The passengers stood there in silence and then the mother, clutching her child, said softly, “My God, that maniac’s going to kill him… he’s dead.”
“No,” said O’Shea firmly. “You’ll see. That’s not how this ends. Lady, five minutes ago, there was nobody deader than we were. And we’re here. That’s no ordinary young man. That’s the Amazing Spider-Man. And that Ock guy is in a world of trouble. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
XXIV
Night had fallen, and for some reason, Harry Osborn felt as if he were in the middle of an arcane haunted-house story. Thunder rolled in the distance, and he was standing in his father’s study, where the shadows seemed long and his father’s shade lurked in every corner. Some oppressive presence certainly was hovering nearby, waiting for Harry to let his guard down just for a moment, and then it would pounce.
He jumped and yelped as the doors to the terrace blew open, whisking leaves inside. Rain began pouring in as well, threatening to soak books or important papers. He moved to close the doors, when a bolt of lightning illuminated the terrifying figure of Doctor Ock looming in the doorway.
Spider-Man was dangling from Ock’s tentacles. He was wrapped in some sort of barbed wire. Doc Ock dropped him carelessly onto the chaise.
The first thing Harry thought to say was, “That seat’s leather! That stupid wire is going to rip it to shreds! Where’d you get it?”
“Train yard,” said Ock carelessly, clearly not giving a damn about the damage to Harry’s furniture. “Decided to bind him, to make it easy for you. Kill him slowly. Make him suffer.” He stepped closer to Harry, and in a tone that indicated Spider-Man might not wind up the only corpse on the premises, said dangerously, “Where is the tritium?”
Harry backed up to the wall safe, never once taking his eyes off Spider-Man. He was almost afraid to breathe, lest he wake up and discover that it was merely a dream, rather than the culmination of long-held aspirations. He started working the combination on the safe, but his attention kept returning to Spider-Man, and his hand was trembling besides.
What little there was of Doc Ock’s patience evaporated. One of his tentacles reached forward, gripped the combination lock, and started turning it with brisk efficiency. Harry wondered for a moment why Ock didn’t simply rip open the safe door, and then he remembered. Tritium was unstable. A violent movement could cause the sample to explode, and most likely Ock didn’t want to take any chances.
The pincers on the tentacle were obviously sensitive enough to feel the tumblers moving beneath them. In no time at all the door popped open, and the pincers gingerly closed around a small steel canister simply labeled “T.”
Doc Ock withdrew it from the safe ever so carefully and studied it with satisfaction. “Before the night is over,” he fairly purred, “you’ll see I was right. The power of the sun. They’ll all see.”
And with that final pronouncement, he was gone, over the side of the building.
Harry remained where he was until he could no longer hear the crunching of the tentacles against the outside wall. Ock was unpredictable; there was no reason to assume he wouldn’t come bounding back on some new demented pretext. After a minute or two, though, Harry was convinced that the man was gone… hopefully for good.
He realized then that he was holding his breath, and let it out in a long, rattling sigh.
His eyes remained locked on Spider-Man, never wavering from the source of all the trouble he had in the world. He moved slowly toward him, feeling as if his legs were operating separately from the rest of him. Harry stopped at the desk, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a pistol. He drew it up, aimed at Spider-Man, and prepared to shoot, certain that no jury in the world would convict him. After all, the wall-crawler was a murderer.
His finger froze on the trigger as he realized that, no, wait, any jury in the world would convict him. What was he supposed to claim? Self-defense? The man was hog-tied in barbed wire. Trespassing? He thought Spider-Man was a burglar and shot him? Absurd. Anyone who’d ever seen him in action knew how damned fast he could move. Who in his right mind would believe that Harry Osborn would be able to pick him off?
And that’s who the trail would invariably lead to. Harry. Guns were traceable. He didn’t know how it would be possible, but sooner or later, the trail would lead to him and his gun.
So…
Don’t use a gun.
Simple as that. Kill him, dump the body somewhere, and let them find it and try all they wanted to trace the murder weapon. He’d just kill him in an untraceable manner.
He put the gun down and instead picked up a ceremonial dagger from the desk. Appropriately enough, it had belonged to his father. You couldn’t trace stab wounds. The knife was perfect.
Moving toward the insensate Spider-Man, Harry squeezed the hilt repeatedly as he murmured, “If only there was a way to cause you the pain that you caused me.”
He choked on the words. His face was suffused with rage. He’d been approaching tentatively, but the closer he got, the bolder he became. He stepped right up next to the chaise, lifted the dagger high. Then he stopped and said, “First, let’s find out who’s behind the mask. Then I can look in your eyes as you die, Spider-Man.” He spit out the name as if it were something foul.
As he spoke, Spider-Man began to stir. Harry realized he had to speed things along. Every bad movie he’d seen, the villain stood cackling over the hero until it was too late, and the hero managed to turn the tables on him. Harry had no intention of playing out like a poorly constructed evil-doer. Time to get right down to it, he realized. He gripped the top of the mask and pulled it off as he said, “Not so amazing now, are you”
A blast of lightning chose that moment to strike, and Harry stared down in stupefaction at the face of Peter Parker, illuminated in the harsh glare of the lightning.
“Peter.” Harry whispered the name. He staggered back, his dagger falling from his hand. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.”
It was a trick, that had to be it. That sick bastard Ock had found Peter, knocked him cold, and outfitted him in the Spider-Man costume that was Jonah Jameson’s pride and joy. Yes, that was it. Of course. How could Harry have been so stupid as to think for even a moment that his friend, his best friend in the world, was…
Peter sat up. He cried out as the barbs dug into his flesh, then with no apparent effort at all, he snapped apart the wires with a simple quick thrust of his arms. Snapped them with superhuman strength. If Harry had been tied up like that, he could have wrestled with the wire until next Christmas, and he’d still be bound.
It was too much for his mind to assimilate. “It can’t be,” he said again, and kept repeating, “It can’t be.”
“Where is she,” demanded Peter, not caring about the fact that Harry was looking straight into his unmasked face. “Where is he keeping her?”
“It can’t be,” Harry said once more.
Peter grabbed Harry firmly by the shoulders and shook him, sharply, to get his attention. Harry stared at him, glassy-eyed.
“Harry!” Peter practically shouted in his face, reorienting his attention to more earthbound concerns.
Slowly Harry sank to the floor, and he started to sob piteously.
“He took Mary Jane, Harry! Listen to me!” Peter stood over him, fists clenched in frustration. “You were once in love with her! If you have any idea where she is, or what he wants—”
“All…” Harry paused, and then managed to get out, “All he wanted was the tritium.”
His face was a portrait of disbelief. Peter grabbed Harry by the shirtfront and slammed him against the wall. “Tritium, Harry? He’s making the machine again! When that happens, M.J. will die, along with half of New York! Now, where is he?”
Harry’s very fabric of reality was shredding. “Peter… you killed my father…”
Peter looked confused that Harry was even bringing it up. The topic was clearly of no relevance to him at all, even though it loomed so large in Harry’s
life that it had consumed him. But Peter loosened his grip slightly, and when he spoke, he didn’t seem angry so much as sad, even tired. “There are bigger things happening here than me and you, Harry. Please…”
Harry stared right through Peter, seeing nothing. All he heard was the voice of his old friend, disconnected from the visual of the current reality. “Some abandoned pier.”
Peter nodded, then turned and dashed toward the balcony. He slowed only to snatch up his mask, which lay crumpled on the floor, and he pulled it on. Despite everything else, despite the shows of strength, despite everything his senses were telling him was true, Harry still didn’t believe, deep down, what he was seeing. The notion that his best friend could be his greatest enemy… it was preposterous, it had to be a joke, a mistake…
Then he cried out as he watched that very same best friend leap off the balcony. Harry ran toward it, crying out Peter’s name, and when he got to the railing he saw the falling Spider-Man fire a web, snag the upper story of the nearest structure, then go swinging off into the rain-soaked night.
He remained there on the balcony with the rain beating down upon him.
Half of New York…
Peter—Spider-Man—had said that half of New York could be obliterated thanks to Doc Ock and his machine.
Harry sent out a silent prayer.
Dear God, let it be the half I’m in.
XXV
Mary Jane Watson decided that being apprehended by armored nut-jobs twice in her life was two times more than she cared to endure. Not only was she offended by the sense of helplessness, she was also painfully aware that it was 7:45 at night, coming up on the eight o’clock curtain for her play. With her missing, it meant that her understudy, Rebecca Kitt, was probably sitting in her chair, putting on her costume, and getting ready to do her part. Not that she didn’t think Rebecca could pull it off. She knew she could. In fact, truth to tell, she felt that Rebecca probably did the part better than she did, and she was convinced the producers would realize that and boot her from the show.
“If I lose my gig, I’ll strangle you with your own tentacles!” she bellowed at Doc Ock. The fact that her clothes were wet and tattered and she was chained to a rusty pipe did not, in her mind, make her threats any less formidable. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”
Arm Boy, as she had come to think of him, continued to pay her no attention. He was totally obsessed with this gizmo of his that looked to Mary Jane like an oversized version of the game Mousetrap. Power was humming through it, and the air seemed to be crackling, as if lightning was parking itself right in the middle of his ramshackle structure. His tentacles were busy releasing into the air the contents of some sort of metal canister, and, to her surprise, it hung there, suspended, defying gravity. Her brief admiration of the stunt was quickly superseded by the realization of just how cold she was. She was shivering, and the whole place stank of salt water and mildew.
She bit down on her lip and emitted an ear-piercing whistle so loud that even Arm Boy couldn’t ignore it. He looked toward her, glowering over the tops of his sunglasses.
“You got what you needed for your little science project,” she called. “Now let me go!”
He actually smiled at that, which wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting. “I can’t let you go,” he said, sounding surprisingly rational about it. “You’d bring the authorities. Not that anyone can stop me, now that Spider-Man is dead.”
Mary Jane’s mind reeled from that statement, but she shrugged it off. She was dealing with a crazy man. How seriously could she take anything he said? It was like getting stock tips from the Son of Sam. “He’s not dead,” she announced. “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it,” he assured her.
Then he turned away from her but, disconcertingly, the pincers of the arms seemed to have other ideas entirely. They snapped at her, seeming for all the world as if they were… jealous of her, somehow. There was enough slack to her chains that she was able to bat away the tentacles.
Doc Ock fired up his machinery to an even more ear-splitting level. The stuff hanging in the middle suddenly ignited, and to Mary Jane’s wonderment, it took on the aspect of a tiny golden sun, no bigger than an orange, forming in the middle of the machine. Where the interior of the warehouse they were in had been dreary and dark, it was now fully illuminated…
And that was when the pulsating light revealed Spider-Man, crawling along the ceiling.
Mary Jane gasped, but the noise wasn’t audible over the howling of the machine. Doc Ock’s back was turned, so he didn’t notice Spider-Man at all. But one of the tentacles seemed to be…
… looking?
Was that possible? Could these arms of his actually see somehow?
Spider-Man lowered himself down a web, toward Mary Jane. Her eyes lit up and it was all she could do not to cry out in relief. He reached for her chains and whispered close to her ear so she could hear him over the howling of the machinery, “As soon as you’re free—”
He got no further than that as a large metal blade sliced into the steel pipe that lay between Spider-Man and Mary Jane.
The arms had warned Ock.
It was the only possibility, as chilling and unthinkable as it was. They had tipped him to the presence of the intruder, and now Doc Ock was coming toward them, his voice dripping with anger and contempt. “I should have known Osborn wouldn’t have the spine to finish you!”
Osborn? Harry was part of this, too? Mary Jane could barely process the information. Harry was supposed to have killed Spider-Man? Harry? The guy who’d practically gone catatonic in high school biology when he’d had to snuff a frog for dissection? She knew he’d become obsessed, blaming Spider-Man for the death of his father, but… My God, the whole world had gone insane.
Spider-Man leaped to a perch that was, for the moment, out of Ock’s reach. Mary Jane noticed that the glowing ball, which had been the size of an orange, was now beach-ball-sized. It burned with a fiery intensity, and she wondered with growing alarm just how big the thing was going to get.
It was then she realized that not only did she not have the answer to that question, there was every possibility that neither Spider-Man nor Doc Ock knew it, either. Which meant that the miniature sun might grow to become a full-sized sun. And having one of those in the middle of Manhattan couldn’t possibly be a good thing.
“Shut it down, Octavius!” called Spider-Man from above. “You’re going to hurt a lot more people this time!”
Spider-Man made a move toward what appeared to be electric cables leading into the machine. It was obvious to Mary Jane what he intended to do: If he could yank out those cables, the power would be disrupted. Unfortunately it was obvious to Doc Ock, as well. His tentacles lashed out, blocking the way, driving Spider-Man back.
“It’s a risk we’re willing to take!” said Ock.
Mary Jane wondered for a moment who he meant by “we.” Was Doc Ock speaking with the royal “we?” But then she understood, and the knowledge chilled her even more than she already was. The “we” referred to him and his tentacles. He thought of them as living entities. And considering the way they acted, she couldn’t say he was wrong.
“Well, I’m not willing to take it!” Spider-Man told him.
Doc Ock’s tentacles coiled back like cobras, then struck. Spider-Man flipped over Ock and landed next to the power cables, but before he could reach them, a tentacle rammed into his back. He staggered from it, and a second grabbed his wrist and slung him away.
Spider-Man tumbled end over end upward and crashed through the rotting roof, sailing away into the night. Mary Jane’s heart sank. If the wall-crawler was unconscious, he would be killed by the impact, wherever he came down. So she was as startled as Ock when he came crashing back in through one of the large, boarded-over windows, swinging on a web and making a beeline directly for the doctor.
Ock, who’d turned his attention back to his machine, swung around in surprise, just in time for Spider-Man to
smash him squarely in the chest with both feet. He hit so hard that he drove his opponent through the floorboards. The brackish water was right below them, lapping up around their legs, as Spider-Man and Ock fought to find purchase.
Mary Jane saw the glowing ball continue to grow, and she pulled at the chains with rising desperation as she became more and more convinced that absolutely anyplace else in the world was a better place to be than where she was. All at once she was lifted off her feet, and found her ankles being pulled toward the fiery ball of whatever the hell it was. The only thing holding her in place now were the chains that bound her wrists to the rusted pipe.
The pipe, for its part, was hardly the most reliable of anchors, and it started to bend toward the machine. Mary Jane, being drawn closer, began shouting for help at the top of her lungs.
Her voice must have been heard over the cacophony of the machine as Spider-Man hit Doc Ock so hard that it drove him down into the water. Because he then turned toward Mary Jane, fired two webs, and swung up to her.
The chains around her hands snapped off the rusted pipe, and Mary Jane was yanked through the air directly toward the glowing ball. She didn’t have to be a science major to intuit that the moment she hit the thing, she’d be incinerated. She let out what she was certain was her final scream, then jerked to a halt.
One of Spider-Man’s web-lines had snagged her wrists, halting her, suspending her horizontally in midair. The aggressive machinery was pulling her in one direction, while Spider-Man was doing everything he could to haul her in the other.
And it seemed as if the machinery was winning… that she was edging closer, ever closer to the growing fireball at the heart of the storm.
A flare of energy, like something from the surface of the sun, licked out at Mary Jane. Conveniently enough, it sliced through the chains that bound her ankles, further freeing her.
Spider-Man dropped to the ground, just beyond range of the fireball’s pull, yanking the web-line as hard as he could. This sent Mary Jane flying toward him, and he caught her. Setting her down, he shouted at her, “Run!”