Chapter 3
Spider-Man stood framed impressively in the doorway. “That is definitely not yours.”
“That’s true,” agreed Peter, facing him.
“Hand it over and Mr. Stark will go easy on you—”
“Don’t call him that,” Peter groaned. “Can we discuss this somewhere else? It’s about to get hot in here.”
The kid shifted his weight to his back leg. “Hand the case over, and we can talk all you want.”
“Believe me, kid, once we talk you’ll tell me to hold on to it.” His spider-sense was yammering at him to get the hell out of there, and he squared his shoulders to the doorway. The second case, the decoy Vess had meant to buy time, was lying on the table and he picked it up. The case containing the One Ring was held in his left hand.
“I knew there was something funky about you,” muttered Spider-Man.
“Why, have we met?” asked Peter innocently, and rolled his eyes when the kid froze. “Subtle.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A hint of anxiousness snuck into the words.
“Geez, kid, you have a mask on and your poker face still sucks. You have got to work on that.”
Spider-Man raised his wrist but Peter anticipated him. “Think fast!” he said, hoisting up the unconscious thief. The web meant for the case caught the man’s back instead, and Spider-Man had reflexively jerked his hand back too fast in anticipation. The thief collided with him bodily and smacked them both to the ground. Winded, the kid scrambled out from beneath as Peter bolted past him carrying both cases.
“What if that hadn’t been a web?” demanded Spider-Man indignantly from the floor. “You were just gonna use that guy as a shield?”
“What else would it have been?” Peter shot back over his shoulder. “You’re Spider-Man! What were you gonna pull out, an AK-47?”
He ran pell-mell down the hall, gripping a case in each hand in a lunatic impersonation of a socialite swinging her shopping bags.
“Stop, thief! You—man, you’re fast! Why’re you so fast! What is your deal?” hollered the Avenger.
Peter’s answer was cut short as what felt like a mack truck slammed into his chest. Still hurtling forward, his legs flew up and he backflopped onto the floor seeing stars and the pale face of Tombstone, glowering down at him.
Wait. Tombstone?
He craned his head and saw an inverted Spider-Man skid to a stop. “Woah, who are you?” the kid said in surprise. “I mean—good job, citizen—now why don’t you—”
Tombstone wordlessly leveled his weapon at Spider-Man. Peter kicked his ankles and the shot went wild. The henchman went sprawling on the floor and Peter knocked the weapon from his hand with one Converse.
“Case to the face!” he yelled, and slammed one down on Tombstone’s sneer. Blood spurted from the man’s nose. So this was the backup Vess had called. Was he working for Kingpin in this universe too?
“Is that guy not with you?” said Spider-Man, bewildered.
“No! And this guy ain’t, either!” Peter pointed at where the Scorpion was crashing around the corner like a racehorse down the final stretch.
First Spider-Man shot a web that pinned Tombstone’s hand to the carpeted floor. “That won’t last long,” said Peter, “he’s got filed teeth.”
The hero narrowed his eyes at Peter’s insider knowledge, but didn’t have the chance to say anything else as the Scorpion launched himself at Spider-Man with a curse. Peter heard him snarl, “I’ve been waiting for this—”
“Watch out for the tail!” he shouted. This Scorpion didn’t have the wacky Wild Wild West spider centaur thing going on, but the stinger arcing from the back of his suit was straight off a Xenomorph.
Spider-Man jerked his head and the tail buried itself in the wall. The Scorpion wrenched it out in a shower of drywall, and through the hole it left behind Peter could see the larger convention area and the people still waiting for Stark’s speech. Startled heads swiveled at the sound of crunching wall.
He started to run down the back hall, hoping to take the fight that way, when Tombstone tackled him at the line of scrimmage.
“OOF!”
The two super-powered men crashed through the wall to a chorus of surprised screams. Peter dropped one of the cases and scrabbled for it in the debris, but Tombstone got to it first. Just as Peter reached for the handle the big henchman slammed his elbow into Peter’s nose and he fell back on his butt.
Normally stoic, Tombstone bared his shark’s teeth in a feral smile. “How’s that for a nose job?”
“Joke’s on you, pal, you probably just set it straight again!” Peter told him through the stream of blood running down his face.
He could have sworn the jackass rolled his eyes. Tombstone took off running, past the assembly hall toward the rest of the convention. Peter swore and tripped over debris to go chase after him, still clutching his remaining case. People jumped out of the way and pressed against the wall; distantly, he heard security shouting for them to stop.
Fighting sans mask was a new experience. Peter felt naked as he sprinted past blurs of shocked faces and skidded around the corner into the main hall. Dazzling holograms weaved overhead like a recreation of Blade Runner’s futuristic Los Angeles and there was a sort of elevator music-variety EDM playing through speakers. What a weird choice. He rarely got a soundtrack for his chase scenes.
Tombstone knocked aside convention goers like they were made of straw. Not everyone realized what was happening; at first Peter drew more stares for his bloody nose than the henchman did racing down the aisle. Peter leaped for all he was worth and planted his blue Converses squarely in the henchman’s back. Tombstone tumbled down wheezing and the case went flying across the air. Peter jumped for it with an outstretched hand.
“Yoink!”
A web snatched it from the air in front of him. Peter landed with a slide and whipped around to see Spider-Man haul the case in with one hand while swinging into the action with the other. A cheer burst from the crowd at the sight of the famous web-slinger.
Peter threw the other case at his head. Spider-Man yelped and dropped the first one to reflexively catch the second before it gave him an endoscopy. Diving, Peter caught the dropped case with a tuck and roll just before it could hit the ground.
“DON’T THROW THAT! Are you crazy?!”
“Where’s the Scorpion? You didn’t leave him in the hallway did you?” Peter panted.
“What? No, duh, he’s down! Give me both cases!”
“You’ve got other problems,” he pointed out. Tombstone had risen in the main aisle, oblivious to the panicking crowd, with another gun raised.
He aimed it at Peter first and fired. With lightning speed Peter yanked the case up to block the bullet. Thank God it was industrial grade. Even in the noisy hall, the sound of the gun was shocking and unmistakable. Bystanders shrieked and ducked down. Craig Pelton jumped and dropped the hot dog he was handing out, sending mustard spiraling into the air like ribbons.
Spider-Man shot a web that yanked the gun from Tombstone’s hand. “You’re in a public place man!” he admonished. He fired several more webs that tangled up Tombstone at the feet and hands and directed his irritated next words to Peter. “Think you could be more careful with those cases?”
“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll block the next shot with my face,” snapped Peter. He nudged Tombstone with his sneaker to guage how securely the man was tied up. The henchman snapped at him with filed teeth and Peter clucked at him disapprovingly as he looked the man over for more weapons.
Through a haze of color he became aware of the murmuring crowd and looked up. Bloody-faced, dressed in a shabby coat and sneakers, he certainly didn’t make a heroic impression.
“Uh, everything’s OK, folks!” Spider-Man said in his most placating tone, raising his hands to everyone. “Nothing to worry about! It’s all taken care of—HEY!”
Peter had taken off running with the case, fumbling with it as he barreled through bodies who were now pressing forward to see the action. There was one more face he thought might pop up, and it was better to get the hell away from all these people before that happened.
“Oh no you don’t!”
Spider-Man swung and landed right in front of him, hand outstretched to stop Peter like he was an officer directing oncoming traffic.
This time the kid knew better than to fire a web and Peter resisted the impulse to fire one at him, which was as recognizable a trait of Spider-Man’s as the suit itself.
But he didn’t slow down. Seeing this, Spider-Man took the initiative and rushed forward, arm drawing back as though for a right hook. Then suddenly, he shot a web past Peter to a table behind him, yanking it forward in a clever pincer action that almost made Peter proud.
He turned and struck the incoming table with his free fist like a swordsman slicing flying fruit in half, then wheeled back to the kid. Peter launched up and somersaulted, twisting so he came down precisely behind the Avenger and hooking his sneakers over Spider-Man’s shoulders in a reverse Frankensteiner he’d lifted from Lucha Libre wrestlers.
It was a dirty move, but one he knew Spider-Man could handle. Peter came out of his roll at a full run, unable to suppress a cackle.
“Not bad, kid!” he yelled over his shoulder at the dazed hero as he made for the main entrance, and the busy Queens street he could see beyond it.
The only warning was that animalistic screech.
He was almost to the tall glass entrance, which covered the entire front wall of the convention center, when the glass shattered before him sending everyone’s arms over their head. Peter was closest and crouched, skidding on the floor and shielding his head against the shower of glass. Frightened people took shelter under displays, and he scanned the area quickly to make sure no one was seriously injured.
“Oh, crap,” he groaned.
The Prowler stepped into view, flexing his electric claws.
“Give me the case,” he said to Peter in his low, manufactured growl, then noticed Spider-Man swinging up with one of his own. “Both of you.”
Was this Aaron Davis, Miles’s uncle? Or some other man wearing the same gear? Villains could adopt each other’s mantles as easily as heroes could. Peter called that particular trope the Dread Pirate Roberts and it was a constant headache.
“Another one?” said Spider-Man incredulously. “Where are you all coming from?”
Peter watched the dark-suited man warily. He’d come across Prowlers before and none of them were a joke. He could kill every bystander within a ten yard radius, and it wouldn’t be with any bullet Peter could dive in front of.
“The cases,” the Prowler repeated.
Electricity crackled from his claw tips as though from a live wire. The kid noticed this too, and looked worriedly over his shoulder at the crowd.
“Everyone clear out,” he said with authority.
Most listened to the Avenger, flowing as far back as they could get. There should be other exits, and Peter saw security getting people out in as orderly a fashion as possible. Some idiots lingered with iPhones held at the ready, risking their lives for some hits on YouTube.
The Prowler attacked in a flash of light and movement. His claws streaked a swath of lightning in the air as he brought them down on Peter, who jumped back.
“Ah ah!” he said, whipping the case up as a shield just as the claws made for his face.
The Prowler’s hand stopped dead before it could rip apart the case and its precious contents. Peter took the split-second to slam the sole of his foot square in the man’s chest, so unexpectedly the Prowler couldn’t engage the electric field wired into his suit, and sent him flying thirty feet through shimmering holograms to land in a nearby display. The force of his blow was a surprise, and the Prowler stood up amid the debris cautiously.
He was crouching for another attack when Spider-Man lassoed his wrist with a web.
Peter bellowed at him, “No, no, DON’T!”
It was too late. Electricity spiked out from the Prowler’s suit, racing up the web to Spider-Man’s outstretched hand. There was a sickening crackle as it reached its target. The kid staggered back and dropped to the floor.
Oh God, thought Peter, stunned.
What happened next he would never have expected: the Prowler froze, staring at Spider-Man as though scared he’d killed him.
He looked at Peter, and if it were possible for a fixed mask to have any expression, Peter could have sworn he seemed vulnerable. There was a moment of silence while they stared at one another.
Then the Prowler turned and fled.
Peter raced over and dropped the case to check the kid’s pulse. When he found it, he breathed a sigh of relief and hardly bothered to acknowledge the warning his spider-sense gave him.
From behind his head came a low whine.
He swiveled his head to see the cold, implacable mask of Iron Man. Its eyes glowed as though lit by some inner fire.
In a voice too soft for anyone else to hear, with the palm of his hand lowered to within a millimeter of Peter’s head and humming with deadly suppressed energy, Tony Stark said to him: “If he’s dead, so are you.”
“He’s not dead,” said Peter.
There was a moment as Iron Man’s readouts confirmed the assessment. He did not fire, but the whine of his suit continued to make the hairs on the back of Peter’s neck stand up.
Already the boy was stirring feebly. Thank God for the hardiness of enhanced individuals. “Wha-?” he said weakly, and the eyes of his mask focused on Peter and the Avenger standing behind him. “Oh, hey man,” he said to Stark.
“Hey yourself,” said Iron Man. “I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting to crash the party crashing my party. Couldn’t you have done this during the Hammer Industries presentation?”
Beneath his flippant words, Peter heard concern. Perhaps the kid did, too, because he struggled to a sitting position. Seeing he was out of danger, Peter sat back and felt his head bump gently against the repulsor still aimed directly at his skull.
“Do you mind?” he grunted.
“Absolutely,” said Iron Man, who did not move.
Out of the corner of his eye Peter saw police drawing near. “We need to talk,” he said urgently to Stark, turning his head as much as he dared.
“I’m sure you have the right to remain silent.”
“Where’z the megaconductor?” asked Spider-Man fuzzily, groping for the case he’d dropped. He flipped it open to find the thing empty. The decoy. Still sitting, he leaned forward and seized the second case at Peter’s side.
It, too, was empty. “What?”
At last Iron Man moved, only to reach into Peter’s coat and withdraw the One Ring from where he’d stashed it in the commotion.
Spider-Man looked at the megaconductor, then to Peter with artificially white eyes. “You have to watch the hands,” said Peter with resigned irony.
“Who are you?” said the kid, getting to his feet. “You’re—you’re different.”
Peter started to rise but the Avenger’s repulsor stopped him at no more than a kneel. “Not an enemy. Listen, I—”
“Hands up!” barked one of the police officers. Iron Man withdrew his hand and Peter instinctively raised his own behind his head, feeling a prickle of real worry for the first time in this universe: he could not waste time sitting in jail.
He would not die in this universe, glitching to death in a tiny cell on the Raft.
“You gotta listen to me,” he hissed to the pair, “you have no idea what you’re messing with, that collider is trouble!” He cut off as the police officers drew within hearing range. One of them took out a pair of high-tech handcuffs that Peter knew at a glance had been patented by Stark Industries.
“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Stark. For a moment he looked like he wanted to pause the officers in the act of fastening the binders around Peter’s wrists.
“I know what you’re doing with it,” snarled Peter over his shoulder. “So much for the rennaissance man. How long do you think you can—”
He caught sight of Olivia Octavius standing no more than a dozen feet away, owlish stare fixed intently on the scene, and snapped his mouth shut. By then the police were pulling him away.
.
“I’m not gonna keep asking,” said the suited officer. “What is your name? It’s not Rick O’Connell or John Wick or Max Rockatansky and if you name one more action hero I’m throwing you in a cell on the Raft with no toilet.”
Peter smiled sourly at him. “John Doe, then.”
The man scowled.
Peter’s gaze dropped to the floor, to which his wrists were fastened by a length of reinforced chain. A similar binding clapped around both ankles. He’d already proven himself too strong in the convention center to be handcuffed to a table, and this particular prison was well with the times, being equipped with measures to detain any “enhanced individuals” brought in. Some of them, he suspected, had once been meant for the Hulk.
They’d underestimated him, however. For the moment he was willing to let them. He did not intend to stay the night. He might never have even made it to the police station but for the combined escorts of Iron Man, Spider-Man and War Machine (who had arrived as he was being arrested) making certain he got there. Spider-Man had insisted on coming along, perhaps to prove he wasn’t suffering ill-effects after the shock.
Once Octavius was out of earshot Peter had tried a few more times to get in a word with them, but was interrupted every time by one of the S.W.A.T. officers.
“Copycats,” he was indignant to hear one guy mutter. What, did they think he was some kind of super power fanatic?
Fortunately he was seventy-five percent sure his fingerprints would not match the Peter Parker’s in this universe; prints were so highly variable they could theoretically be the only difference in what would otherwise be a picture-perfect copy of another dimension. DNA required a warrant. He did not think he’d be in the system even if they got it, but he didn’t want to leave any dangling threads that could be used against this dimension’s Peter Parker in the future.
Once he’d been booked the three Avengers had dropped out of sight. Hopefully they were still lingering around the station, waiting to ask their own questions once the mug shot and crap were done.
Peter had caught a glimpse of his mug shot and grimaced at the stubble. No one ever believed crazy shit coming from a guy with stubble. An EMT had swabbed away most of the blood from his face, but some still stained his neckline and collar.
“Where’s Stark?” he asked finally.
The officer raised his brows. “You want his attention bad, huh? Bad enough to steal his tech and wreck the halls with your other pals?”
“They’re not my pals!” Peter protested. “Ask Spider-Man; I helped him take them down!” How unfair was this?
“What, you trying to impress the Avengers? I don’t think they’re holding tryouts.” The other officers in the room grinned and Peter rolled his eyes.
“No, definitely not,” he said firmly. “But I do need to talk to Stark. Isn’t he here? You telling me he isn’t curious about all this?”
The officer took offense. “Tony Stark will wait his turn,” he snapped.
Defensive, thought Peter wryly. Probably they often had to remind people who the real authority was in the city. When heroes brought in crooks it was still treated as a citizen’s arrest; at times he’d relied on Good Samaritan laws to abet his interference. He’d always worked alongside street cops, but sometimes middle management proved pricklier and he wasn’t positive this guy wasn’t FBI. “Then what am I being charged with? Super strength? You’ve got nothing to arrest me on if Stark and Spidey aren’t pressing charges.”
The officer’s brows shot up. “We have a hell of a lot. You’re not going anywhere just yet.”
It was worth a shot.
They led him to a private cell and re-fastened the binders on him. Peter cooperated like a perfect little saint, hoping to put them off their guard for later.
The room was windowless and sterile. Harsh blue light, reflecting off gray walls, made it seem as much an operating room as a jail cell. A cot sat to one side. There was a small toilet and zero privacy to use it. Everything was heavily reinforced. The cot was not Hulk-sized.
Peter sat on the cot. He was more exhausted than he realized. It’d been a long day—a long few days. He’d give it a few minutes, just enough to see whether Tony Stark or one of the other Avengers paid him a visit. Hadn’t “collider” been the magic word; hadn’t he set off Spider-Man’s own internal alarm? Just a little while. Maybe until they fed him something. Yeah, he’d wait for dinner. He didn’t have the money for a hot meal and he couldn’t keep chugging along on one self-cooking hot dog. He hadn’t had a good meal since at the diner with Miles, or a proper night’s sleep in…how long had it been? Not that he ever needed it, who needed sleep?
Until then, he’d sit back on this cot and close his eyes—not to sleep, mind you, just to block out that glaring light…
.
“MJ?” he murmured drowsily some time later…then his eyes snapped open and he shot up straight. How long had he been asleep? In that room he had no sense of time. It could have been forty-five minutes, it could have been six hours.
He spied a little clock on the wall and almost had a heart attack. Five hours, wasted!
At first he thought his spider-sense had prodded him, or that a bout of glitching had startled him awake, but then he realized he wasn’t imagining the rumbling sensation beneath the floor. Peter swung his legs down and sat his sneakers flat, feeling the ground shake.
Then: a small explosion, right there in his cell. Peter yelped and leaped to his feet away from the hole that had blasted through his wall, sending dust and smoke all around the little room. Concrete tumbled down in small landslides. Behind the hole, he saw moving shapes. Not the Avengers, surely? Weren’t they all about using the front door now?
“Geez, couldn’t you have just posted bail?” he coughed into his coat sleeve.
A figure stepped through the hole and resolved slowly in the swirling dust. Then: electricity crackled low, from the claws hanging at his sides. Peter looked up to see the narrow white eyes of the Prowler. He braced for an attack that never came. The henchman simply stood there, glowering at him.
There was a moment of silence. “No bail?” Peter repeated, with a bad feeling.
“Sorry,” said another, sly voice.
Adamantium tentacles wove around the corner of the blasted hole, drawing in their mistress, who seemed borne upon them like a fantastical queen. Her face was hooded, but Peter had already reassessed his personal biases and needed no reintroduction to Doctor Octopus. His stomach dropped.
Ock drew before him, her feet never touching the ground, and leaned in to inspect him with large, flashing goggles. Peter reeled back.
“Thought I’d skip the paperwork,” she murmured, and he heard the smile in her words.