As rants went, it wasn’t bad. Granted, spiders weren’t insects, but Peter didn’t really expect Jonah to know or care about that. And since it was originally Peter’s suit, questions of ownership were murky at best.
But hey, Peter could be accommodating. “Jonah wants Spider-Man?” he thought as he pulled his mask over his head. “Then he gets Spider-Man.”
His clothes were wadded up into a compact web-sack, which he stuck in a shadowed corner of the Daily Bugle roof. He flexed his arms and legs. All the freedom of movement was still there. Even better, apparently Jonah had had it dry-cleaned and professionally restored. Even those annoying bloodstains had come out. It looked and felt better than new.
Well, so did he.
He leaped off the roof with neither fear nor hesitation, fired a web-line, and sailed through the steel-and-glass valleys of Manhattan. He heard people shouting from below, “Take a look—overhead!” and “Hey there! There goes the Spider-Man!”
Damn straight, he thought.
XXIII
There had never been any doubt in Ock’s mind that Spider-Man would show up.
He had seen the truth in Peter Parker’s face, despite his mewling protests. Parker knew exactly where Spider-Man was holed up, and would be able to produce him with little to no effort.
He comes, Father. Let us handle him.
Patience, children, patience. This time, we shall be the spider. Let the fly who thinks he’s a spider come into our snare.
Ock sat perched atop the gigantic clock tower, waiting patiently, as Spider-Man swung closer and closer. Would the webbed one be so foolish as to come directly at him? No, of course not. Ock knew better, and sure enough, as the clock below him tolled the hour of three, Spider-Man landed on the clockface, just out of range of the undulating tentacles.
“Where is she?” called Spider-Man.
“She’s nearby,” Ock replied calmly. “Quite safe. Come… let’s talk.”
Father? Are we really going to talk to—?
What do you think?
I think… he is ours.
You think correctly.
Instantly the tentacles lashed out at Spider-Man, the first one sweeping right at his head. There was to be no toying with him, no dancing. The arms were going in for the quick kill… which might actually be merciful and more than Spider-Man deserved. But Ock considered himself, at heart, to be merciful.
And not a murderer. Certainly not that.
In truth, he knew that he could have simply terrorized Harry Osborn into giving him the tritium. It wouldn’t have been much of a challenge at all. But when Harry had offered him this devil’s deal, it had played perfectly into Ock’s own desires. Doc Ock, for all that he had done, still believed himself to be a moral man. A decent man. A man laboring toward a project that would benefit the world, struggling against staggering odds arrayed against him by that very same world he sought to aid.
He also blamed Spider-Man for meddling with his efforts in the past. The problem was, past was past, and as much as he and his children wanted to kill Spider-Man for it, that was pure vengeance. Vengeance, in the final analysis, was not the pursuit of the civilized man. Hunting down Spider-Man, murdering him… it just didn’t sit right. Oh, it was fine with his children. They would have been perfectly content to shred Spider-Man at the first opportunity. But he was the loving parent, whose job it was to guide them, and cold-blooded killing… it wasn’t appropriate. Not to a man of science.
Harry Osborn, however, had offered him the ideal out. Destroying Spider-Man now, it wasn’t murder. Not at all. In this equation, Spider-Man could be reduced to a simple obstacle that was preventing Doc Ock from developing a source of energy that would revolutionize the lives of people everywhere. If Spider-Man lived, the tritium would not be Ock’s. If he died, it would.
It was just that simple.
Thus did Spider-Man, in Ock’s mind, become nothing more than a mere egg that needed to be broken on the way to producing the ideal omelet.
Now the tentacles worked in perfect concert, bobbing and weaving, distracting and confusing the web-slinger. It was obvious to Ock that Spider-Man possessed some sort of faster-than-normal reflexes, so his first task would be to thwart those by making it impossible for him to know which way to look. The tentacles lashed this way and that, feinting from one direction and striking from another. Spider-Man briefly managed to keep ahead of them, but then one struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head, and another swung down like a baseball bat and swatted him right off the clockface.
Spider-Man plunged away and down, spinning toward a nearby rooftop, crashing through a neon sign and sending sparks flying. He rolled to a stop near the base of a water tower.
Ock angled down toward him as Spider-Man staggered to his feet, calling, “Just tell me what you want!”
“You,” Ock shot back, and the tentacles lanced forward once more. Spider-Man leaped out of the way, somersaulting overhead as one of the tentacles obliterated a leg of the water tower. It wobbled, groaned, and suddenly twin web-lines attached to the top, expediting the fall.
In a flash Ock realized what Spider-Man was doing. His tentacles, responding to the alarm, started to propel him out of the way, but it was too late. The water tower crashed to the roof, shattering upon impact, and something like five thousand gallons of water exploded from within. This engulfed Ock, sweeping him off the roof in a miniature tidal wave.
He tumbled, but not far. The pincers crushed into the sides of the building, and he bounced to a halt a fair distance above the sidewalk. His teeth gritted, he snarled deep in his throat and hauled himself back up toward the roof just as he saw Spider-Man peering over the edge to see what had become of him.
He sent a tentacle driving toward his opponent, who jumped back just as the pincers grabbed at his throat. But they weren’t able to secure the grip, allowing Spider-Man the seconds he needed to shove free of them.
Spider-Man backpedaled, rubbing his throat where the pincers had briefly held him. “Why did you take her?” he called out hoarsely.
“To get to you. And what sweet revenge. You killed the woman I loved. Now you will feel that pain.”
“But I don’t love the girl you took!” Spider-Man called out. “She’s… she’s nothing to me.”
“But she’s something to Peter Parker, that much is evident,” replied Ock. “And Parker is obviously your friend. I saw it in his eyes. He wanted to protect you. How will he look at you, I wonder, when you fail to protect his true love.”
Spider-Man tensed, and Ock knew he’d hit a nerve. He grinned, ready to hurl further taunts, to keep Spider-Man off his mental game. But the grin faded as Spider-Man moved so fast that Ock never even saw it. One moment he was on the other side of the roof, the next he was plowing into Doc Ock like a freight train. The momentum carried them off the roof, into midair, beyond the tentacles’ reach of the building.
Bereft of support, the arms flailed about like mad, trying to find something, anything to grab on to. Ock, for his part, was otherwise involved, as Spider-Man pounded on him. As they fell, though, Spider-Man couldn’t quite get solid leverage, and this prevented the infuriated wall-crawler from caving in Ock’s face.
Definitely hit a nerve, Ock thought.
Below them was a train trestle. Realizing that there was going to be nothing between the two combatants and the tracks, the tentacles curled up below, acting to cushion the impact when they hit the tracks.
They never got the chance, as a train thundered into view.
If their timing had been off by even a second, the train would have plowed into them, and the only thing left would have been four flailing metal arms wondering where everyone had gone. As luck and a certain amount of sheer perverse, twisted fortune would have it, they instead slammed down onto the top of the train, right near the front.
Spider-Man bore down immediately, and the scientist realized with growing horror that his foe was getting the best of him. The tentacles were trying t
o yank Spider-Man off, but he was holding onto Ock with the same adhesive power that enabled him to scale buildings. He wasn’t letting go anytime soon, and he was continuing to pound on him with such ferocity that Ock was on the verge of blacking out.
Tell us what to do, Father, tell us what to do!
The car… the front car… controls…
Yes! Yes, we understand—!
Two of the tentacles wrapped down and around and crashed into the front cab. The engineer fell back, screaming in alarm, as one of the arms slammed the accelerator into overdrive and then snapped off the lever. With another swift blow, the emergency brake system was shattered.
The train began to speed up, and Doc Ock was sure that under the mask there had to be growing panic. As the train rocketed forward, accelerated to eighty miles per hour, Ock crowed, “Ready to go down with the ship—or train, as it were?”
In an instant, Spider-Man was off him. Immediately the tentacles rallied around their master and propelled Ock clear of the train. Naturally, he anticipated that Spider-Man would come right back in at him—because, really, what were the lives of a bunch of anonymous innocents aboard a train when compared to the envy-fueled hatred that Spider-Man clearly bore for him?
Ock looked around, scoured the area, the rooftops. As the train thundered into the distance, he saw no sign of Spider-Man at all.
“Coward,” he muttered.
The moment Doc Ock was clear of the train, SpiderMan scuttled around to the other side. He leaned in through one of the broken windows and saw the engineer surveying the wreckage with mounting panic. The engineer, noticing movement by the window, flinched, and then recognized the masked face of Spider-Man peering in at him.
“I can’t stop it!” shouted the engineer. “The brakes are busted!”
Peter was trying not to worry. The main concern is that we might rear end another train, right? But maybe they can reroute the—
His spider-sense started screaming at him. His head snapped around, anticipating another attack by Doc Ock. As it turned out, he should have been so lucky.
Instead, what he saw was the terminal station up ahead, and it didn’t get much more terminal than what he was seeing. Just beyond the station lay a dead end. Worse, some yards beyond the dead end, the track just stopped. The city had been in the process of building an overpass above the train yard, but the money had run out. And so had the track. The result was an eighty-foot drop-off beyond the dead end.
It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it.
Donald O’Shea was a thirty-year engineer who was looking forward to his retirement in two weeks. So when someone whom he could only assume to be a terrorist had destroyed the control mechanism, the first thing that went through his mind was that it was grossly unfair that he should have to die at this point in his life, when that nice condo in Florida was ready and waiting for him.
When the masked face appeared at the window, he was certain it was the terrorist sticking his head in to inspect the damage he had wrought—heedless of risk to his own life because, well, that’s how those lunatics were. But then he recognized who it was peering in at him, and he could scarcely believe it.
“I can’t stop it!” shouted O’Shea over the roar of the wind. “The brakes are busted!”
“Get everyone to the back!” Spider-Man called out.
The thought of abandoning his post was anathema to him, but O’Shea knew that they were approaching the last stop. Quickly he threw open the door of the control room and shouted to everyone in the first car that they had to get back. He wasn’t entirely sure what good that was going to do. If the first car went over, they’d all go. But Spider-Man had said to do it, and at that moment, with the train rattling to its doom around him, O’Shea didn’t have any better ideas.
It was fortunate there were only half a dozen passengers in the car at that moment. Any sizable number would have resulted in a stampede, a crush at the rear door, and people being trampled, or worse—although, considering how they were all likely to wind up, it wouldn’t have mattered that much.
In less than a minute, he had all the people crossed into the next car. Then he glanced over his shoulder and spotted a flash of blue and red and realized that Spider-Man had dropped down into the coupling area between the engine and the passenger cars. Moments later there was the wrenching of metal, a grinding noise, and abruptly the engine was gone. Instantly the passenger cars began to slow.
“What happened!?” screamed one young woman, who was clutching like mad onto her squawling infant.
“He uncoupled us from the front car!” O’Shea shouted.
“Is that even possible?!”
“No! No one’s that strong!”
Even as he spoke, O’Shea staggered forward against the lurching of the car and threw himself against the closed front door, peering through the window. Sure enough, the engine was hurtling away, crashing through the barriers set up to ward off approaching trains. Seconds later, even as the passenger cars continued their slowing, the front engine—like a great steel lemming—hurled itself off the precipice and plummeted the distance to the train yard below. Though he couldn’t see it, O’Shea could hear the impact.
That was when he realized the passenger car wasn’t slowing down fast enough.
Obviously Spider-Man had realized it, as well.
O’Shea had read a great deal about Spider-Man. All the newspaper articles, all the ranting editorials. He’d seen the photos and the occasional fast glimpses of him caught by TV news crews. But none of that prepared him for the sight of a slender costumed figure perched on the front of the remains of a speeding train that was very likely doomed.
Spider-Man could have leaped clear; it would have been no problem. Instead, he started firing those fantastic web-strands of his. He snagged onto passing buildings, but all that he seemed to accomplish was to rip off chunks of brick and mortar and ledge. The train slowed, but just barely, and not remotely enough. The end of the track was looming. It was hopeless.
Yet still Spider-Man’s efforts didn’t flag. Instead, he started firing webs fast and furious, and they adhered to every surface around. O’Shea heard Spider-Man cry out in anguish as dozens of web-lines snared and snagged and pulled taut, and none of it would have meant a thing if he hadn’t been able to hold on to them.
“We’re slowing down!” shouted a passenger who couldn’t see just how close they were to total destruction. Shards of wood from the former barrier lay on either side of them. They were chugging past it, approaching the drop. O’Shea could see that the webs were starting to fray. The woman with the baby screamed, and some schmuck wearing a Yankees cap had gone dead-white and was howling, “It’s not gonna work!”
The train drew nearer to the end, and still Spider-Man would not relent. O’Shea could hear him howl something like, “C’mon! Hold! Hold!”
Right up to the edge the train rolled, and almost, almost over…
… and then it stopped. At the precipice, it stopped, and even rolled a couple feet backwards.
O’Shea yanked open the dividing door, saw Spider-Man perched right on the edge of the train where the coupling had been. The web-lines fell from his nerveless fingers, and that was when O’Shea realized that Spider-Man was about to topple off and forward… and that his fall would certainly pitch him down to the train yard eighty feet below.
Without hesitation, O’Shea lunged forward and grabbed Spider-Man by the arm. He started to haul him back into the car and then realized with surprise that for someone as relatively small in stature as Spider-Man was, he was damned heavy. There wasn’t that much of him, but what there was was solid muscle.
Then another hand reached out, a child’s, which wasn’t much help, but then the child’s dad pitched in, and other passengers, as well. Then there were hands all over Spider-Man, pulling his limp body into the train. “He’s alive!” someone called as Spider-Man moved ever so slightly…
… and suddenly his mask was gone.
The
Yankees fan, who had taken on the responsibility of lowering Spider-Man’s upper body to the floor of the train, was holding it in his hand as if he’d snatched an errant foul ball. “Somebody’d pay big bucks for this guy! We could get on TV!”
One of the other passengers glared at him with such ferocity that he seemed to shrivel. O’Shea stepped forward and put out a hand. “It’s an open palm now. Three seconds from now, it’s a fist.”
The Yankees fan promptly handed the mask to O’Shea, then turned and muttered, “Ten to one you’re a Mets fan.”
O’Shea ignored him. Instead, he turned and looked down at the battered and bruised face of their unlikely savior. It wasn’t remotely what he’d expected. “He’s just a kid. No older than my son.”
The woman who was holding the baby crouched near Spider-Man’s head and gestured for O’Shea to give her the mask. He did so and she started to pull it back down over his face. A couple of the other passengers helped her out until it was merged seamlessly once more with the top of his shirt.
The moment of silence was abruptly shattered by the terrible wrenching of metal. For one horrible second, O’Shea thought it was the sound of the tracks collapsing from the strain. And then the top of the train was ripped clean off, and leering down at them from overhead was a terrifying figure with metal cables wriggling around him like things alive.
“Stand back!” shouted Doc Ock. “He’s mine!”
Nobody moved… except for the Yankees fan, who cleared the area by several yards. Everyone else closed ranks around their fallen hero.
“You don’t scare me, pal!” said one beefy fellow. “I chucked rocks at the nut on the glider, and I’ll take a piece o’ you, too. You want him? You’re gonna have to come through us!”
“Very well,” said Doc Ock, not sounding especially concerned.
He descended upon them, knocked several of them aside, including O’Shea, and scooped up the unconscious Spider-Man. O’Shea grabbed at one of the tentacles, knowing it was hopeless, and he was right. It slid right through his fingers and, seconds later, both Ock and Spider-Man were gone.