."

"They cannot get inside. We are protected."

Lois spoke quietly. "They are throwing lit bottles filled with
gasoline through the windows. Soon everything will begin to
burn."

He stared at her for a moment, then glanced back at his family.

"The smoke will kill them long before the fires will," Lois
said.

The adobe walls would not burn, but the rooms inside would, and
it wouldn't be long before the smoke was overwhelming.

"Is there a way to get everyone on the roof?" Lois asked.

He shook his head. "We'd have to leave the children, the old
behind."

"Do you have any vehicles that will carry you all?"

"There's an old grain truck in the back," he said.

"I'm going to distract them," she said. She glanced at the
others. "Does anyone have a cell phone?"

**************

These people had been good to her. They'd opened their home to
her, and in some ways, they'd been more of a family to her than
her own ever had.

She barely knew them.

She hadn't even bothered to learn their names. They hadn't been
witnesses and so it hadn't mattered. Somehow, it mattered now.

All she knew was that she didn't have a choice. Maybe this would
atone for what she'd done in the Congo.

Fighting twenty men had been surprisingly easy, but these
weren't men. They were something else, and Lois had no illusions
about her chances against them, especially with the
Angelica-thing having a gun.

She wasn't even sure how to fight them.

All she had was her cell phone clutched in one hand, and the
crossbow bolt in the other. At the urging of the eldest Cortez,
she'd snapped the tip off the end of the bolt, leaving a jagged
edge.

She could feel the heat from the fires now, and the smoke.

Unlocking the door as quietly as she could, she picked up her
cell phone again from the ground, and prepared to run.

She slammed the door open and launched herself out into the
open.

The light of the fires behind her lit everything in high
contrast.

Several of the men were standing in a group near the thing that
had been Angelica. The rest of them were spread out around the
building, waiting for the onrush of humanity.

As Lois ran toward them, she yelled into the cell phone and
dropped it.

It was then that the miracle happened.

The wind in the trees stopped suddenly, and everything fell into
an unnatural, almost preternatural stillness.

The creature in Angelica's body stared at her for a moment, and
in its eyes, Lois saw an awareness that something was wrong.

A tremendous wind rose suddenly, and the light from the fire in
the windows behind her flickered and died.

The wind died down for a moment, then it rose again, this time
in the middle of the crowd of things near Angelica.

They went flying in all directions, although most flew towards
the woods.

Angelica ran, and Lois could see several of the other things
flying, caught up apparently by small twisters.

Before she could do anything, it was over.

************

The Cortez family was unharmed, although all of them were pale
and the children were crying quietly to themselves.

Lois jerked violently as there was a knock at the door. They'd
been discussing whether to still make a run for it. There was no
telling if they would receive a second miracle if the things
came back.

The door opened, and Lois rose quickly to her feet.

Clark stepped inside and looked apologetic.

"I didn't hear a car drive up," Lois said.

"Someone locked the gate near the road," Clark said grimly. "Is
everyone all right?"

Lois nodded. "We've got to talk."

It was strange, but although he was only a man, Lois felt a
sense of relief now that Clark was here.

He just had that effect on people.

"I should have been here," Clark said grimly.

Lois frowned. "I'm not sure how much of a difference you could
have made if you had been here." She hesitated. "How did you get
here so fast, anyway?"

"I was already on my way back," Clark shook his head. "I was
right about Jimmy. A couple of thugs tried to sneak in and
attack him."

"Were they...?" Lois asked.

Clark shrugged. "I'm not sure how you tell the difference. I got
the drop on them, and they are in police custody now."

"And Jimmy?"

"He's all right." Clark said. "The LAPD have placed him under
guard."

"Clark," Lois said, "Did you ever see Angela naked?"

Flushing, Clark looked away. "There was never anything between
us."

"She...It taunted the Cortezes." Lois stared at him intently.
"It implied that you rejected Angela."

"I...It wouldn't have been right." Clark said. "They'd taken me
into their home, treated me like family. I couldn't do that to
them."

Lois nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off him.

She'd suspected that he was a good man, but part of her kept
expecting him to disappoint her. He was competent, but so were
most of the people working at her level.

There was just a strange sort of freshness about him. To the
untrained eye, it made him look a little naïve, but Lois was
beginning to suspect that there was more than that. He seemed to
want to believe the best in people, and the people around him
wanted to live up to it.

She certainly did.

"Are you ok?" he asked. "You aren't hurt?"

Lois shook her head mutely. In the rush of everything that had
happened, she wasn't sure just how she felt about anything.

She'd killed again. Even if the man she'd thrown the burning
bottle at had been some sort of weird alien creature, it had
been her hand that had thrown the bottle.

She had a flash again of blood and rage and death. She shook her
head again to dispel the image from her mind.

Clark hugged her suddenly. Lois stood stiff for a moment before
relaxing.

She'd never been comfortable with being touched by strangers.
Her own family hadn't been touchy feely types, and so she'd
always felt strange when people tried touching her without
permission.

This felt nice, though. She felt oddly safe wrapped in Clark's
arms, and safe wasn't something she'd felt much of since she'd
been in the Congo.

She wondered if the dreams were ever going to leave her.

"I'm glad you are ok," he said.

"We have to do something for the Cortezes," Lois said. "It's our
fault that this happened."

Clark shook his head. "Angelica was the assistant coroner.
Anyone interested in delaying the investigation was going to
take care of her first. My guess is that they tried bribing and
threatening her first. It would have been better for them for a
falsified report to come from a living coroner."

"And once Angelica was turned, whatever anger she held toward
her family would have made this inevitable." Lois sighed.

"Still, I can't see that she's going to stop now that she's
tried once."

Lois nodded at Clark, then stiffened and stepped out of his
grasp.

She could hear sirens in the distance. Help had finally
arrived.

***********

The lights from the fire trucks and police cars were annoying.

"A woman led the attack," Lois told the lead detective. "There
must have been twenty men following her."

The evidence was still on the ground in the form of three
coolers, some of which were filled with unused Molotov
cocktails.

"Let's go over the fire again. You say that the house was hit by
some sort of tornado?"

"I guess that's what it has to have been," Lois said. "I can't
think of any other kind of wind that would have hit the house
from all different sides and put out the fires."

"You say it knocked some of the assailants over?"

"It blew them quite some distance," Lois said. "I already showed
you the place where they landed."

"You didn't recognize any of them?"

Lois hesitated, then shook her head. She'd overheard the senior
Cortez telling investigators that they hadn't known any of the
men, or the woman either.

She could understand wanting to keep the truth in the family.
The family had been through enough.

"We're going to have more questions, Ms. Lane. Please don't
leave town without getting in contact with the LAPD." The man
handed her a card. Lois barely looked at it.

The sky was beginning to lighten already, and Lois found that
she was beginning to relax. The worst was over, for tonight at
least.

**************

Lois had been lucky. Her room was one of the few that hadn't
been targeted, although she was sure that they would have gotten
around to it eventually. Clark hadn't been as lucky, and
everything he owned had been burned or damaged.

She woke, and felt oddly refreshed. Her dreams, if she'd had
them had been unmemorable.

A look at her watch told her it was noon. She'd had five hours
of sleep.

She dressed quickly after a quick shower. Thankfully the place
still had hot water.

A great deal had been done while she was asleep. Much of the
mess had been cleaned up, and she could see suitcases and bags
sitting in the common room.

"What's going on?" Lois asked. Clark was carrying a number of
bags, which he dropped gently to the floor.

"They are sending the women and the children away to stay with
relatives out of state," Clark said. "They plan to be gone by
nightfall."

At least the children were out from school, Lois thought,
although she wondered what the women were going to do about
jobs, those who had them.

"The men are staying?"

"The younger, stronger men," Clark said.

The door opened and the eldest Cortez stepped in the room
carrying a box. He was followed by several men, also carrying
boxes.

He pulled a box cutter from his pocket and bent down to open the
first one, pulling out a gleaming weapon of metal.

It was a thing of odd beauty, that crossbow. Lois's hands ached
to touch it.

She'd never had an interest in weapons before. In fact, she'd
always been a strict advocate for gun control.

Yet she couldn't help her visceral response to the weapon.

The other men were also opening boxes. They pulled out an odd
assortment of crossbows, clearly bought in different places and
of all different makes and models.

The eldest Cortez set his crossbow down on an end table, then
slowly rose to his feet. He sighed.

He turned to Lois and said, "We'll remember what you've done for
us. You'll always be welcome among us."

Lois shook her head. "I didn't do anything."

"You saved my life," he said. "And the life of my wife. You ran
at someone who was shooting at you to give us the time to get
away. "

He took her hand and said, "Those things aren't nothing."

Clark was staring at her, and Lois realized that she hadn't
bothered to mention much about her role in the attack. It hadn't
seemed important last night.

Her mind flashed back to the sensation of grabbing a flying
object out of the air a moment before it would have hit the
elder Cortez.

It was impossible. Nothing human could move that fast.

Lois didn't want to think about the implications. The thought
that she might be changing into something alien, inhuman was
frightening.

"We won't be unprepared the next time," he continued. "If they
come back, we will be ready."

*************

"I've been thinking about the wind that hit us," Lois said.

Clark was driving again, and he didn't look at her. For some
reason, a muscle in his jaw tensed.

When he didn't speak, she continued. "They just don't have
tornadoes in this part of the country."

"Yes they do," Clark said. "California averages around five
tornadoes a year. You just don't hear much about them."

"It's a pretty big state," Lois said. "What are the odds that
one of the five tornadoes in the whole state would hit just at
the right time to save the Cortez family ranch?"

Clark shrugged. "It happened." He wasn't looking at her.

"The sky wasn't even cloudy last night."

"What are you getting at?" he asked. His voice was oddly tense,
and Lois looked at him curiously.

"With everything else we've seen...well, heard about...it makes
you wonder."

"Yes?"

"They were burning people as witches in Sunnydale. It could be
mass hysteria...but what if it wasn't?"

Clark relaxed and glanced over at her with an amused look. "So
you think some witch called up a storm to save the Cortezes?"

"Maybe one of the Cortezes IS the witch," Lois said. In her mind
she envisioned one of the old women muttering protective spells
in the garden.

"The Cortezes are Catholics," Clark said. "Very devout."

Lois caught his amused grin and she scowled. "You weren't there.
You didn't see what I saw. What else could it be?"

Clark grinned at her. "Alien intervention?"

"Get serious," Lois said. She scowled again and turned to stare
out at the passing countryside.

At least they were getting to pick up Jimmy. She didn't feel
comfortable leaving him alone and unprotected, not when she knew
what was out there.

***********

Jimmy grinned up at her from the wheelchair.

"I could get used to this," he said. "Getting pushed around by
beautiful women."

"From what I hear, that's pretty much your dating history," Lois
said dryly.

Jimmy shrugged. "It works for me."

"You haven't heard from the girl in the leather pants, have
you?" Lois asked. She'd checked with the hospital. Faith hadn't
left any sort of information with them. She'd slipped out
shortly after delivering Jimmy.

Jimmy shook his head, ten grimaced. "Don't I wish. It's just my
luck. I meet the girl of my dreams and a minute later I get my
face smashed into a wall."

"Love is like that," Lois said. It wasn't as though she'd ever
felt that way, but it was what she'd always heard.

The front doors of the hospital slid open, and Lois pushed Jimmy
out into the light.

Jimmy stood up slowly at curbside, and Clark, who was waiting
with the car, helped him inside.

As they slid into their seats, Clark spoke.

"I have a lead on a living member of the cult they found in the
mass grave."

"One of the Cortez cousins is a paramedic," Clark said. "With
everything that has happened, the family has been talking."

Clark pulled smoothly out into traffic, and Lois glanced back at
Jimmy, who seemed to be alert and conscious.

Turning back to Clark, Lois said, "He remembered something."

Clark nodded.

"Did he work in Sunnydale?" From what one of the Cortez men had
said, the family had avoided the city.

Clark shook his head. "He worked out of Norwalk, a city about
twenty minutes southeast of Los Angeles. The closest State
Psychiatric Hospital is there."

"And Sunnydale was being swamped with new cases," Lois said.

One of Jimmy's news articles had mentioned that the Sunnydale
Psychiatric Hospital had been overwhelmed with schizophrenic
patients. The CDC had promised to investigate, but Jimmy hadn't
found anything further on the matter, with a single exception.

Apparently the patients had escaped the ward as a group,
emptying the entire unit. Afterwards, there weren't any mention
at all of further cases, or the disposition of those who had to
have been wandering the streets of Sunnydale.

Given what she'd heard about the place, she wondered just how
long they'd managed to survive those streets. Sunnydale didn't
sound like it had been a city with much of a homeless problem.

The problem wouldn't have been finding a good meal. It would
have been avoiding being one.

"They started shifting some of their excess patients by
ambulance to the state hospital. Those who were violent were
escorted by Sheriff's Deputy."

Lois nodded impatiently. "So why does he remember a single
patient after all this time?"

"The man had a tattoo on his forehead. He was docile when they
put him in the ambulance, but he tried to escape in the middle
of the trip."

"So he went to the state psychiatric hospital two years ago."

"That's where we start."

**********

Norwalk might have been a twenty minute drive southeast of Los
Angeles, but getting there was a nightmare. Lois was used to the
traffic in Metropolis which, Like Manhattan was compact and
busy.

She wasn't used to the sheer urban sprawl of Los Angeles. The
distance from one place to another amazed her, and the sheer
number of car accidents and subsequent slowing traffic was a
problem.

It wasn't even rush hour.

What should have been a forty five minute trip took almost three
hours.

The city itself seemed nice enough. Small, neatly kept homes
with well tended yards. These were the sort of homes Lois had
once fantasized about having, before she'd realized that there
was no such thing as Mr. Right.

She glanced over at Clark, who seemed to know where he was
going.

Suburban bliss began to change, becoming darker and more
neglected the closer they got to their destination.

It reflected Lois's mood. She stared out the window as they
found themselves passing through an industrial district.

She wondered how many of these places were abandoned, filled
with the homeless. How many of these people were facing the same
fate as Sunnydale's had?

If monsters were real, why hadn't she ever heard about them in
her own town? Did they only exist in Sunnydale, or were they
like cockroaches?

Did every city have its own monsters, hidden away where the
average person couldn't find them?

Life would have been easier if she'd never started that
gunrunning story, if she'd never heard of Sunnydale.

They were back on the highway again, and Clark soon turned off
onto another road.

The place was huge, with acre after acre of green lawns and
trees. Mental health was apparently big business.

They'd soon have their answers.

**********

"We can't help you." The man at the desk was fussy and neat, and
he stared at them disapprovingly.

"We're just trying to find this man, and the last place he was
known to be was here." Lois said. "He may have vital information
relating to a case of mass murders outside of Sunnydale."

"If you have a warrant, I can speak with you. Otherwise, I can't
help you." The man stared at her calmly.

"What are you trying to hide here?" Lois asked.

"Confidentiality rules exist for a reason, Ms. Lane. It's
difficult enough to get people to come in for psychiatric help
that they genuinely need without the fear that their name will
be released to the newspaper whenever a reporter gets an urge to
do a story."

"We have no intention of naming names." Lois glanced over at
Clark, who had spent the entire interview silently staring at
the wall with his glasses pulled down to the bridge of his nose.
"But it's vitally important that we find this man. We think he
could be in danger."

"Then tell the police."

Clark suddenly moved, shoving his glasses back up his nose.

"If you can't help us with an individual case, could you help us
with information about common procedures?"

The man nodded reluctantly.

"What happens to a homeless patient who is declared at least
temporarily stable?"

"He is referred out to a number of shelters. The Salvation Army
accepts some of these people."

"Would it be possible to get a list of shelters in Los Angeles
County that people are sent to?"

"There are six shelters that we commonly use," the man said. He
looked at Lois and sighed. "I'll write down the addresses of all
of them."


***********

"How do we even know that he wasn't picked up by other members
of his cult?" Lois asked. She was still irritated by the
officious man's refusal to help.

Hadn't he heard of freedom of press?

"How would they have even known where he was?" Clark asked.
"Unless he called them to come pick him up, which is always a
possibility, they would have hit the same roadblocks as we
did."

"You don't think he was coherent enough to call them?" Lois
asked.

"I think that there's a lot of pressure on the hospital to make
room for new patients," Clark said grimly. "And not a lot of
options for aftercare."

"There are agencies..." Lois said. She hadn't had much
experience with the mentally ill. Her stories had always focused
more on crime and corruption.

Through her family she understood alcoholism and depression, but
schizophrenia was beyond her.

"Some of these people have problems taking their medications. If
they can't even find a roof to sleep under, how are they
supposed to remember to take their meds or come to their
appointments?"

"You have some experience with this?" Lois asked.

"I did some stories in Kansas," Clark said. "I can't imagine
that things are better in the big city."

Clark began to slow, and it took Lois a moment to realize why.

Traffic was backed up ahead, and everything was coming to a
stop.

Rush hour had begun.

**********

Lois felt frustrated and angry. Clark had managed to get off the
freeway and had managed some creative driving that had cut their
drive time to only three hours, but it was still frustrating to
realize that they had wasted most of the day on something that
wasn't likely to pan out.

"Why are we starting with this one?" Lois asked. "It's on the
middle of the list."

It wasn't even the closest to the hospital. There was one that
was closer.

The sun was already setting, and with it, Lois's sense of
danger. In the back, Jimmy was laying on his side, asleep.

At least the hospital had ruled out a concussion.

"It's one of the closest," Clark said. "And I have a gut
feeling."

He touched his glasses self consciously, and Lois wondered what
he was hiding.

It seemed strange for a man outwardly as honest as Clark to be
hiding things, but there was something about him that had been
nagging her for a while.

Something told her that there was more to him than met the eye.
It wasn't just his quiet confidence, his competence, or his
excellent driving.

It certainly wasn't that he was attractive, although he
undeniably was.

In the few days she'd known him, he'd somehow grown more
handsome than he was when she'd first met him.

Deep down, she liked him. She'd been through a great deal over
the past few days, and the last thing she could have tolerated
was a talkative, annoying partner.

He'd been sensitive enough to known what she'd needed, and he'd
kept quiet.

Or perhaps that's just how he was. Either way, his presence
soothed her. In her old life she might have thought he was
boring. She'd have been so busy chasing the next story that he
would have faded into the background.

But out here, all alone with her thoughts, she could see him
more clearly.

Perry had clearly known what he was doing in assigning him to
this case.

Clark slowed the car again, and they soon pulled up in front of
a nondescript brick building. A large crowd of men, mostly
African American and Hispanic were standing outside the
building.

It was clear from the way they were dressed that they didn't
have much. Homeless chic hadn't really caught on in L.A.

Jimmy woke up, looking groggy.

"Watch the car," Lois told him.

In Metropolis, a car like their rental would be stripped to the
chasse in less than twenty minutes in some sections of town.
This place looked like one of those places.

***********
"You honestly want me to remember someone that came through here
two years ago?" the woman stared at them and laughed. "Do you
know how many people we have coming through here every day? And
now with the Sunnydale thing? We've got people sleeping on the
floor."

"We're asking about a man with a tattoo on his forehead," Lois
said. "He would have been clearly mentally ill."

She pulled out a close up photo of the tattoo taken from one of
the corpses at the morgue.

The woman glanced at the picture then did a double take.

"I did know someone like that. He doesn't come by anymore. He
went by the name of Olaf."

"Do you have any idea where he might be?"

"I've heard that he was harassing some of the kids over at the
East Hills Teen Center." The woman shook her head. "Getting
people to take their medications is almost impossible, and when
they are off them, things can deteriorate pretty fast."

The woman wrote an address down on a sheet of paper. "Ask Anne
Steele what she's seen. She's the director of the teen center,
and she might be able to give you a better lead."

Lois glanced at Clark, and they both rose to their feet. "Thank
you."

*****************

"We're getting closer," Lois said. "I can feel it."

Clark's hunch had been correct. Lois wondered if he was hiding
something. Maybe he had a source at the hospital that he didn't
want to reveal.

The East Hills Teen Center was in a part of town even more
poverty stricken than the last place they'd visited. The
interior was well kept, and the teenagers passing through seemed
respectful and clean.

The director of the place was absurdly young however, barely out
of her teens herself.

"How may I help you?" the woman asked. There was something about
the way she looked at Clark that Lois didn't like.

It was speculative interest, in the way a woman looks at a man.

"My name is Lois Lane and this is my partner Clark Kent," Lois
said, reaching out to shake hands. The woman's hands were warm
and human.

"We're investigating the collapse of Sunnydale," Lois said,
continuing.

The woman's expression changed. "I don't have anything to say
about Sunnydale."

"You are a native?" Lois asked.

"We're here looking into a mass grave outside of town. There
were a number of men with this tattoo buried there, and we think
that a survivor may have escaped." Clark spoke smoothly, and he
smiled at Anne.

He handed her the photograph, and Lois noticed that her hands
lingered a moment too long on his.

The woman...girl really, gasped as she saw the photograph.

"There's a local street person who has a tattoo like this. He's
been harassing some of the kids, and I've had to call the police
on several different occasions."

"Any idea where he usually stays?"

Anne shook her head and handed the picture back to Clark. "Some
of the kids do, though."

She gestured, and a pair of young African American kids stepped
forward.

The boys were more than happy to give directions to Olaf's
home.

************

Olaf's home was a box in a dark alley behind a dumpster.

The entire alley smelled of garbage, rotting food and human
urine. It was dark even to Lois's newly enhanced vision, and
Lois had an uneasy feeling of dread.

>From the darkness, a deep, accented voice spoke.

"Are you here to kill me then, killer of men?"

Lois froze.

"Come to finish off the work of the Beast?" the voice continued,
this time closer. "Brought your own creature and the monster
inside."

The thing that shuffled into the light was barely a man. The
tattoo on his forehead, and the light of madness in his eyes
were only accentuated by the long knife in his hand.

Lois took a step back, the blood draining from her face. It
wasn't that she was afraid of the knife.

He knew what she had done.

"It is not my time, reaper. You may not take me." The man stood
in the shadows, swaying. A moment later he stepped out into the
light.

"Abomination," he muttered, staring at them with his good eye.
His other eye was covered with a dirty rag which did not conceal
a crusted matte of something nasty seeping from the other one.

Lois stood frozen, unable to speak. The sick feeling at the pit
of her stomach had never gone away, though it had gradually
faded into the background over the past few days.

It was back in full force.

There was something about the way the man was staring at her.
His single eye stared at her as though he knew all her secrets
and despised them.

He was a tall man, dressed in multiple layers of clothing. His
clothing reeked of stale urine and body odor.

"I was the hand of God, and the eye, and now I am nothing." The
man shook his head. He had a full, matted beard, and crumbs fell
from it.

"Olaf?" Clark asked. "My name is Clark Kent, and this is Lois
Lane. We are reporters-"

"I know who you are." The man scowled. "I know what you are.
This is not your place, not your home. This is our place, MY
place."

"We just wanted to ask some questions about the other members of
your order." Clark glanced at Lois and she shook her head a
little. She didn't feel ready o speak yet.

"Dead. All dead because I could not see." The man's expression
turned morose. "I was to be the eye, and they were the hand."

"The Hand?" Clark asked.

"Of God, fool!" Olaf stepped forward, his eye blazing. "We were
the hand of God, ready to smite the Enemy."

"And you failed." Lois spoke, and she realized that her voice
was flat.

"The Beast was too strong. Mortal hands had no chance." The man
was becoming agitated. "Damn her back to hell!"

Lois shared a look with Clark before turning back to the
questioning.

Olaf hadn't been an old man. His posture and bearing was that of
someone who had been broken. He stooped, and although he had
once been a big man, he was now skinny and he swayed.

It looked as though he hadn't eaten in a while. His eyes were
sunken in his head.

"You came to America to find the Beast?" Lois asked, finally
regaining her voice.

Olaf stared at her. "No one seeks the Beast. To meet her is
death." He closed his remaining eye. "Beautiful death."

"Then why?"

"The Key must be destroyed."

"You were looking for a key," Lois said. "And it took a hundred
of you?"

"The Key was hidden. It was our holy duty." The man looked
suddenly morose. "We could not kill her."

"The Beast?" Lois asked.

"They Key! The Key was a girl, the sun's morning light."

Lois scowled. Talking to Olaf was like trying to swim through
tar. Every question only led to more, and nothing ever seemed to
go anywhere.

"We were talking about the Beast." Lois said. "What did she look
like? Was she tall, short, blonde...?"

"If you are seeking the Beast, you are a fool!" Olaf scowled and
stepped closer to Lois. "You'll get what I got. Cold hands
reaching into your head...stealing it all away."

Lois glanced at Clark again, remembering a fingernail embedded
in a man's skull.

"Did she do this to your eye?" Lois asked. Despite the filth,
she found herself leaning forward to look under the rag. She was
repulsed, yet fascinated.

Even though she knew she'd regret it, she couldn't not look.

Olaf batted her hand away and said, "No touching. I did this."

"Why?" Lois asked, repelled. What could make a man gouge out his
own eye?

"If thine eye offends thee...." Olaf lifted the rag to reveal
the ruined socket where an eye had once been. "My eyes failed my
brothers. I was to be their seer. Now I see better."

Lois stepped back, and leaned in toward Clark. "I'm not sure
he's capable of telling us anything more."

"We need