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Chapter 12
As they left the hospital, all Clark could think about was what he had
promised Gail, about what he had realized back in her room. He needed
Bruce’s help! The same guy who they’d freed back in the hospital, and then
had left them to face Gail alone. He hadn’t even bothered to check up on
her, he raged, and she still expected Clark to help him. The stupid,
ungrateful, uncaring- Clark bit off the thought and forced himself to calm
down. No matter what he thought about Bruce, he needed him. One thing Gail
had been right about was that despite everything else, Bruce was an amazing
fighter. He’d hurt Richie, maybe not badly, but he’d done more damage than
Clark had. Maybe together they could figure out a way to bring Richie down.
Sure, he told himself, that wouldn’t be too hard. Beat a guy who’s got skin
like a razor; that shouldn’t be too difficult. Yeah, and all he had to do
first was find Bruce, and who knows where he could be.
"And there’s another thing I have to worry about," Clark
muttered. "What if Bruce finds Richie before I find him?"
"Don’t tell me your actually planning on going after him," Chloe
said. They passed the Beanery as they walked down the street. From the
hospital on the outskirts of town to the school it was about a half hour
walk.
"Which one?" Clark asked, still thinking.
"Take your pick! First we’ve got a wanted felon, a guy who almost made
a shish kabob out of you last night; and next there’s a guy whose been
kicking the tar out of wanted felons. I mean," she said quickly,
"not to criticize you or anything, but what can you really do? Even if
you bump into Bruce on the street, like right now, what could you do? Make
him go back to the hospital? Or tell him not to go after Richie?" She
frowned and looked behind them, checking the street.
"What’s the matter?" Clark asked her.
"Sorry," she explained, "Pete’s just shown me too many
horror movies I guess. When you say something like that, then whoever you
didn’t expect to pop up just then, does." Suddenly she shrieked as a
hand clutched her side. Clark nearly jumped out of his skin as he turned
around, expecting the worst. Instead he saw Pete grinning from ear to ear.
"Sorry, Chloe," he apologized, still laughing, "couldn’t
resist." Chloe yelled at him and hit him with her bag. "What were
you expecting someone else?" Pete laughed as he jumped back.
"Jerk," she muttered sullenly. "I thought you were supposed
to be at school, doing research for me, not making me lose ten years of my
life."
"I was, I hit pay dirt and decided to find you guys early," he
said. "How’d things go at the hospital? What’d Bruce say?"
"Not much," Clark replied. "He barely thanked us for getting
him out of there before giving us the slip. I think he’s going after Richie
by himself, even if it gets him killed."
Pete’s face grew serious as he listened. "I can almost understand
why," he said, nodding.
"What do you mean?" Clark asked.
"Well, you really have to see this," Pete explained to them as
they started back towards the school.
Ever since Chloe had taken charge of the school newspaper, The Torch, she
had slowly transformed the newsroom into her own private shrine to
investigative reporting. She had two computers hooked up to an online
reference guide of bizarre and unexplainable phenomenon as well as
scientific and historical search engines. Her back office, the home of the
infamous ‘Wall of Weird’, had newspaper clippings that dated back to the
founding of Smallville. She had even gathered, at her own expense, several
old almanacs and journals from the earliest settlers and traders that had
passed through this territory. In short, her office held literally anything
and everything that a person could ever want to know about Smallville, and
it’s unique history. When they entered, Clark saw that Pete had staked a
claim to the computer in the far corner. It was surrounded by
candy-wrappers and plastic cups.
"I guess you’re not the only one who’s been up all night," Clark
told Chloe as they sat down at the desk. Chloe stared at the wrappers in
disgust.
"Pete," she asked him, "what have, I told you about cleaning
up when you’re done in here?"
"Sorry," he apologized quickly, "I started doing a bit of
research at home, and when I found something, I had to use the computers
here to confirm it." He rubbed his eyes and blinked several times.
"Actually I took a break to find you guys when I started to see double.
Too much sugar for me."
"Well before the sugar rush ends," Chloe said, "why don’t
you show us what you found?" Pete smiled and motioned her to a seat.
He sat down next to the computer and pulled up a picture of Bruce that
looked fairly recent. He was slouched over, giving the camera a bored smile
as he stood next to a bar.
"This is an Inquisitor picture of him taken two years ago," Pete
explained. "It’s the kind pretty much everyone knows about, ‘Rich kid
enjoys life of leisure at Florida hot spot’. There’s almost an identical
one about Lex a few pages over actually. Anyway, this is the Bruce Wayne we
all know, right?" he asked them.
"Not hardly," Chloe stated, staring at the photo. "You
should’ve seen him at the hospital, completely different."
"No, we do know this one," Clark disagreed. "We met him at
the Beanery, remember? When Lex was first introducing him. He was that
person then," he said, pointing at the screen.
"So what? Does he have split personalities or something?" she
asked him.
"Wait a second," Pete told her, "it gets better."
"Last night," he explained, "I kept finding these kind of
articles about him. Everywhere I looked all I’d see were Inquisitor and
even Daily Planet stories about what a mess this kid is." He started
to hand them printed out sheets, one by one explaining them. "’Wayne
fortune in hands of high school dropout.’ ‘Wayne heir goes on wild romp
through hotel’. ‘Wayne midterm party torches half of college hall’. There’s
even one linking him and Brittany Spears, but I won’t go into that,"
he said quickly, catching Chloe’s eye.
"Anyway," he continued, "I was going to close out when I hit
the sort button to go by earliest date, just to see if I could find out
when these wild stories about him started. That’s when I found this,"
he said passing them a single sheet of paper.
Clark read it over Chloe’s shoulder as she read aloud. "’Wayne Family
Slain in Hold-Up Attempt’." She looked up over the paper to stare at
Pete. "His parent’s?" she asked. Pete nodded and motioned her to
go on. "’Dr. Thomas Wayne was gunned down last night as he and his
wife, Martha, and their son, Bruce, 8, were walking home from a movie. The
murder is believed to have motivated by greed; the assailant demanded Mrs.
Wayne’s jewels along with money, though it is unclear if the two resisted.
Police have no leads to the whereabouts of the killer.’" She lowered
the paper. "Oh my God. He watched his parents get gunned down. I had
no idea."
"Yeah, that’s the kicker," Pete said, "neither did I. You
think that being in the paper as much as he is, this kind of stuff would be
out there, right? But nothing, none of these other articles mention it. And
how about this: this was the only article I could find online about the
Wayne murder."
"You’re kidding me," Chloe said, moving up to the computer.
"That can’t be right."
"It’s true, I checked it," Pete told her, moving away.
"Somehow he covered it up."
"You can’t just cover something like this up," Chloe said,
searching her database. "This is public domain, he can’t hide
it."
"I wouldn’t put that past him," Clark said quietly. He pulled out
a sheet of paper from the stack Pete had given them. It was a picture of a
much younger Bruce, leaning against a lamppost, staring at the camera. The
caption read: ‘Wayne tragedy survivor, Bruce Wayne stands by the spot where
his parents fell’. Clark stared at the look of stern resolve on the boy’s
face. It was as fierce as the look on Bruce’s face the night before, when
Clark had left him at the circus. It transformed his young face into a
stern mask, hard and unflinching. "That made you, didn’t it," he
muttered, shaking his head. "That’s what created you."
"Did you say something, Clark?" Pete asked.
"Just that, I guess this is might be an explanation," he said.
"I mean, why else would someone like him go out and hunt down people
like he does. He wants revenge."
Chloe looked at him and then turned back to her computer. "Maybe
so," she said quietly. "Maybe he deserves it. I don’t know."
Pete leaned over her shoulder and stared at the screen. "So what are
we going to do with this?" he asked her.
"What do you mean?" she asked, sorting through the files again.
"I mean, what are we going to do with this story?" he asked her.
He held up the printed out article and waved it in the air. "Do we
trash it, go to the Inquisitor, what?"
"No!" Clark and Chloe both said at the same time. They glanced at
each other and then looked away.
"Let’s just hold onto it for now," Chloe said, moving the data
into a secure file. "We can always decide what to do with it later.
I’ll encrypt the article in here, I guess you can just give the printout to
store somewhere."
"I’ll hang onto it," Clark spoke up. Pete and Chloe looked at
him, surprised. "If that’s okay," he added.
"Sure, I guess," Chloe said, and Pete handed over the article.
Folding it up carefully, Clark tucked it into his pocket. "Well now
that that’s out of the way, what about Richie? Any more news on him while
we were gone?" she asked Pete. He shook his head and slipped back seat
to face the computer.
"Nothing new," he said, brining up the Smallville Ledger
homepage. I went to the Daily Planet site a few minutes before I left and
they had as much as- hold on," he said suddenly as he brought up the
site. "Uh oh," he said quietly.
"Uh oh," Chloe asked. "Uh oh, what? Is it bad?"
"Since when is uh oh, good?" Pete remarked. "It says here
that the governor’s just decided to call in the National Guard. They’re
making this a full manhunt for Richie, I guess."
"The National Guard," Clark breathed in amazement. "This
just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?"
"So what now?" Pete asked.
"We find Bruce," Clark said firmly. "We have to tell him
about this. If the National Guard moves in, and Bruce gets caught between
them and Richie, he’ll get himself killed that much quicker. And I promised
I wouldn’t let that happen." Pete and Chloe exchanged a worried glance
and nodded in agreement.
END
OF CHAPTER TWELVE
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