Spiderman 1 (14 page)

What made even less sense was that it worked.

He clung there, batlike, his mind trying to process the in
sanity of what was happening to him.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw, twenty yards away,
the truck driver standing on the street, staring at his front
grillwork as if unable to comprehend why there wasn't a
teenager smeared all over it. The fellow hesitated a moment,
then got down on his hands and knees to inspect the under
side. For a moment, Peter thought he was actually dead, and
that he would see his body lying there like in those movies
with ghosts and angels and such. But then the trucker
shrugged, shook his head as if doubting his senses, climbed into the cab, and drove off. He left behind him a street that
was decidedly devoid of corpses.

At that moment a woman in the office building slid open a window, with the intention of watering some flowers in a
window box. Upon seeing Peter, she let out an astounded yelp, enough to startle Peter loose of the wall. The ground
yawned up at him, and in his desperation he grabbed out for
a drainpipe to avert the fall and perhaps even pull himself up to the roof and safety. Instead the urgency of his grip caused
him to crush the pipe beneath his steel-hard fingers, and it gave way. Peter fell, his arms waving desperately around,
and then he hit the ground .. .

...
on his feet.

It made no sense. Falling as he had been, even if he'd
landed standing up, his leg bones should have been driven
somewhere up into his chest from the impact. Instead he hit
the ground in a crouch, as if he'd fallen only a foot or two,
and when he stood it was with no effort, no ache or pain. It was as if dropping off a building and landing unhurt on the
ground were the most natural things in the world.

The woman overhead had been moving her mouth without benefit of sound emerging from it, and finally she found
her voice and let out a high-pitched scream. Peter ran from
the alleyway as fast as his legs would carry him, which it
turned out was pretty damned fast. And still his heart con
tinued beating with that slow, steady calm. It was as if his
body was already acclimated to his new situation and was
patiently waiting for his mind to catch up.

VI.

THE FIRST FIGHT

Human beings are blessed with an infinite capacity to rationalize away or ignore anything their senses cannot com
prehend. Peter Parker was no exception, and as a result he had managed to explain the oddities of the morning by the
time lunch rolled around. The banner had been pasted to
the side of the bus, and the paste had gotten on his fingers. When the truck had been bearing down on him, he'd man
aged to jump out of the way but had hit his head in doing so,
stumbling against the side of the building. In his concussed
haze, with the events surrounding the spider bite still fresh
in his subconscious, he had imagined himself as a giant spi
der on the side of the building.

It all made perfect sense ... certainly far more sense than
that he was somehow transforming into a
. . .
well . . . well,
that was just ridiculous.

Utterly ridiculous. Kafkaesque.

"As Peter Parker awoke one morning from uneasy dreams
he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic spider." Yeah, like
that
was going to happen.

Nevertheless his newly acquired appetite could not be ig
nored. The cafeteria woman, who was accustomed to Peter
being the lightest of eaters, gaped as he loaded up his tray with enough food to feed the marching band. He made his
way over to a table, moving with unaccustomed grace as he
easily balanced the overladen tray. No one else in the cafeteria gave him a second glance as he sat, which was nothing

unusual. Peter Parker, after all, wasn't someone who generally registered on most people's radar.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mary Jane approach
ing, and for a moment he thought she was going to sit next
to him. Instead she maneuvered toward her customary group
of friends, who were seated at their table and waving her
over.

Suddenly Mary Jane skidded on a wet patch on the floor,
the souvenir of a previous lunch period when someone had spilled some milk. In trying not to lose her footing and also
to hold onto her tray, M. J. accomplished neither, and she started to fall with her tray angling toward the floor.

Instantly Peter was on his feet. It was as if he were mov
ing before the incident unfolded. With his left hand he
snagged her tray, righting it so quickly that nothing spilled
from it. At the same time he dropped his right shoulder so
that M.J.'s flailing hand could clutch onto it. Not having yet realized what had happened, M. J. regained her footing, then
looked around desperately for the tray as if hoping she could
still catch it. Her eyes widened as she saw Peter holding it
effortlessly.

She turned and looked at him as if seeing him in a new
light. "Wow. Great reflexes!" she said.

Peter himself couldn't really believe that he had pulled it
off. He'd been operating purely on instinct, and it was only
now, when the moment had passed, that he fully realized what he'd done. But he also understood that nonchalance
was the key at times like these. So he shrugged as if it were
nothing and handed her tray back to her.

"Thanks," she said.

"No problem."

He expected her simply to walk away. But instead she
was staring into his eyes
...
no. Not staring. She was gaz
ing, and he felt as if some sort of electrical connection had

been made. "Hey, you have blue eyes," she observed. "I
never noticed without your glasses. You just get contacts?"

No. Actually, I've got eyesight that would make a hawk
jealous, and for all the newfound strength I feel coursing
through me, none of it means a thing when compared with
the heady sensation of your eyes upon me.. ..

"Uh-huh," was all he managed to get out. Then his throat constricted, and while he tried to manage an oral presenta
tion of some of the thoughts tumbling through his head, all of them crowded forward at once, and none of them managed to make it to his mouth.

"Well
. . .
see ya," Mary Jane said and, shrugging, she
turned and walked away.

He felt totally devastated. Forgotten once more, angry at his own uncertainty and incompetence, and then—to his as
tonishment—Mary Jane did something she'd never done be
fore.

She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled. An after-the-fact acknowledgment of him.

He couldn't believe it.

Despite the fact that she then sat down at the "popular kids" table—right next to Flash, of course—he still treas
ured that brief look she'd sent his way. The look that prom
ised ... well, it hadn't promised anything, really. But it had hinted at something he hadn't even dared consider before.
Namely that she found him . . . what? Interesting? Hand
some?

Peter sat back down at his table and started to eat with the
same aggressive bulldozer approach he'd taken at breakfast. He started to set his fork down so that he could pick up the
can of soda to his right.

The fork stuck to his hand.

He stared at it as if it was someone else's hand. Then he
tried to pull the fork free with his other hand, only to

discover that a long, gooey strand of
. . .
of something ...
was stretching from his hand to the fork. At first it was like whitish gray mucous, as if he'd blown his nose out through
his wrist. But then he pulled on it, and pulled, and it re
minded him of that stuff he'd had when he was a kid: Silly
String. Except the tensile strength was far greater, and some
how it was managing to secrete through his wrist, and
what
was he doing scientifically analyzing it when the fact was
that, Holy God, he had some kind of supersnot oozing out of
his forearms, what the
hell was up with that?!?

He pulled even harder on the fork, but rather than separate it from the strand, he instead managed to shoot out an
other strand, this time from his other hand. And suddenly all
the rationalizing, all the reordering in his mind of the morning's events, went right out the window as he realized,
It's
webbing! It's webbing! I've got spinnerets in my forearms,
oh jeez, what if somebody notices but now it could be worse,
could be worse, at least I'm not shooting webbing out my
butt, which is where spiders generally secrete their webbing,
and perhaps it might bear some further investigation as to precisely why the spinnerets choose to manifest themselves
and
Holy God, I'm shooting freaking webs outta my freak
ing arms!!!

The only thing more horrific to Peter than the webs was
the notion of someone spotting them. That would be it for
him, over, done, no chance of normalcy, no chance of Mary
Jane, no chance of nothing. If the other kids saw him oozing
white gook out his arms, he might as well just put a paper bag over his head and slink out of high school forever.

But things were just going from bad to worse, and the
paper bag over his head looked to be a very probable future for him. For the strand he'd just fired shot across the aisle to
the table across from him, and smacked into Liz Allen's tray.
Liz was chatting with someone and hadn't noticed, thank

heavens, but he only had seconds in which to act before she
did spot it, and look to see where—and to whom—it con
nected.

Hoping to yank the web strand free of the tray, Peter
pulled as hard as he could. In retrospect, he should have re
alized what would happen, but he wasn't thinking especially
clearly. Unfortunately, the inevitable did occur. Liz's tray
took off like a rocket, arcing through the air straight at Peter.
He ducked under the tray as it soared over his head. He
heard the tray crash behind him, heard an uproar and shouts,
and turned to see what had happened.

Flash Thompson was sitting there, wearing the girl's
lunch. Jell-O was trickling down his shirt, milk was in his
hair, pasta was on his shoulders, and murder was in his eyes.
Mary Jane, sitting next to him, wasn't helping the situation
by desperately trying to cover up her laughter and failing
miserably.

M.J.'s barely stifled laughter was the only noise in the
cafeteria at that moment. Like an infuriated rhino trying to
find a target, Flash's eyes swept the room, looking for the guilty party. And Peter realized that if there was one thing
Thompson the football star was capable of doing, it was
chart the trajectory of an incoming object. With rapid-fire
calculations he could never have articulated, Flash figured
out what direction the tray must have come from. He
glanced in Liz's direction, but probably realized that she
didn't have the arm strength to hurl the tray that far. So he
tracked it to the closest source, and his piglike stare fell
upon a sweating and loudly gulping Peter Parker.