Superman: Dawnbreaker (DC Icons #4)(54)

The hologram cut out again, only this time the spaceship also went dark.

Clark sat down in the dirt, physically and emotionally wrecked. He wanted to go back to his room and sleep for days. And when he awoke, maybe this whole thing would turn out to be a dream.

Only he knew it wasn’t a dream.

It was real life.

His life.

He pictured an eight-year-old version of himself lifting a thousand-pound four-wheeler off his neighbor’s legs. Pictured sparks flying when he’d touched the electrified wire in the steer pen. Pictured himself taking a handoff for the very first time on a football field, defenders bouncing off him like rag dolls.

“Clark,” Jonathan pleaded. “Clark, listen to me.”

All these things he could do. His powers. But it wasn’t because he was special.

It was because he was an alien.

A freak.

“Clark, please.” His dad reached for his trembling shoulder. But Jonathan wasn’t his dad at all. He was some random human who had just happened to find a spaceship in his field.

It could have been anyone that day.

In any field.

In any world.

“We thought about reporting the crash,” Jonathan was saying in his ear. “Or bringing you to the authorities. But I have to believe things happen for a reason. And once we held you…”

Clark heard the words, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He couldn’t make sense of anything. Not the spaceship or the folded blankets or the hologram with the man’s shocking message. That he was Clark’s real dad. This strange alien from Krypton.

“You see, we’d recently discovered we could never have children of our own. So when you showed up like that, out of nowhere…well, we decided to raise you as our own, Clark. We became your family—at least here on Earth. And I promise you, we’ve always done our very best.”

Clark shrugged out of Jonathan’s grasp and stood up. “I gotta go.”

“But, Clark—”

“I gotta go!” He put his backpack on.

His entire life had been a lie.

Jonathan slowly moved toward Clark with a profound hurt in his eyes. He reached an open palm out, but Clark ignored it and took off out of the barn.

He heard Jonathan’s voice calling after him, but Clark didn’t turn back.

He could never turn back.

Not now that he knew the truth.





Clark ran faster than he’d ever run before. These powers were all he had to hold on to now. They were his protective shield. His salvation.

Soon he reached speeds that blurred everything around him. Winds battered his face and tore a hole through his jacket. His shirt. He ripped the torn clothing off his back and flung it away as he bounded over neighbors’ fences, trespassing through farms and cattle ranches and cornfields. This town, Smallville, was all he’d ever known. Yet now he understood it was no longer his to claim. Home was millions of miles away. Home was out beyond the solar system somewhere. Among the distant stars.

No, that wasn’t right. According to the man on the hologram, his birthplace, Krypton, had exploded. So his real home no longer existed.

Clark Kent no longer existed either.

That was a made-up name. A made-up persona.

He was Kal-El.

His mind drifted to the missing undocumented workers. If the people of Smallville only knew there was a real alien living among them…

He stopped at a large barn on the Pullman farm. He knew the Mankins Corporation had recently purchased it but had yet to take over, so it was all but vacant. Clark climbed atop a massive tractor and stared blankly at the wall in front of him—then through the wall. He scanned the fields and the farmhouse, confirming he was the only one around.

If his whole life was a lie, then what mattered?

Nothing.

Clark shifted the tractor into neutral, hopped off the springy seat, and gave the hulking machine a powerful shove. The tractor lurched forward, crashing through the barn doors and caroming down the hill, toward a large pond.

He sprinted in front of the runaway tractor and spun, closing his eyes and holding out his arms and waiting for the massive machine to knock him senseless.

For once in his life, he wanted to feel something.

That wasn’t what happened.

The tractor slammed into Clark’s bare chest, but he hardly budged. The front loader crumpled in the collision and fell off, and the grille folded in on itself. The remainder of the machine stopped cold and settled in front of him with a kind of sigh.

Clark had hardly felt a thing.

No marks on him anywhere.

He grew so angry, he grabbed the cab of the machine in his bare hands and spun around and heaved it toward the pond. He fell onto the ground, watching the tractor land with a great splash in the far end of the water, where it slowly began to sink.

Clark climbed to his feet and bounded down to the pond and let out a long, deep exhale—an exhale that froze the entire body of water in an instant.

Freak!

You’re an alien freak!

He stared at the frozen pond, trying to figure out how he could possibly go on with his life. No matter what he did, no matter who he befriended, he would never be one of them.

He was destined to be alone.

Forever.

And what kind of an existence was that?

He glanced back up the hill, where the broken loader still lay. Then he looked at the frozen pond again. A silly idea occurred to him, and he marched back into the barn and began sifting through the junk drawers for a ball of twine. He found the twine inside the bottom drawer and ripped off four large pieces and shoved them into his pocket, then turned and left the barn.