Epilogue: Fertile Valley

It took a month of research and legwork to find Fertile Valley. By that point, nausea was starting to set in—not in the mornings so much as the afternoons. Lois Lane had to pull her rented car over to the side of the road and dash for the bushes to lose her lunch, one hand holding her stomach. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she could already feel it getting bigger.

Maybe it was. Her breasts certainly were. Even the little bit of Fertile Valley water had kickstarted something in Lois Lane's body. In the last four weeks, she had outgrown all of her bras...and the bras she had bought to replace them. Her 34Bs had become 34Ds...and even those were starting to feel tight.

The town was gone. Feds had raided Fertile Valley during the early 2000s, arrested damn near everybody. Whole families. Kids went into the system, most of the men went to prison. It was like Pitcairn Island all over again...but the G-men had kept the whole situation awfully quiet. No media circus, just arrest damn near everybody. Eminent domain bought the land, contractors pulled down the houses, let nature reclaim the farms...Lois drove down a weed-pitted road of cracked black asphalt, to see the dip of the valley beneath the new growth of trees.

They didn't call it Fertile Valley, not on the sign or on the maps. Feds had seen to that too. They wanted people to forget. Just have it as a random park, out in the middle of nowhere. Utterly forgotten.

Unless, of course, you were the very pregnant reporter that wanted to find out more. She picked the lock on the chain, working quietly with a shim and a drop of oil, and when she'd driven past it she put the chain back, the lock hanging off it so that if anyone did come by they wouldn't know immediately that she'd been through here.

Lois still had an empty bottle of the Fertile Valley water. That was what had set her off on her journey of discovery. Digging through old archives...print archives, because someone or something was keeping tabs on digital searches. Lois Lane had gone up against some of the weirder and more esoteric government intelligence agencies before. It wasn't just that someone had made sure nobody else lived in Fertile Valley or even remembered it...they didn't want anyone to know about it at all. Most of what Lois could find were highly fictionalized accounts, little more than pornography.

She drove on, her eyes on the lookout. They hadn't torn up the roads, but they'd let them overgrow, so that stands of trees followed the weird grid pattern of a small town. Lois kept driving down the mainstreet, until it ran out. Up ahead, she could see the overgrown trail, paralleling the creek. That was where the cave should be, with the spring...

The sun was still high in the sky when she set out, and Lois was glad she'd brought her hiking boots, and gotten the vomiting out of her system. The climb was a bit steep, the trail very overgrown, tall grasses catching at her long pant-legs, and Lois hoped she didn't have to worry about ticks later...but then, she hadn't seen many deer since she got in the valley, and that was weird too.

At the end of the trail was a shelf of rock, rising up out of the earth, foothill to the mountain rising above it. Pale cement covered a large half-oval space, maybe seven feet high and twelve feet wide where it sank into the ground. Lois touched it in surprise. Had they gone so far? Just walled it off? The creek wended away on her right...and for the first time, Lois saw, with stark surprise, that it was dry. She hiked over to it, down the steep bank, careful not to fall. Didn't want any chance of miscarrying...

There were large, flat, rounded stones. Once this would have been a swimming-hole, a kind of pond, the water rushing down over the rocks and feeding the valley. No more. No wonder the deer left, if they'd damned the source...

The water had to go somewhere.

Her boot pushed down into brown mud on the bottom of the creek bed. The reporter's eyes scanned the hollow as she moved further up, looking...there had to be something, she couldn't have come all this way for nothing...

The ground was getting wetter, marshier as she neared a particularly large boulder in the side of the mountain. An old pipe jutted out. The spigot had been capped and welded in place, but there was a crack running along the length, a dribble of water dripping down into a small puddle.

Lois licked her lips. Life did find a way.

She grabbed a rock. Birds flew up from the trees at the first crash of stone on metal. Rust flaked off the pipe, and if there was anyone to hear, they would have heard the steady, rhythmic pounding...minute after minute...and then a clunk, a crash, a splash.

Lois Lane held her hands beneath the stream of cold, clear water that poured out. Raised it to her mouth and drank, letting it splash across her shirt, pour between her legs. She gulped down more and more, the familiar aftertaste filling her up in a way she hadn't felt for weeks. Her hands squeezed her breasts through the wet shirt, almost imagining she could feel a tingle inside. She had only seen one picture of women from Fertile Valley...a mother and two daughters, barely legal, in homespun clothes...and each one was pregnant. Each one had tits that would put Lois Lane's E-cups to shame.

The reporter headed back to her car. There were plastic bottles and containers there. Enough for this first trip. Behind her, the water began to pool...not like it had been, but enough to get the creek flowing again.

There were no cell towers out here, no signal in the valley at all. Lois had to use her satellite phone.

"Angie? It's me. I found it." She was breathing a little hard as she got back to the car. The reporter was almost shaking with excitement. "I found Fertile Valley Spring!"

The phone signal went through a satellite owned by WayneTech. A certain phrase triggered a subroutine, which sent a signal, by a roundabout and circuitous route, to a certain cave in Gotham. A red alert flashed.

"Batman?" Batgirl spoke into a microphone. "We've got a breach in Fertile Valley."