End: The Bat Cave

"...still seeing some odd activity in the brain. I've been taking blood samples every hour, but the levels of hallucinogens aren't dropping. It's almost as if her body was manufacturing it."

"What about Scarecrow? He designed the toxin. He must have some idea how to undo its effects!"

"Not that simple. There was something else in her system. I haven't been able to analyze it. I suspect it's some sort of mutagen..."

Lois Lane listened. She was naked beneath the sheet. Her back rested against smooth metal. The voices belonged to two men, oddly familiar, but distant. Shivering in the cool air, Lois Lane slowly opened her eyes.

To stare up at the looming hulk of a tyrannosaurus rex.

The reporter's scream ripped through her entire body. In a heartbeat she was off the examination table and on her feet, fleeing into the darkest part of the cave. Hard stone pounded beneath her feet as she gave way entirely to her instincts. At some point, the cave narrowed. **** her on her hands and knees. Still moving deeper into the darkness.

Yet even without any light to work with, her poisoned brain continued to conjure images to torment her with.

She imagined her bloated belly and swollen tits drag along the stony floor of the cavern. Little hands and feet pushed against her from within as her milk oozed out in liquid trails. Hips widened by pregnancy brushed against the sides of the cavern. Lois shivered as she imagined herself stuck down here. Or **** to give birth. All alone. Squatting in the dark, in pain, as the hot liquid burst from her pussy. As the squealing, scrabbling thing inside of her tried to crawl its way out.

Or perhaps she would be found by some terrible race of giant albino ants. Alien insects who would **** her deep into their tunnels. **** their sickly-sweet jelly into her mouth. As her abdomen distended to grotesque proportions, legs shrunken to mere vestigial stumps. Dependant on them to move as her torso undulated, her gaping cant continually pushing out egg after egg, a process only interrupted when a male drone periodically mounted her to inseminate the next batch.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Lois Lane thought as she felt the angle of the cavern floor shift. It had begun to climb, and the air smelled a little fresher up ahead, although it was still so dark that she couldn't see her hand in front of her face. Why am I like this? I know pregnancy won't be like that, I know I'm not going to be some...some breeder like something out of a science fiction novel!

A smell, acrid and sharp, hit the reporter's nostrils. Her hand squished into something liquid and sticky. Yet she kept climbing. The cavern was opening out a little, and there was dirt wedged into the rock. She breathed shallowly. Her heart hammered, but now it was the exertion of climbing that made her chest pound, and it was a warm sweat that came with exercise that oozed down her arms and legs, not the cold sweat of panic.

Even if I do get pregnant, I'll have like...one kid. Go up a cup size. Put on a few pounds. I won't be like those other women...

Lois Lane frowned as her brain flashed through a report she'd filed early in her career, as a cub reporter still working her way through university. A tiny Christian church that preached a variant of the gospel. What they called the Quiverfull movement. Families encouraged to have as many kids as possible. Lois had sat with the women, many of them with eight, nine, ten kids...living. Women that had started having children as teenagers and then kept getting knocked up, year after year. Even as their loser boyfriends and husbands went to jail, got involved with ****, ran away. The reporter had seen in pictures how the young, thin, pretty young women had been wore down from repeated pregnancies, miscarriages, gestational diabetes, poverty, pregnancy brain...Tired, dull eyes, sweaty, drooping tits, a permanent paunch, stomachs criss-crossed with scars, asses like helipads...she'd sat in their filthy living rooms as they changed diapers, or suckled a newborn, and the older ones had never known mom when she wasn't pregnant, some of them were planning to do the same when they got old enough.

Roots beneath her fingers. A glow, up above. Fresh air.

Then Lois Lane's head hit something furry and sharp. It screamed, and the naked reporter flattened herself against the wall she'd been climbing. Dozens of furry bodies brushed past her, one caught in her hair before it tore free. Lois refused to close her eyes this time. She kept them open as she caught glimpses of wings, claws, tiny bright eyes, flared ears and nostrils.

Bats. A dozen bats. Up above, a tuft of dry grass.

She remembered her mother, when pregnant with her little sister Lucy. Something had gone wrong in the pregnancy. The adults hadn't told her, but Lois had picked up on it in the way her father, who normally was devoted to his career, had dated on his wife. Her mother had no energy. Her stomach had gotten bigger and bigger, but the woman had seemed to fade away, skin thin and pale almost to translucence, tired all the time. Dad had been worried to distraction.

When Lois Lane's mother had collapsed one day, a red stain spreading from her lap, there had been no time to send Lois off to her grandparents. She'd ridden with them in the car to the hospital. Had been in the waiting room, scribbling with a red crayon, as her mother's screams echoed down the hall.

By midnight, Lois Lane had a baby sister. She remembered her father taking her by the hand to take her into the room where her mother lay, holding the baby. So near to **** that Lois was afraid to touch her hand.

In the now, Lois **** herself upward.

That's not me, Lois told herself. That's not going to be me.

Her hands touched grass. Naked, filthy, stained with dirt and guano, Lois Lane hauled herself up from a hole in a field. She stared up at a sky without stars. Dawn was coming, and the sky was a deep blue.

The last bat flew back into its shelter for the night. Something touched down on the grass behind her. Lois Lane stared at the red boots, the blue tights, the red cape...her eyes got as far as his red pants, and then it seemed to push forward, a monst, veiny prick tearing through the red fabric, spewing hot seed at her face.

Lois Lane tensed. She **** herself to stare at it until the hallucination faded. Superman knelt down next to her.

"Lois?" he said softly, blue eyes full of concern. "Are you alright?"

The Daily Planet's greatest reporter thought back on her night out, and then shook her head.

"I think I'm not altogether right in the head," she said, with a sad shake of her head. "Can I borrow your cape?"

"Of course," he said as he unhooked the red fabric and passed it over to her. Lois wrapped it around her body. It smelled like him. Like a summer afternoon out in the midwest. She accepted his hand as she pulled herself up, now aware of how much her fingers and feet hurt, how badly she'd scraped herself in her panicked flight through the cave.

"Batman is working on that," Superman said. "The fear toxin you were dosed with...and whatever else you were exposed to."

"I heard part of that," Lois Lane said as she stumbled forward. She couldn't quite bring herself to lean on his arm, and so he kept his distance, radiating concern.

The reporter felt fragile. Reality was shaky. At any moment, she knew, everything could go sideways. Her brain would slip a gear, and then she'd be back in that nightmare of being bloated, pregnant, ugly, transformed, dying, fecund, fertile, gross, disgusting, so hot, like some goddess of old, like some trailer trash cunt...

She shook her head, not that it helped. Whatever she'd taken from the club, whatever Scarecrow had given her, had unlocked a deep vein of every nastiness in her brain that wasn't going away anytime soon.

"I'm still me," Lois Lane said as she looked up and saw that the field ran up to a rose garden, and beyond that a dark mansion. Superman kept pace with her, utterly patient. "Just...dealing with a lot of stuff I repressed, I guess."

A door opened, to shine yellow light. A bald man with a mustache stood there, in impeccable suit. He held a fluffy white cotton robe in his arms. Lois recognized him.

"Hello Alfred," she said. A brief image flashed through her mind of herself in a maid's outfit, her distended abdomen obvious beneath the apron, the old man behind her as he pushed his cock into her cunt, still warm and wet and dripping with Bruce Wayne's spunk.

"Welcome back to Wayne Manor, Miss Lane," he said with a genuine smile. "I've drawn you a hot bath, and laid out some clean clothes. There is fresh coffee if you require it. What would you like for breakfast?"

Lois took the fluffy robe as he ushered her in. The image stuck in her head, but it was hard to feel threatened by someone that offered coffee.

"Just some fruit, I think. Grapefruit?" She said, and realized that Superman had paused. The two men watched as she stepped through the door into the ground-floor guest bath, and closed the door behind her.

"Of course. Whenever you're ready. Please call if you need anything."

The reporter stared down at her stomach. It looked bloated. Lois Lane could feel something squirm in there. Her thighs coated with jizz. Then as she held her breath and counted to ten, the vision faded. Only her flat stomach, knees rubbed red and raw. By the bath, Alfred had set out a table with cotton balls, antibacterial creme. She sighed.

"Mind over matter, Lane," Lois told herself. "I'm not going to let this beat me."

Nor did she. Yet that is another story.