Superman: Dawnbreaker (DC Icons #4)(24)

“Really? Why?”

He shook his head. “No clue.”

She stood up straighter and patted him on the shoulder. “Clark, you seem seriously spooked.”

Clark was spooked. Because now he believed the burglary wasn’t random at all. They’d targeted his house. And he no longer believed they were there to steal farm equipment. They’d come for something else. But what did they want with the crater and the old barn? He couldn’t answer these questions yet, but seeing photos of his property tacked up to Wesley’s wall like that…he couldn’t help feeling that his family was in legitimate danger.

“One of the photos,” he told Lana, “I think it was of our farm. Why would our property be on the wall of some run-down scientific research office?”

“I have no idea, Clark. But we’re going to find out. I promise.”

Clark nodded.

There were pictures of a lot of farms, he kept telling himself. But he came back again and again to that blown-up photo of the old barn, taken with some kind of infrared camera. And he kept replaying the man in the cowboy shirt hacking at the lock on the door with an ax.

It was time to look inside the old barn.





That night, well after his mom and dad had gone to sleep, Clark snuck down the stairs and out of the house. The moon hung so low in the sky that it muted the stars. For the first time since fall, the night air was warm and slightly damp, and the bugs whined around his ears as he cut across the farm. Clark followed the faint tire tracks from the old pickup, feeling a profound sense of violation.

He walked down the long, subtle decline toward the pond, wondering why anyone would be interested in the seemingly ordinary farm. Eventually he found himself staring down into the crater. It looked as if the very center had been dug up. What could those men possibly have been looking for?

As a kid he used to come here all the time. He’d take summer naps under the large maple tree near the old barn. Or he’d rest his head against the lip of the crater when he needed to think about something. But now he tried to see it from Dr. Wesley’s point of view. It was fifteen yards across and maybe twenty feet deep. But other than the fact that it was so close to the old barn, Clark didn’t see what was so special about it.

Clark stood in front of the old barn next. The large wooden doors loomed over him. The padlock was badly scuffed and hanging wide open, and in his head he could still see the man hacking at it with the ax.

Clark remembered how strange his dad had always been about this place. For the first time in Clark’s life, he wondered if Jonathan was hiding something from him.

Clark tossed aside the busted padlock. The doors creaked as he slowly pulled them open, prompting him to glance up the hill at the dark farmhouse, where his parents slept. How disappointed would they be if they knew what he was up to right now? Behind their backs.

The air inside the barn was musty and stale, and the dust he kicked up swirled all around. He picked his way past heaps of old junk, moving blocks of rotting wood, old tractor parts, scrap metal, toys from his childhood. Rusty toolboxes sat on the workbench along the wall, likely filled with random screws and nuts and bolts. On a small family farm like theirs, if something broke, buying a new one wasn’t an option. Clark had become quite adept at doing makeshift repairs on pretty much anything.

He worked his way to the back, toward the corner that had shown the most color on Dr. Wesley’s photo. Could it have been highlighting all this random stuff? he wondered. It was piled nearly to the ceiling. He climbed up the heap, grabbing a few broken two-by-fours and tossing them aside. He chucked away an old oilcan, a rusted motorcycle muffler. As he continued to make his way through all the junk and garbage, an uneasy feeling came over him. Like he knew there was something important beneath all this clutter, but did he really want to find out what it was?

He pressed on until he had removed enough of the old junk to see that there was a large object under an old tarp. It was roughly the size of a small car. He froze. What if this was something Jonathan and Martha had hidden for a reason? What if it was something personal?

Did he really have a right to be snooping around like this?

While his parents slept?

A wave of guilt overtook him, and he ended up leaving the barn without digging any further. Instead, he would try a more forthright approach.



* * *



—

It was nearly three in the morning when Clark reached a hand through the dark to shake Jonathan awake. His dad slowly stirred, then opened his eyes. When he saw Clark standing over him, he bolted upright and swung his legs off the side of the bed. “Clark? What’s wrong, son?”

Martha didn’t stir.

Clark motioned with his head for his dad to follow.

They went down the stairs quietly and cut through the living room. Clark grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer on the other side of the living room. Jonathan pulled his tattered robe on over his pajamas as they walked out the front door. “What’s this about, son?” he asked Clark nervously. “Is everything okay?”

“I want to show you something.” Clark led him up to the edge of the crater and shined the flashlight on the part that had been dug up. “After you left last night, I found some men on our property. One was messing around inside here with some kind of metal detector. Another was trying to break into the old barn.”