Super: Origins (2 page)

When Lex reached the station level, she could see that the train she needed had just arrived, so she rushed through the entry gate and down another escalator to get it. She slid in through the train doors a moment before they began to close, speakers sounding the familiar “Please stand clear of the doors” warning. Three p.m., she noted, looking at the clock on her cell phone.
I should get there in plenty of time
, she thought as the train pulled out of the station.

Fifty minutes later, sweating and worried, Lex began to doubt it. The train had been delayed along its route, so when she’d finally arrived at her stop, she’d hurried along the two blocks to the address. They weren’t very nice blocks, either; consisting of a few burnt-out looking warehouses and some worn homes with children in frayed clothes in the front yards, watching her suspiciously as she walked by. Lex could tell she was getting closer to her destination by the Potomac River when she began to smell something like stale water and dead fish.

Standing about where she thought she should be, Lex now surveyed a number of different warehouses, none of which had numbers. Unsure whether the building she wanted was the red brick one with a boarded-over window or the grey concrete one with only two small windows in front, Lex called the number she’d been given.

“Hello,” a voice answered after one ring. Cool, collected—it was Clara again.

“Ms. Pingham, this is Alexandra McKilliam. I’m here, but I’m not sure which building it is. I can’t see any building numbers.”

“Ah, yes, I should have mentioned. It’s the grey building. Please just come to the front door and ring. Someone will be with you momentarily.”

“Thanks, Ms. Pingham.”

Lex hung up and went to the front of the grey building. She saw a large door that looked like it slid open and, to the left, a box with a large button in the middle of it. Lex pressed it and thought she could hear something buzzing faintly inside the building, and then silence. She waited a few minutes in the suddenly quiet afternoon and then started to hear voices on the roof, two stories up, coming in her direction.

“…you jerk! Get the hell out of here before you regret it!”

Lex looked up to see if she could spot the people arguing, and instead saw something falling in her direction. She leapt backwards as fast as she could and heard a tearing sound. Lex cursed inwardly as she realized that she’d probably ripped the back of her suit skirt. The uneven movement caused by her restrictive clothing made her land somewhat awkwardly so that she had to prevent herself from falling by catching herself on the pavement with her palm. As she stood back up she realized she now had a bleeding left hand, a ripped skirt, and a thin stripe of white paint across the tops of her favorite shoes. Lex was happy she’d made the right call, however, as the five-gallon bucket of paint hit the ground several feet away. It had been almost full and hit hard right about where she’d been standing. White paint fountained against the door just as it began to open and the bucket jumped and spun, spraying paint everywhere until it finally fell over and gushed the rest onto the pavement.

When that finished, Lex looked back up to the roof to see if she could tell what had started all of this. She saw two heads peering over the edge, a woman and a man. The woman’s hand flew to her mouth as she looked down at the paint bucket and at Lex.

“Are you all right?” Lex heard faintly from up above.

Lex then looked through the front door, now fully open. A woman stood in the doorway, looking at the paint and bucket disapprovingly over her silver-rimmed glasses. She looked to be about thirty and had dressed very professionally that day in a navy suit jacket and skirt with a simple white blouse, her long brown hair caught up neatly in a twist on the back of her head. Lex thought the woman must be Clara, since the way she looked matched what Lex had expected after hearing Clara’s voice on the phone.

After a moment, she glanced up at Lex and smiled, although it looked a little strained. “You must be Ms. McKilliam. I’ll have to ask you to excuse the mess.”

Lex looked down at her hand, which had started to bleed freely around the grit stuck in it, and her shoes. “Ms. Pingham. Nice to meet you. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to do the same.”

Clara looked at her a little more closely, probably noticing the flash of red and the uneven white stripe across Lex’s black shoes, and then looked at the location of the bucket, right in front of the door. “Ms. McKilliam, please accept my apologies for this situation,” Clara said, then turned to her right. Lex watched as Clara’s professional façade fell away and she began barking at another woman who was nearing the door.

“Casey, Ms. McKilliam is here for an interview. You are one of the ones who have been complaining that we need new people on this team, and this is how you welcome them? She could have been killed!”

Casey gazed at Lex for a moment, as if considering what Clara had said. “No,” Casey eventually answered, “She moved too fast for me to catch her with something like that. I didn’t even do it on purpose. Relax, would you?”

Lex now had a moment to look at Casey as she stepped the rest of the way up to the door. She held a man in the air by the back of his shirt, and as Lex watched, Casey put him out the door, landing him on his feet but roughly enough that he stumbled. He turned and looked at her as if he wanted to yell, or at least say something sarcastic, but Casey gave the man a hard stare and he just shouldered his tools and left instead.

Probably one of the reasons he had done so was Casey’s stature. Lex estimated the woman to be around seven feet tall with the physical build and obvious strength of a bodybuilder. It hadn't escaped Lex that Casey had carried the man to the door with little effort, as if she’d been holding a newspaper, not even breathing heavily. The next thing that Lex noticed, after getting over some of her surprise about the incident with the workman, was that Casey was dressed in workout gear—bike shorts with a long t-shirt and a pair of sneakers. Her blonde hair was back in a simple braid that ran halfway down her back, and her dark blue eyes appeared frank and direct.

Casey sighed as she looked back at Lex. “Look, I really am sorry. I had no idea you were down there because we don’t get many visitors here. Anyway, Clara,” Casey said, turning back to the other woman, “this is actually all my fault. Be sure to blame it on me when you talk to Sauer.” Rolling her eyes, Casey added, “It’s not like you wouldn’t anyway.” She began to turn to go back inside, but then glanced back at Lex. “Oh, and good luck, I guess.”

Lex was unsure of what to make of that last comment and so just replied, “Uh, thanks.” Stepping around the paint as well as she could, she made her way to the front door.

“There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen,” Casey’s disembodied voice said from somewhere inside. Clara glared in the general direction it had come from and then turned to Lex.

“Let’s get you cleaned up a bit before we go in to Mr. Sauer,” she said.

Lex nodded and followed her in and to the left, the door automatically creaking shut behind them along its track. Turning her head to briefly scan her surroundings, Lex noted an open area to the right with couches and tables, just past two sets of staircases. It had wide picture windows with a view past some tired-looking docking to the water, then of the river beyond and the tall buildings across it, probably Crystal City, she thought. Not exactly a downtown vista, but very nice compared to what Lex had expected after the neighborhood she’d traveled through to get here.

Everything smelled faintly of cinnamon and coffee, Lex noted as they moved through the kitchen door. Looking over Clara’s shoulder, Lex saw large stainless steel appliances and an island in the middle with stools pulled up around it. She stepped up to the big sink, took some soap from a nearby pump bottle, and drew some water to wash her cut, working the wound a little to push the grit out. While she dried the abrasion, Lex watched Clara poke through a white metal cabinet attached to the wall, eventually handing over a gauze pad, some bandages, and some disinfectant packets. “Is this what you need?” Clara asked.

Lex nodded, reached for the articles, and quickly patched her hand up. “Thanks for your help, Ms. Pingham,” she replied, throwing the trash into a large wastebasket near the door. She wished there was something she could do about her shoes and skirt, but sighed as she realized that there was no help for them now. “I think I’m ready.”

“Good. Mr. Sauer doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Please come this way.”

Clara led Lex out of the kitchen and then back towards the open room she’d spotted earlier. Before entering the room, however, they turned and went up a set of stairs to the left. At the top Lex saw a corridor with doors on either side and noted that the window at the end of the hall showed a blank wall at the bottom and part of a cloudless, intensely sunny sky at the top. Mentally thanking whoever invented air conditioning, Lex turned left to follow Clara and trailed her through the last door on the right.

“Mr. Sauer,” Clara said as she went into the room, “I apologize for the delay. There was an incident at the front door, and Ms. McKilliam was slightly injured. We had to stop by the first aid kit on the way up.”

The man Lex spotted turning towards them was much older than Clara or herself and had the look of someone used to getting what he wanted and for whom cost was never an issue. He sat in a sleek, motorized wheelchair and wore a suit that probably cost more than Lex had ever earned in a year. She smelled good cologne and could tell that the cut of his grey-silver hair had probably been done by someone whose phone number she couldn’t even afford. Lex swallowed, her ripped skirt and paint-spattered shoes looming so large in her imagination it seemed they had their own neon signs. Even if it hadn’t been ripped, her suit, a simple design in black linen with a fitted, short-sleeved jacket and a knee-length skirt suddenly seemed pathetically cheap in comparison. She forced a smile on her face as she thought,
Oh well, I’ve probably lost the chance at this job!
The idea made her feel a bit less anxious, however, and she sensed her shoulders dropping a fraction as she stood taller and moved forward to meet her interviewer.

Clara introduced them as they crossed to the side of the conference table where he sat and Lex leaned forward to shake hands with the man. Momentarily surprised by the strength of his grip, she increased her own fractionally and then they both pulled away. As Lex stepped back, she took a better look at the room she’d walked into and found it the nicest she’d seen in the building so far, furnished with a large, polished, black conference table surrounded with comfortable-looking leather chairs.

“Clara, what was the incident you just referred to?” Sauer asked. “I didn’t think the neighborhood was
that
bad.”

Clara’s lips thinned a little before she answered. “Casey seemed to be in some sort of argument with one of the workmen on the roof, and during their…discussion, a five-gallon bucket of paint was pushed off the roof, nearly onto Ms. McKilliam.”

Mr. Sauer looked at Lex with a raised eyebrow. “Really? I’d like to see what happened. Could you bring it up on the monitor, Clara?”

Clara pushed a button Lex hadn’t noticed, which flipped a screen up on the table in front of Sauer, then typed a few things into the keyboard in front of it. Finally, Clara swiveled the screen so that all three of them could watch it. Lex saw herself waiting at the front door and then watched her face turn upwards. Her expression changed, and then it looked as if the camera had suddenly moved away from her. After that, Lex stumbled a little and caught herself from falling with her left hand.

Oddly, Lex heard Sauer chuckle, almost as if to himself. “Could we see that again, Clara, from the side?”

After Clara typed a bit more on the keyboard, Lex and the others watched as the scene replayed itself from a different angle. She darted sidelong glances at her companions’ faces and watched as they stared in surprise, blinking and seeming unable to track exactly what had happened. Lex finally looked squarely over to see Sauer nodding to himself, a look of satisfaction on his face. She tried not to let her own expression show how bizarre she found the situation, however, because for the life of her, Lex couldn’t figure out why they’d care.

“Ms. McKilliam, please have a seat,” he said, and Lex chose a nearby chair at the conference table. As she slid into the chair, she found it difficult to stop herself from petting the buttery-soft leather on the armrests, but tried hard to focus on the interview instead. Clara sat opposite them and opened a laptop that she’d pulled out of a nearby bag. Sauer then went on in a thoughtful way, “You’re Bill McKilliam’s daughter, aren’t you? Do you know I knew your dad?”

Lex could feel her throat constrict and her stomach clench, but responded quickly. “Mr. Sauer, please feel free to call me Lex.” She paused a moment, trying to think of something else to say. “I don’t remember your name from when I was a child. Are you someone he met in the service?”

Mentally cursing her father, Lex wondered if she would ever get out from under the man’s shadow. After being out of his house for almost a decade now, she still felt like she couldn’t escape him.

“Well done, Lex,” Sauer complimented her. “Yes, your father and I met up in the service. We weren’t close pals or anything, but we did work together on several occasions. He seemed a very reliable man.”

“Yes, I’m sure. He always spoke highly of his military service.”
Where they taught the rat bastard to torture people. I’m sure he was very good at his job, even then,
Lex thought.

“Did you train under your father in martial arts?”

Lex sighed internally. Just about everyone who heard her last name wanted to know about that because of the stupid radio commercials. Anyone who'd lived in the DC area for even a short amount of time had heard the man’s voice on the radio, talking up his string of martial arts studios. She’d considered changing her name, but it had seemed like too much trouble. Instead, Lex avoided listening to the radio.