by Diane Duane
Shortly he was down in the mid-Twenties, and he slowed down to take in the landscape. This time of night, things were more than just quiet, they were desolate. There were few restaurants in this area, not even many bars, and almost no one lived here, except the occasional tiny colony of homeless squatting in some unused or derelict structure. Not even much traffic passed by. Here the street lighting was iffy at best, the lamp bulbs missing or sometimes blown out by people who liked the dark to work in. The presence of that kind of person was one of the reasons he patrolled here on a more or less regular basis. Left to themselves, the children of the night might get the idea that they owned this neighborhood, and it was good for them to know that someone else had other ideas.
He paused on the roof of one building, looked up and down its cross-street, and listened carefully.
Nothing. He shot out another line of web, swung across another street, and waited. It was not only sound for which he listened.
Nothing.
So it went for some good while. Not that he minded. Every now and then, he lucked into a quiet night, one which left him more time to appreciate the city and required less of his time worrying about it. The problem was that the worry came a lot more easily than it used to. The city was not as nice as he remembered it being when he was a child—and he chuckled softly to himself, remembering what a dirty, crime-ridden place it had seemed to him when his aunt and uncle first brought him from Queens into Manhattan. By comparison, that New York of years ago—and not that many years, really—was a halcyon memory, a pleasant and happy place, where it seemed the sun had always been shining.
Not anymore.
He paused on another rooftop on West 10th, looking around. Nothing but the muted city roar. Locally, no traffic—but he could hear the grind and whine of a diesel truck, one with a serious transmission problem to judge by the sound of it, heading north on 10th Avenue. We’ve got a dull one, he thought. No “weird stuff” in sight. Normally I’d he grateful.
Then it hit him.
Several times over the course of their relationship, he had tried to explain to MJ how it felt, the bizarre experience he had long ago started to call his “spider-sense.” It was, first of all, very simple: there was nothing of thought or analysis about it. It wasn’t a feeling of fear, but rather of straightforward alarm, untinged by any other emotion, good or bad. It was the internal equivalent of hearing a siren coming up behind you when you knew you hadn’t done anything wrong. It had seemed to him that, if as simple a creature as a spider experienced alarm, it would feel like this.
It also made him feel as if he was tingling all over. He was tingling now.
He stood very still, then slowly turned. The sense could be vaguely directional, if he didn’t push it. Nothing specific northward, nothing to the east. Westward—
He shot out some web and swung that way, over several decrepit-looking rooftops. Unlike the buildings closer to midtown, these were in rather poor repair. There were gaping holes in some of the roofs, places where the tar and shingles and gravel had fallen in—or been cut through. Looks like there’s precious little to steal in most of these, though.
The spider-sense twinged hard, as abrupt and impossible to ignore as the nerve in a cracked tooth, as he came to one particular building. He had almost passed it, an ancient broad-roofed single-story building with big skylights which looked mostly structurally intact, though most of the glass in them was broken. Well, all right…
He shot out another length of web, cut loose the last one from which he had been swinging, and let it lengthen as he dropped toward the old warehouse’s roof. After a second or so he impacted, but so lightly he doubted anyone inside would have heard him.
Softly he stepped over to the skylight with the most broken glass, dropped beside it to show the minimum possible silhouette, and peered inside.
A very old place indeed. Down on the main shop floor, if that was what it was, lay toppled or discarded timbers, piles of trash, and puddles of water from other spots in the roof that leaked. His gaze took in old oil-drums lying on their sides, some of them split and leaking, and old newspapers plastered to the floor and faded by the passage of time.
Spider-Man shuddered. It was in a place very like this one that he had found the man who killed his uncle.
At other times, it all seemed a long time ago. His life had become so busy since. But here, it all seemed very close. The memory was reduced, now, to quick flashes. That afternoon in the science department at college, the experiment with what was mildly referred to as “radioactive rays.” He could almost laugh at that, now. It had taken him years of study, nearly to the master’s level, to really understand what had been going on in that experiment—and he now knew that the professor conducting it hadn’t fully understood what was happening, either. There was more going on than the generation of plain old gamma rays: the radiation source had been contaminated by unusual elements and impurities, producing utterly unexpected results.
A spider had dropped gently downwards between the generating pods and become irradiated. Its DNA so quickly uncoiled and recoiled into a bizarre new configuration that it was actually able to survive for a few moments and bite Peter before the changes in its body chemistry killed it. The memory was frozen in Peter’s mind like a slide from a slideshow: the tiny glowing thing falling onto his hand, the sudden rush of pain and heat as their respective body proteins met in what started as an allergic reaction, but turned into something much more involved and potentially deadly. Only the tininess of the spider and the minuscule amount of venom from its bite had saved his life. As it was, the radiation-altered proteins in its body fluids complexed with his own, the change a catalytic one, sweeping through Peter’s body faster than mere circulation could have propelled it. Ten seconds later, he almost literally had not been the same person.
Another slide-image: the building he jumped halfway up, frightened by a car horn behind him, his hands adhering to the brick as if glued to it, but effortlessly. A standpipe that he accidentally crushed with what seemed a perfectly normal grip. Soon he had realized what had happened to him and, after the initial shock wore off, decided to market it.
He made a costume, not wanting his quiet home life with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben to be affected, and started making public appearances. The media ate it up. Sudden fame, to a guy who had always been regarded by his peers as a useless bookworm, was heady stuff. So it was, one night after a television appearance, that a man brushed past him and dove into an elevator. The cop in pursuit had shouted at Peter (still in costume at that point) to catch the running man. Peter had let the guy go, not particularly caring about him. He had other business to think about, appearances to plan, money to be made. What was one thief, more or less, to him?
Until a burglar, surprised in the act, shot and killed his Uncle Ben.
Weeping, raging, Peter had struggled into his costume, going to join the pursuit. There was an old warehouse not too far away where the burglar had gone to ground. By ways the police couldn’t manage, he had gone in, cornered the burglar, disarmed him, battered him into submission—and then had found himself looking, horrified, into the face of the man he hadn’t bothered to stop.
That face hung before him again, now. Other memories might mercifully fade. Not this one. Since that awful night Spider-Man had learned the lesson that with great power comes great responsibility. The weight on his conscience of his uncle’s lost life had perhaps lightened a little over the intervening years, but he doubted he would ever be completely free of it—and maybe he didn’t want to be.
Now he looked down into the warehouse, alert, and saw nothing but what was actually there. As good a chance to test this as any, he thought, and silently unshipped the camera apparatus, set it up near the edge of the skylight, checked its view and made sure that the pan-and-tilt head worked freely and without fouling itself. He wasn’t using a flash tonight; instead he had loaded the camera with a roll of the new superfast ASA 6000 film, which would let the
camera work by available light and keep it from betraying its presence to unfriendly eyes.
Right, he thought. Now let’s see what the story is in here.
Softly he walked around to another of the skylights and peered inside. There was more glass in this one, and the view through it was somewhat obscured: he rubbed at one pane with a gloved hand and looked through. Nothing.
Spider-Man went along to the third skylight. This one, as the first, was missing most of its glass. Now, though, he heard something: voices muttering, the clunk of something heavy being moved, metal scraping laboriously over metal. He peered down. There was a shape on the floor. He squinted.
A security guard in uniform lay askew, crumpled and motionless. Unconscious? Dead?
He went through the biggest pane of glass with a crash, uncaring, taking only time enough to leave a strand of web behind him to ride down as it lengthened and break his fall to the floor. Landing, he took in the surroundings in tableau, as if frozen—four men, thuggish-looking, caught in the act of loading big oil-drumlike metal canisters onto a truck backed into the warehouse’s loading ramp. Wide eyes, mouths hanging open, certainly unprepared for his arrival.
Not that unprepared, Spider-Man thought, as one of them pulled a gun. But the man was moving at merely human speed, and his opponent had a spider’s swiftness of reaction. Spider-Man flung out one arm, shot a thick, sticky line of web at the gunman. It stuck to the gun, and Spidey yanked it out of the man’s hand and threw it across the warehouse into the piles of trash in the shadows. The man yelped—apparently his finger had gotten stuck in the trigger guard, and now he stood shaking the hand and cursing.
“Serves you right,” Spidey said as the others came for him, one of them pulling his own weapon. “But come on, now, didn’t you see what just happened?” He threw himself sideways as the second man fired, then came up out of the roll, shot another line of web and took the second gun away, flinging it after the first one.
“Anybody else?” The first of the four came at Spidey in an attempt to get up-close and personal. “Oh well, if you insist,” he said, resigned but amused. Spidey sidestepped the man’s headlong rush, shot a line of webbing around his ankles, and got out of the way to let him sprawl face-first to best effect. The second one, now deprived of his gun, swung a board at Spider-Man and missed in his excitement. Spidey cocked one fist back, beginning to enjoy himself, and did not miss. That sound of a perfect punch landing, so bizarrely like the sound of a good clean home run coming off a bat, echoed through the warehouse. The man went down like a sack of potatoes and didn’t move again.
“Glass jaw. Guess the gun is understandable,” Spidey said, as the third of the four came at him. This one didn’t just dive headlong, but stopped a few feet away, turned, and threw at Spider-Man what under normal circumstances would have been a fairly respectable rear thrust-kick. Unfortunately, these circumstances were not normal, as Spidey had been having two-bit crooks throwing such kicks at him since the craze for kung-fu movies had started some years before. While the kick looked good, the man throwing it had obviously never heard about the defenses against it, and Spidey simply stepped back a pace, then grabbed the foot hanging so invitingly in the air in front of him, and pulled hard. The man fell right down off his inadequately balanced stance on the other foot, and straight onto his tailbone with a crunch and a shriek of pain.
“I’d get that X-rayed if I were you,” Spidey said, throwing a couple of loops of restraining web around the man before he could struggle to his feet. “Now then—”
His spider-sense buzzed sharply, then, harder than it had on initially seeing the warehouse. Spidey threw himself instantly as hard and as far to the right as he could. It was just as well, for just to his left there was a deafening BANG! and an explosion of light, and dirt and trash from the warehouse floor were flung in all directions through a thick roil of smoke.
The light and the noise were horribly familiar: Spider-Man had run into them entirely too often before. Pumpkin bomb, he thought. He came up into a crouch, aching slightly from the concussion but otherwise unhurt, and stared through the smoke at its inevitable source. Tearing through the smoke, standing on the jetglider which was one of his trademarks and his favorite way of getting around, was the orange-and-blue-garbed figure of the Hobgoblin.
Spidey jumped again as another bomb hit near him and went off, then leapt one more time to get out of range. “Hobby,” he shouted, “why can’t you stick to playing with cherry bombs, like other kids your age? This kind of antisocial behavior’s likely to go on your permanent record.”
A nasty snicker went by Spidey overhead: he rolled and leapt again, to be very nearly missed by an energy blast from one of Hobgoblin’s gauntlets. “Spider-Man,” Hobgoblin said in that cheerful, snide voice of his, the crimson eyes glinting evilly from under the shadow of the orange cowl, “you really shouldn’t involve yourself with matters that don’t concern you. Or with anything else but your funeral arrangements.”
A couple more energy blasts stitched the concrete in front of Spider-Man as Hobgoblin soared by low overhead. Spidey bounced away from the blasts, hurriedly throwing a glance toward the four thugs. They were already showing signs of recovery, and the webbed ones were struggling to get loose. Not good. Spider-Man looked at the truck. This may not go exactly as planned. I need a moment to plant a spider-tracer on that—Another pumpkin bomb hurled near him and, warned again by his spider-sense, he jumped one more time, but almost not far enough. He felt the concussion all over the back of his body as it detonated. “Hobby,” he shouted, “I expected better of you. How many of these things have you thrown at me, all this while, and not gotten a result?”
“One keeps trying,” Hobgoblin said from above, over the whine of the jetglider. “But since you insist—”
Immediately it began to more or less rain small knife-edged electronic “bats” which buzzed dangerously near. It was too dark to see their edges glint, but Spidey had had occasion before to examine them closely, and they were wicked little devices—light graphite and monacrylic “wings” with individual miniaturized guidance systems and razor-sharp front and back edges. Me and my big mouth, Spidey thought, resisting the urge to swat at them as they buzzed around him—they could take off a finger, or even a hand, in no time flat. He ducked and rolled out of the way as fast as he could, slipping behind a couple of standing canisters in an attempt to confuse the razor-bats.
“Is this better?” Hobgoblin said sweetly.
Spider-Man didn’t answer, intent as he was on dodging the bats. He spared a glance upward. Came in through the skylight. I wonder, Spidey thought, did the camera get him? Well, we’ll see. Meanwhile, I want him out of here—he’s got too much of the advantage of mobility, and inside here I’m a sitting duck for these things. Also, I’ve got a better chance of snagging him out in the open.
Spider-Man shot a line of webbing at the edge of the skylight where the camera was positioned and climbed at top speed. “Coward! Come back!” he heard Hobgoblin screech.
Outside, he looked up and around. Several buildings in this block and the next were ten stories high or better. He shot a webline at the nearest of them and went up it in a hurry. Behind him, to his great satisfaction, he heard the camera click, reposition itself, click again. Good baby. You just keep that up.
Hobgoblin, standing on the jetglider, soared up out of the skylight without noticing the camera. Whatever else happens, Spidey thought with slightly unnerved satisfaction, these pictures are going to be dynamite.
The bright, noisy detonation near him in midair reminded Spider-Man that he had more immediate explosives to worry about. Now if I can just keep clear of those, he thought, long enough to snag that sled.
For that, though, he needed to get himself anchored to best advantage, ideally in a situation that Hobgoblin would fly into without adequate forethought. Little time to manage such a situation. All the same, Spidey thought, there’s a chance. Those two buildings there are pretty close. He
swung around the corner of the building to which his webbing was presently attached, but instead of shooting out more webbing to the next anchorage and continuing around, he pulled himself in close to the side of the building and lay flat against it. Hobby shot on past and kept going, apparently assuming that Spidey had done so as well. Good. He always tends to overreact a little.
Now Spider-Man swarmed around the side of the building, back the way he had come, shot several strands of web across to the next building, felt them anchor; moved down and shot a couple of more, anchoring them in turn. In the dark, they were almost invisible. Now all I need to do is swing across there with Hobby behind me, and one or another of those lines is going to catch him amidships and take him right off that glider.
He wall-crawled as fast as he could up to the top of the building, peered around, saw nothing. Good. He anchored another strand of web, waited—
—and suddenly heard the buzzing all around him. The razor-bats had followed him up out of the warehouse.
Without hesitation he jumped off the building and web-slung for all he was worth, working to shake the things by swinging perilously close to the wall of the next building over. Several of the razor-bats hit the wall, disintegrating in a hail of graphite splinters. But the rest followed, and one of them got in close and nailed him in the leg. He managed to kick it into the building in passing, but his leg had a two-inch-long razor cut in it now, shallow but bleeding enthusiastically. Next best tactic, he thought, and shot out another line of webbing, heading upward toward where Hobby was gliding by, watching the fun and laughing hysterically.
