Spiders have clear blood, blue when oxygenated. Not many know that, because there's usually so little to see, but now it was soaked into the sheets of crudely woven silk and dripped down into the dirt beneath a starless night in a barren world. Her children had managed to stop the bleeding. Two black, hairy stumps where her front legs should have been were wrapped in webbing. The pain had settled into a burning sensation, nothing next to the burning in her head.
SPIDER-MAN? The name tore across the minds of her children, who skittered and darted away from her. HE CALLS HIMSELF A MAN AT SIXTEEN? PARKER THINKS HE HAS THE RIGHT TO STEAL MY VICTORY, MY DELIVERENCE?
She stopped crawling, eyeing an enormous skeleton half-buried in dust. The rib cage curled up from an enormous, carapace-like slab of bone, and it was as big as she was. All at once she seized a rib in her pedipalps, clamped her mandibles around it, and snapped it in half with a sickening crack.
HE THINKS HE CAN DO AS HE LIKES JUST BECAUSE HIS NAME IS PETER PARKER! I LIVED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS BEFORE HE WAS BORN! Half the rib hurtled across the landscape and rolled to a stop. THAT WORLD IS MINE TO TAKE!
She paused for a moment.
PARKER SHALL PAY FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE. I CANNOT STRIKE HIM NOW, BUT I CAN BRING IN REINFORCEMENTS FROM OTHER WORLDS. PERHAPS I CAN CREATE MYSELF A BACK DOOR INTO THOSE WORLDS AS WELL...
Earth-H: Outskirts of Höllenfeur, Utah Territory—1885
"Energon! We've found the mother lode! Blackarachnia, Waspinator—get to work, you lazy bums!"
The two Predacons stared at their cohort.
"Tarantulas, it's two in the morning and we've been here for three days. You get to work." Blackarachnia snapped.
"Wazzpinator agrees! Would greatly enjoy seeing energon blow up in Tarantulas' face for change!"
The Predacon mad scientist twitched.
"Boss, what's going on?"
"Quiet, Blackarachnia! I'm detecting some kind of anomaly in time and space, and it's right above—"
Just then, a violet portal in the sky sucked up both Tarantulas and Blackarachnia.
"Oh slag! Wazzpinator is getting out of this!"
The hapless Predacon made it about a quarter-mile before he got sucked up.
Earth-SG; New York City, Present Day
"Arachnolord, come out with your hands up!"
From his lair above the streets, the Infamous Arachnolord watched as the police began to break down the door of his current base.
"Stacy, I'm going to kill you for this! Nobody betrays me and lives to tell about it—"
Just then, a violet portal sucked him up.
Earth-130115:
WELCOME TO MY DOMAIN, SPIDERS AND WASP.
Her new "guests" looked around their surroundings in shock.
"Who are you and what do you want?" Arachnolord snarled.
I HAVE NO NAME. AS FOR WHAT I WANT...YOUR ASSISTANCE IN THE COMING DAYS WILL SUFFICE.
"Wazzpinator not interested!" He had barely closed his mouth when a pedipalp descended like a bolt of lightning, and the ground just to the right of Waspinator shattered under the blow.
SILENCE! YOU WILL DO AS I SAY! MY CHILDREN AND I HAVE EATEN METAL BEFORE, YOU THINK WE ARE ABOVE DOING IT AGAIN?!
Waspinator reluctantly shook his head. "...No. I mean yezz, mizz. I mean-"
"Care to explain what's going on?" Blackarachnia asked.
BARRING THAT INCOMPETENT, FOUR-LEGGED EXCUSE FOR A WASP, YOU ARE ALL SPIDER-TOTEMS—ENTITIES CONNECTED TO THE WEB OF LIFE AND DESTINY. YOU NOW STAND IN THE REMAINS OF MY DOMAIN, AND A NEW ONE AWAITS JUST BEYOND THE BORDER BETWEEN WORLDS. She paused, staring down at the assembled company.
I WANT IT. I WILL HAVE IT. AND ALL THAT STANDS IN MY WAY IS THE SPIDER-TOTEM THAT HAS CLAIMED IT. It was that exact instant that another drop of bluish blood dripped into the ground before the Predicons, drawing their attention to the bandaged stumps. ELIMINATE HIM. TEAR HIS FLESH FROM HIS BONES AND SCATTER HIS BLOOD ACROSS THE OCEANS. DO THIS...AND YOU MAY SHARE WITH ME THIS NEW WORLD. WHAT DO YOU SAY?
Arachnolord scratched his chin in contemplation.
"Deal."
"Deal." Tarantulas added.
"Deal." Blackarachnia affirmed.
"Does Wazzpinator have any choice?"
Earth-61610:
"Looks like we've got an early riser here."
Teresa blinked, staring at the ceiling. She turned her head and saw Drake sitting next to her.
"How long have you been here?"
"As long as you have."
"Let me rephrase that. How long have you been sitting next to me?"
"Five, maybe ten minutes."
"Why?"
Drake sighed.
"You started thrashing in your sleep. Was it a nightmare or something?"
Teresa bit her lip.
"There was this giant spider. It—actually, I think it was a she. She was missing her front legs and she opened more of those portal things, like she was getting backup or something. There was an evil Spider-Man and a trio of robots— one of them was a wasp, but the other two were definitely spiders."
Drake tilted his head.
"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
"Maybe."
Teresa sighed.
"Well, time to see what's on the airwaves around here."
She grabbed a remote control and began to surf the channels.
"—Mad science and you—"
"—Particulate advisory is in effect for Boston, Providence, New Haven—"
"—No guts, no glory! No pain, no gain! One for—"
"—Slices, dices, and makes julienne fries—"
Teresa finally settled on what looked like the opening credits of a low-budget '80s action movie.
"Hyperbolic Vanguard Corps? Who comes up with names like that?" Drake asked upon seeing the title.
"It's mid-morning, I'm bored, and we've got nothing better to do. It's worth a watch." Teresa replied.
"Riiight. I'll just do something more productive. Would you kindly hand me that phone book?"
Teresa lifted the hefty tome off the floor and handed it to her cohort.
"What're you going to do with it?"
"I'm going to make a few calls. See if I can't find this universe's versions of us."
Teresa sighed again as she settled into the chair and watched as the film began.
"Good luck. You're going to need it."
An Hour Later
"Yes, I'm looking for a 'Drake Carter'. You found him? Put him through—"
"Hello, this is Drake Carter. Can I interest you in some aluminum siding?"
Drake hung up.
"Well, that answers that question." he muttered.
Teresa rolled her eyes, while Ollie was currently eating a chunk of French bread and a quarter of a block of cheese.
"So now what?" the former asked.
"Well, we're pretty much stuck here. Maybe we can see if we can stream or download a movie." Ollie suggested
Teresa fiddled with the remote, and soon the trio was staring at Specs's digital movie library.
"Doctor Faustus…The Physician's Apprentice…Invasion of the Zetans…The Queen of Crete- The Complete First Season…The Modern Prometheus—okay, I wasn't expecting to see Jurassic Park in this universe." she said.
"Must be one of those things that's constant throughout universes. It's like what that guy from Babylon 5 said about every race having its own version of Swedish meatballs."
Teresa and Ollie both shot Drake a confused look.
"It's a TV show—"
"We know what it is." Teresa and Ollie replied in unison.
The commute to the Flatiron Building took twenty minutes. He would've skipped the whole route and roof-hopped, but it felt good to spend some time outside of the costume and away from what came with it. Not that he was completely free once he swapped the tights and backpack for the longcoat and satchel—he found himself putting some distance between himself and other people, anxiety and a barely-there hum in the back of his head as he neared or passed them—but it was something he needed from time to time. Gwen had told him a while back that sometimes he had to go remind himself what normal was.
So he had walked. Taken the subway, too, although the unpleasant humming in his head insisted that that had been a bad idea. And now Specs leaned against the back wall of the elevator of the Daily Bugle building, hands in his pockets as he watched the number above the door slowly tick up to 21.
At last the cramped metal box dinged, and Specs was out the door before they had finished opening. Elevators. Another bad idea. He always forgot just how enclosed those things were, how little room he had to move and how easy it would be to become cornered in one, unable to escape. He was not, as he had repeatedly insisted to Gwen, claustrophobic. He just needed room to move, and not having it made him uncomfortable. Whatever. He dodged and wove through the chaos of the Daily Bugle offices on the balls of his feet, the tingling in his head rising and falling chaotically as he moved, and knocked smartly on the door labelled RITA CONWAY—EDITOR.
"Come in."
He did, removing his coat as he closed the door with his foot. Two women looked up at him—a thirty-five-year-old African American woman with her hair up sat behind the desk, and a girl of maybe seventeen leaned over it. She gave Specs a tight-lipped, deliberately condescending smile.
"Peter," said the older woman behind the desk, sweeping a finger across the touch screen embedded in it. "You're earlier than usual."
"Good morning, Ms. Conway," Specs replied, stepping forward and adjusting his satchel's strap. "Yeah, I managed to avoid the Bermuda Subway Station this time. Do you have any open assignments?"
"Assignments?" repeated the younger woman. "You've got some catching up to do, Parker."
Specs raised an eyebrow. "Catching up? To you, Julie? I didn't realize that progress had started going backwards. What're tho—" the last word caught in his throat as he realized.
Conway pulled two fingers across the touch screen, rotating the image 180 degrees to let Specs see. The OsCorp Tower, resembling a knife as it stabbed into the sky, blacked out save for a bolt of violet that illuminated six lines of silk.
Specs' shoulders slumped as he sighed. Julie was looking at him out of the corner of her eye as she hid a smirk, pulling the photo offscreen to be replaced with another. This one showed eight colorful figures stepping out of the building, as well as the frontmost ranks of the mob that had met them there. "This was OsCorp last night," Julie said. "You weren't there?"
Specs rubbed at his eyes. "No," he sighed, "I wasn't."
"I know. I was," Julie grinned.
Specs slowly turned to glare daggers at her. Conway stood up slowly, giving both a warning look, but he barely noticed and Julie stood up a little straighter, smugly.
All at once, Specs' face cleared and he raised his eyebrows in mock-surprise. "Oh, you took these? That explains why they're all underexposed."
Julie's grin vanished. "Excuse me? They're only underexposed compared to your work, Mr. I-Always-Leave-the-Flash-On! And, you'll notice, they're sharper than anything that crushed soda can of yours can take."
"Oh, yeah, until you try to take a picture bigger than a postage stamp! My shots are big enough for a computer wallpaper—"
"Parker! Masters! What's my rule?" Conway interrupted, leaning on one hand. "If you're gonna spit acid, do it outside!"
They both looked at her, stepping away from each other, as she sat back down. "Sorry, Peter, there was an exhibition at the Public Library today, but Robbie already assigned someone else to that. You're out of luck."
"I usually am," Specs commented, pushing his hands into his pockets. "You have my number if something comes up, right?"
"On speed-dial. You fixed your camera?"
"No, I was gonna memorize an image and describe it to a sketch artist—yes, I fixed my camera." He pulled an extensively modified OsPhone out of his pocket and pulled off the device clipped to the back. It was a circular machine, about the diameter of a soda can and about a centimeter thick. Composed of several rings of metal, a closed black lens aperture was set in the center. He opened up the camera app on his phone and the aperture on the device opened, revealing a large bead of water in a membrane. He zoomed in on his phone and two of the metal rings turned a little with the buzzing of motors, shrinking the bead and making it bulge outward, before he turned towards Julie and snapped two pictures of her unimpressed face.
"Very nice. I'll call you." Conway dragged Julie's photos into an email. "Julie, I'll pass these two along to Jameson. Your standard rate?"
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you." Julie pulled her camera off the recessed metal plate outlining the screen, and the photos Conway hadn't selected vanished.
"Excellent. Have a nice day, you two." That was the most definite goodbye Conway usually gave, so Specs grabbed his coat and held the door open for Julie. They both set out for the elevator, or in Specs' case the stairwell next to it, in silence when Specs grabbed the back of Julie's jacket and pulled her back just before they reached the end of the cubicles.
"WHERE'S URICH?!" J. Jonah Jameson stormed past without noticing them. "WHY THE FUCK IS THE ONLY COMPETENT WRITER ON MY STAFF NOT AT HIS DESK?! WE'VE GOT THE BIGGEST STORY IN WEEKS HERE! We thought two Spider-Assholes was bad? WELL NOW THERE'S EIGHT! THINK OF THE PROPERTY DAMAGE!" He turned into the next row of cubicles, and both photographers relaxed, Julie waving away the smell of cigar smoke. "…LEEDS! You'd better have something for me or I swear to fucking Christ WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" Julie peeked over the top of the cubicles, watching Jameson alternate between reading the document on Ned Leeds' screen and scream at him. His back was turned.
"Whew," Julie said quietly, dropping back down below the wall. "Nice save there, Parker." Specs said nothing. "…Parker?"
By chance, his eyes had landed on a framed front page hung on the opposite wall. The headline screamed SHE'S BACK in bold letters, but he was staring at the photo below it. It had been his work, even though (by his own request) the caption beneath credited the late Phil Sheldon, and it showed a teenage girl, hunched over and holding a gash in her arm, not quite silhouetted by the fire behind her. She was outfitted head to toe in a skintight costume of white, black, and red with a hood pulled up over a full-face mask. One off-red eyepiece reflected the crowd in front of her, but the other was missing, and the bright blue eye behind it was staring directly at the photographer and smiling.
Julie looked from the photo to Specs. "Oh, I see," she said wryly. "Somebody's still got a crush."
"Still in love," Specs corrected without looking away from the photo. His words were quiet, his eyes distant.
"Yeeeaaaahhh…That's creepy, Parker. It's not healthy to be in love with a dead girl." She glanced at Jameson again, then started for the elevators again. "I mean, she was pretty cool, but, y'know, she's gone. Life's gotta go on."
Specs squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds. "Yeah," he breathed, his hands in his pockets. "Yeah, I know." He looked down, if for no other reason than because looking at the picture had begun to hurt, and then the tingling in the back of his head jumped, and he jumped with it.
The man in the cubicle he was hiding behind had rolled back in his chair to look at him. A trenchcoat was draped over the back of the chair, an e-cig was between the fingers of his raised hand, and his eyes were as tired and as intense as Specs' own. Specs leaned away from him a little, raising an eyebrow at the silent stare.
"She's worried about you," the man said bluntly.
"No she's not," Specs snapped. "She's got no reason to—"
"She's a decent human being. That should be enough, buster."
Specs gave a fake snort. "Have you met her? Julie Masters ends at the camera. And I'm, y'know, her rival. She doesn't want to care about me."
"Okay, let me put it another way." He turned in his chair to face Specs properly. "You're really shitty at pretending nothing's wrong. I'm guessing your relationship with Spider-Woman was more than just a one-sided crush, but even without that whatever's in your head is too heavy for a sixteen-year-old. Go home. Take a load off until you get back that stupid ego teenagers are supposed to have, and open the hell up to someone before you turn into me." He paused to take a long draw of his e-cig. "You're stronger than you think you are, but not as strong as you think you should be. Give yourself time to heal."
Specs was silent for several seconds, staring at him. His eyes narrowed a little. "If I wanted an opinion I'd ask. I know what I need to do next, and I don't know who you are." He turned away from McGee, edging along the wall of the cubicle.
"Sure. Never mind old Jack McGee, who's been working here since before you were even conceived." The chair wheeled back into the cubicle.
"I WANT THAT STORY IN MY INBOX IN AN HOUR, OR YOU'RE FIRED! ROBBIE! GET ME THE SALES FIGURES!" Specs felt Jameson's footsteps moving down the next aisle, vaguely away from him, and Specs darted out and scurried towards the door to the stairs. He sprinted the last few feet, moving too fast to see properly, and then he was on the other side of the door and he was safe. He sighed in relief, looking down the stairs, and then shook his head slightly and started up them, towards the roof.
The skyscrapers of the city could not last forever. Oh, they tired, with sculptures of glass reaching as high as 2,000 feet and smaller buildings of concrete and brick between them as though to offer aesthetic balance, but there were sections of the city where the sky remained resolutely unscraped. When New York City had been industrialized over the years, changing in architecture and shape through the interwar period and beyond, the section of the city now known as the Narrows had changed very little from its days in the Victorian Era. The same narrow, winding streets were flanked by the same low, antique brick buildings; they had been repaired, renovated and remodeled as needed, but never replaced; only seven streets were even styled as modern avenues, and they ran straight through and towards upstate New York. The Narrows was little more than a network of alleyways, and in one of the wider ones, a meeting was going on.
Roderick Kingsley looked over the roughly thirty or forty remaining members of his gang.
"Goblins, can you hear me?!"
"YEAH!"
"Right now, we have the panties of every gang in this flooded 'hood in a twist! Think about what we've done! Remember the Minutemen? The Poison Ivies? The Sons of Samhain? The Thunder Warriors? Remember how we sliced and diced our way through their turfs? Right now, we can take the Narrows! We can drive out the Corsairs, the Eisensterne, and the Black Lotus! Then we'll be kings of this little hill! My little Gobbies, can you dig it?"
"YEAH!"
"Can you dig it?!"
"YEAH!"
"You ready for war? You want war?!"
There was a massive roar of approval at Kingsley's statement.
"LET'S DO THIS THING, YA SLACK-JAWED PYSCHOPATHIC APES!"
The Goblins began to prepare for war. Whereas their late benefactor had once given them bleeding-edge weapons and equipment and augmented them with experimental serums, they now brandished simpler, yet far more brutal, weapons. Baseball bats, longshoremen's hooks, machetes, knives of all sorts, spearguns, spiked knuckles, sawed-off shotguns, and homemade hand grenades left the makeshift armory. In place of the experimental serums, they used the next best thing: cocktails of homebrewed combat drugs meant to bolster aggression, dull pain, boost reactions, and make them hit harder.
In a four-story brick establishment that had been fitted with large windows sometime in the Fifties, Annie Miller adjusted her hoodie. This building had just been "liberated" from the Black Lotus by the Corsairs, and she'd been assigned to guard it. The makeshift barricades built by the Lotus were still standing, just in case of an attack by the prior owners or by some other gang. So far, it had been silent as the grave, despite her cohorts scouring the building for caches of drugs, weapons, and other loot left behind by the Lotus.
She opened a case on her hip and removed a cigarette that she had taken from one of the drug caches. She remembered that the box had been labeled NORI, but a cursory examination of its contents yielded a vast quantity of processed deepweed- a variety of kelp rich in nicotine and THC.
"Couldn't hurt to take the edge off." she muttered to nobody in particular.
Annie lit up, took a long drag on the cigarette, and ascended into the cosmos to a place where joy is everlasting and fear is but a memory. Unfortunately, it was at that time that the Goblins arrived.
"Shit," breathed a member of the Corsairs—a young woman of Irish descent with close-cropped hair and a stained hoodie—as she dropped the empty clip from her Beretta and slammed a new one in. The hastily-made barricade she crouched behind shuddered under sustained fire, and a fellow Corsair fell backwards, a portion of his head blasted off. She took a deep breath, the gunfire paused slightly, and she raised herself a little, enough to see over the barricade, and fired off four shots at the group of Goblins before having to duck under again. "Fuck…"
"Where did this many come from?" snapped another member, barely audible over the gunfire. There was screaming on the floor below them, cut short by a sickening crack and a loud laugh. The woman looked down at the floor, then shook her head and began crawling for the stairs, keeping her head down.
"The fuck are you going?!" called the other Corsair over his shoulder. "If we can cut them off here—"
"We can't!" she snapped back. "Look at this bullshit!" She stopped, pressing herself into a doorway before returning fire until her gun was empty. "Come on, next floor! We're dead down here!"
She didn't wait to see if he would follow her—crouching to remain under the line of fire, she moved as fast as she could towards the stairs. She only glanced behind her once she reached them, right in time to see a homemade grenade land on the near side of the barricade. Her eyes widened and she sprinted up the stairs, the horrified scream of her friend followed by an enormous BANG and the entire hallway obscured by a cloud of smoke and plaster.
She paused at the window at the top of the stairs, looking out so see a collection of corpses on the street it overlooked and several Goblins. Then she heard feet on the bottom of the stars and dashed down the hallway until she ducked into the room at the end of it.
It was a storage room; she had unpleasant memories of moving boxes as big as her into this room from the ground floor from when she'd infiltrated the Lotus. This meant, mind you, that she knew where to find what she was looking for. She put her foot through the side of a wooden crate, pulled it back out with some difficulty, and reached into the hole and pulled out a prototype coilgun. It took another second to load up a clip (which doubled as a battery for the electromagnets). The weight of the weapon would take some getting used to, but it would work for now.
"Corsairs…come out to play-i-ay!" a voice sneered from the hallway.
The door slammed open, she spun around to shoot whoever came in, and found herself in a standoff against a man with a buzz cut, longshoreman's hook, and rusty Ruger semiautomatic. The green Goblin tattoo on his right wrist grinned at her.
"Have the others stand down!" she demanded.
The man gave her a toothy smile, except without the smile. "No."
"Are you high?!" she asked the man, who obviously was. "This building is Corsair territory now! Even if you walk away from this, you're fucking dead!"
His finger tightened on the trigger. "You're fucking dead too. No ifs about it."
"I'm not kidding. We are gonna bring so much hell to Kingsley's doorstep, he'll never be able to—"
"I'm not with Kingsley."
She blinked. Her brow furrowed. "W-what?" she said, baffled. "I thought Kingsley controlled the Goblins now."
A smile tugged at the corner of the man's lips. "Just the dumb ones."
Her eyes narrowed a little, and her finger began to squeeze the trigger. "Whoever you work for, he must be pretty dumb too. I'd have you tell him we're coming for him, but…I think he'll get the message."
"And so will your precious Captain."
And outside the window, across the narrow street and on the parapet of the building opposite, the Scarlet Spider said, "I've seen enough," and launched herself off the roof.
The window shattered as her forearms hit it. She rolled when she hit the ground, firing a webline at the barrel of each gun and yanking them away before kicking the Corsair away.
"IT'S THE SPIDER!" screamed the Goblin. "Wait, IT'S A SPIDER!"
"Who are you yelling at?" Scarlet asked as the Goblin went for his gun.
Her spider-sense began to tingle and she instinctively rolled to the side as a shotgun blast came through the floor from below.
"Tiger! Get in here!"
"Working on it, Red!" called Lucky from just outside, where he was stuck to the wall.
The Corsair snatched another coilgun from the box and tried to fire it at Scarlet, cursed, and rooted around for a clip when a second shotgun blast came through the floor beneath her. Her knee exploded, her pant leg torn to shreds and stained with blood as fragments of bone shot across the room, and her scream, high-pitched and keeling, rang in Scarlet's ears for the half-second before it was cut off by another shotgun blast and the still-warm corpse fell backwards.
"TIGER! NOW!" Spider-sense went off again, and she dove away from the spot and perched on top of one of the crates as the floor where she had been shattered.
Lucky, for his part, dropped down a floor, firing a webline above him, and swung through the window, where he found not one, but two Goblins. One of them immediately swung an aluminum baseball bat at him, and ducked under it and countered with a side kick. The other held the sawed-off shotgun, and as Lucky knocked the first one on his butt with the side kick, he leveled it at him and fired.
Lucky managed to dodge the buckshot with an awkward one-footed twist backwards, and on the way up, as two empty shells popped out of the back of the shotgun, he fired a webline at it and yanked it out of its owner's hands. Throwing it aside, he ran at the gunman, who intercepted him with a punch to the face. Lucky stopped short, almost falling backwards, but that was more out of surprise than anything—the punch would've hurt if he had been a normal human, but as it was it was merely unpleasant. He returned the punch, but the assailant (apparently a skilled martial artist) caught it and flipped Lucky over himself.
Lucky's feet found the ground and stuck, and he threw the Goblin into and through the wall as his spider-sense began to tingle again. Turning around, he saw that the first Goblin had dragged himself back to his feet, blood coating his face from the nose down, teeth gritted, and his knuckles white around the aluminum bat.
He swung it at Lucky's head with a scream of rage. As Lucky moved towards the fulcrum of the lever, he raised one arm to deflect the blow and received an unpleasant shock—twofold; the bat was electrified. The shock jumped through his arm and numbed his shoulder, and he fell to one knee with a cry of pain. The Goblin put all his strength into the next blow, but the knee to the face barely fazed Lucky and he grabbed the Goblin's leg. The Goblin's gloved hand found Lucky's chest as he pulled himself up, but he managed to ignore the shock, and this time when he punched the Goblin the Goblin stayed down.
Lucky paused for a second, looking at the gauntlets the Goblin had been wearing, before with the cracking of wood and plaster and two shouts of surprise, a body fell into the hallway from the floor above. He ran out into the hall to find another Goblin lying there, half-conscious, and a large hole in the ceiling through which Scarlet was staring awkwardly.
"I think we're playing by different rules here, Red," said Lucky.
"Ya think?" Scarlet dropped down to the floor, giving the Goblin she had been grappling with a light kick in the head.
"Some of them have some kind of Taser gauntlets," Lucky told her, jabbing a thumb at the unconscious Goblin in the room behind him. "That one was using a metal bat to extend it. Be careful. You okay?"
Scarlet began to say something, but she stopped as footsteps pounding up the stairs revealed another Goblin. This one had smeared green paint on either side of his face, and strapped to his right forearm was a spring-loaded rail device, four orange spheres mounted along the top. He pointed it at Lucky and Scarlet, an unhinged grin on his face, and fired one of the spheres.
The world slowed down. Scarlet's eyes widened behind the mask as she realized that the sphere was a grenade, and as it neared them she and Lucky dove into opposite rooms.
The explosion seemed to rock the building on its foundations. Both walls were destroyed, they felt fire char the backs of their costumes, and Lucky felt red-hot pieces of shrapnel tear through his back as the shockwave knocked them both flat. The ceiling immediately above caved, its supports destroyed, and a cloud of dust and smoke obscured the entire floor.
The Goblin had also been knocked backwards, but he pushed himself to his feet and began sauntering into the cloud, laughing to himself. It took a second to step over the remains of the barricade and the roof, but he looked around for the corpses of the two Spider-People he had seen. He coughed at the dust, looking at the portion of the ceiling that had collapsed. He kicked it smugly.
A pair of hands, gloved in tattered red, came out of the dust and grabbed him by the jacket. He looked around wildly as Scarlet grabbed the arm bearing the grenade launcher and webbed it to his chest. Her fist pulled back, and the Goblin fell with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a home run.
Scarlet rested her hands on her knees, gasping in pain. Her costume was partially shredded, the wounds under it bleeding profusely. Her back was figuratively on fire—it had been literally on fire a few moments ago. Unsteadily she reached down to the unconscious Goblin and ripped the grenade launcher off his arm, folding it in half and throwing it away. "Tiger," she muttered, then said it again, louder than normal to be heard over the ringing in her ears. "TIGER! ARE YOU OKAY?"
She began lifting up portions of the ceiling, and one rose of its own accord and fell to one side as Lucky shifted it off of himself. "Ow," he said, although neither could hear it over the ringing.
Scarlet grabbed his arm, helping him up, and he put a hand on his back. "Aaauuhh." He looked over at Scarlet through shattered eyepieces. "AM I TALKING LOUDER THAN NORMAL RIGHT NOW?"
"WHAT?"
"WHAT?"
"I CAN'T HEAR YOU," Scarlet said, gesturing towards her ears. "THERE'S MORE OF THEM DOWNSTAIRS. ARE YOU ALRIGHT?"
"WHAT?"
"OKAY." Scarlet flashed him two thumbs up, and he responded with a wavering thumb sideways. "LET'S DO IT! YOU CAN WAIT HERE IF YOU WANT."
"WHAT? YOU GO AHEAD. I'LL BE A MINUTE."
Scarlet nodded, turning around and jogging for the stairs. She slowed down as she descended, trying not to make her footsteps heard, but four Goblins already had their guns pointed at her when she came into view.
"Hey, fellas," she laughed nervously. "Didn't your mom tell you—"
One of the Goblins rolled his eyes and fired.
"—HEY!" Scarlet jumped, landing on the ceiling and bouncing away as the others Goblins began shooting at her. "You could at least let me finish my stupid joke before you blast me!" She kicked one gun away, landing a punch on its owner, before she dodged another shot and caught that gunman across the face with a spinning kick.
Before she landed, a razor bat caught her shoulder. She gave a short, sharp cry, falling to the ground, as the Goblin who had launched it returned to his gun and shot at her twice. She rolled, dodging the shots, and pulled the bat out of her shoulder, dropping it on the ground before pushing herself away with her feet.
"Thought you Spiders were supposed to be fast," grunted one of the remaining Goblins, although this was inaudible over the gunfire. He fired two more shots, and then, as he tried to reload, Scarlet managed to stand and kicked him in the head.
The fourth gunman had already reloaded, and he fired two shots at Scarlet before she delivered a haymaker. The second Goblin was already getting up, though, and another two had come out of one of the rooms the hallway branched off into. She dodged two other razor bats, webbed one of them in the face, and threw a second into the third. One of the Goblins got up immediately (his muscles bulged unnaturally) and went after her with five, six, seven, eight deceptively fast punches. She dodged each of them in turn until he feinted with the ninth, catching her with an uppercut that staggered her a little.
As she stumbled backwards into the wall, the Goblin slumped, panting hard. He folded his arms, each hand holding the opposite tricep as he groaned in pain and trembled oddly. The trembling subsided, but didn't cease, as he stepped towards Scarlet and began to raise his fists again. Scarlet pushed away from the wall, shaking away the stars in her vision as she accelerated to meet him, fists raised—
-and a tattered red boot collided with the side of his head, knocking him five feet and into slumberland.
"…Oh, come on!" Scarlet said as Lucky landed a little ways beyond the fallen Goblin. "I had him!"
"So sue me! I come downstairs and the first thing I see is you leaning against a wall, clutching your head with this guy bearing down on you!"
"I was only dazed for a second! I'm fine; I was about to kick his a—"
"Oh shit!" came a voice down the hall, and they both turned to see two Goblins who had just reached the top of the stairs. The one in the front had taken a step back upon seeing them, and as Lucky and Scarlet stepped forward as one, he called down the stairs, "TWO SPIDERS! ON GUARD, NOW!" As the second one pulled a collection of marble-sized orange spheres out of his pockets, the first rolled up his right sleeve, revealing a gauntlet with three pairs of razor-sharp bat wings lined up along the top, and threw his arm forward, launching the first razor bat at the advancing Spiders.
Lucky leaned to one side without breaking stride, the bat flying past him. Four orange marbles hurtled through the air, Lucky ducked, and Scarlet threw her hands up as four small explosions bloomed in the air just in front of her. Blinking the spots out of her eyes, she sprinted out of the smoke, fired a webline at the one who had thrown them, and zipped forward to kick him in the face.
Another razor bat zipped past an inch from her back as she ducked, and then one of Lucky's web shots splattered across the gauntlet and stuck the final one in place. The Goblin looked down at the web, down the hallway at the approaching Spider-Man, and began attempting to pull a gun out of his pocket.
Several things happened at once. The Goblin managed to extract the gun from his pocket, Lucky's fist collided with the side of his nose, Scarlet's opponent hit the bottom of the stairs, and spider-sense practically exploded in both their heads.
Which made sense, because in the next instant the stairs exploded.
"WHOA!" screamed Lucky as the ground collapsed under him. Scarlet fired a webline wildly, but they were already falling. Off-guard, both of them hit the ground floor off-balance and fell as an enormous cloud of smoke billowed through the room and the rubble piled around them.
The gunshots started immediately. It was impossible to see through the dust, but the bullets filled the air so that it didn't really matter what they were aimed at. Lucky screamed as a bullet was lodged in his gut, and Scarlet had pushed herself up just to take one in the arm. Another grazed her thigh, tearing out a line of flesh, as the sonic boom of a bullet shot past Lucky's ear and caused him to flinch right into the path of another. The Goblins that had come with them were long dead, their blood pooling beneath them as their teammates unloaded into the smoke.
At last the chorus of BANGS came to a halt as each of them ran out of ammo, almost simultaneously. As they began to reload, the cloud of dust billowed through the ground floor, and they levelled their guns and carefully began stepping forward.
Two Goblins near the back of the group suddenly hit the ground with a pair of thuds. The others collectively swung around and one of them fired at the spots just above them, but then a gloved hand came out of the smoke and ripped the gun from his hand before slamming him into the ground and pinning him there with webbing.
Three of the remaining gunmen fired at the noise, but the Spider had already vanished. One Goblin cried out as a ricochet hit him, and then another cried out as a fist knocked out two of his teeth. The gunfire turned thataways, but then a pair of weblines hit another Goblin and dragged him into obscurity, where there was a thwack sound.
And then there were three. The smoke was beginning to settle, and one Goblin managed to dodge a kick from Lucky before pulling out a butterfly knife and slashing at him. Lucky dodged the blade before delivering a knife-hand strike to the base of the man's neck and the Goblin went down.
Another Goblin had dropped his clip and was loading a new one in, but Scarlet webbed it and yanked it away before punching him in the gut and webbing him to the ground.
Lucky and Scarlet both stood, panting and cradling their wounds, as they began to advance on the final Goblin from opposite sides. He fired twice at Lucky, who dodged both shots with some difficulty, and then whirled to shoot at Scarlet. His gun clicked as he pulled the trigger frantically, the slide backwards to indicate an empty clip, and he threw it aside and pulled a bomb out of his pocket.
Oh no. Lucky jerked forward, forcing himself to move as the Goblin turned the dial with his thumb and pressed the button. No, no, no—
He's insane, Scarlet thought as she tried to sprint on her bad leg. He's going to blow himself up—
Their thoughts were overlapping. –Stop him, save him—
-He's a kid, he's our age—
-GET IT—
-NO—
Two weblines hit the bomb simultaneously, and they both pulled it to the side as fast as they could. The pumpkin bomb flew from the Goblin's hand and landed in the corner, where it bounced once, was plastered in place by webbing, and exploded.
Scarlet grabbed the Goblin and shoved him to the floor, falling on top of him to shield him from debris, as Lucky turned away from the blast and covered his head. The webbing absorbed much of the blast, but the shrapnel tore it apart even as one of the building's load-bearing points was destroyed. Spider-sense was tingling furiously as the walls buckled and the ceiling began to fall.
It was over in thirty seconds. After that, it took Lucky and Scarlet maybe thirty more to dig their sore, stiffened selves out of the piles of bricks and plaster. Scarlet checked on the teenager cowering under her, relieved to see he was basically alright, before pushing herself into some semblance of a standing position.
The Goblins they had knocked unconscious lay about them, some partially buried, a lucky few out of range of the collapsing roof. Lucky reached down cautiously and pulled a brick off of one Goblin's face, and the face under it was smashed and broken and frozen in a contortion of pain. Lucky took a step back, dropping the brick, as both Spiders gradually became aware of sirens.
"W-we should go," Scarlet murmured.
Lucky nodded silently, and they both started for the recently-made hole in the wall. Flashing red and blue lights were visible through the smoke, and as Lucky and Scarlet walked out the other side, moving slowly from their injuries, it was to find two police motorcycles and a car awkwardly parked outside, jammed together in the tight space. In a lighter moment, one would have wondered how the police car was going to maneuver out of the alley. Four police officers were waiting around their vehicles, guns already drawn and pointed at the two.
And behind them, on the other side of a hastily-place police line, a few people were gathered. None of them wore clothes that would cost much, and a sense of hunger seemed to linger about them. They stared at Lucky and Scarlet, some furious, some merely exasperated, but most looking a little bit broken. Several bodies were scattered about, hit by a gunshot that had escaped the building, or by shrapnel from that last explosion. Each and every one of them was like a punch to the gut from Megatron himself.
"Get on the ground," ordered the nearest cop—one of the motorcyclists. He wore a full-body light armor and a full-face helmet, but the visor was transparent, allowing them to see his face.
"Is there an ambulance on the way?" asked Lucky. His voice was barely audible, his hands cradling the bullet wounds in his stomach and shoulder.
"What do you care?" snarled another of the police officers. "(Oh, you've been shot.) You deserved it, assholes!" One of his partners elbowed him, but there was a cry of "YEAH!" from the other side of the police line.
The nearest police officer stepped a little closer, cautiously. "Just get on the ground, Spider-Man. You too…whoever you are. Let's not make this even worse than it is."
"FUCK OFF!" screamed that same voice from the other side of the police line. "KILL THE VIGILANTE FUCKS! WE ARE THE LAW!"
Lucky and Scarlet looked at each other—his blue and her green eyes could clearly see each other through the shattered eyepieces. Scarlet shook her head silently, and the two of them returned their attention to the police. All at once, their hands jumped forward, and a web shot glued itself to the barrel of each gun.
There was yelling and shouts of surprise as they both sprinted forward, past the police, and jumped off of the police car. They both stuck to the wall of the opposite building, climbing up as fast as their stiff muscles would allow. When they reached the roof, Lucky hunched over, groaning as he clamped his hand over the healing wound in his gut, but then they both recovered enough to take off.
They had been moving for maybe two minutes when they crossed paths with a red-blue-and-black blur. Screeching to a stop on a wall, they looked back to see another Spider-Man turning around and running towards them, orange eyepieces glinting in the morning light.
A bee landed on Scarlet's shoulder. A voice, very similar to her own, came from behind her. "What happened?"
Scarlet turned and saw Honeybee.
"Gang war." she muttered through clenched teeth.
Notes From Courier:
-McGee is a reference to the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV show. Instead of being pursued by General Ross, that version of Banner was hounded by a reporter named Jack McGee.
-Kingsley's "Can you dig it" bit is a reference to the film version of "The Warriors". Ditto the "Corsairs, come out to play" line.
-Arachnolord is from the Transformers: Shattered Glass universe. If you're wondering what that is, it's basically the Transformers version of the Star Trek "Mirror Universe". Also, the Earth-H abductees are from that universe's version of Beast Wars, so Ungoliant would probably have a hard time eating them.
Notes From Brackets:
-Most of those movies don't exist, but whatever.Dr. Faustus is meant as a direct adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's portrayal of the legend, The Queen of Crete is a show about an attempted Europa colony, and the Modern Prometheus is, in Specs' eyes, the best adaptation of Frankenstein ever made.
-Julie Masters and Rita Conway are both characters from the 1970s The Amazing Spider-Man TV show. I am aware that Rita was meant as an Expy of Glory Grant from the comics, but I wanted to make her her own character.