It was a great day to be at the beach. Parents in short pants, short sleeves and tank top with both screaming children and bickering teenagers scouted out spots and surrounded themselves with coolers, radios, towels and umbrellas to shield the sun. With the Fort Lauderdale background behind them, and the sun up high, a mild few of the small planet ignored the frustrations of an unpleasant and unforgiving world to risk skin cancer for the perfect bronze body. A young girl chased after her ball while an adolescent boy chased his dog kicking up hot sand along the way. Sondra Greenberg looked up with annoyance at the sand hitting her and briefly noticed the fat husband of a middle-aged couple looking her over.
He was so not her type.
There was a lot more people now that she had arrived. She smelled barbequing nearby and heard the screams of college kids experimenting with beer and regressing back into a sub-human prototype for humanity. A five-year old boy stood beaming to her as she sat up, sipped her Pepsi and adjusted her sunglasses. Lifting her perfect swimmer's body among this sea of various body types, she took a brief gasp and jogged down to the water line. Along her way, a lifeguard shooed kids from a washed up jelly fish, a surfer lugged his board back out of the water and a skinny practical joker sneaked his fake shark fin to the tide. The water rose up over Sondra's ankles and wet sand oozed between her toes. Within time, it was up to her knees as she adjusted the bottom of her black bikini, tied back her long blonde tresses and then descended down to the water now up to over her waist. The faint images of the legs of people around her resembled out of focus pillars ranging in color from stark white to pale pink as Sondra dived effortlessly deeper and further into the wash of bubbles from her breath and the sea green world under the waves. She wanted to go further, as far as she could get. She wanted to see coral and fish, but what she got was a sharp pain in her leg. Her left leg locked up and she inadvertently screamed underwater. With her good leg, she pushed off from the bottom for the surface, but along the way the tide and waves played games with her. When she finally broke surface, she realized she was too far out to return on her own and screamed out for help.
The benevolent and excited cries of happy tourists as well as the crashing thunders of waves colliding with each other drowned her out. Sondra screamed again and tried thrashing for attention. She couldn't be sure anyone saw her.
"Don't worry, I got you." Someone said.
Sondra turned her head to her savior and then realized she was being taken out of the water. How was that possible? Had the coast guard seen her? Her rescuer wasn't hanging from a rope nor was he in the water. He was above it! His steely grin beamed assuredly to her as his black hair wafted in the wind thrashing over them. They were flying, but how was that possible? Down below her, people arched their heads up to her as her brunette angel carried her high up over the people looking up to her and then down near the deck of the restraunt. Crowds of people were gathering to meet her and her friend. As Sondra's right foot reached earth, she braced herself on a chair then recognized the Kryptonian attire of her rescuer and the red and yellow crest upon his blue bodysuit. Were they filming a movie? Where were the cameras?
"It's Superman! He's real!" People were yelling and screaming trying to examine the incredible special effects.
"It's Christopher Reeve! I thought he was dead!"
"No, it's Dean Cain!"
"How'd he fly? I don't see any wires!"
"Forget Orlando Bloom, I want his autograph!"
"Ma'am?" The man of steel turned to Sondra. "Are you okay now? I can take you to a hospital."
Sondra just barely shook her head. Superman looked to his throng of admirers and autograph seekers and just grinned embarrassingly at the attention. People were running to meet him and were trying to touch him. One lady lifted up his cape to look underneath for the wires that carried him, but he just gently suggested everyone back away from him. He turned his head up and once again took to the skies up over the hundreds of people still rushing to say hello to him. Sondra's blue eyes turned skyward as the flying hero became a speck in the distance over Miami.
Several hours later and across the country, throngs of people rioted in the Seattle streets. No one knew why or how it had started, but parents ran carrying their children and storeowners fought to gate up their stores. Glass shattered up and down the market way as looters made the incident worse to get what they could. Two police officers remained trapped in their car as throngs of figures tried to overturn them. The ocean of humanity went on forever around them. They had a report that there was a department store burning on the corner and a restraunt under fire. Police cars came from eight blocks away to secure the police.
"National Guard!" Officer Chris Wright hid behind a burning van as he avoided get shot by gang members. "We need the National Guard!" A crying child distracted him as he shifted his gaze from his shooters. Where was she? He turned away and shot again at the punks representing absence of respect for authority. A lethal lit cocktail of burning gasoline in a bottle flew over Wright's head and he scrambled to new cover. The family drugstore that had once been behind him suddenly ceased to exist.
"Return to your homes!" A bullhorn atop a patrol car blared out and was suddenly hit by trash and bullets. Officers were chasing looters and teens with guns. An African-American girl being pinned down to be handcuffed by officers was kicking and swearing. Her best friend cracked a glass bottle over the helmet of an officer.
The sky suddenly cracked open and a torrent of cold piercing rain started hitting the earth. A lightning bolt streaked across the sky while protesting criminals were deserted by their partners in terror. The officers barricaded in their patrol car watched relieved through rain-covered windows as protestors fled from the weather. Hordes of rioters fled for cover as Chris Wright rejoined his partners. Thunder cracked again as the cold wet weather washed away the temperament of a couple hundred bad-tempered civilians.
"I thought we were going to have ten days of clear sky." Officer Ben Moody looked to Chris.
"Look!" Chris pointed heavenward to the Viking-figure being pulled through the air by his hammer. Ben flashed upon images of comic book characters and thought the massive leather and red-caped shape resembled the Odinson known as Thor, but that was impossible. His buddies had seen it too.
"We didn't see that." Captain Matt Pierce answered from his rain-streaked lips.
It was also night in Chicago, but it wasn't raining as five blue and white patrol cars raced after Victor Manuel Rodriguez. Wanted in five states for trafficking illegal drugs, Rodriguez and his four compatriots continued to show their distaste for normal people and normal life by smashing through cars at stoplights, driving over the sidewalk without regard to the people in his way and shooting point blank at the police cars trying to get around him. He had dumped his cargo five miles back and had left seventeen people crippled or dead in his death race from the law. He was not going to jail nor was he giving himself up. He was willing to do what it took to escape.
Coming up on another red light, he was suddenly awash in truck lights and smashed broadside over fifty feet. Two of his guys were killed outright in the car crash. Grabbing his bag of cash and his Uzi, Rodriguez started firing his clip into the police and fled on foot toward the stores. Rather than holing up where he could be caught, he charged down the side toward empty alleyways and met someone else instead. Opening fire on the female shape, the clips from his rapidly emptying Uzi deflected back upon him; the strikes of light off silver bracelets revealed a dark-haired Nicole Kidman clone in a gold and star-spangled bustier. She was more built and spectacular than the blonde actress she resembled and his bullets weren't stopping her rapidly moving arms.
Officers converged on the alley and took their places ready to enter the alley as Rodriguez was spit out from the darkness without his gun. Striking the windshield hard of a stopped patrol car, he looked as if something had knocked the life out of him. Officers Garrett and Dodson looked into the alley simultaneously as a bent Uzi hit the ground. When they looked up to see where it had come from, they noticed a brief glance of the impressively endowed brunette in the gold and American bustier vanishing up and over the rooftops.
"That's it!" Dodson told his partner. "No more comic books in the squad car!"
In Las Vegas, Nevada, brunette and attractive Monica Uchtman clutched her purse as she finished her last shift at the Golden Nugget Restraunt. Her heels scuffed the sidewalk as she waved goodbye to her friends and then continued on her way across the parking lot next door. Out of her eyesight, three figures rushed to her side of the street to come up behind her. They grinned amongst themselves and shared non-spoken looks of male fondness for this seeming goddess before them, but instead of treating her as a person, they elected to control her. In their mind, it was Monica's fault for the way her ample bosom bounced within her tight sweater or how her skirt framed her butt.
A brief shriek came from her lips when they dragged her. They didn't care for her purse; it landed where she dropped it. A hand clamped down on her small lips and her brown eyes rounded with sheer terror. It was happening too fast. Who was attacking her? How many were there? She felt herself dragged backward from the parking lot to the litter-strewn alley next to the liquor store and then her back hitting the side of the condemned warehouse. As she could see were those eyes staring into her and raping her mentally and physically. She felt hands pulling at her skirt and underwear. Tears poured from her eyes hoping for compassion, but her attacker couldn't be counted as human. No normal human being treated another person like his. His Hispanic eyes were angry, furious and animalistic. Nothing that could possibly be considered human existed there. His partners held Monica to the cold ground. Her breath fought for oxygen from her heaving chest. Her favorite brown sweater was being ripped from her body with her bra as Monica closed her eyes in shame. She didn't want to die like this. Would anyone know where she was? She closed off as many of her senses off from the attack and waited for it to end. Just let it end. The groping then stopped and so did the sensation of weight atop her. There was the sound of something slicing the air around her as Monica opened her eyes.
Twenty feet off the ground in the light of the streetlights was a vast spider-web. It stretched the full scope of the streetlights twenty feet apart to the corners of the two buildings perpendicular to them. Her attacker was hung upside down with his pants still down. His partners in the hobby of criminal and inhuman behavior were stuck to the long thin threads along with him. Traffic was stopping and gawking to look at the sight while another handful of witnesses looked, stared and pointed hysterically delirious and overjoyed to the sky toward the red and blue figure swinging up above the lights of the Marriott Hotel on the Strip. People were screaming the same name.
"Spiderman! It's Spiderman." They yelled. "He's real!"
The stress was too much for Monica and she keeled backward onto the sidewalk with pedestrians running to help her. When she opened her eyes again, a paramedic was loading her into the back of an ambulance. Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle from the crime lab were with her to take care of her. An electrical truck lifted police officers to cut down the three rapists.
"Greg," Gil Grissom was leading the research on the illegal creation covering the air above the traffic. "I want samples of that web to the lab ASAP. I want to know what it is and who made it?"
"Isn't it obvious!" Greg was just as excited as the witnesses telling the same story. "It's Spiderman!"
Gil just made a non-impressed look of authority to remind him he was not as excited as the comic book fans around him. His childhood excitement momentarily stifled, Greg turned to scrape some web off the light pole and stuff it into a plastic container. Behind him, Warrick Brown came under and around the crime tape around the entrance alley. His hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket, he was trying to refrain from grinning as the city went crazy with more Spiderman sightings.
"Catherine and Sara took the vic to the hospital." He revealed as police fenced off curious by-standers and screaming reporters. "They think she's in shock, but she should be okay. You remember Monica from the…"
"Yes, I do remember her." Grissom lifted his head up reflecting on Monica's resemblance to a felon he once knew. "Anything else?"
"There's a guy who wants to talk to you about this case." Warrick smirked a bit.
"Let me guess?" Grissom grinned abashedly himself. "Peter Parker? Clark Kent? Stan Lee?"
Warrick just sighed and stepped out of Grissom's line of sight toward the brunette haired male figure in the dark blue suit and white shirt. The would-be informant didn't wear a nameplate or a tie, but Grissom knew who he was.
"Mr. Grissom." FBI Agent Fox Mulder pressed his hand forward to shake hands. "We meet again…"
"Of all the people in all the world, he just had to return to mine." Grissom tilted his head quite intrigued toward Warrick.