When someone suddenly jumps at you from the darkness above, without warning and with obvious hostile intentions, your brain doesn’t get much of a chance to participate.
Reflexes take over.
The attacker managed to knock me off my feet, but the body that had inherited the memories of my mind reacted on its own.
My bent knee came up, I caught the attacker’s momentum, combined it with the momentum of our fall, and then drove my leg forward with all the force I could muster.
A second later, I watched the man’s body disappear through the hole he’d just created in the roof of the barn.
“Clark?!” Dad shouted from below.
He’d been working on an old disc harrow and had apparently heard the commotion.
“What happened?
Are you all right?”
“I think…” I scratched the back of my head while lying on the floor.
“I just killed someone.”
“What do you mean, killed someone?”
Jonathan actually froze.
“By throwing him from a great height.”
I sighed and pointed toward the hole in the roof.
Dad looked up and muttered a short curse.
“And I think I know him.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it was Greg.
Greg Arkin.”
“Well…” Dad sighed wearily and picked up the flashlight from the table.
“Let’s go find your Greg’s body.”
“Let’s go,” I answered in the same tired tone as I got to my feet.
“But he’s not my Greg.”
There was no body.
For the next hour and a half, Dad and I walked across the field with flashlights, trying to determine the direction in which Greg had been sent flying.
The problem was that I had no idea how much force I’d actually used when I kicked him, which made calculating his landing point considerably more difficult.
Eventually, we found it.
The crater was there.
The body wasn’t.
According to the tracks around the impact point, the “body” had apparently crawled away under its own power.
On its own two…
Well, four limbs.
There wasn’t a drop of blood in the crater or along the path where he’d crawled away.
Then the trail entered the woods and simply stopped.
It looked as though the injured creature had stopped walking on the ground and started jumping from tree to tree.
“Well,” Dad finally said, summarizing what we’d found.
“The good news is that the boy survived.
The bad news…”
“Is exactly the same thing,” I finished for him.
“According to my calculations, for a body weighing around seventy to seventy-five kilograms to reach that crater after being launched at the angle I kicked him, he would have had to rise roughly seventy or eighty meters into the air.
An ordinary human being wouldn’t be able to move on his own after surviving something like that.”
“And judging by the tracks, whatever crawled into those woods was moving pretty damn fast.”
“You’re probably right.”
Dad scratched his head.
“Apparently Smallville is a much stranger place than we thought.”
It was a conclusion he couldn’t exactly argue with.
“Let’s go home,” he said with a tired sigh and turned toward the farm.
“You go ahead.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“I’m going to check Greg’s house.
I’ll talk to his mother and make sure he’s okay.
Maybe I can figure out what the hell happened.”
“Clark, I don’t think that’s a good…”
I didn’t hear the rest.
I accelerated and disappeared toward the house where Pete, Greg, and I had once spent countless afternoons playing together when we were little.
The house looked ominous.
There were no lights on.
The front door was locked.
Nobody answered when I knocked, even though Mrs.
Arkin’s car was parked outside.
Greg’s old green Volkswagen Beetle was there too.
Under normal circumstances, I probably should have left and called the sheriff.
Of course, that would have meant explaining exactly why I’d been at the house in the first place.
So instead, I put my hand on the doorknob.
The lock gave a miserable little squeak when I applied a little force.
A little more force than the door had been designed to withstand.
I knew breaking into someone’s home was a criminal offense.
But if everything inside was fine, I’d apologize to Mrs.
Arkin, replace the lock, repair the door, and pay for everything myself.
And if it wasn’t fine…
Unfortunately, the second possibility was the correct one.
The first thing I noticed was the strange webbing covering parts of the walls.
Then I found clumps of fresh human skin in the bathroom.
And finally, like the cherry on top, I found a cocoon in the corner of Greg’s room.
There was a body inside.
Mrs.
Arkin.
Dead.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the remains of the woman I’d known since childhood.
Then I forced myself to focus.
I’d have to wipe my fingerprints from the door and everything else I’d touched after I’d finished examining the house.
The examination itself only made my jaw tighten and my brow furrow.
Greg had an entire collection of video recordings of Lana Lang.
The recordings had been taken through the window of her bedroom, apparently from a tree nearby. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
That alone was disgusting.
Only I was allowed to spy on her.
At least, that was the justification I was apparently using to make myself feel better.
But taken together with everything else I’d discovered, the situation became much more serious.
A little deduction gave me a pretty obvious picture.
Greg had been watching Lana for years.
He’d become obsessed with her.
Then something happened.
Greg mutated.
Exactly what had caused the mutation wasn’t particularly important.
This was Smallville, after all.
The guy had mutated.
He’d become stronger, faster, tougher, and more resilient.
He could climb walls and produce webbing.
And apparently, he could shed his skin.
The drops of liquid still clinging to the walls of the shower hadn’t even dried completely.
Judging by how fresh they were, he’d shed that skin only recently, perhaps twenty minutes before I arrived.
That made sense considering the distance between our farm and this house.
So, let’s continue the deduction.
Greg mutated and killed his mother, whom he apparently hadn’t cared much about.
Then came the attack on me.
No.
Not quite.
Before that came the “accident” involving Whitney.
I distinctly remembered seeing dents on the roof of Whitney’s car when I pulled him out of the wreck.
There had been traces of the same green adhesive I’d seen on the ceiling of my barn.
That meant Greg had probably tried to kill Whitney.
Then, after Lana came to my barn, Greg attacked me.
And if I continued the chain of events logically, there was only one obvious next target.
Lana.
And considering what I’d seen in Greg’s room, I had a pretty good idea what he intended to do with her.
Kidnap her.
And probably worse.
The guy had completely lost his mind.
So what was I supposed to do?
Simple.
First, wipe my fingerprints from everything I’d touched.
Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to remove my shoes before entering the house.
Mrs.
Arkin had always been extremely strict about keeping the house clean.
At least something useful had come from that habit.