Powered by the renewed conviction in his voice, the remaining two tentacles clasped themselves around Spider-Man’s throat like twin boa constrictors and started exerting pressure.
Spider-Man felt blackness closing in upon him as, in desperation, he fired webbing out from his crisscrossed arms. They snagged a table at one end, a desk at the other. The sudden emergence of the webs momentarily confused Octavius, and that uncertainty caused the tentacles to loosen ever so slightly. It was just enough. Spider-Man yanked his arms free, uncrossing them, and the furniture was hauled directly toward Octavius.
Instantly, the tentacles dropped Spider-Man to the floor. He gasped for air as his opponent, in that same casual, unhurried manner, shattered the table to splinters with two of his arms and then turned his attention to the oncoming desk.
As it developed, he would have been well advised to be less leisurely in his actions. The flying desk struck Octavius full-on. It lifted him clear off his feet and hurled him toward the plate-glass window at the front of the bank.
Both the massive desk and Octavius crashed through the front window. The tentacles managed to cushion the impact; otherwise Otto’s body would have been crushed. As it was, his abrupt appearance on the sidewalk sent screaming pedestrians running. One flailing tentacle smashed a green circuit box that powered a traffic light and sent electricity crackling through the air. The intersection lights instantly went out, and Octavius—still in motion—slammed into a cab that had abruptly halted when the light went out of commission.
Spider-Man was moving fast, leaping toward Octavius, hoping to take him down while he and the arms seemed dazed. His speed was insufficient, however, for Octavius saw him coming and used his tentacles to rip the doors off the taxi, hurling them with lightning speed. Spider-Man avoided one, but a moment before he leaped out of the way of the second, he realized the trajectory would take it directly into a terrified bystander—a woman who seemed rooted to the spot. There was no time to web it. Instinctively he leaped into the door’s path and took the hit.
The impact knocked the air out of him. The door fell one way and he flew backwards into the bank. The woman, realizing how lucky she’d been, recovered her senses and bolted from the scene.
All in all, Doc Ock was rather pleased with how the test run was going.
For that was indeed one of the two main purposes of this little outing. The first, of course, was the attack on the bank vault. Credit the television news with airing a feature story concerning a sizable collection of $20 Saint-Gaudens gold coins—dredged up by a salvage crew from the vaults of a sunken ship nearly a century old. They had been deposited in this particular bank’s state-of-the-art, ostensibly impregnable vault. The coins would fetch an impressive price on the resale market.
The second purpose, however, was to see just what his children, his tentacles, were capable of accomplishing.
He was impressed by both. The coins—those he had seen when they came pouring out of the bags—were exceptionally beautiful. Struck in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and everything from back then seemed to have had so much more style than items of the present day. As for the tentacles… well, they’d certainly smacked Spider-Man around with only a few bumps and bruises along the way to show for it.
There had been a moment, though… a moment when his certainty had wavered. At least he thought that was the case. No. Probably not. He’d likely imagined it.
As he dusted himself off, he wasn’t particularly perturbed to see two police cars, sirens screeching, pull up and grind to a halt. Four officers jumped out, weapons drawn. They cocked the hammers of their guns, presumably to indicate that they weren’t kidding around. Ock stifled a yawn.
“Freeze!” shouted the nearest officer.
Obligingly, Ock didn’t move a muscle. His tentacles, on the other hand, stretched high above his head. They swayed back and forth, slowly, almost seductively, and the gazes of the police officers were fixed upon them. It was like reverse snake charming.
Two of the tentacles began to stretch forward… and their pincers abruptly started snapping with deadly intent.
The police didn’t hesitate. They started firing, not at the tentacles, but at Doc Ock himself. It didn’t help. While they had been distracted by the two tentacles wavering at them, the other two had coiled around their master to create a shield of unbreakable metal. By the time the police shook off their paralysis and began shooting, all they were able to do was gape in frustration as their bullets bounced off the tentacle shield that had formed around Doc Ock.
This, of course, was fine while he was stationary. But he wasn’t planning to stand there all day. If he remained long enough, sooner or later the cops would show up with something his tentacles couldn’t protect him against, such as tear gas.
Time to go, he told his children. We need a hostage. Let’s find someone.
People were rushing out of the bank. Certainly one of those fools would be ideal. The exterior of the bank was a war zone; anyone hasty enough to dash out into the middle of it certainly deserved whatever they got.
There was one woman with graying hair, waving her hands in a comical manner, calling out a name. “Peter!” she was calling. Ock had known a Peter. But his recollection of that individual was fading away. His mind was slowly bifurcating into the time before his children, and the time after them. Since the latter was all that mattered, he was becoming less and less interested in retaining the former. Too much pain.
The tentacle snared around the old woman’s waist, and she screamed. She had an umbrella and, impressively, she didn’t lose her grip on it. Instead, against all rules of sanity, she started whacking at the tentacle with it. It made Ock smile. She was a pistol, this one. He hoped he didn’t have to kill her… but he would if it became necessary.
“Hold your fire!” one of the cops cried out, as Doc Ock had known he would.
The tentacles extended, and Ock rose into the air, higher and higher, supported by three of his mechanical limbs. The fourth continued to keep his hostage positioned squarely in front of him as the tentacles carried him in giant strides, moving backwards away from the police. She was perfect for this business. They’d have to shoot through her to get at him, which they naturally wouldn’t do. Nor would they try to pick him off from some other vantage point, because if they did manage to kill him, the tentacles would go slack and the woman would plunge to the ground. At her age, it wouldn’t take much of a fall to shatter every bone in her body.
People scattered to escape the massive limbs, which hammered into the concrete with each step. One of them smashed through the top of a cab and came out the bottom, then shook the cab off like a cat ditching a particularly aggressive mouse.
He kept moving. That was the important thing, to keep moving. The police were pursuing on foot and the howl of sirens indicated that more were on the way. He picked a skyscraper at random and started to climb, the arms hauling him upward with ruthless efficiency.
The old woman was still screaming as Ock shouted, “Stay back, or I’ll kill her!”
As Spider-Man swung at high speed in the wake of Ock’s destruction, the one thing he was able to tell himself with confidence was that at least Aunt May was safe from the maddened doctor’s rampage.
That confidence lasted for as long as it took him to spot the senior citizen struggling in the rough grasp of one of Ock’s tentacles.
“Aunt May,” he breathed through his mask.
The arms carried Doc Ock skyward with dizzying speed. Ten stories up, then twenty, and suddenly his path was blocked by someone who was the last—and yet, oddly enough, also the first—person that he expected to see.
“Set the lady down,” called Spider-Man, clinging to the side of the building ten feet above Ock.
It seemed to him that Spider-Man sounded singularly nervous, repeatedly glancing in the direction of the old woman. Ock couldn’t understand why. It was just one old woman. She’d lived her life. What did it matter, really, if it t
erminated now? He was just saving her years of slow, painful death as her body fell prey to whatever unfortunate diseases nature had in store for it. Still, no reason Ock couldn’t have some fun with this wall-crawling freak who had cost him so much.
“Make me,” Ock said defiantly.
One of his arms released its grip on the building and swung at Spider-Man. The wall-crawler evaded the swipe, the blow pulverizing the bricks where he’d clung only a moment before. God, he was fast. A second strike was no more productive than the first, except that this time a window was shattered.
And suddenly there was webbing all over Doc Ock’s face. He grasped at it, trying to pull it clear with his own two hands, but was unsuccessful. Abruptly his head was yanked forward and impacted squarely with Spider-Man’s fist. His head snapped back and forward again, and again he was punched by the wall-crawler, over and over. It was as if his head was a rubber ball on the end of an elastic band, and Spider-Man’s fist was the hard surface it was repeatedly ricocheting off.
Desperate to free one of his tentacles to deal with this cretin, Ock shoved the old woman toward a ledge. She grabbed at her salvation, clinging desperately, yet was unable to hold on. But then she swung her umbrella up and its handle hooked on to the stone relief of an angel’s face on the side of the building. As he finally cleared his eyes of the webbing, Ock had to give the old bat credit. She was resourceful.
Spider-Man swung in her direction, but Ock would have none of it. Two tentacles coiled around him, poised to strike. Spider-Man webbed them again, applying an even thicker coat of his noxious adhesive than he had to Ock’s face. Ock tried to pull them apart and couldn’t. So instead, he settled for using the webbed-together tentacles as a battering ram, slamming Spider-Man and knocking him into a window. Bewildered office workers had been watching, but now they scattered to either side as Spider-Man crashed through, landing inside.
Spider-Man was briefly dazed by the impact as he clutched onto the side of a desk. For a moment his head spun as he tried to remember where the devil he was. Am I a temp now? he wondered as he glanced around the office, and then a concerned-looking secretary said, “Are you okay, Spider-Man?”
Oh. Right. I’m Spider-Man. Lucky me.
Suddenly, three tentacles smashed through the office floor, and any confusion as to who he was or what he was in the middle of instantly evaporated. Electrical wiring and ridged steel construction rods called rebars were ripped up by the tentacles as they reached about, clearly searching for their enemy.
A fourth tentacle smashed through, making Spider-Man wonder just where Ock had anchored himself if all four tentacles were on the hunt for him. But his thoughts turned to other concerns as a tentacle grabbed the ankle of the secretary who had been solicitous of Spider-Man’s condition. Quickly he grabbed one of the exposed rebars and jammed it right through the offending tentacle. It released the secretary and tried to recoil, but couldn’t.
It writhed, pinned by the metal rod, and servos from within the mechanism of the tentacles made a series of high-pitched noises that bore an uncanny—even disturbing—resemblance to a scream, although SpiderMan had to think that his imagination was running away with him. Green florescent liquid oozed from the puncture. Spider-Man grabbed the tentacle and held it steady. He stared straight into the area of the pincers and saw they were constructed around a tiny lens. Was it possible the thing was actually sending images directly into Ock’s brain? This was bordering on the exceptionally weird, and considering that it was a guy in blue-and-red tights who was thinking that, it suggested whole new realms of weirdness.
Oh, well. Might as well run with it.
Speaking straight into the lens, Spider-Man said, “That climbing the wall thing? That’s mine.”
He released his hold on the tentacle, and the metal coil went straight back down through the floor. Suddenly he heard a scream from the direction of the ledge outside.
Oh, my God! Did he actually put her there?
Things had been happening so quickly that he had just assumed Doc Ock was still holding on to Aunt May. He hadn’t seen him put her down anywhere.
He sprinted toward the window, wondering frantically, What kind of life am I leading that every female who means anything to me at all winds up, at some point or another, dangling from a ledge?
Even as he finished the thought he was on the outside of the building, clinging to the wall, looking right and left on the ledge and too terrified to look down at the street, for fear of what he’d see.
But she wasn’t on the ledge. There was no sign of her.
No… no, I failed her… Uncle Ben, I’m so sorry, I tried to watch out for her…
And Ben’s sharp, angry voice came right back at him. Like you watched out for me, you mean? Doing a bang-up job of attending to our best interests, aren’t you?
That was when a taunting voice called to him from a short distance away, “What’s the matter?”
Spider-Man turned in Doc Ock’s direction. He was atop a building across the street, and one of his tentacles was waving a struggling Aunt May around.
“Lose something?” he asked.
May Parker’s heart had been racing so fast that she was convinced it was going to come smashing right out of her chest. The height was dizzying, the situation terrifying.
But the longer her predicament had gone on, the more her terror began to be replaced by cold, burning anger that this… this metal-armed beast had thrust her into this position.
She only knew Spider-Man by reputation. She knew that he’d been involved with that business with Mary Jane, but M.J. had refused to talk about it to any degree, saying it was too upsetting to relive by discussing it. May Parker wasn’t stupid, though. As much distaste as she might have for Spider-Man and his dangerous, grandstanding theatrics, which the Daily Bugle was always decrying, she knew that he had put a stop to the activities of the Green Goblin. Considering her own run-in with that cackling lunatic, she didn’t have to think hard to choose whose side she would have been on in that confrontation.
Now she was caught squarely in the middle of an altercation that wasn’t all that dissimilar, and if Spider-Man was frightening to look upon, he was still a damned sight better than the miscreant who had turned her into a pawn.
So it was that as Spider-Man swung toward her kidnapper, May turned her attention to how she could help Spider-Man and, by extension, herself. She heard the bespectacled villain muttering, “Just a little closer now,” and saw that one of his awful tentacles was poised behind his back with a steel spike emerging from it. Clearly, he intended to keep it out of sight until Spider-Man was upon him, and then strike.
“Shame on you!” Aunt May cried out, her sense of propriety offended. She swung her umbrella around, apparently with more reach than he’d expected, and the handle jammed into the cad’s sunglasses, shattering one of the lenses. He cried out, his hands flying to his face, and Aunt May felt triumph. Then she felt gravity, as the tentacle released her and she fell.
She didn’t even have time to let out a scream, though. Spider-Man swung in and snagged her before she’d fallen more than a couple of feet. He swung down and away, and before the angry octopus-man could follow, May heard the sounds of bullets ricocheting around him. She caught a brief, dizzying view of gathering policemen on the ground, firing up at him now that May’s safety was no longer an issue. And then they were gone, nothing more than part of the blur that was the ground as Spider-Man, with a confidence that bordered on elegance, swung through the city with the clear intention of getting May to safety.
It was the first chance she’d ever had to see him close-up. He was far more slender than she would have thought from his pictures. And yet his mass was deceptive, for he held her as if she weighed nothing and she could only imagine the kind of muscular strength required to hold on to strands of thin rope and swing across vast spaces.
“We showed him,” Spider-Man said confidently.
“What do you mean ‘we’?” was her ar
ch reply. As far as she was concerned, of the two of them, she was the only one who had gotten in a significant shot.
He angled down toward the ground and descended to a plaza near a subway stop. By pleasant coincidence, it was the F train. Not that she was planning to take it to Forest Hills; she had to get back to the bank and let Peter know that she was all right. He was probably worried sick, the poor boy. He was so sensitive.
Spider-Man set her down as onlookers gaped in astonishment. Two young girls, dressed in such a provocative manner that May had to wonder what their mothers were thinking when they let them out of the house, called out such scandalous things as “Take me, Spidey! Take me!”
May sniffed at the shocking behavior the girls were displaying. But then her mind flew back, unwanted, to her behavior as a teen during a Frank Sinatra concert, and she felt slightly more charitable toward them.
Displaying sufficient character not to take advantage of such blatant and willing fans, Spider-Man fired a web-line and swung on it into the sky. The wind rippled her hair and May watched him go, murmuring, “Incredible.”
She wondered if he had blue eyes.
XIII
Peter could think of lots of places he would rather be than the planetarium that night. Curiously, most of them involved his risking his life, and yet somehow that was a more attractive option to him than watching Jonah Jameson strutting around, preening about his son the hero.
Yet as Peter, outfitted in the best-looking clothes he had, dutifully snapped pictures of elegantly dressed guests arriving in limos, he wondered if he wasn’t simply jealous. Although he certainly didn’t do his Spider-Man gig to be thought of as a hero, he knew that’s what he was. But he couldn’t feel good about it, since his heroism was rooted in his guilt over Uncle Ben. Furthermore, even if he did feel good about it, he couldn’t go around boasting because, hey, secret identity.