no ordinary world part6

6

The woman known as Chloe Sullivan stormed from the blackened steel doors that housed Luthor's private observation room.

As Dr. Emil Hamilton refered to his watch, the female reporter had been in there for a little under an hour. But now that she was free from its confines, it looked as if she'd been trapped there, her determined strides  all but sprinting down the long steel encased corridor, high heels bruising the floor.

Dr.Hamilton,  inpatiently waiting outside, followed her gait as she passed, noticing the fury in both her punctuated steps, and hard scowl.

"If I could have a moment of your time--"

"It's  been made perfectly clear that my time is up here, Dr. Hamilton." She said between steps, never pausing to look behind her.

"Please!" Emil paced himself, carrying his clipboard, pager, and files against his chest. "I know  you're a very busy reporter for the Planet, and I know you don't have a lot of time."

She slowed, only barely, allowing Emil to pace beside her. "You don't have time to waste when you're on a deadline, Doctor."

"I'll make it quick." Emil pushed up his sliding glasses and took the reporter aside. "Mr. Luthor implemented a suppression order the hour you arrived." He scanned the hall furiously for prying ears. He whispered, " No one is permitted to talk to you without risking criminal charges Leaking classified information about a government project is considered a felony."

 "If there's been any 'leak' in your labratory," she retorted, " I've been fed  it first hand, from Lex Luthor himself."

"That is exactly my point." Emil fixed his body between prying eyes/ears and the reporter. He leaned in, "It's a game. Lex wants to use you, limiting the fingers of information right to his palm. "

Emil scanned the hall again, this time noting several white coats starring in their direction, along with the pinch-nosed secretaty at the reception area.

"That's very nice to hear that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. I remember being manipulated by Lionel's distant puppet strings last time I was here. I was lucky enough to rip those away the first time, and I'll do it again if I have to." The brown haired journalist spun on her heel, turning the corner where the elevators where, "But you see I have enough for my story just from the teaser material. You can look forward to the incriminating expose on the front page tomorrow, Dr. Hamilton. I must have witness at least a dozen illegal scientific practices since I walked through those doors.  It's been a pleasure."

"Wait!" He ungracefully caught her sleeve.

Several other white coats passed them down the hall, necks and glasses turned.  All of them fellow cowokers of Emil, who he knew fed their shameless curiosity all too regularly.

The reporter looked at him just as curiously.

"What if I showed you something," Hamilton whispered, gathering his files in his damp palms, "something that would change your mind about that expose?"

Her brown eyes searched his, "After what you just told me about a federal gag order? Swap your highly regarded career for forty years in prison? Why?."

"If I don't do this," Hamilton answered gravely, "Not only will be career be over, the entire project will be over. The world can't withstand another failure of this magnitude."

They were alone now, the crowd of coats moved along.

"Another failure?"

He could feel her gauging him with her eyes, gathering the reasons why she should trust him at all.

"There's a reason why I brought you here." Emil fingered his plastic creditials and swiped it against a magnetic strip. "And it has little to do about this project at all. But about the one preceding it."

The reporter looked between themselves and the elevators down the hall. "These aren't the same elevators we took before."

"Not all doors lead to the outside here." Emil said carefully, pushing for the basement. "If you want the truth, you have to be willing to dig deeper."


**




As the sun perched on the crests of Smallville's ridgeline, like a crimson disk on a jagged high wire,  Clark's mind teetered  back and forth along with it, the ebbing of doubt and recount of the last hours causing the unrest in his heart. 


Usually during that time of evening, Clark would have already been home with his wife, reading the afternoon edition of the Daily Star. But he wasn't home, and Lois wasn't anywhere around.

 Clark wasn't going home. Not today. Not after Lois' glowing story that pitched Clark in a very bright, and unwanted spot light. Right now Clark needed to be alone, and away from his wife and the dozens of extra wide smiles that haunted him like wooden dolls.

Right now Clark craved to be left alone.

And he found it here, alone in his car, parked way out in the boonies of town.

Strangely, being in the middle of nowhere brought Clark closer to the center of truth. Here, he could think.

Here, he had solitude.

There was something strange about the fire. It had happened all too sudden, in a flash and then ashes. Everyone all to quick to sweep those ashes away without even questioning why or how.  The community all too eager to carry Clark on their shoulders, ignoring the weight on his.

The truth.

Clark needed to know the truth. His stomach turned, an unusal feeling of unrest.  There was something wrong, something off.

But out here, as the day died down, the fragments began to settle into place.

Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow he would dig deeper, uncover what it was he was so sure the sherif was hiding from him.

Uncover why his own wife would lie to him.

Clark sat inside his small coupe, pausing for the imaginary cars that never came nor went from this place, lonely fields of grass continuing to bow back at him and then whisper among themselves.

It was a compact car; tiny, equipt with four doors, two pedals,  one steering wheel and not much else.  Clark had driven it to and from work for his entire tenure at the newspaper, and never once had he complained that maybe the fit was a little too snug.

But strangely today, like everything else, it just didn't fit.

His left shoulder had a way of rubbing against the door, and his right one always trapped against the seat belt. Clark always thought the seat itself was ridiculously small, and the headspace in the cabin awkwardly  short. Clark hadn't complained when Lois picked out the car, realizing only now that he hadn't complained about a lot of things in his marriage up until now.

Beside him in the empty seat was the inconspicuous brown parcel he had received in the mail two mornings ago.  Clark peaked from the side, casting a warm look to his passenger. His eyes lighted to the crisp brown color, so small, yet so significant.

This secret was the only companion that seemed to give Clark hope.


The fields whispered again.


 His hair still smelled of smoke, and his finger nails were stained with ash, hands gripping the steering wheel as his father's black wrist watch laid exposed from his cuff. Its face glinted back at him, reflections of the setting sun and of the remainders of the day.

It incited an idea.

A tunnel of curiosity, his mind surfacing to that place he had only thought of in dreams. It was one of the few places where Clark felt his life completely private, where he had his this entirely different life, a different world entirely.

In his dreams, he had a different identity.

Since childhood it had been a game for Clark, creating this fanstical world beyond the one he knew. His imagination filling in the emptiness he felt, loneliness. He imagined tall buildings, and shooting planes. The ability to fly, traveling to more than one world, the possibilty that he could one day go to the stars. A place he was so naturally drawn to.

But all of this was kept secret, and no one knew.

For Clark had grown out of his boyhood shell, and it would be questionable if any one knew how a grown man still wished.

Still, his father's old watch reminded him.

He was awake now.

Searching for something that never quite surfaced, only continuing to linger on the cusp.

And now, Clark felt something disturbing. Something he had never felt before. Something he could only describe as reality crashing down. Overwhelmed by the crushing realization of how unfullfilling his life had become, of how trapped he felt.

The car's cabin shrank upon his massive shoulders, metal pinning him until he felt his chest swell with a painful lack of air.

Clark panicked, palms sweaty and chest hot. He extracted himself from the suffocating cage  he'd strapped himself into for so many years, kicking open the driver door.

Outside of the car, Clark shook of his dark navy tie and breathed.

 Warm streaks of crimson slashed into the hints of violet that bled into starlight. It was there in the darkest corners of the sky where Clark felt peace flood into his soul.


He waded through the forest of  tall grass that he had neglected to cross for years. It was deep there, the unattended fields. Left untouched by the rest of civilization and wild. It seemed that even the crickets were absent, as it was so silent that Clark could hear his heart beating in his ear.

Just beyond the grass was a clearing, and then the small hangar that looked as much forgotten as it had been to Clark until now. The building's sqaured windows were smeared and dusty, lined up in rows at the very top of the structure and all around. Its bay doors were closed, and looked to be for some time. Between the cracks of the concrete were rogue dandelions and the long tendrils of scattered weeds. Abandoned air craft sat dormant on the side of the clay runway, their tires flat and dry rotted from abscence of sky.

Clark walked carefully around the retired behemoths, admiring the distant regality echoing between them.  His palm touched one of it's rusted propellers, and spun.

"Can I help you, son?"

The caretaker, Mr. White, spoke from across the clay yard, one side of his mouth  occupied by a healthy cigar. His grey hair was sparse, but fluffed out at the sides of his ears. He gazed at Clark with slit eyes, creased with lines that counted the many years spent under the red sun.

Clark remembered the man well from earlier memories, and more recently, at his father's funeral.

"Hi." Clark smiled and put out his hand, "Maybe you remember me?  My father--."

"I know who you are." Perry puffed out with a fine white smoke, studying the vast outline of Clark's shape, backlit from the sunset.

Perry White was considered a hermit inside Smallville gossip circles. He always wore the same getup, faded button up along with the dated set of suspenders that held his rolled trousers in place There was a rolled up newspaper in his back pocket with today's date.

"You lookin' for somethin'?" Perry crossed his arms over his protruding belly, a detail Clark didn't remember Perry sporting years before.

"Yeah," Clark walked over fallen plane parts and clumps of clay and grass. "The truth."

"The truth?" Perry turned around, eying Clark's falling shadow.  "Out here?"

The sun dipped below the horizon.

Night fell.

Clark paused, craning his neck to face the darkening sky. "No, up there."

The sky had changed to a swallowing violet.

Stars appeared.

"They say grounded men can only see the world from one angle at a time." Perry puffed from his cigar, gently dragging out the long seconds before he spoke again, "Leaves the rest of the world hidden behind the corners and turns that obscure the whole picture."

Clark looked again at the news paper rolled in Perry's back pocket. Something about the script looked funny, foreign. But there was something funny about Perry White altogether. Something about him that singled him out from the rest of the small population. Perhaps thats why he lived out he alone.

Perhaps that's why Clark felt so at ease beside him.

Perhaps Clark didn't belong either.

 "And then man learned how to fly.See the world for what it was. Small." Perry  glanced at Clark knowingly, "It changed him forever."

Clark casted a deep look at the man's profile, resting thought in his words. "Sometimes I feel like the world is so small its closing in on me. I wish I could just leave this place."

"Why don't you?" The older man said easily.

Clark smiled sadly, nodding over to the ridge of encasing mountains that blocked any travel other than by air.  "I can't fly, Mr. White."

Perry smiled back before throwing out his cigar, ashes scattering with the slight breeze.


*

Emil Hamilton had led the reporter through a maze of tunnelways, lit by the occasional overhead flurescent bar.

After what seemed like the millionth unmarked, security coded steel door, Emil paused.

"Consider this a breaching of confidentiality." He said, turning towards the retinal scan.

"I thought we breached that four floors ago." She watched blue laser wash over Emil's dark skin and scan across.

"Actually," Emil said as he turned around smiling. "Your security clearance ended at the second level."

"Ah."

The door hissed, as the pressurized room behind it appeared.

A white room.

"What is this place?"

"This," Emil handed her a plastic suit, "well this is just the sterilization room."

She held the suit in her hands, the small oxygen tank that he next handed over.

"Careful," Emil said, stepping into the rubber boots. "Radiation is elevated in these next areas."

She looked both at the suit and him skeptically, and then put it on.


*

There was another pressurized door, vents shooting a smoky gas upwards from the floor in powerful jets.

It was obvious that not may were permitted this way. It was dark, and damp. Poorly lit.

Forgotten almost.

Through the plastic face guard of her radiation suit, she followed Hamilton to a doorway where a large vault rested.

Also steel.

"Emil."

He ignored her, his gloved hands punched in a code.

A sharp hiss from the door jumped her back.

"The temperature here is slightly lower. " Emil's voice was muffled by his plastic suit.

Black.

And cold.

Even through her suit, she could feel it. Her breath fogged the plastic visor, obscuring her sight. Ice particals formed, crystalized breath.

From her side, she felt Emil tap one of the controls of her helmet, the breath disappearing immediately.

"Hyper defroster." Emil gloated, "a side project of mine as a young intern at Luthor Corp."

"Very nice." She smiled, a creeping feeling that she might actually trust Hamilton afterall. "So, are you going to tell me where I am? And why you're helping me?"

He stopped, and tuned towards her, the small LED light attached to his helmet shinning in her eyes.

"I'm not doing this to help you." Emil explained, "I'm doing this to help Clark."

He turned back towards the tunnel they seemed to be walking into, the walls jagged and rocky.

A cave.

"I'm one of the last who still believe in the cause. Others are so sure that the experiment is over, but they're wrong. It's not over. The day we stop believing in Clark Kent, what he stands for, the day the world loses hope for everything."

The walls of the cave became tighter as they walked deeper, causing both of them to crouch.

"What were you saying before," her voice muffled behind her visor, "about the previous failed experiements?"

Strangely, she could hear Hamilton laugh up ahead of her, "It's no secret the government has been hiding covert labs for centuries. Area 51 being the commonly known. The higher ups tried so hard to cover up the truth but look what a mess they created! The lies and deception.  All of it was a curtain for what was really happening."

Along the walls, their helmet lights illuminated carvings from the walls.

Foreign symbols, pictographs.

Journalistic curiousity willed her to stop, but Emil's lonely helmet light kept moving ahead.

She jogged along. "You're telling me that the government actually found alien technology? And that LuthorCorp is was subcontracted out to test it?"

"Technology wasn't all they found."

"What do you mean?"

"The first experiment." Emil turned around. "I'm sure you've heard of 33.1."


***

"I can't fly."

Clark looked down as Perry's leather boot snuffed out the reminding embers of his cigar.

"Well," the gruff older man spat finally, "and  here I thought Kent men were born to fly."

The moon shone so still.

Clark was quiet, searching through the abandoned air field and the tired, rotted planes that sat as shored out ornaments.

"Y'know, in the war they used to call me 'Chief'. I flew a lot of missions across the backs of silver wings. Saw a lot of ocean, a lot of different land. Wrote all about it back home too, in a little column they kept for uniforms. When it was all said and over, later on, back when I was home, the name sort of stuck. I worked in a newspaper once, just like you."

Clark smiled. "My father never said you were a reporter."

"Not a reporter, kiddo." Perry drew out another cigar from his pocket, and lit it. Fire burning at once, and then a smooth smolder.

Fine, white smoke.

"I was the editor. 'In Chief' to be exact."

Clark frowned. "What made you leave the newspaper business?"

Perry smiled, for once. "Same reason you're the way out here, asking yourself the same questions I used to." He took out the bundled newspaper he'd kept in his back pocket. "I wanted to know the truth behind the world, the truth that was behind the twists and turns of the story other reporters were churning out. I knew there was something more, and I went after it myself." He grinned again, and winked. "I went undercover."


*

"I thought Level 33.1 was exterminated."

"It was." Emil replied, ducking through the turns of the cave. "After LuthorCorp shut down all of its projects, the lab was non existent. Over." Emil sighed, "But then the experiement sort of, reanimated."

"What?"

"They called him Davis Bloome. A subject much like Clark but a few more years developed. We based everything against Davis Bloome. His diet, his daily interaction with humans."

She frowned.

"In the early stages, everything seemed normal. Plausible, hopeful for a total integration of races."

"What are you saying? That this, 'Bloome' was affected somehow?"

"He started displaying  abilities. Growths." Emil shook his head  in horror, "Lionel had him terminated after two years and discontinued the experiment."

Their bulky contamination suits squeaked by low lying rocks, while the RMD's built into their chest consoles ticked with the rising radiation.

"Dr. Hamilton, you're not telling me everything." She yelled from behind her suit. "What's at the end of this tunnel? Why are we wearing these suits?"

He raised a hand, stopped, and whispered. "It's here."

Beyond Hamilton's shoulder, she could see it.

A dark, oblong shape, its surface as black as the air inside that very dark space.

"Is that--?"

"It's where everything began." Emil walked closer, the ticking of their radiation sensors hyperactive. "The experiment has expanded so far from the center of its origin, so obscured that people like Lex Luthor forget the consequences of letting another experiment fall through our fingers.Terminating the experiment is not possible. The only solution is containment."

She stepped closer, eyes widening at the glowing, jagged rocks that bound around the strange vessel like green, poisonous barbs. "It's a ship."

Emil looked to her, "We recovered more than one."



*




Lex massaged his bald temples in the middle of the dark room, the glint of his ring catching the reflection of the open door. "Has she left the premises?"

"Yes, Mr. Luthor." Emil shoved the large steel door closed, and joined Lex by the main camera console. "I escorted her out myself."

Lex didn't say anything more, choosing to watch the lonely screen in blackness.

Emil strained through his squinted eyes, taking notes on his clipboard. "I see the Clark is out in the southwest perimeter." Emil scanned the readings of the biological monitors. "His stress levels have risen twelve percent since this morning, and I would corolate that with Clark not adhering to usual daily behavior."

Lex pursed his lips, tilting his head to the side.

"Ofcourse why should he behave normally?" Emil led, "We haven't exactly been implementing the usual practices."

"A criticism, Dr. Hamilton?" Lex barely perked.

"No." Emil tucked the clipboard away, resting his hands against his chest, "A praise. Perhaps you're right. Clark's life may have been too structured. How could we ever learn how the control would react to real life situations and its complications. How will he react to chaos?"

A smile tilted Lex's lips. "How does anyone learn if they're not tested?"

Emil resonated in thought. "I just hope you've calibrated the boundaries of this testing. How far is too far, Mr. Luthor?"

"Clark will set his own boundaries as does every man."

Emil said nothing further, noting the dissonance within Lex as static aired in the surrounding speakers.

"Audio's a bit scratchy."

On camera, Clark Kent walked along side Perry White, a long time veteran of the experiment, and well known alcoholic. Luthor staffing had had problems with White lately, and were already thinking of cutting him loose.

 It was strange, Emil thought, that Clark would venture out there in the abandoned sector now of all times.

"Microphones are in and out in that quadrant, Dr. Hamilton. Make a note to the engineers promptly. I want sound along with my visuals if I'm paying two million a day to float this ship."

"Yes sir."

Oh, and Hamilton?"

"Sir?"

"There is dirt underneath your fingernails."

Emil frowned. "I'm sorry?"

"The next time you go digging around, remember." Lex sat motionless in his chair, "I'm always watching."