Free The Death and Life of Superman by Roger Stern Page A

more affectionately than passionately. “Sweeter dreams, Lex.”
    “An’ to you . . . m’darlin’ . . . Supergirl.”
    Within moments, Lex Luthor was once again fast asleep. It was, he had once told her, a talent he had inherited from his father. For nearly half an hour she watched as his chest slowly rose and fell and his eyelids twitched rapidly through REM sleep and beyond. Then, satisfied that his nightmares had passed, Supergirl silently arose, floating free of the covers and gliding across the room. She stopped at the door, looking back once more at her slumbering lover before slipping out into the hall. There she glanced down at her clinging nightgown. Can’t go out like this, she thought, as the cloth began to flow about her, changing in both form and color. In an instant, she stood attired in a bright red skirt with matching cape and boots—layered over a royal-blue leotard. Across her chest stretched a red and yellow pentagonal shield, forming a familiar stylized letter S. She paused but a moment to check her reflection in the window at the end of the dimly lit hall before leaping from a nearby window and flying out over the city of Metropolis.
    Hundreds of feet above the streets, Supergirl swooped and soared to her heart’s content. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake, leaving Lex alone tonight, but she needed far less sleep than he did. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t slipped away many times before. She loved to fly at night, with the lights of Metropolis spread out before her.
    It’s so beautiful at night, thought Supergirl, like a huge Christmas tree, going on for miles and miles. The city, with its millions of residents, held a constant fascination for her. There were no cities where she had come from, only ruins. This is what my world would have been like, if not for General Zod.
    Supergirl had come to Earth not just from another planet but from another universe. That extradimensional realm had been an altered copy of our own reality, a kind of pocket universe created by a mysterious cosmic entity.
    There was a duplicate of Earth in that pocket universe. But that world had possessed no Superman and had been all but defenseless when attacked by a trio of superpowered terrorists led by the murderous General Zod. Zod’s forces effectively subjugated that world, forcing the native resistance forces to go underground.
    Although that other-Earth had no Superman, it did claim among its residents a doppelganger of Lex Luthor. That alternate-version of Luthor was a younger, more vital man than the aging industrialist of our world, but he was no less ambitious. He was a scientific genius without equal, and he quickly became the leader of the resistance forces. In an attempt to devise a means of combatting the superterrorists, he made two remarkable discoveries. The first was a substance of his own invention that he called “protomatter,” and the second was the existence of our universe and its Superman. Despite being able to observe our world, he was at first unable to make contact with it. And so he set out to create his own superpowered champion.
    The other-Luthor deduced that protomatter could be manipulated to duplicate the human form right down to the molecular level. After much grueling work, he finally managed to create an artificial life-form inspired by his observations . . . a Supergirl. Luthor was her Pygmalion, and she his Galatea. He had created in his Supergirl a being able to levitate and fly at incredible speeds. While not as strong as Superman, she wielded powerful psychokinetic energies and could generate energy shields capable of cloaking her presence, effectively rendering her invisible. And due to the fluidity of her protomatter substance, Supergirl could also alter her appearance at will.
    But even with her amazing powers, Supergirl was no match for Zod and his partners. They ran roughshod over the planet, boiling away its oceans and depleting its atmosphere. Soon they rendered it