Don't Learn How to Drive During a Car Chase
***Peter***
Peter Parker was already having a bad day before the elf fell out the sky.
Not that he’d been having a particularly great few years, to be honest. First, he gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and develops all kinds of weird superpowers, like extra strength, extra speed and extra stickiness. Really, high school is stressful enough as it is without having to worry about whether you’re going to accidently get stuck to a wall. Then Iron Man, actual freaking Iron Man, actual freaking Tony Stark, had given Peter the superhero name Spider-Man, but he said that he wasn’t ready to be an actual Avenger. Then Mr Stark finally agreed to make him an Avenger, and he was finally allowed to join the greatest superheroes in the world, but they failed to stop Thanos in the Infinity War, and Peter gets turned into dust for FIVE WHOLE YEARS. Then Peter got un-dusted (is that a word?) during the middle of this really big battle, but Mr Stark died to save the world.
That hadn’t been a good day, either.
Today had started off so relaxed, too. Since the villain Mysterio had died on that bridge in London, Peter hadn’t had much to do at weekends. He’d had breakfast. Stopped a bike thief. Finished his Math homework. Put on his Spider-Man suit, and done some exercise (by which he means he used webs to swing from building to building across the skyline of New York city). You know, nice, normal stuff like that. And then the ten seconds happened that flipped Peter’s life upside down.
He had perched on a lamppost opposite Madison Square Garden, gazing down at the crowds of New Yorkers that were shuffling around the arena. One or two people had noticed that Spider-Man was there and pointed, at him, excited, before carrying on with whatever it was that they had wanted to do on that day. Peter had grinned. There was something so weirdly wonderful about being a part of a crowd – like being one brick in a lego building, or one cog in a machine, or one organ in a body, each unique, but each the same, in the beautiful, chaotic, structured mess that was New York.
And then the volume had surged on the billboard opposite Peter’s lamppost, and blared out the headlines. Several huddles of people had gazed upwards at the news reporter, who announced that ‘we come with the revelation that after last week’s attack in London, an anonymous source revealed this video. It shows Mysterio moments before his death. As a warning, you may find the video disturbing.’
Peter had felt sick. He hated Mysterio more than he ever thought is possible to hate someone. Peter had adored Mysterio even enough to consider him as being a second mentor like Mr Stark, before Peter realised that he was a lying, manipulative mass-murderer who used technology to fake his supremacy (so nothing like Mr Stark). Yet there Mysterio had been, in a shaky video on the billboard, crumpled on the floor of the bridge where Peter had left him to die. His hair and face had been smeared with blood, as he had whispered frantically into the camera, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it off this bridge alive.’
Dozens of people gathered around the billboard were now pointing and gasping at Spider-Man. Some were watching him instead of the billboard. Some were even filming him.
In the video, Mysterio’s voice had grown louder, and more desperate. ‘Spider-Man attacked me for some reason. He’s saying that he’s the only one that’s going to be the new Iron Man – no one else.’
The streets had resounded with the gasping of the crowds and the shuffling of feet and the snapping of camera lenses. A policeman, tucked behind another lamppost, had mumbled into his radio.
Peter had known that Mysterio was lying. Of course he was lying – in one final blow before his death, he’d decided to ruin Peter’s life in revenge. But as hundreds of people had shrieked and looked at Spider-Man in horror and fear, it had wounded him far more than any of Mysterio’s lasers ever did.
Peter had taken a deep breath. It was okay. Well, it wasn’t ok, but it was fixable. He just had to get away from the crowds, so he could take off the Spider-Man suit. Then nobody would ever know that he was Spider-Man. He could go home, to his aunt. Then he could try and contact another Avenger, and they could work out a plan.
But then in the video, Mysterio had sobbed, ‘Spider-Man – Spider-Man’s real name is’ -the video had crackled up, and for a second, just a second, Peter had hoped that he was safe, but then the video had resumed – ‘Spider-Man’s name is Peter Parker!’ A photo flashes up on the billboard, of a scrawny sixteen-year-old with messy brown hair. Of Peter.
There’s this moment in that really old movie Star Wars when Darth Vader uses the Death Star to blow up Alderaan. And Princess Leia is forced to watch her home, her friends and her family explode into particles of nothingess.
Peter’s Alderaan is exploding now.
And this is the moment, the worst moment of Peter’s existence, when the crowds below are rioting and sirens are screeching in the distance, when Peter’s head starts swimming and the floor starts spinning, when he wishes he could wake up and it would all be a dream, when Peter knows he has failed, when his life as he knows it is over.
This is the moment that the elf falls out of the sky.
Someone shrieks and points, and a sea of people turn their phones up towards a blob in the clouds. Is it a bird, or a plane? No, it’s falling far too slowly, almost supernaturally, to be anything ordinary. Is at an Avenger, here to rescue him? Or destroy him? Peter doesn’t know what the Avengers will believe about him now. He doesn’t know what anyone will believe about him now. As the blob falls down, it gets bigger, and Peter can make out that it’s a person, dressed in dark robes, and the crowds are scrambling out of the way, and then the person lands on his feet, as gracefully as a cat.
The crowds scream. Peter screams. Everyone screams except for the man. His ears are pointed like an elf’s in a fairy tale, and everything about him does belong in a fairy tale. His long hair, which is so pale it’s neither gold or silver, pours over his shoulders like a sheet of liquid platinum. His clothes are made of a fabric Peter has never seen before, and they shimmer in the light, sometimes black, sometimes the deep silver-green of fir trees. But what is by far the most striking thing about him is that strapped to his back is a huge, curved bow, etched with strange elaborate spirals. Peter’s never seen anybody like him before – it’s as if he was from an entirely different word. Is he an alien? Or from another realm?
Some of the crowds squirm away from him, some edge closer to film it, and some rush frantically backwards and forwards, undecided. Sirens echo from just a few blocks away. But the elf remains as serene as if he were carved from marble. His eyes flit from the masses of people who are scurrying on the sidewalk to Spider-Man, who is elevated on the lamppost. ‘Are you a hero?’ he asks. His voice is as silky, like honey.
It takes Peter a second to realise that the elf is talking to him. ‘Um…’ he stutters. Is he a hero? There have been moments that he’s felt like Spider-Man is a hero. But right now, when half the world wants to destroy him for a crime he didn’t commit, and the other half wants to put him being destroyed on YouTube, he doesn’t feel like a hero. ‘I’m Spider-Man,’ Peter replies. Because right now, that’s the one thing he can be sure of.
The elf sweeps to a bow. ‘Little hero, chaos has once again befallen my land. I command you to return with me to Middle Earth, to purge it of evil.’
Five minutes ago, Peter would have leaped at the opportunity to go on an adventure to a weird-sounding place with a cool-looking elf. But right now, five police cars are tearing down West 32nd Street. A helicopter’s propeller hums above him.
The elf has sensed that Peter’s focus is drifting, and he raises his voice. Peter gets the vibe that the elf isn’t used to people not paying attention to him. ‘Little hero,’ he hisses, ‘Middle Earth is in grave peril. I command you to join my second Fellowship, and…’
‘No thanks,’ Peter says. He points up at the helicopter. ‘I’m kinda busy?’ The elf guffaws with surprise. Twenty – no, thirty – SWAT men are pouring out the police cars, their guns all pointing straight at Peter. The turning to every street is blocked. He’s surrounded.
So Peter goes the only direction he can. Up.
He leaps down from his lamppost, pushes through the screaming crowd, and jumps onto the wall of the Maddison Square Garden arena. He scrambles up the wall. The crowds point and gasp. Peter is guessing that they haven’t seen many teenagers with superpowers climb up walls like spiders before. He crawls over the billboard, and the light reflects onto his suit, staining his whole body blue. Snipers take aim, and the bullets smash window after window below him. One whizzes centimetres away from his arm. Peter scrambles onto the roof. His hands and knees ache. A second round of gunshots rip from below. Peter scrambles to his feet, and runs. Bullets pelt the roof. Chips of concrete fly up. Peter runs faster. A bullet whizzes past his arm. He’s almost run the length of the arena. He shoots a web from his wrist at the top of the next building, leaps off the roof, and swings like the pendulum of a clock over the roaring street. The wind whistles in his ears. He kicks his legs out, and smashes throw a window.
A waitress and thirty New Yorkers look up from their pizza and scream. Peter screams. A few fragments of glass from the window are slipping through the mesh of his suit and slicing his skin. Peter runs across the restaurant. ‘Sorry pizza people!’ People duck under the tables. Greasy pizza slides across the glass-covered floor. His foot gets stuck on a slice of margherita, and he skids along the floor for a second, before regaining his balance. Phew. Peter smashes through the final window, shoots a web, and somersaults over the road, onto the roof of the next building.
He runs. The fragments of glass which slipped into his suit crunch against the soles of his feet, grating them raw. He glances over the edge of the roof. The SWAT teams have jumped back in their cars, and are tearing down West 32nd Street, pushing their way through the traffic. Peter grins. He’s ahead of them, for now. He just needs to keep running, and call someone to get him out of New York. He scoops his phone out of his pocket, and waits for the screen to light up. Nothing happens. He squeezes the power button. Nothing happens.
Great. The one time he needs his phone for something other than playing candy crush, it’s got no battery. His hand shaking, he puts it back in his pocket. His last line to the Avengers, and to help, has been cut off. He’s going to have to get out of the city alone.
He really shouldn’t have taken so many selfies this morning.
‘Little hero!’ a voice calls from behind. Peter spins round. What the hell? The elf is gliding across the roof behind him, his hair billowing behind him like a ship’s sail. Even the way he runs is strange – his boots barely touch the concrete, as if he were as light as the air itself. ‘Little hero! Middle Earth is in great disorder! You must join my second Fellowship, and return to my land, too…’
‘How are you even able to run this fast?’ Peter whimpers. He stumbles over a vent. ‘Were you bitten by a radioactive spider too?’
The elf furrows his silvery eyebrows. ‘You are perhaps too petulant for a hero, but your agility is nevertheless acceptable.’
‘Uhh, thanks?’ Peter isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment or not.
‘But you must obey me. I need you. Middle Earth needs you. Thousands of strange metallic monsters, far more threatening than orcs, have invaded the Shire, and..’
A round of bullets is shattering a skylight, just metres in front of Peter. He rolls out of the way, and looks up. Two helicopters are now tailing him. Peter yells over the thundering of the propellers, ‘Mr Elf, can’t you see that I’m a little bit busy right now?’ He gestures frantically at the helicopters above, and the police cars below. ‘I have no idea what’ – he leaps to his feet, and keeps running – ‘what… what Muddle Earth is, or what orcas are, and I don’t exactly have the time to ask. Unless you’d like to ring some Avengers for me, please leave me alone!’
The elf’s voice wavers with confusion. ‘What is ring some Avengers? Which ring is it?’
What? How can he not know who the Avengers are? There isn’t a single person on this planet, or even most other planets, who doesn’t know who the Avengers are. He turns round to look at the elf, and as he does, his foot slips on a puddle of glass. He skids for a second, then tumbles onto the hard concrete, and is hurled off the edge of the roof.
He falls. His stomach flips, his ears pop, and he screams, as he watches the storeys of buildings whipping past him, and the pavement growing closer. He shoots web after web after web at the building behind him, but none of them stick to anything, and the distance to the ground has halved. The elf is calling after him, but he can’t make out any of the words above the whipping noise in his ears. At last, a web sticks to a third-storey window, and Peter is swung from it like the pendulum of a clock. His legs smack into the pavement. He collapses onto the ground, panting.
His back aches. His legs ache. His everything aches. He doesn’t care. He’s okay. He’d rather that his whole body was purple with bruises then it became a Spider-Man-shaped pancake on the road.
On his right, traffic is heaving out of the way onto the sidewalk. Three - no, five – police cars are tearing down Broadway towards him.
He’s not okay.
He needs to get out of the city, away from the police. Peter can’t sort this out this mess on his own. Not even his friends can help him. The other Avengers will know what to do. If he can get to the Avengers facility, he can get to safety.
A yellow cab is pulled over on the sidewalk. Peter pulls himself to his feet, and bangs on the window. ‘Can you drive, please?’
The driver looks up from her phone, and yanks her headphones out. ‘What?’
The police cars are three blocks away. Their sirens ring in Peter’s ears. ‘Please can you drive? Out of Manhattan? Upstate, to Esopus?’
The driver gnaws on her gum. Does she notice the face that the city is dissolving into chaos and Peter is running for his life? Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she doesn’t care. ‘You got 50 bucks in that suit somewhere?’
‘Umm, let me check…’ Peter rummages around in the pockets of his suit for cash. He has a grand total of three cents, two safety pins, and an Uno card to his name. Peter doubts that cab drivers extend their card payment policies to Uno cards. ‘Would you accept an IOU?’
The driver scoffs. ‘Does this look like a charity to you?’
‘Umm, no, but…’ How do you explain to someone that in the space of five minutes you’ve suddenly become the most wanted man alive, and you need to get somewhere where you can phone a racoon? The police cars are two blocks away. Peter swings off the roof of the cab, knocks the driver into the passenger’s seat, and slides in front of the steering wheel.
The driver screams, ‘Get out! Do you even know how to drive?’
Peter stares down at the pedals. ‘Um, sort of.’ Don’t get him wrong, he had taken a few lessons, but after an unfortunate incident involving a very cute duck, a very big lorry and a very long 3000 foot drop off a bridge, he’d made the strategic decision to take a break from driving. Unfortunately, being turned into dust for five years made the break a little longer than he’d planned.
‘What d’you mean ‘sort of’? How can you ‘sort of’ do anything? Get out!’
The police cars are one block away.
Peter steps on one of the pedals. Nothing happens. He steps on the other, and the engine roars. The cab lurches down the road. Peter grins.
The cab driver is clenching onto the passenger seat so tight her knuckles are white. ‘It doesn’t hurt to steer, you know.’
‘Oh!’ Peter forgot that you had to steer cars. He yanks the wheel right, and the cab serves away from the curb, towards a railing. He spins it left, and the cab straightens. The police car behind breaks a bit. ‘Thanks, Ms Cab Driver!’ The cab driver shrieks. A police car pulls alongside the left of the cab, ready to overtake. In front of them is a crossroad, where traffic is pulling up on either side, to clear a tunnel for the police cars to go straight ahead. Peter charges into the junction, and veers to the right. Cars swerve back onto the road. Tyres screech. One car slides into the back of another. A van spins onto the sidewalk. ‘Sorry!’ Peter calls. He pushes down the gas pedal, and drives away from the junction. He glances back. The five police cars are stuck behind the barricade of colliding traffic. ‘Yes!’ Peter punches the air. The cab skids. He puts his hands back on the wheel.
‘Nooo,’ the cab driver moans. Her eyes are squeezed shut.
‘What do you mean ‘no’?’ Peter glances back. The police cars are still trapped behind the crashed traffic. ‘Not gonna lie, I’m a pretty great driver.’
‘You’re driving on the wrong side of the road!’ she whimpers.
‘What do you-’ A motorbike is hurtling towards the windscreen. Peter yanks the wheel to the right. ‘Okay,’ he admits, ‘I’m an acceptable driver. I should really take the test soon.’
‘You haven’t even passed the test?’ the driver squeaks.
The road is opening up towards a second crossroads. Crowds are weaving in and out of shops and scurrying up the steps from the subway. Peter turns the cab left. He grins. At this rate, he can get to the Avengers facility in no time, and-
Peter’s heart jolts. A police car is parked across the road. He glances round. Three more police cars are blocking the other three ways off the junction. He’s trapped.
The cab driver screams something at him, but Peter can’t make out any of the words above the ringing of his ears and the thudding of his heart. His life as he knows it is gone. Being a superhero, just being Peter Parker – it’s all gone. Four policeman are marching towards the cab, silhouetted by the blinding blue light of the cars. Peter buries his face in his hands, so that he doesn’t have to look at anything other than the red of his suit. He hears the thudding of the cab door being forced open, the sobbing of the cab driver, the rattling of handcuffs.
‘Peter Parker.’ Peter opens his eyes, and instantly wishes that he hadn’t. He’s staring into the eyes of a policeman, and they glare at his with more betrayal, hatred and anger than Peter’s English teacher’s did when he still hadn’t read Jane Eyre. Somehow, being looked at like that hurts far more than it did to fall off the roof of a building. The policeman snarls at him. ‘You are under arrest for the murder of Mysterio, for ordering a drone strike on civilians, and for… my leg!’
Peter blinks. ‘Your leg? I didn’t do anything to your leg. I mean, I didn’t actually do any of those other things either, but…’ The policeman collapses to the ground. Peter peers over the the window. A golden arrow has speared through calf, and sunk deep into the tarmac. He wriggles and twitches, but can’t move his leg. Blood oozes onto the road.
Perched on the railing by the entrance of the subway station like a bird, his platinum hair streaming across his shoulders, and his bow aimed at the policeman, is the elf. ‘Greetings, little hero!’
Relief washes over him. He’s not alone. All around Peter, police are pouring out of cars, guns pointed at him and the elf. There are five, ten, no, too many to count. He waits for the elf to notch an arrow, draw the bow, take aim. Nothing happens. ‘Mr Elf?’ he yelps, ‘are you going to sit there all day?’
He yawns, and sets his bow down on the railing. ‘Perhaps.’
One policeman bends over to examine the one on the ground. Another three approach Peter, brandishing guns and shouting at him to put his hands in the air.
‘Please help me,’ Peter begs, ‘I’ll do anything! I’m really useful. I’m strong, and I’m sticky, and I know Avengers, and I’m really good at algebra, and making waffles, and shooting webs at stuff, and…’
A hoard of police are running to the elf, yelling at him to identify himself. But instead of attacking, running away, or even screaming like Peter would have done, the elf plucks an arrow from his quiver, and rolls it between his thumb and finger. ‘In exchange for my aid, you will do anything that I ask?’
‘Yeah, anything! Anything at all!’ Even as the words fly out of Peter’s mouth, he can feel that they’re a mistake. But then, wouldn’t it be an even bigger mistake for him to rot in jail for the rest of his life?