Chapter 1

The sky above New York was pitch black, pierced only by the gentle silver of stars. On the ground below, cars, their headlights little more than sparks from the high buildings, made their way from place to place. The occasional screech of brakes echoed up from below; a careless pedestrian stepping out in front of a car, or perhaps someone pulling out on a red light. From the Chrysler Building, Spiderman couldn't tell. He didn't particularly want to know, either. He was cold, tired, and in pain. His last confrontation with Venom and the Sandman was to blame. Rain came down in a grey drizzle, making his brilliantly bright blue and red suit become damp and weigh down on his shoulders. It did nothing to improve his mood.

It'd been a day since his final confrontation with Venom. And already he was back on the job. There was no rest for Spiderman. Not now, and not ever.

Standing up, Spiderman stretched, his suit's black web-lines stretching. He looked through his white eye-pieces, spying a tall building off to his right that he could swing from.

Spiderman bent his knees, and then jumped to the right. He sailed twenty metres into the air, his powers of agility pushing him forward, and began to fall with a graceful spin. He waited, and then extended his right hand. His two middle fingers made a half-fist, and he extended his index, his thumb, and his issmall finger. Suddenly, with a whack, a thin line of silver webbing shot from his wrist, shooting out and connecting with the tall building he'd noticed earlier. He gripped the web-line, and swung around the building, releasing the line and landing gracefully on the side of another skyscraper. His hands and feet stuck to the steel wall without resistance, and he climbed up at rapid speeds as if he was crawling across a level floor.

The blue flash of police lights glowed outside the window, casting a harsh light in the dark laboratory. Cletus Cassidy, a renowned serial killer, stumbled through the dark lab, knocking over test-tubes and stumbling over desks. Glass cabinets rimmed the walls of the large laboratory, containing vials and jars of varied substances. Cassidy knew that the police would get him this time; there was no escape.

Running a hand through his sweat-dampened brown hair, Cassidy stumbled towards the lab door. He grabbed a small wooden stool from under a desk, and walked up to the wooden door. He quickly jammed the stool between the door handle and floor. That'll hold them for a while, he thought, smiling a little in relief. He slid a hand into the inside of his black, waterproof jacket and felt the comfortingly cool metal trigger-guard of his pistol. The pistol was average sized, and jet-black. It fitted snugly into Cletus's small, grimy hands. The magazine in the gun had originally carried sixteen nine millimetre rounds, but now it carried just ten.

In a cocaine-induced frenzy in the middle of Fifth Avenue, Cassidy had pulled his gun on a woman, a pregnant woman, and shot her in the head. He'd shot another two men who'd witnessed his crime, and ran. He'd stumbled through the streets of New York, pushing aside cold and weary bystanders, and shooting yet another due of people; one woman, and a child who couldn't have even been six. He'd then shot a police officer who'd tried to confront him just before he'd arrived at New York University, and broke into a laboratory inside.

Cassidy grinned manically and licked his thin, white lips. He'd gotten quite a buzz from killing the police officer, and he had no remorse for any of his other victims; Cassidy was psychotic, and he knew it. Cassidy had killed his own grandmother when he was five by pushing her down the stairs, and he still had fond recollections of that day.

All people die… Cassidy thought. I just help them along the way.

Suddenly, without warning, a crack sounded up from outside of the laboratory. One of the wide windows that occupied the rear wall of the room suddenly shattered, sending small shards of glass shooting in all directions as a bullet, fired form a police man five stories below and a few hundred metres away, shattered a window. Cassidy screamed in horror as he felt the white-hot bullet graze his left shoulder. He toppled back, the bullet just scratching his skin with its glancing hit. But Cassidy screamed anyway; it was like his shoulder had been hit by a whip.

Stumbling backwards, Cassidy tripped over his own feet. His arms wind-milled as he fruitlessly tried to regain his balance, and he toppled backwards, smashing into one of the glass cabinets at the front of the room. The glass shattered, piercing small wounds all over Cassidy's body. He knocked over many vials, and they shattered on the floor, sending multi-coloured liquid splashing across the lab's pristine white floor. One jar, contained a black, semi-liquid substance that seemed to pulsate, shattered near Cassidy's foot.

Cassidy picked himself up from the cabinet wincing and pulling out shards of glass from his back.

He straightened up, just as the sudden bang of a shoulder ramming a door echoed through the room. The police were coming into the room! Cassidy, suddenly giddy, laughed; he would kill as many of the police as possible before surrendering.

Cassidy slowly slid his P99 from its concealed holster, and levelled it at the door. He fired a shot, waited another five seconds, and fired another shot through the door. He continued with the pattern until he'd used every single one of his rounds.

Well. Looks like I'll have to threaten a lot of lawyers to get out of jail this time, Cassidy thought, with just a pang of disappointment.

It was then that he felt a sudden pain on his right leg, where one of the shards of glass hit cut, just below his knee. Looking down on reflex, Cassidy's face twisted in shock, fear, and revulsion.

The black, pulsating mass in the jar that he'd shattered had seemingly expanded and grown. It was now slithering its way up Cassidy's leg; it'd already engulfed both of Cassidy's feet, and was moving up both of his legs. The pain had been the black mass sliding into one of his cuts.

Screaming, Cassidy threw his gun into the pulsating mass. The black goo merely solidified a part of its mass, and the gun bounded off its suddenly hard surface. The goo resumed its climb up Cassidy, engulfing the serial-killer up to his scrawny thighs.

Cassidy had seen enough horror B-movies as a slightly deranged child to imagine that this stuff might be some sort of self-replicating life-form attempting to assimilate all life into itself. Of course, Cassidy was wrong. What was absorbing him was much, much worse.

He was being absorbed by a symbiote.

Cassidy screamed and reached down to tear the gooey substance from himself as it reached his abdomen. The goo merely started to slide up Cassidy's flailing arms, and the pain of the substance flowing into Cassidy multiplied tenfold as it slid into the hundreds of tiny glass-cuts on Cassidy's thin arms.

Cassidy screamed a final time as the glossy black substance finally reached his neck, rising up to flow into his mouth, up his nose, into his eyes, and through his ears, until, eventually, the entire black goo had consumed Cassidy.

Suddenly, Cassidy's body-shape became easy to make out. It writhed horribly, but the black goo had solidified to form a sort of muscled body suit that seemed to be mainly solid, but part liquid. Suddenly, Cassidy's mouth reappeared, but it sported a long row of fangs instead of teeth, and a curling black tongue.

His eyes also reappeared, but they had at least quadrupled in size, and were now spherical, and purely white. His nose also appeared in the form of two slits.

And then, finally, the bodysuit turned a mottled mixture of red and black, run through with what looked like red and black webbing, not unlike the black web pattern on Spiderman's costume.

Suddenly, Cassidy, or perhaps just the living being that had enveloped him, allowed his mouth to break into a psychotic and terrifying grin that revealed the gleaming white fangs in the mouth of the creature… Carnage had been born.