Issue 3
New York City, NY
Jameson’s article had come out faster than Peter expected it would, pumped into the heart of the city and then outward to its fringes. “Man-Spider Attacks Bugle Office, Assaults NYPD”. A sterling review of his first real endeavor, and they couldn’t even get his
name right. At least paintbrush-head nailed the hyphen. Still, he had to spend the last God knows how many hours swinging through the streets and making double sure people knew what his
real name was. If Jameson wouldn’t speak to him, maybe the city would.
Peter swung and released, switching hands and trying to cram the rest of his egg and cheese sandwich into his mouth, tracking it with half-lidded eyes. He tasted the wax of deli paper and hacked out a cough, wrenching a turn around the Manhattan Municipal Building. The tendrils of his mask snaked back around his mouth and he dropped a dozen feet, pulling a saliva-stained strand of paper from his mouth and letting it catch on the New York Wind.
Gross. Another webline dragged him back into the sky and he was flying again.
He landed on a rooftop and pushed off of it, sailing clean past the flagpole he aimed for.
Nuts. A web shot back out from his wrists and he hung there like a limp fish, listing in the gentle breeze. His sigh turned into a yawn and he pulled himself up, hand over hand, back to the top.
Get it together, Parker. You’ve still got all of Harlem to look through. Joy, joy, joy… The neighborhood spread before him in a grey-brown haze, struggling out of the swirling miasma of the cracked streets below. Every building slumped into the next, devoid of any definition but for the inky blackness that swirled between them, crackling and bubbling and...
Peter shook his head and rubbed his temples, willing the sleep out of his system. The hard edges and definition came back to the place, solidifying out of the darkness. He let his breath go and focused on the rhythms of his costume. Tendrils of black fiber interlaced with one another, infinitely dense yet impossibly fine, all prehensile. They stood up all across his body, quivering in the biting wind. Through their vibrations, he began to feel it all coming in. The brickwork of the building behind him, lacing down and outward to the painted concrete a hundred feet below him. This was his web, spreading in and around him as he waited, focused, waiting for anything to trip his Spider-Sense. Somewhere at the edge, he felt the fringe of some grander presence, with a kind of gravity to it, dragging on his fibers, pulling him closer. It felt cool and metal and warm and fleshy all it once. It was legs and arms and a grand throne suspended in some network of webs, and -- Peter’s senses flinched all at once. Two blocks away, due north, brush of gunmetal against elastic waistband. Screams.
There.
The twang of the flagpole echoed through the neighborhood as Peter threw himself into the air, firing two webs and slingshotting himself a half block ahead. He was a spider, skittering ahead and squeaking across dirty windows as he closed on his prey. He was silhouetted against the black concrete, a deep blue hoodie pressing a gun into the back of a passerby. He hadn’t heard Spider-Man yet.
Good.
The suit sprang across the concrete as he landed, cushioning the fall and sending spikes of force deep into the earth. Before the mugger had time to turn around, Peter was upon him, throwing him into the air and following, dragging him on a webline; higher, higher. Peter put his whole body into it, flinging the crook up ahead and stumbling, but running up the building all the same. Spider-Man was on the edge of the rooftop and the gunman hung in the air, a dark stain against the shining beauty of the moon.
Then he was falling. Peter snatched him from the precipice of death, hand snapping on the man’s collar. The fabric ripped and he fell further inches, and then he dropped again, his scream blasting Peter’s eardrums.
Goddamnit. He forced his eyes open and webline snapped to the man’s back.
“Oh God, oh Jesus, I--” The gunman stumbled over his words and pinwheeled in the sky, kicking at nothing.
“Shhhhh.” Peter said, again rubbing his temples. It felt good to close his eyes, just for a moment.
“People are sleeping, man.” He pulled the thug up, bit by bit, as he swung and grasped wildly at the hair of webbing between him and death.
“Are-are you that, that...?” He was breathless, straining, eyes locked on the stark ground beneath him.
”Yeah, Amazing Spider-Man, jazz hands, blah blah.” Peter mumbled. He the webline to the edge of the building, crawling down to get a good look at the man. Huge, white, featureless bug eyes met his pair of dull browns and he squirmed, trying to wedge his way further back into the window. His piece had been lost in the climb, now probably shattered somewhere down through a hundred yards of freefall. Peter found himself staring into the cheap fabrics of the man’s coat, mesmerized by the simple patterns of the man’s coat, deeper and deeper and darker and -- his eyes shot open, and he sucked in a breath.
”I probably need to get through a lot of these tonight, so, yeah. Don’t make me, I don’t know, drop you or something. That’s what that Bat-dude from Gotham does, right?” Spider-Man stifled a yawn and tapped the man on his forehead and he jerked back, slamming his head against the glass.
“Don’t kill me!” He screamed. Peter blinked slowly, tuning out the screams and focusing on the weight in his eyelids. A response fought out of his consciousness.
”Just… Just keep your pants on. Guy robs a wrestling tournament a few days ago, shoots an old man on his way out. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, I just want to send him a postcard.” Peter groaned.
The robber shook his head back and forth, “No no man! No! That’s Tombstone’s racket, I don’t fuck with that!”
“Tombstone, I keep hearing that name. Spooky. Am I gonna have to fight Boris Karloff in a graveyard or something?”The man looked at Spider-Man, as if for the first time. His skin was clouded, somehow darker than black, with impossibly long thin lips twisting into a smile that curled beyond the edge of his face and up into the very back of his jaw, rippling open to a mouth of jagged teeth that poked out at every angle. Eyes the color of curdled milk pierced through the lenses of Spider-Man’s mask, staring back at the boy beneath.
“Pe-ter Parr-ker.” Fluid the color of death drained from the man’s mouth and Peter jerked backward, stumbling down the wall, fighting to keep his grip and yet staggering, falling. He slammed a boot through the plate glass as he tried to regain his footing, scraping at the wall with his hands.
The thug flinched and closed his eyes as the sound of breaking glass erupted, trying to hide his head in his chest and throwing up his arms to cover himself. Everything was normal again. The thug was curled into a ball, backed as far against the window as he could be.
The suit vibrated around Peter, gradually coming to a halt as Peter fought to uncurl the balls his fists had wounded themselves into, going back up the sheer glass of the wall. One foot at a time.
What was that? He was dimly aware of a buzz against his skin, his phone pressed tight against him in the fabric of his suit.
“I uh… I gotta take this. Take five.” A web sealed the thug’s mouth shut and Peter crossed onto the rooftop from the side, pulling his phone out from a web of cascading fibers. He answered.
”Peter?” May’s voice shook and crackled over the receiver.
“Uh, hey, Aunt May. Sorry I--”“Oh thank God! Peter Benjamin Parker, where have you been?”“Just uh… Just catching some air, May, I--”“I’ve been worried sick!”“May, it’s just a little--”“It’s been three days Peter! I’ve been calling Anna Watson and Captain Stacy and I’ve been fighting like hell to get on the phone with Norman Osborn!”May’s voice faded into the background of his thoughts.
Three days? Impossible. He’d only been out… How many criminals
had he shaken down? How long had it been since…?
”--and with that Spider-Man character on the loose! You’re coming home this instant, young man! Where have you been!?””I -- I’m sorry, I... Uh. It’s uh… It’s a long story, Aunt May, I--”“No excuses, Peter! And with your Uncle in the hospital, I--” Peter could hear her shaking her head over the line.
“We’re going to have a long talk when you get home. Right away.”“Okay… I’m almost home. I’ll see you soon. I love you.” Peter couldn’t feel the words coming out of his mouth as he ended the call, not waiting for a response. Three days.
Three days. It felt like
hours. He thought back on it, crawling through the docks, swinging low through Hell’s Kitchen as the sun crested over the horizon. Three days, gone. Three days less for Ben. And nothing to show for it but a name.
Tombstone.
Seventy-two hours of Spider-Man… Where does the time go?
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