AN: If anyone can guess where the Breadmaster is originally from, I will be hella impressed. Nobody LAWLs at the good oldies anymore. You kids today and your Invader Zim . . . !
Not baked goods, professor. Baked BADS!
Also, RLH is an extremely plot-driven story, and the story itself really isn't about sex, but there may be a scene or two here or there. Nothing too explicit, but you've been warned.
TIMELINE: This story takes place right after the events in Ultimate Spider-man Compilation #2 ("Double Trouble"), and before #3 ("Public Scrutiny"). However, liberties are occasionally taken.
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN: RUN LIKE HELL
CHAPTER ONE
I see a lot of things.
Weird things, to put it mildly.
Sometimes, I fancy that if people weren't too busy throwing empty bottles at me whenever I swing by, or generally blaming me for everything from flat tires to the hole in the ozone layer, people might say to me, Spidey, what is the weirdest thing you have ever seen?
Good question.
Because, I mean, how would you decide? Is a midget in an eight-foot tall mechanical rhinocerous get-up stranger than, say, a guy who runs around in purple insulated clothes with little vibrating pulse units strapped to his hands? Seriously. I want to know. I'll need to have some sort of scale when I'm in therapy three years from now.
But right this second?
That guy right down there on the corner. He's like, fourty. And he's throwing loaves of bread at people. I swear, some days Jersey looks good.
But hey, other than that, it's a beautiful day in downtown Manhattan, so for once everybody at the office is in a good mood. Including yours truly, of course, but I got to experience the crisp, fall day from an entirely different angle. Did you know the Queensboro Bridge is beautiful in the fall in the late afternoon? Especially when you see it from thirty feet in the air while you're zipping past, all that orange and gold sunlight is running along the beams. The air is starting to get a bit of a bite to it – I don't care what the weatherman says, he's not the one running around in tights – but so far it's just enough to make me appreciate the way it gets my heart pumping, and believe me, it's harder than you'd think to keep your head clear when you're flipping around so much.
It would have been even better without the added distraction of my new bakery buddy down there, because I was very nearly on time for work for once. I'm sure that's not such a big deal for some people, but some people don't have to react to gunfire on their way to work by ducking into an alley to strip down to their spandex, okay?
This whole web-swinging thing is still a little new to me, and when I drop down behind him on the sidewalk, I get that funny little swooping feeling in the pit of my belly that's not entirely unpleasant. He doesn't even notice me right away, of course. To be fair, he's a lot more focused on the police cruisers that have the intersection blocked off. I can sympathise with that – a gun in your face is pretty riveting.
"Cretins!" he yells, flinging a handful of buns that actually look pretty tasty – hey, I missed lunch, okay? -- but explode in mid-air like a series of little firecrackers. "Philistines! How dare you?! How dare you smugly masticate on your Wonderbread when it barely qualifies as 'bread' at all?! Such an affront to all that is yeasty!"
It's at this point that I start to seriously wonder if I'm hallucinating. I can't believe that this is my life now.
"Uh." Okay, so it's not much of a snappy entrance line, but really, how do you follow something like that?
In any case, he either doesn't hear or ignores me. He's hefting a loaf of brown bread now, and it's . . . ticking? "I will not cease until my demands are met and the people of this city stop worshipping false bread idols! Nothing more than stupid consumer cows ignorant of quality!"
There's a click from across the street, and then the obnoxiously loud, fuzzy, slightly distorted sound of someone speaking into a bullhorn. "Sir, put the bread down. Nobody has to get hurt. Let's talk about this."
My head swims a little. Maybe I really am hallucinating. I can't help but wonder if maybe I'm lying drooling happily in a hospital bed somewhere, maybe after Doctor-freaking-Octopus clocked me a good one upside the head.
Some days, days like today, I almost think I wouldn't mind.
He still hasn't seen me, and now he's got his arm cocked back to throw. The cops across the street have finally noticed me, and I see them start to point, their jaws gaping.
Great. I can't wait to see how this looks in the Daily Bugle tomorrow.
Thwip
The strand of webbing flies just where I want it – I'm getting a lot better at this – and my new bread friend squawks as the entire gooey mess thwaps against his hand, encasing it in a silvery, gleaming mass of web. He spins around, finally noticing me, and his mouth drops open in a perfect o of surprise that is almost prissy.
"Hey, I hate to interrupt your really great expository exchange with the police here – which isn't lame at all by the way – but I was thinking maybe I'd web your mouth shut and drop you in the back of that cruiser over there." I pause, giving him a moment when he only goggles at me. " . . . yes? No? Come on, work with me. I know it's hard when you're new, getting into the swing of things, but the banter is one of the first skills you need to pick up."
Click. "Spider-Man! Step away from the suspect and put your hands above your head!"
Wow. Less than two minutes. That's got to be a record for me. Usually I don't start getting blamed until after all the hard work is done.
"Are you kidding me?" I say, holding my hands up at waist-level regardless; it's not smart to antagonise the guys with the badges. After all, I was bitten by a spider, not a kevlar vest. "Guys, this . . . this relationship really isn't working out for me. Where's the trust?"
Click. "Stay where you are and don't make any sudden movements . . . hey!"
"What?" I reply, raising my hands a little more. "This isn't sudden. This is very slow, deliberate backing out of range. Seriously, guys, come on -- "
BANG.
I don't know if you've ever had a firecracker go off next to your ear before. Even the really small ones can be loud enough to be physically painful that close. Not to mention the ringing ears and the nausea that follows.
That's what this was like. Only . . . yeastier.
Great. I'd forgotten about him.
I don't know what the Breadmaster over there threw at me, but the next instant I'm flying through the air, my head suddenly feeling like it's packed with cotton. There's not much pain, but for a moment I can't catch my breath, and it's a small miracle that I miss the corner of the brick building behind me and thud relatively harmlessly to the sidewalk.
As I roll over onto my hands and knees, coughing a little and rubbing at my chest,which is starting up with a nice, dull throb that'll probably last all night, I realise the other superheroes will probably never let me live this one done. Get your ass kicked by Doctor Doom? Hey, no sweat, pal, happens to everyone. Some guy with a loaf of bread? Yeah, right.
The back of my neck suddenly begins to crawl, and I react without thinking, my legs bunching beneath me briefly, then springing almost straight up into the air. Another explosion, bigger this time, buffets my poor ear drums, and the shock wave pushing up from beneath me sends me into a mid-air somersault. The world spins around me, and below I can see the crowd that had gathered scatter like spooked geese.
And there's a donut flying at my face.
Granted, people tend to throw a lot of crap at me, but I'm not taking any chances. I fire off a web-line to the left, hear it smack against the side of a building, and yank, hard, with both hands. I have a moment of giddy exhilaration as I spring forward like an elastic band, feeling almost boneless, before I let go and drop to the ground.
Up above, the donut explodes, so I guess that's something. At least I wasn't running from a Krispy Kreme.
The Breadmaster is fumbling in a bulging sack slung on a stap over his shoulder, indignantly waving his webbed hand in the air like a bad air traffic controller. The first web I throw hits the other hand as it comes out of the sack, no doubt carrying something equally humiliating. And, as he turns to face me, the next web hits him right in the face.
"Geez! Settle down, Pillsbury." I cross the distance between us in two short leaps, fist cocked . . . and pause. The guy is sort of tottering around in a circle, shrieking with anger, arms pinwheeling and head wagging blindly from side to side, completely helpless. I look back over my shoulder.
There are still some people watching, peering over the hoods of cars and lining the far side of the street. One woman meets my gaze, and when her eyes flick from my still-upraised fist to the flailing guy beside me, she actually looks a little reproachful.
"Well, great." I mutter, dropping my hand with a sigh. "Now I'm a bully, too."
Click. Uh oh. "Spider-Man! Remain where you are!"
My head snaps around to see that, with the threat of bready annihilation disarmed, the police are now moving swiftly foreward. I like to think I catch on pretty quick to things, but also that I'm a good judge of character. I think I can read people pretty well.
Right now, their faces say JAIL.
"Sorry, what was that?" I say, snapping off a web to the opposite building, ignoring their shouts as I use it to propel myself upward. " 'Go on about your business and away from our handcuffs'? Wow, well, if you insist."
I don't actually go far – just up and over the few closest buildings to get me out of sight so I'm not tracked on my way to the Bugle. I stop for a moment on top of a post office, pulling up the top part of my costume from the waist to check the damage.
Turns out, exploding bread? Actually pretty dangerous. I grimace a little as I gently press the edges of a large, angry red welt in the middle of my chest that's starting to turn a pretty impressive mottled purple. I've got to admit, I was lucky. I really need to stop underestimating people, I know I do. A foot higher, and that stupid bread bomb might have broken my neck like a twig when it went off.
Sighing, I tuck my shirt back in. I'll have to come up with something more impressive when I tell Mary Jane how I got this particular little badge of glory.
And now I have crumbs in my underpants and I'm late for work. Great.
I hope Mary-Jane is having a better evening than I am.
School is a bitch.
Mary-Jane knows she's hardly a rebel for thinking it, but it's true. The sun has already gone down by the time she admits defeat in the school library; she can see the darkened football field from the hall windows, the sky threatening rain, as she stops at her locker to pick up her hoodie. She has to groan a little at the loss of yet another afternoon of freedom, but her history teacher has made it pretty clear that she needs to pull in at least a B on her next exam.
I'm sorry, ma'am, I've been a little distracted lately, what with my boyfriend being a superhero and all. Why, just last week, I didn't hand in my homework because I was up late worried some guy with metal tenatcles and a bowl cut was going to pop Pete's head like a grape. Can I please have an extension?
Yeah. Great.
The school is mostly empty by now, although she can hear the soft,wet sound of the janitor's mop coming from the art room as she passes by, along with the tinny, faint sound of somebody's portable radio. Her sneakers squeak on the freshly washed floor, and somewhere a door slams.
She wishes Peter didn't have to work tonight, not when she really wants to just unwind and let her poor, overworked brain try to relax, even if it is probably too late anyway for Aunt May to let him out of the house otherwise. Mary Jane thinks briefly of calling up Liz – it is a Friday – and suggesting they rent something stupid and see about putting themselves in a sugar coma for the rest of the evening. Certainly not dignified, but very satisfying.
Humming to herself, she pushes open the main doors and steps outside into the cool night air. She's about to head down the pathway and go for home when she hears the noise.
Pausing, Mary Jane stands in the circle of illumination spilling from the school's doors, twisting around uncertainly. Noise is really all that describes it, because her mind can't put any real specific source to the short, sharp sound that she's just heard. She waits a moment, but it doesn't repeat itself.
Ahead, the street lamps come on with a chk-vmm of circuits firing that Mary Jane notices only subconsciously in the way that everyone is aware of electricity.
She takes another step towards the street, then stops again, something nagging. Without thinking why, she walks into the nearby parking lot, moving slowly forward into the rows of cars belonging to faculty and maintainence crew workers pulling a late night. Overhead, the sky rumbles with a sound like faraway boulders rolling together, and a drop of rain strikes the side of her face.
Grimacing, she rubs at her cheek, shivering a little as the wind picks up. What're you doing, dummy? Investigating noises? I'm sorry, are you part of the Scooby Gang now? It's going to rain. Go home and eat candy until you forget who invented the cotton gin.
Sure. That sounds great right about now.
Except . . . if she's really honest with herself, that wasn't just a noise. In fact, didn't it maybe sound a little more . . . like . . .
. . . a scream?
She freezes for a moment at the idea . . . but only a moment, snorting a little at her own imagination and rolling her eyes with a smile. That's the problem with my generation, she thinks wryly, too much Jennifer Love Hewitt and Neve Campbell getting menaced by butcher knives. We start seeing oogy-boogies everywhere. Mom was right.
As she turns to go, however, she catches a moment out of the corner of her eye. At the other end of the parking lot, near the south entrance, a very human shadow moves languidly around, bending towards something on the ground.
Mary Jane opens her mouth to call out a greeting, but the words never make it past her lips. They die a slow, whispering death in her throat, and all that emerges is a low wheeze of air as her eyes widen slightly.
The hair on the back of her neck is standing up.
Something is wrong.
She isn't sure why, but she suddenly feels terribly exposed, and her heart is racing in her breast. Her grip has tightened on her backpack's shoulder straps, and for a moment it's like she's turned to stone. She doesn't move. She doesn't blink. She barely even breathes.
She's always wondered what it would be like to have Peter's spider-sense, that little tingle he's described whenever something is wrong. She knows it's saved his life at least once or twice. And, admittedly, even with the more fantastic aspects of his life, sometimes she's wondered if, in part, it isn't more good old basic instinct. Intuition, maybe.
Whatever the case, right now her own Spidey Sense is tingling. No, if she's truthful about it to herself, it's jangling, a deafening cacophony of sudden nerves and instinct in her brain that makes her catch her breath. She thinks, distantly, that this is how a rabbit in a field must feel when it sees a hawk's shadow pass over.
Without pausing to think why, Mary Jane drops to the ground onto her tummy and shuffles forward quickly on her elbows until she's beneath the nearest car. The movement is surprisingly graceful and nearly soundless, but she feels clumsy, stupid and slow, and to her ears she seems to be making far too much noise. Her clothing sounds like sandpaper abrading the pavement of the parking lot, the zippers on her backpack as she pulls it in behind her seem to be jangling abnormally loudly, and even her breathing seems to be at least as loud as a furnace bellows. She hopes the rain is enough to muffle any tell-tale sound.
The pavement is unnaturally cold. Immediately, the chill begins to leech it's way through her clothing with something akin to gleeful malevolence. Between one heartbeat and the next she's shivering, where previously the night had only seemed cool and refreshing with the rain. Her hands, clenched up at her sides, feel numb and stiff. Her breath rises before her frightened eyes like tiny ghosts in the dark, quivering on every exhalation.
For a long minute, nothing happens. The sky opens up a little more and the steady tattoo on the metal of the car Mary huddles under becomes one continual ssshhhhrrrrmmmm of sound, clear drops falling off the bumper to land in front of her face. Maybe she should feel foolish right about now, but instead she's shocked to find herself near tears. She gasps a little, blinking her eyes furiously in an attempt to keep them at bay, and makes a miserable, soft choking sound. God, she feels so small right now. So young. She hates herself for it, knows she should be trying to break out of that damned "Superhero's Girlfriend" stigma of needing to be rescued, but damnit, right now what she thinks of is Peter Parker dropping down on a line of webbing. Even more than Peter, she wants her mother right now, but she'd settle for anybody, anybody normal to break the unnatural, eerie spell that seems to have fallen over the evening.
A pair of dirty sneakers steps in front of the car.
Mary Jane squeezes her eyes shut, suppressing a low moan of fear, the skin on the back of her neck crawling, but when she opens them again, the shoes are still there. Maybe they were white once, but now they're dirty gray with mud and sodden with rainwater, the laces limp and untied like dead earthworms. She realises that she can hear them, too, whoever is out there. Whoever they are, they're breathing through their mouth; a horrible sort of chuffling, wet and short breaths that remind her of someone struggling with very bad congestion.
There is something smooth and hard clutched in her right fist and she awkwardly, breathlessly brings it up by her shoulder where she can turn her head enough to examine it without making any noise. It's her pencil, she's unsurprised to see, her favourite one, the one with the stupid little bird head over the eraser that Liz gave her a while back. The fluff of feathers is shocking pink, and the eyes are cartoonishly wide and goggled, but she doesn't care how stupid it looks. She's more interested in the point. Wondering if it's sharp enough . . . to . . .
Well. Sharp enough if it comes to that, anyway.
You're being ridiculous, some part of her brain is yammering away, someone is out there with a bad head cold looking for their car or something and you're hiding under one like you've been chased with a chainsaw.
A drop of blood falls to the pavement in front of her nose.
Mary-Jane's eyes are huge and unblinking, luminous in the gloom.
Another drop. A part of her brain notes how much brighter real blood is than the fake stuff they use in the movies.
A voice above her, low and breathy, but decidedly male.
"Alas . . . my love . . . you do me wrong . . . to cast . . . me off . . . dis-cour-teous-leeee . . . ." The feet in front of Mary-Jane shuffle slightly, turning to face the opposite direction. " . . . for I . . . have loved . . . you well . . . and long . . . delighting . . . in your . . . com-pan-eee . . ."
SPLAT.
Inside her head, Mary-Jane is screaming when the dark, wet something slaps wetly to the ground in front of her. Something darkly red that seems to shimmer and quiver in the faint light, perhaps about the size of her own fist.
Something she might have seen in an anatomy textbook somewhere, perhaps?
Go. Go NOW.
The thought doesn't even have time to finish as Mary-Jane is scrambling backwards, abraiding her palms painfully on the ground and not noticing. She's making too much noise, she knows, and the back of her hoodie catches on something on the underside of the car, forcing her to spend a few precious breaths jerking back and forth like an animal until she tears free. Then suddenly she's on her hands and knees in the rain, gasping, hair hanging in her face, and she senses rather than sees the dim shape of someone moving towards her around the front of the car.
She doesn't see their face, whoever they are. She's moving too fast, up and onto her feet almost like a sprinter breaking from the starting line, and then she's running down the line of parked cars, arms pumping at her sides, hood falling back and her hair streaming out behind her. She's always considered herself to be in fairly good shape, but then she's never had to do anything like this before, and she understands now with perfect, primal clarity that running for one's life is quite different than going out for track or making the bus.
For a few moments, she actually stops thinking, stops feeling, even the awkward thump of her backpack between her shoulder-blades and the edge of a book inside digging painfully into her spine. All she knows is the slap of her shoes on the ground, the increasingly harsh drag of air in and out of her lungs, the fingers of wind weaving through her hair. Her heart is racing, adrenaline speeding throughout her nerves and throwing everything around her into brilliant, crystal clarity. The parking lot entrance draws rapidly nearer in front of her, the brightly lit street beyond promising some sort of sanctuary, like throwing on the bedroom lights after a bad dream.
The toe of her right shoe thuds into something and she pitches forward.
The squawk of surprise and fear that leaps from her lips is more than a little undignified as she takes two huge, running steps forward to catch herself. For a moment she simply can't move; a stitch takes advantage of her momentary stillness to sieze her side like a terrier with a rat, and her thighs tremble with exertion. Reflexively, she risks a look backwards to see what she's tripped on.
Her jaw drops open, and it seems to her as though all the breath leaves her body in one great sigh. She can actually feel the colour drop out of her face. Her backpack slips from her suddenly slack hands to clump to the ground, forgotten.
The girl lying on the pavement with rainwater in her eyes and upturned palms isn't anyone Mary Jane knows, except maybe another face filling out the crowded school halls between classes. She doesn't recognise the cute upturned nose, or the bouncy black pigtails with their streaks of punkish pink, or the "Have a day" button pinned to her collar.
Mary Jane Watson has never seen a body before, and it leaves her empty and unfathomably cold inside.
There's red on the ground, a lot of it, washed into watery streaks by the rain and slithering towards the gutter in the road. Mary Jane doesn't want to look, doesn't want to see where it's all coming from, but her eyes drag themselves downward, away from the girl's face and towards her chest.
Mary Jane is six, and she's standing barefoot on the docks at the cabin her family vacationed in that summer. She's crying in great, whooping gasps while her father ignores her, on one knee on the wooden planks while he methodically guts the still-gasping fish he's just caught. The flash of the blade is very bright in the summer sun, and the white belly seems to simply unzip, supple flesh sighing back to reveal the glistening innards.
Mary Jane is gagging, her belly hitching painfully as she staggers backwards, but this isn't what brings her crashing back to reality.
The rain has tapered off, and footsteps are coming her way.
Her head snaps up and she stares back the way she came, heart hammering crazily enough that she thinks distantly that she might faint. There's a shape moving towards her along the rows of cars, pace slow and methodical, but coming steadily closer. Something metallic winks at her in the dark.
Stop standing around you stupid fucking bitch! Her mind suddenly screams at her. This voice is hard, take-no-bullshit-or-prisoners angry, and it hits her like being slapped across the face. Move your ass and RUN!
Gasping, Mary Jane turns on her heel and flees into the street, her breath whooping painfully in her lungs. Without even thinking, she's running towards the police station, more than three blocks away.
Behind her, in the dark, the footsteps continue their easy pace forward, even when she disappears down the street. Dirty sneakers plod up to the broken girl lying on the pavement, a few solitary rain drops still falling to jump in the puddles around her. For a minute, everything is quiet and still.
Then a hand reaches down to the discarded backpack lying next to the body. One of the zippers has come partially open, and a hard, laminated piece of plastic is poking out.
Student ID.
Mary Jane Watson's smiling face, her hair in plastic barretts.
Below that?
Her address.