The Death and Life of Superman (9 page)

Harper shook his head and chuckled to himself.
One way or another, I always wind up playing the Guardian.

In a plush penthouse apartment on the ninetieth floor of the LexCorp Tower, Lex Luthor II tossed and turned in his sleep, dreaming.

In his dream, Lex was running for his life. Something was chasing him down a long series of twisting corridors. His chest burned from the effort, and every muscle ached. Why . . . do I feel . . . so tired . . . so old? Even his thoughts were labored. An old familiar pain seized him, and he looked down to see an ugly prosthetic hand clamped to the end of his right arm. My hand! No! He stopped and pulled at the metal hand. It came away, revealing the reddened, irritated skin of the stub of his arm. It was a fat, flabby arm.

The wall suddenly became a mirror, and Luthor screamed. The man who stared out at him was old and fat and bald. Behind him the shadows laughed.

“You shouldn’t run so hard, Lex. You’re not a young man anymore.”

“Who is it? Who’s there?” Luthor’s voice was a tortured wheeze.

“Don’t you recognize me, Lex? I’m disappointed.” A gaunt and gangly figure shambled forward, a soiled and tattered lab coat flapping about his ankles. A week’s growth of beard crawled along his jaw, and a disreputable brush of a mustache grew beneath his hook of a nose. Above, a scraggly wisp of hair was all that was left of the widow’s peak that had once topped his forehead. His eyes were all but hidden behind the thick lenses of gogglelike glasses.

Luthor swallowed hard. “Dabney Donovan. I don’t believe it.”

Donovan laughed. “Is that any way to greet the man who made you what you are?”

“But you’re dead, I killed you!”

“You killed one of my clones, Luthor. You see, I trusted you even less than you trusted me.”

“You bastard, what have you done to me?” Luthor grabbed Donovan by the lapel of his lab coat and shook him.

Donovan’s mouth gaped wide in a grotesque smile, and then his jaw fell loose from his head and clattered across the floor. Luthor let go of the lapel and jumped back as Donovan’s body fell apart, collapsing into a bleeding, oozing heap.

“Oh, my God!”

“God had nothing to do with it!”

Lex whirled around. There was another Donovan right behind him.

“Genetic engineering, Lex. If you know the right molecules to tweak on the chromosomal matrix, you can create anything. You don’t need to rely upon any deity.”

Donovan’s breath smelled like rotting meat. Luthor tried to turn away but found himself back against a wall.

“That’s how we saved your miserable life, after all!” Donovan poked a bony finger against his chest. “First, we faked your death by letting your body-double die in the plane crash. Then, while the world was mourning the passing of the great Lex Luthor, we got you on the table and scraped away all the tainted tissue.”

Donovan took a step back and began fishing around in his coat pocket. “Now, where did I put that—? Ah, here it is!” He pulled what looked like a television remote control from the pocket and flipped a switch. In response, an image appeared in midair . . . a ghastly image of a brain and two staring eyes floating in a chemical bath within a huge glass retort. Donovan assumed a professorial demeanor.

“There wasn’t much left of you by the time we got through, Lex. Just a brain, a bit of the spinal column, and two eyes . . . and they were slightly astigmatic! Ah, but we fixed all that. There was more than enough DNA to play with. With the proper manipulation, it took us only a few months to make a new man of you . . . stronger, taller, younger . . . we even did something about that annoying pattern baldness.” Donovan ran a hand through his own thinning mop. “Must remember to do something about that myself.”

“Then what went wrong?” Luthor demanded. “What’s happened to me? Why am I old again?”

“You were young only in body.” A new voice echoed from down the corridor, drawing nearer. “Inside, you were still the same old Luthor. You might have convinced the rest of the world that you were your own son, but you couldn’t fool me . . . not for long.”

From out of the shadows came a tall, powerful figure that Luthor knew all too well.

“Superman!”

“Yes, Lex, and I have something for you.” From beneath the folds of his cape, Superman produced a heavy lead canister.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, I think you know what it is, Lex.”

“Keep away from me!”

“Why, Lex, I want only to give you a hand!” He opened the end of the canister with a twist, revealing a withered human hand. It was Luthor’s hand. On one finger was the ring with its dimly glowing kryptonite gem . . . the ring that had nearly cost him his life!

“This is what you want, isn’t it?”

“No . . . no . . .”

“Take it. Lex. Take it!”

The hand flew from the canister, grabbed Luthor by the throat, and began to squeeze.

“No! NOOOOOH!”

Lex awoke with a start, clutching at his throat. His heart racing, he raised a good right hand to his head. The neatly cropped beard, the long, flowing mane of hair was still there. He hit a switch on the nightstand and a soft diffused light illuminated the far corner of the room. He arose from his bed and walked toward the light, regarding his reflection in the window. A rugged young man with broad shoulders and a tight, firm gut looked back at him. He breathed a sigh of relief.

“Lex?” A body stirred behind him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, love. Just had m’self a bit of a nightmare ’sall.”

A lithe, athletic young woman emerged from beneath the covers and padded across the room to join him at the window. Her long blond hair fell across his chest as she snuggled close to him.

“Why, I can feel your heart pounding. That must have been a real horror.”

“Wasn’t any fun, to be sure. I . . . I dreamt that I’d lost m’hand . . . like m’father had.”

“Oh! How awful!” She kissed his hand and gently caressed it. “What do you think could have caused such a terrible dream?”

Lex shrugged. “I think about Father all the time.” That was no lie. “Guess m’mind just jumbled things up, and made me imagine what it must’ve been like . . . to be in his shoes. Nothing to really worry about.”

Except for Dabney Donovan,
thought Luthor.
The one I killed
did
turn out to be a clone . . . that much of the dream was true. He’s the only one outside of Kelley and Happersen who knows my secret.
Gretchen Kelley had been his personal physician for years and had been willing—however reluctantly—to play the part of his mother. In her own way, she loved Luthor, and he knew that he could trust her with his life. Syd Happersen was a valued aide who had been with him since LexCorp’s founding. Happersen couldn’t betray Luthor without exposing his own part in a number of capital crimes. Only Donovan was a potential danger to him . . .
He’s the only one beyond my control.

“Are you sure it’s nothing?” The young woman’s face was a picture of concern.

“Would I lie to you, love?”

“No, of course not.” She smiled. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

They slipped back under the covers and she cuddled close to him, softly crooning in his ear.

“Mmm, lovely tune.” He stifled a yawn and looked at the clock: 3:47. “ ’S the hour, love, not the comp’ny.”

“Shhh, that’s all right. You need your sleep.” She kissed him, more affectionately than passionately. “Sweeter dreams, Lex.”

“An’ to you . . . m’darlin’ . . . Supergirl.”

Within moments, Lex Luthor was once again fast asleep. It was, he had once told her, a talent he had inherited from his father. For nearly half an hour she watched as his chest slowly rose and fell and his eyelids twitched rapidly through REM sleep and beyond. Then, satisfied that his nightmares had passed, Supergirl silently arose, floating free of the covers and gliding across the room. She stopped at the door, looking back once more at her slumbering lover before slipping out into the hall. There she glanced down at her clinging nightgown.
Can’t go out like this,
she thought, as the cloth began to flow about her, changing in both form and color. In an instant, she stood attired in a bright red skirt with matching cape and boots—layered over a royal-blue leotard. Across her chest stretched a red and yellow pentagonal shield, forming a familiar stylized letter S. She paused but a moment to check her reflection in the window at the end of the dimly lit hall before leaping from a nearby window and flying out over the city of Metropolis.

Hundreds of feet above the streets, Supergirl swooped and soared to her heart’s content. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake, leaving Lex alone tonight, but she needed far less sleep than he did. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t slipped away many times before. She loved to fly at night, with the lights of Metropolis spread out before her.

It’s so beautiful at night,
thought Supergirl,
like a huge Christmas tree, going on for miles and miles.
The city, with its millions of residents, held a constant fascination for her. There were no cities where she had come from, only ruins.
This is what my world would have been like, if not for General Zod.

Supergirl had come to Earth not just from another planet but from another universe. That extradimensional realm had been an altered copy of our own reality, a kind of pocket universe created by a mysterious cosmic entity.

There was a duplicate of Earth in that pocket universe. But that world had possessed no Superman and had been all but defenseless when attacked by a trio of superpowered terrorists led by the murderous General Zod. Zod’s forces effectively subjugated that world, forcing the native resistance forces to go underground.

Although that other-Earth had no Superman, it did claim among its residents a doppelganger of Lex Luthor. That alternate-version of Luthor was a younger, more vital man than the aging industrialist of our world, but he was no less ambitious. He was a scientific genius without equal, and he quickly became the leader of the resistance forces. In an attempt to devise a means of combatting the superterrorists, he made two remarkable discoveries. The first was a substance of his own invention that he called “protomatter,” and the second was the existence of our universe and its Superman. Despite being able to observe our world, he was at first unable to make contact with it. And so he set out to create his own superpowered champion.

The other-Luthor deduced that protomatter could be manipulated to duplicate the human form right down to the molecular level. After much grueling work, he finally managed to create an artificial life-form inspired by his observations . . . a Supergirl. Luthor was her Pygmalion, and she his Galatea. He had created in his Supergirl a being able to levitate and fly at incredible speeds. While not as strong as Superman, she wielded powerful psychokinetic energies and could generate energy shields capable of cloaking her presence, effectively rendering her invisible. And due to the fluidity of her protomatter substance, Supergirl could also alter her appearance at will.

But even with her amazing powers, Supergirl was no match for Zod and his partners. They ran roughshod over the planet, boiling away its oceans and depleting its atmosphere. Soon they rendered it all but uninhabitable.

In desperation the other-Luthor tried transporting Supergirl to our world to locate and enlist Superman’s help in ending Zod’s reign of terror. The complicated transfer left Supergirl dazed and disoriented, but her quest finally proved successful, and Superman returned with his young namesake to aid the resistance fighters.

But Superman’s help came too late. Before they could be stopped, Zod’s terrorists left Supergirl gravely injured and destroyed all other native life within that other-universe. In the name of the resistance, Superman was forced to execute the terrorists. It was the only way he could keep their killing spree from crossing over to our world.

Superman gathered up the injured Supergirl and left the dead duplicate of Earth, carrying her back to our reality and entrusting her to his own parents. Although her injuries had affected her mind, leaving her childlike and simple, under the care of Jonathan and Martha Kent she slowly began to recover. Supergirl came to love the Kents dearly, but—in her attempts to regain mastery of her powers—she feared that she had inadvertently put the Kents in danger. Afraid that she was too dangerous to remain around normal human beings, she flew off into space.

After some time spent wandering among the stars, Supergirl finally came to realize that Earth was the closest thing to a home that she might find. Locating a small abandoned starship, she put her doubts behind her and set a course for our world.

But something went wrong.

Supergirl’s ship went off course, crash-landing in the New Mexico desert. There it was spotted and recovered by a research team from the aeronautics division of LexCorp International. The first face that Supergirl saw upon regaining consciousness was that of Lex Luthor II. He was the very image of the man who had created her, and she had fallen hopelessly in love with him.

I was so lucky to find him,
thought Supergirl, as she looped around the
Daily Planet
Building.
I wish Superman could understand that.
She frowned, remembering the awful scene with Superman when he had learned that she was living with Lex.
He said that he didn’t want to see me hurt, but he was just as worried that I’d spill the beans about his double life. As if I’d ever reveal anything that would jeopardize him or the Kents! I just wish I hadn’t lost my temper.