CHAPTER 3

It was Rebecca's lunch break. Rebecca termed to herself that her lunch break was the time when she wanted to relax, talk with her workmates and generally let herself go for sixty minutes of her eight-hour working day. It was a warm day, and she was quite enjoying the air in the comfortable outside atmosphere of the Café Puerzo just down the road from her work place. Chicken Fajita in hand, she was having a well-earned chuckle with her friends, an eager contrast to the quite serious work she was often engaged in.
"The way I see it" Rebecca said, running a hand through her soft brown hair "Ed's really got to loosen up; I know he works as hard as the rest of us, but he can't snap at us like that"
"Come on 'Becca" Michelle, the milk chocolate skinned beauty sitting opposite Rebecca and grinning like a wild-child "You know he's just doing his job, hell we all are"
"Yeah, but he doesn't need to put the boot in" Rebecca replied, at a near grunt "You're just saying that because you've got the hots for the guy"
"Now that is bullshit" Michelle replied, with a chuckle.
"If I was you then, I'd watch what you say around other people-"
Rebecca trailed off as she realised Michelle was no longer listening to her. Michelle was staring into the distance behind her in a slightly wide- eyed and bewildered way. Rebecca leaned towards her, waving a hand in front of her friend's face.
"Uh...Michelle...?" she said.
"Turn around, Becca" Michelle replied calmly.
Rebecca did. What Rebecca saw was unbelievable; not simply because the two figures swinging between buildings on strands of spider-web were doing exactly that, but also because Rebecca had a feeling that she knew who it was who was doing it.
"Oh...shit." She breathed.

The air tore into Leon's face as he swung at high speed across from one building to the next; unleashing webbing to give him another point to swing from, and then changing direction rapidly as he did so. The ground surged beneath him at a frightening pace, one which was intensifying what with Claire to his left chuckling and whooping in her determination to finish the race. Neither of them were particularly good web-slingers; their movements were both still quite jerky, and their swing often had something to be desired. Yet, from Leon's perspective, they were actually doing it.
Leon didn't know what gift it was he'd been given, and what it was yet. One thing for sure however, he was glad as hell that they had got it. Claire and himself were different from everyone else; human-spiders. Their swinging continued; towers of shimmering glass sweeping past as the two battled for dominance. Then, Claire, who had apparently been thinking, asked a very pertinent question.
"Leon!" Claire yelled "How do we stop?!"
"We...uh...!"
Leon didn't know. The problem was that he didn't want to stop where he was because he was some fifty feet from the ground, and also that if he did stop then somebody might decide calling the press would be a good idea. As fun as their discovery was, having the media crawling all over two of Umbrella Inc.'s prime targets wouldn't make it too difficult for Umbrella to make the spider virus connection to a certain pair of care-free skyscraper joyriders. Leon swung around a corner, followed by Claire.
"I don't know, um...improvise!" he called back.
"Oh, that's really helpful!" Claire retorted. There was a batch of warehouses ahead near the dock, all of which looked like very tempting hiding places for the time being. The buildings were quite old, and looked like nobody had been particularly bothered to clean the rust and decay off of them for quite some time. Their signs were in faded red, and whoever it was whose logo was currently faintly stencilled on their signs were clearly long lost in the mists of bankruptcy.
Leon adjusted his swing so that he came in lower, and aimed for the roof of the... "SHIT!" he exclaimed, as his flailing feet met the roof and sent him tumbling spectacularly along its surface, before coming to rest in a slightly bruised heap by a hatch in the roof. Claire swung overhead, smiling broadly. "Nice landing! Remind me not to-" "Claire, there's a huge-" There was the sound of something solid meeting something else that was quite solid too. ".... Sign" Leon finished, wincing as Claire slid down the enormous billboard ad and collapsed in the roof-surface in front of him like an undercooked wedge of pasta. "Ow" Claire complained as she stood up, shakily. "Nice landing" he smirked. Claire gave him a sour look, and stretched her aching back. "Ouch...come on, let's get out of here." There was the sound of siren wails in the distance that sounded as if they could just be possibly getting closer. "And I'd say we move quickly" Leon added.

"YOU...MORONS!!" Seeing Rebecca angry wasn't something Claire thought she'd ever see, but god knows, somehow it had finally happened. Chris and Jill had arrived home a minute or two ago to the raging inferno that was now Rebecca venting her wrath on the slightly bruised pair. Leon and Claire lay back in the sofa in the sitting room as Rebecca paced up and down, face bright red as she emphasized just how unbelievably angry she was. It was maybe two hours later, and the buzz that had been going around about the 'real spiderman' had quickly died as nobody saw who'd done it. Some extreme stuntmen took responsibility for the 'stunt', they would read in the next day's paper, but for now that apocryphal news story was of no importance. It was warm inside, and it was getting hotter and hotter as Rebecca yelled. "Didn't you know better?! Of all the...stupid things to do you went and did that?! What in gods name possessed you to go swinging around the rooftops like Tarzan lord of the apes?!"
Leon and Claire exchanged guilty glances.
"We just wanted to have some fun" Claire mumbled.
Rebecca's look could have killed a wildebeest at close range.
"Some fun. You two have undergone genetic mutations unlike any the world has ever seen, and you felt like flaunting them for all the world to see? Have you forgotten what we're doing? And why we don't want to attract too much attention?"
"Rebecca, we're well aware of that" Leon said, a little sharply "But it's me and Claire who've mutated, me and Claire alone. You don't understand what it's like."
Rebecca's mouth hung open as Claire fired a barrage too.
"We're not your pet science experiments Rebecca, we're as human as the rest of the people in this city. It's...an unbelievable feeling..." Claire trailed off, staring at her hands.
At this inappropriate juncture, Chris strolled in, cigarette unlit. He stared at Leon and Claire, eyes narrowing. It was clear that Chris too was unimpressed with their adrenaline-fuelled webslinging the day before.
"Oh. The spiders are in the glass tank again" he remarked sarcastically "Nice going guys, nearly blowing our cover and all that"
"Oh for crying out loud-" Claire protested, tired of being constantly berated by everyone else "It was a one off! An experiment!"
Chris shook his head at his little sister, and sighed wonderingly.
"I'd have thought you'd knew better than that."
Leon was about to argue with him, when Jill casually walked in, a sour expression on her face, and dropped the final nuke.
"I don't think we can even trust you being out of the house; your new 'powers' seem to have gone to your head."
Leon turned to Jill like a schoolboy who'd just been grounded, and said
"What? You're going to make us stay in the damned house? Until what?"
"Until you both learn some self control" she said coldly "It's difficult enough what with you being...different now."
Different now. Leon sank back into the sofa, his hearing going dead as the figures raged at him and Claire. Different. Now. Those words seemed to echo in Leon's suddenly cavernous brain, bouncing off its internal walls and reverberating infinitely. They were different. All of a sudden, Leon was aware of what that meant. They weren't the same anymore. To Jill, Chris and Rebecca, they weren't the same people anymore. They were....different now. Underneath their anger, their scowls and icy remarks, Leon felt a tingle in that secretive seventh sense he'd been gifted with – fear. The others were scared of them, scared of what they had become. Leon looked at Claire, she looked right back; her beautiful eyes glimmered with fear.
We're different now.

"Different now" Leon said, shaking his head as Claire flopped onto the bed beside him, both having retreated to Claire's double bed just to escape the angry glares of the rest of the house. Even Sherry, usually so sparky in her nature was looking considerably more timid around them.
"I don't understand" Claire whispered, huddling up beside Leon "Chris treated me like a stranger. Why was he so cold?"
"Because they don't understand" Leon replied, simply "They don't understand us. We're different from them, you see?"
"But..." Claire chewed her lip, fingering the cross around her neck as her grey T-Shirt heaved over a body that Leon couldn't help but stare at momentarily "...We're still the same people!"
"To them we're..." Leon waved his hands "I don't know. Not-human."
Leon had also dressed down, wearing a black baseball shirt and jeans as he lay beside Claire. He felt a shiver of surprise and mild pleasure as she tightened her grip on his arm.
"We're freaks." She whispered, voice cracking "Freaks."
As Claire began to cry, Leon held her close to his chest. He felt the tears soak his shirt, and stared out of the window into the sun-drenched neighbourhood; men, women and children...none of them like Leon and Claire were. He had never felt so alone.
He looked at Claire, and breathed in the gently perfumed scent of her soft auburn hair.
Not totally alone though...