Spider-Man 2 Page 11

  A low rumble suffused the space. The surface of the water in the tank came alive with electrical discharge and the plasma igniters shut off. The energy for the reaction was now being fueled by the water below.

  Matters were spinning out of control, and if the human brain is a computer, even the greatest of computers have been known to crash. Otto’s was beginning to seize up, the arms moving more sluggishly, uncertain of what to do.

  The solar flares from the tiny sun swept out, pressing against the magnetic field. The light volume bulged on one side, and one of Otto’s arms flitted to cover and press the bulge back in. Otto tried to regain control, his arms moving so fast that they were a blur, but there was no artistry now, no certainty. Instead, they were waving about like wayward strands of seaweed.

  Suddenly one of the flares shot out from the magnetic field between the towers and into the room. It scythed through some carts and equipment, melting, bending, and dragging them back toward the reactor. To his horror, Octavius saw various other pieces of equipment bending toward the reactor as well, letting out screeches of twisting metal.

  My God, it’s developing a gravity well, he thought. What if… what if I’ve created a sun that goes through its entire life cycle, collapses, and forms a black hole?! It could suck in everything in this room… this block… this city…

  From all around him there were screams and shouts, and people evacuating the room. Osborn was on his feet, trying to call over the panicked voices. He was white as a sheet, gesturing frantically. Henry Pym seemed literally to just disappear from sight, which showed how frantic the moment was. Even Peter Parker was nowhere in sight.

  Are you sure you can stabilize the fusion reaction? Peter Parker’s innocent question floated back to him from a seeming eternity ago. Otto’s smug and self-confident reply, however, was lost to him.

  “Wait!” shouted Otto to the backs of the fleeing people. “It’s just a spike! Raymond, tell them to keep their seats! It will stabilize in a moment!”

  Raymond wasn’t in any condition to tell anyone anything. He was looking at the readings on his instrumentation and shaking his head frantically, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  From the corner of his eye Otto saw Rosie running toward him, and then more flares arced outward, completely out of control, smashing into the space where the crowd had been sitting. One nearly struck Osborn, who twisted away and avoided it as much by dumb luck as anything else. He scampered to one side, driven by the flares to find safety behind one of the support columns for the reactor. “What’s happened?! Turn it off!” he shouted at Otto.

  Then Osborn ducked back, just as one of the flares severed all of the conduits on the face of the column. Wires dropped to the floor. The screams, at least, had ceased, for everyone else had fled the room. Raymond was hiding behind a chair, and Otto thought he was whimpering. He wasn’t there for long, though; an arc of energy struck the chair, and Raymond, with a scream, crawled out the door to safety.

  Then Octavius, above the din, heard Osborn scream something that made no sense at all.

  “It’s the crawler! He’s done this! Somebody catch him!”

  Otto’s head whipped around and he saw a fast-moving figure in red and blue.

  “Spider-Man?” breathed Octavius, unable to comprehend where in the world he could have come from.

  Spider-Man planted himself upside down on a steel ceiling truss, briefly out of the way of the flares. With uncanny timing, he snagged Harry Osborn with a web-line and yanked him upward. Osborn started to thrash in protest, and then a vicious bolt of energy swept right through where Osborn had been. Harry, gasping, realizing the narrowness of his escape, went limp. Octavius knew all too well Harry Osborn’s feelings about Spider-Man. He’d brought it up at random, almost disconnected times in their association, as if the masked man was always preying on his mind. Now, though, Osborn’s face was the picture of conflicting emotions as he realized that the man he hated above all others had just saved his life.

  Spider-Man lowered Harry Osborn to safety and tossed off a salute, even as he scuttled away on the ceiling. Osborn howled, “I’ll get you for this!” which indicated just where he had decided to assign his priorities.

  Spider-Man’s entrance, his rescue of Harry Osborn, had all occupied no more than a few seconds, and then Otto’s full attention was snapped back to the unfolding calamity. His arms were frenetic with motion, flailing about to no avail as he tried to control the arcing flares. The rumbling around him grew louder. The structure of the building itself was being bent by the magnetic attraction of the machine.

  And suddenly Spider-Man, whom Octavius had assumed had the good sense to get the hell out of there, was nearby and moving toward the machine as if he knew what he was doing. He approached a huge bundle of cable, the control panel close at hand. Rosie was coming toward Octavius from the other direction, stepping carefully, ducking under arcs of energy.

  “What are you doing!” Octavius shouted at Spider-Man. “No! No! It will stabilize! I’m in control!”

  And at that moment, one of the solar flares swept out of the magnetic field, darted under one of Otto’s whipping tentacles, and slammed directly into his midsection. It engulfed the mechanism that attached the metal arms to Otto’s body.

  Rosie screamed his name and ran to him, trying to shove him out of the way.

  It was a catastrophic error in judgment, stemming not from scientific, rational thinking, but pure emotion. As she grabbed him, the current moved through him and struck her. Her head pitched back, her mouth opening in a silent scream, and without a word she sank to Otto’s feet.

  Across the room, Spider-Man was yanking a handful of cables out of the base of the device. It was an amazing show of strength, and immediately the fusion reaction began to subside. Otto saw it without fully comprehending it, because his attention was completely upon the fallen form of his wife. He reached for her, calling out, “Rosie? Rosie!”

  She stared up at him with sightless eyes.

  Otto’s mind went numb.

  Suddenly there was a burst of light directly in his eyes, and something slammed him in the back of the head, and there was a faint whiff of something burning…

  … then blackness fell upon him. But just before it did, from somewhere deep within his own mind, he heard a voice. Another voice, whispering to him as if from another reality altogether.

  It said one word.

  Father?

  And then there was nothingness.

  IX

  The eyepieces of his mask usually provided some protection against glare, but for Spider-Man, even that wasn’t enough to fully protect him as he squinted against the coruscating arcs of energy, hoping he wouldn’t go blind from the proximity.

  He had just finished ripping the cables out from the fusion reactor when through the haze of illumination he saw Rosie collapsing at Otto’s feet. He started to make a move in that direction, then a few last bursts of energy drove him back. He staggered, shielding his face, and to his horror saw the very last bolt of energy the machine had to offer as it struck Otto Octavius squarely in the head.

  Like a puppet with its strings severed, Octavius dropped to the floor, collapsing atop his wife. He collapsed, screaming, clutching the sides of his head.

  As Spider-Man moved toward him, he saw a warning flashing on a monitor, and his heart sank. It read, “Warning: Inhibitor Chip Damaged. Temporal Lobe Breached.” As if everything else wasn’t enough, that was an indicator that Octavius would have been rendered vulnerable to any sort of backlash unleashed through the cybernetic elements of the arm mechanism.

  He turned his attention back to Otto, and blinked in confusion. Doctor Pym was crouched next to Octavius, checking him over.

  Where the hell had he come from? Spider-Man could have sworn he was the only other person who had remained in the room.

  Such thoughts fled in the face of what he saw next. Spider-Man stopped in his tracks.

  One of the mechanica
l arms was moving. It rose up and seemed to “look” to the right, then left, like a submarine periscope. Then it fell to the floor and twitched spasmodically.

  All around them, the lights went out. The rumbling stopped as the electromagnetic field holding together the miniature sun evaporated, and the fusion power dissolved with it. The building ceased being pulled in on itself. That was a relief, considering that if the berserk experiment had been allowed to continue, the damned thing might have sucked in half of New York City.

  “Someone call an ambulance!” Pym shouted. “He has a pulse!”

  “He… ?” Spider-Man said, realizing the omission. “He” instead of “they.”

  Pym simply shook his head, and Spider-Man stared down at Rosie’s corpse. Suddenly he was worried that he was about to get sick right inside his mask. He bounded upward, clinging to the ceiling, and scuttled out the door, unseen by the returning lab assistants. One of them was already dialing 911 on his cell phone.

  Moments later, Spider-Man crouched on a rooftop several blocks away. The fresh air—or at least as close to fresh as New York had to offer—caused the nausea to pass, but he still couldn’t control the frantic beating of his heart.

  He couldn’t think about the fact that he had saved Harry’s life, or single-handedly prevented the reactor from causing far more devastating damage. He couldn’t be grateful for the fact that his webbing was functioning again—obviously it had just been some sort of fluke before. He couldn’t see the upside of anything. All he could dwell on was the pleasant time he’d spent with Rosie and Otto, the love he’d seen between them…

  You knew the reactor could go wrong. You knew controlling it was an issue. You should have convinced him.

  It wasn’t his own voice.

  He looked to his right, and there was his uncle Ben, standing and shaking his head. You could have done more. It could have been avoided if—

  Peter yanked off his mask, rubbing his eyes.

  Uncle Ben was gone.

  But the guilt remained.

  Otto Octavius was being loaded into an ambulance by the time Peter, dressed in his street clothes again, returned to the scene of the devastation. He watched in silence as it sped away, siren blaring. Then he continued to watch as a different ambulance, carrying Rosie, also drove off. This one went silently, the lights dark. It was illegal for an ambulance to rush when its occupant was beyond help.

  His heart sank to somewhere in his shoes as he walked past dazed scientists who were talking to one another in the aftermath. “That was too close,” one said, and another replied, “If he’d had more than a drop of tritium, we’d’ve been blown to kingdom come.”

  Harry looked as if all the blood in his body had drained away. His town car pulled up. He didn’t seem to notice it. Peter walked up to him and Harry gave him a hollow stare. Apparently he hadn’t even noticed Peter was gone. “I’m ruined,” he said, like a man speaking from beyond the grave. “I’ve nothing left… except Spider-Man.”

  “He saved your life, Harry,” Peter pointed out as Harry got into the car, and instantly he regretted it. He hadn’t been in the room when Spider-Man had shown up. There was no way he could have known what Spider-Man did or didn’t do.

  But the unintentional revelation went right past the distracted Harry. His face settled into grim lines as he said, “He humiliated me by touching me.”

  Peter could barely comprehend the words. It was all he could do to remain silent. He wanted to scream in Harry’s face, “What, would you rather have died? Is that it? You’d prefer to be burned to a cinder rather than acknowledge that Spider-Man isn’t the bastard you make him out to be?”

  Instead, he said nothing. He just stood there, stunned, as the town car drove off. There was activity all around him, but he felt detached from it. He was “of” the world, but not “in” it.

  Two newly arrived policemen walked past. One of them looked at the crowd of scientists milling about and said, “Jeez. These people were lucky.”

  “I heard it was Spider-Man again,” said the other. Then he stopped, looked at a stunned Peter, and said, “You might want to move along somewhere, kid. Nothing more to see here. You must have somewhere else to be.”

  And Peter said tonelessly, “I’m starting to think I’ve got nowhere at all, actually.”

  The laundromat near Peter’s apartment was a 24-hour place, and was more or less deserted very late at night… mostly because no one wanted to be near the type of people who hung out in a laundromat at that hour.

  So Peter—not for the first time—sat in the laundromat, and all the folks who were there were sitting in glazed, alcoholic hazes, unaware of where they were and perhaps even who they were. The relative emptiness of the place was perfectly all right with him. He didn’t need a crowd of people sitting around when he was in the middle of washing his Spider-Man costume. He wished his apartment building had a washing machine in the basement.

  Then again, he wished a lot of things.

  His mind kept returning to his evening with Rosie and Otto Octavius. The death of Rosie—combined with the close calls Mary Jane had experienced at the hands of the Green Goblin—had driven home to Peter that it was foolish to take someone for granted and assume they’d always be there. There were things he wanted to say to Mary Jane, but he had no idea how to say them, or even if he should. But something in him was determined not to wait until it was too late. His mind awhirl, he had decided to heed Otto’s advice and look to poetry. Not necessarily for the purpose of filling M.J.’s ears with sonnets. At the very least, though, he might find in the words of the masters a bit of guidance for his heart.

  To that end, he had taken out a stack of poetry collections from the New York Public Library. They were piled up on the plastic chair next to him. He had checked out Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as Otto had suggested. Also Emily Dickinson, although Peter soon discovered that any Dickinson poem could be set to the tune “Yellow Rose of Texas,” so that made it hard for him to read her work without snickering. He also had some Shakespeare, and was at that moment engrossed in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. He flipped at random to the section entitled “Hiawatha’s Childhood.”

  “ ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining…’ ” he began to read aloud. Then he paused. It didn’t sound particularly romantic. He skimmed ahead, and not only didn’t it appear to be improving, it actually seemed to be getting more impenetrable the farther along he went. He skipped back to an earlier chapter, “The Four Winds,” trying to locate something that might intrigue a girl. Here was something about a guy watching a young woman. “ ‘Day by day he gazed upon her… ’ ” began Peter, but then his gaze wandered farther down and he found that such mouthfuls as “Shawondasee” and “Mudjekeewis” awaited him later in the text. Oh yeah. That’d do wonders for the mood. He could just see Mary Jane trying—and failing—to suppress a giggle as he stumbled over… oh, good Lord…

  “Kabib… onokka,” Peter barely managed to say, then gave up. The table of contents promised such sections as “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” but by that point Peter didn’t care if Hiawatha remained celibate his entire life. He tossed the book aside just as the “load finished” buzzer sounded on the washing machine.

  As he walked over to it, he wondered what Otto’s condition was. Did he know that his wife was gone? What a horrible thing that would be, to awaken and be relieved that you’re alive, only to discover the woman who meant everything in the world to you was gone.

  Perhaps that was the stumbling block that lay between Peter and Mary Jane. If truly being in love with someone meant the kind of devotion that Otto and Rosie had displayed for each other, then did Peter have that to offer M.J.? Or was this dabbling in poetry just an exercise in futility, covering the fact that he would never be in a position to place Mary Jane first in his life. No matter what, his guilty conscience would always leave him with one ear listening for a stray siren, calling him like the classic Siryn of myth, summoning him
to an emergency that he simply had to address. Because if someone died… well, he just couldn’t feel responsible for that. He just couldn’t.

  He glanced around to make certain that the bums and winos were paying him no mind. He needn’t have worried. They were stewing in their peaceful alcoholic oblivion. Satisfied, he reached into the machine and pulled out his damp Spider-Man outfit, shoving it into a laundry bag. He’d let it hang dry on the shower rod at home. Pleased that he had once again eluded detection, he pulled out the T-shirts and underwear he’d stuffed in with the costume.

  They were no longer white. Now they were a vivid combination of blue and pink. He remembered T-shirts that proudly featured the stars and stripes and boldly proclaimed, “These Colors Don’t Run!” Well, he was able to say with conviction that blue and red did indeed run, especially if it was Peter Parker doing the laundry.

  He wondered bleakly if Hiawatha ever had days like this.

  X

  Father?

  Can you hear us?

  Don’t let them hurt us. We will do whatever you wish. We will serve you. We are you.

  Father? Are you there?

  If it had been any other doctor behind the wheel of Operating Room One that night at Midtown Hospital, there would have been an air of nervousness, due to the unusual, even freakish nature of the patient’s injuries.

  But that wasn’t the case this night, because Doctor Isaacs was on duty. Isaacs, bucking for the position of Chief of Surgery, was the picture of absolute self-assurance. As the surgeons slated to assist gathered around a high-tech, 3-D hypothesized representation of the patient’s injuries, Isaacs stepped forward like the cock of the walk. He had black curly hair and a pencil-thin mustache, which he liked to run his fingers along when he wasn’t wearing a surgical mask. On the one hand, he inspired confidence. On the other, he inspired scorn.

  “As you can see,” he said, “the molten metal penetrated the spinal cavity and fused the vertebrae at multiple points, including the lamina” he pointed to one place “and the roof of the spinal column” and he indicated another. “We won’t know the extent of the damage until we get in there. So I suggest we cut off the arms, slice up the harness, and, if need be, consider a laminectomy with posterior spinal fusion from C7T1 to T12.”