72 Hours Earlier
Lois Lane was already hard at work putting the finishing touches on her most recent installment on the impending garbage strike when her partner, Clark Kent, walked into the bull pen.

”You’re late again,” she complained. It was her most common complaint about the partner Perry White, the Daily Planet’s editor, had forced on her five months ago. Clark was always late, or missing, or just plain not there. It was a wonder he was still employed, even though he always got his stories turned in in the nick of time.

“I had an appointment with the assistant public works coordinator and the governor’s mediator, remember?” Clark said, taking a seat at his own desk and booting up his computer.

“Is there a chance Maynard will pull it off? Get the union to call off the strike?”

Clark shrugged. “Maybe. It’s a little early to tell, but definitely maybe.” He opened the word processor and started typing in his notes.

The phone on his desk rang and he picked it up: “Clark Kent, Daily Planet.”

Lois listened to her partner’s end of the conversation, watched as he took down an address.

“Yeah, tell him I’ll be there. Thanks,” Clark said finally, hanging up the phone.

“You’ll be where?” Lois asked. Clark looked over at her as if surprised she was still sitting at the desk next to his.

“With a source, tomorrow,” Clark said, going back to his typing.

“What source?” she insisted.

He grinned at her. “None of your business. It’s not your story.”

“We’re supposed to be partners,” she reminded him archly.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t do something on my own, does it?” he asked.

She frowned. He had a point. Just because they were partners didn’t mean they couldn’t also work separately and she had frequently turned in stories the past five months he’d had no input on.

“Just tell me this, does it have anything to do with Superman?”

“If I tell you ‘no’, will you drop it?”

“That depends on if I believe you.”

“Lo-is,” he said, drawing her name out into two long syllables. She just looked at him, daring him to continue.

He was a reasonably competent reporter, although she would never say it out loud. He was not hard to look at either, with that black wavy hair, soft brown eyes and a body that all the straight women and most of the gay men in the newsroom would love to get close to. After a long moment, he caved, just as she knew he would. Even Superman couldn’t stand up to Mad Dog Lane when she smelled a story.

“Remember that Kryptonite sample that Wayne Irig sent to the Kansas state lab, the one that disappeared?” Clark asked quietly.

Lois nodded. “The stuff that’s supposed to be able to hurt Superman.”

“Yeah, that stuff,” Clark said. “Well, there’s a rumor that Bureau 39 found more Kryptonite around Irig’s farm while they were tearing things up.”

“I thought the government disbanded Bureau 39 after Trask got himself killed in Smallville?” Lois reminded her partner.

“Just because somebody signed an order to do it doesn’t mean it got done,” Clark said. He sounded annoyed and a little worried.

Lois knew that Trask and his men had tried to kill Clark and his parents only six weeks before, claiming they had aided Superman on his arrival on Earth. They claimed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Superman was just the first in a conquering invasion.

Lois had been furious at their claims that Superman might be a menace, more furious at how Trask had hurt her partner.

“So, what’ve you got?” Lois demanded. Clark was so cute when he was flustered.

“Joe the Nose called me, said a friend of a friend wanted to talk to me about Bureau 39.”

“When and where?”

“Lois, this is my story. I don’t need you to baby sit me. Really, I can do this on my own,” he insisted. Then his head came up in that annoying way of his, as if he could hear something no one else could. “Lois, I forgot I was meeting someone,” he muttered, running out of the bullpen toward the stairwell as if the devil himself were after him.

“Clark!” she yelled after him.

   

It was Superman who launched off the roof of the Daily Planet toward the alarm he’d heard from his desk at the Planet.

He homed in on the shrill sound, landing outside the Fale’s Jewelry store on Grant.
A police car was already parked in front of the store, and two officers were waiting outside the entrance door. The alarm turned off.

“They went down the alley, Superman,” one of the officers said as he landed. The two men looked familiar, but he’d met so many of Metropolis’s finest in the past five months.

Superman gave the two uniformed men a puzzled look. Why were they just standing there? He was familiar with most of the alleys in the city, and the one behind Fale’s was no exception. He knew it was a dead end. Suddenly curious, he walked into the alley, mindful that the two officers were following him at a short distance.

He stepped closer to the dumpsters at the end of the alley, intending to check them and suddenly felt the stabbing pain and nausea of Kryptonite. He felt a hand on his arm and thought for a moment he was being helped. Then another hand put a cloth over his nose and mouth and he smelled chloroform.

The world went dark.