Chapter 4
Sometimes, Peter thought, the tendency of things to go from Bad to Worse seemed more by cosmic design than accident.
He was bound up in classic hostage fashion, with adamantium binders circling his wrists up to his forearms at the back of the uncomfortable chair they’d shoved him in. They’d only just removed his gag. All that was missing, he reflected sourly, was a pair of railroad tracks to tie him to.
After the one-sided jailbreak they’d shoved him in the back of a nondescript van like some common bank robbers. An exchange of vehicles had been made, at which point the Prowler had stalked off into the fading light. Either he was off to electrocute someone else or he heard the dinner bell ringing.
“What is this place?” Peter asked like he didn’t know already. They didn’t bring him up through the subway tunnels, so he was still tempted to count them as an emergency exit.
“My lab,” said Ock happily. She’d removed her hood and replaced her goggles with round spectacles. When unencumbered by her lab coat, she tended to maneuver solely by her snakelike tentacles as if walking under her own power was too pedestrian. “This is where I built the particle accelerator that brought you here. Tell me…did it hurt?”
She asked this eagerly, with a manic gleam of interest in her eyes that sent a chill down his spine.
“You are super creepy, you know that lady?” he told her.
“Am I in your universe?” she asked, ignoring his comment. “Of course, you may not know for sure…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” said Peter. “You friggin’ kidnapped me and started talking sci-fi mumbo jumbo like you think I know what you’re saying—”
Ock’s smile didn’t slip. “Don’t play dumb, or I’ll have no use for you. I know about the glitching. My man here told me about your hand. How long do the spells last? Do they escalate?”
Vess glared at Peter from one side of the room, an ice pack held to his head.
The would-be thief’s arrival had totally confused Peter for a second, and he’d tried to cover his surprise by dryly expressing concern for the man’s migraine before the truth hit him like Mjolnir:
Octavius had been attempting to steal the megaconductor for herself.
It wasn’t the city she’d been afraid of alerting so much as her CEO. A sizable draw of power would have drawn the attention of the Avengers…because Stark didn’t know. Not only had he never green-lighted the collider, he wasn’t even aware of its existence! Ock would have stolen the megaconductor and hidden it under his very nose to power her machine.
“Stark wouldn’t like that,” she’d said…
Peter looked around the control room and the chamber beyond the viewing screen. This kind of operation was mind-blowingly expensive and secret dimensional splicers didn’t typically qualify for research grants.
Abandoning pretense Peter asked, “How the hell did you build a massive particle collider under Stark’s nose, with his own money?”
Her look of self-satisfaction was all the confirmation he needed. One of Ock’s tentacles waved itself dismissively. “Oh, Stark has more money than he knows what to do with, and I’m nice to Gary in Accounting—I send him a Starbucks gift card every few months, wrapped up in a sizable check—but even Iron Man would notice millions missing from the budget. So I went looking for a benefactor…”
Peter sighed. “Is his name Wilson Fisk?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You do know a lot.”
“You’re not unique, you know.”
She didn’t like hearing that. What had given all the Spider-People comfort, the knowledge they weren’t alone, only irritated someone whose ego would allow no peers.
“This didn’t end well the last time you tried it,” he said conversationally.
“Oh?” She peered at him. “And how did it end?”
“As these things usually end…with a big boom.” Well, so he hoped.
“Aren’t you the prophet,” said Ock. A smile played around her mouth; she thought she was untouchable, the exception to every other timeline.
She peppered him with several more questions he avoided answering: how long had he been there? Had he been pulled into more than one universe? Why him, specifically; who was he to be so involved? It was frickin’ déjà vu. He might as well have been back in the chair at Alchemax.
He squirmed back as her tentacles snaked closer. Peter had never really been sure who wore the pants in that relationship. Sometimes, in his own universe, Otto had seemed as subject to the whims of the tentacles firmly fused to his spinal cord as they were to his commands. Codependent in madness.
“You know… you could just—send me along my merry way, to my own dimension…” he tried, just for shits and giggles.
“Hardly,” said Ock. She adjusted her glasses and squinted at him as if she could prompt an atomic freakout by will alone. “You’ll be kept under strict observation to measure the accelerating rate of glitching.”
“That,” Peter told her flatly, “will kill me.”
That merited less than a shrug from her.
Had she crossed that threshold already; the one that, even at his lowest, he never dared approach? Was Miss Frizzle a murderer?
Apparently losing interest in him until his cells decided to splinter again, she turned to her workstation, tentacles acting in concert to bring up hologram charts and adjust controls. One waved for Vess and a pair of brutes to take Peter away. Judging by Vess’s sneer Peter figured the man would do his damnedest to make sure his charge ended up in the observation room sporting a concussion to match his captor’s.
MJ, he thought. At their approach Peter drew his breath to probably lie through his teeth. “I hate to tell you, but Stark’s probably on his way now.”
All eight tentacles paused in midair. She slowly swiveled to face him. “What did you say?”
“I spilled the beans at the precinct. Stark and I had a nice, long chat, and pretty soon we realized what a comedy of errors today was—but he’s rounding up the Avengers as we speak.”
Her face was white. “You’re bluffing.”
He absolutely was. “I’m absolutely not,” he grinned. “How happy do you think he was to hear you’d built a collider in his basement? Somehow I think that violates the non-compete terms…”
“They don’t know where to find you.” Ock sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“Sure they do. I lied: I’ve actually been here before. You built this place in the same spot as the last dimension. New York real estate, am I right?” He took some pleasure from her clenched jaw. “Like I said, you’re not unique.”
It sounded so good he could almost believe it himself.
“So you’d save everyone a lot of trouble and Vess another head injury if you turned yourself in right now. No one’s died yet. They’ll give the mad scientist thing a little more leniency if the price tag doesn’t have blood on it—”
“Take him away!” Ock snapped to the grunts, who hauled Peter to his feet. He didn’t resist, hoping to lull them the way he’d thought to disarm the precinct into underestimating him.
“Don’t do anything stupid!” he called over his shoulder.
His last sight of Ock was of the scientist rising slowly on her adamantium tendrils, then turning to work furiously at the control station.
.
.
“Come on, I know you have bagels here,” hollered Peter. Through a small inset window in the door he saw Vess’s aggravated face. It disappeared from sight, only to reappear moments later with a bagel stuffed in his mouth.
“Mmmf,” he said, pointing at it and chewing slowly. “Delicious.”
Cute. It would play better if he were doing it without a black eye.
Peter looked for a vent and saw a grate in the corner. Step One: get these adamantium cuffs off his arms. Step Two: go up that grate. Step Three: find a place to pee in the subway tunnel and try not to feel like a bad citizen for it. Step Four: find Stark and make good on his threat to send the Avengers down here.
His battletime shopping list now complete, he tugged at his cuffs. The clasps were held together by a combination lock he could just barely see craning his head over his shoulder. Now, how to get the combination?
“Hey Vess! I—ahh!”
The atom attack he was planning to fake was superseded by a real one. Peter reeled and fell as his vision exploded into fragments of a hundred different dimensions, each one hooking a claw into his skull and playing tug o’ war with it. The room buzzed into different layouts, forms it must have taken in other dimensions, going carpet-to-linoleum-to-tile-to-carpet-to-carpet and everything flickering in-and-out like a bad signal.
His cry of pain was enough for Vess to throw the door open and run inside—not to help, but to observe and record for his maniac boss. The tech clutched a datapad.
By the time he’d reached Peter the attack had subsided, leaving the hostage inhaling carpet fibers from the floor.
“Aww,” that bastard tech said in disappointment. He’d barely begun to stand again before a swath of red and blue dropped through the air behind him.
Peter heard someone say, “Hey, good to see you again,” and then a yelp. The data pad crashed to the floor. He looked up and squinted.
Spider-Man stood above him, holding Vess by the collar. “You dropped this back at the convention center,” he said to Peter, gesturing at the tech who clearly couldn’t believe his bad luck.
“Could I drop him again?”
Vess spluttered as he kicked fruitlessly in midair and Peter stood up. “Combination code for the binders. Now.”
Still dangling, Vess typed in the numbers while Spider-Man watched. The binders sprang free with a loud click, and Peter shook the feeling back into his hands and rotated his shoulders, turning back to face him.
“You’re having almost as bad a day as I am,” Peter said cheerfully, and tapped him on the head again. Vess went lights out and Spider-Man lowered him to the floor. He webbed up the tech’s wrists and hands for good measure.
“So,” said Peter, who had sensed the Spider-Tracer ever since it’d crawled into the back of his collar at the police station, “Are the Avengers on their way?” Wouldn’t that be a convenient backup to his lie.
“Well, the suit guy—Mr. Stark thinks he’s FBI or SHIELD or something—he wouldn’t let anyone talk to you right away, so I stuck a tracer to your coat—”
Peter cut him off with an impatient wave. “Yeah yeah, I know how it works. We expectin’ any cavalry?”
“How do you—?”
“Kid!”
“No!” said Spider-Man, throwing up his hands, “They kind of got called to the scenes of some other jailbreaks!”
Indignant, Peter said: “I didn’t break out! These jackasses broke me out before I could do it myself! Hold on—what do you mean? Don’t tell me Tombstone and Scorpion are loose?” He groaned. “Ah, shit. Guess I know what the Prowler’s been up to. Well, let’s scram. We don’t have long before the alarm gets raised. Did you come from the tunnels?”
“Um, yeah…”
“OK, back up the vents we go.”
Spider-Man turned reluctantly to the grate he’d dropped out of, muttering, “I still don’t even know if you’re a bad guy and now you’re bossing me around? We have a lot to talk about.” He sprang up the grate easily and shifted around in the tunnel to give Peter a hand up.
“Nah, back up,” said Peter, and he leaped casually up to join the Avenger in the vents. Spider-Man looked at him for a long moment and began to shuffle down the vent in a direction Peter knew would lead back to the tunnels.
“So…you’re from another dimension, huh?” the kid whispered as they crawled along the metal sheeting.
“How much did you hear?”
“Everything…that Tracer has a micro-recorder. Brand-new stuff.”
Peter guessed Stark had had a hand in that. “Yeah. I’m just trying to phone home.”
“Was…” Spider-Man paused. “What was that freakout you had on the floor? Is it what that lady was talking about?”
Peter muttered, “Glitch in the matrix.”
“You’ve got that movie too?” Beneath the joke, he could hear the kid’s worry. He was reasonably concerned about rescuing this weirdo only to watch him die in a seizure of colors.
Their way took them past the laboratories Peter had seen on his last trip. “This is wild,” he heard Spider-Man say. “All this stuff is hidden away from the main lab. I’ve been to the particle physics research center. You’d never know any of this was here.”
Peter wondered at that, but there wasn’t time to go over it. It wouldn’t be long before someone discovered the unfortunate Vess and the alert went up.
Just now, however, he noticed an increased flurry of activity underneath them. Techs ran by clutching reams of papers and equipment. One even scooped up the bagel plate, dumped it wholesale into the lap of his lab coat, and sprinted for an exit.
“Think I lit a fire under their seats?” he asked wryly.
“They’re closing up shop,” whispered Spider-Man, almost in awe. He paused at one grate and they watched several scientists hurry past with armloads of computers.
“Amateurs,” said Peter, “They should jettison the monitors.”
“They really believe the Avengers are coming.”
“No chance of that happening?”
On cue, Spider-Man cocked his head and appeared to be listening to an internal voice. Stark, presumably, checking in. “They’re bailing,” he said finally. “Dunno what they’ll do with the big machine. I’m gonna take a look.” He was silent a moment more, and responded to the question Peter couldn’t hear: “Not yet—might get out without a fight.”
Peter was tempted to tell him that was as sure a jinx as anything but didn’t object as Spider-Man started crawling again in the direction of the collider. Truth was, Peter would have gone there anyway. What would Ock do with it now that its hours might be numbered?
Coming up on the machine, both Peters quieted and scooted up to the largest grate. Through the slats Peter could see Ock working furiously at the controls. One tech ran up to her with hair askew and electronics piled haphazardly in her arms.
“Shouldn’t we go?” she asked Ock. The tentacles beared down on her menacingly and the tech stumbled back a few steps.
“Not yet,” said the scientist through bared teeth. Her tendrils whirled around the equipment with ambidextrous competence. So engrossed was each appendage that Ock was actually standing on the floor with support from her own two legs. She could only be pried away from her precious collider, knew Peter, by her fingernails and the grasping mouth of every tentacle.
“What’s with Medusa?” said Spider-Man.
“Stark’s background checks on his employees are evidently not all that thorough,” Peter whispered back with a roll of his eyes. “She’s two-timing him with Wilson Fisk.”
“Wilson Fisk, the industrialist?”
“More like Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin.”
Evidently the kid had heard this moniker before, some bread crumb dropped from the mouths of street thugs over time, because the white eyes of his mask narrowed on Octavius. “Some guy called the Kingpin has been rounding up the last Chitari hybrid tech on the streets. I didn’t know it was Fisk.”
“He’ll have every criminal in this city under his thumb if he gets the chance,” Peter told him. He did not say: And one of him has killed one of us.
As if he’d been summoned, the doorway darkened as though thrown into a solar eclipse. A massive frame edged through the entrance and loomed over every suddenly fearful face in the control room. Only Octavius seemed unaffected by Kingpin’s menacing presence as she continued to work intently.
His bulk seemed too huge, too out of place for this universe. Beside Peter, Spider-Man hissed an intake of breath. “He’s so big. I didn’t think he was so big.”
After a strained stretch of silence Kingpin said with deadly calm, “What is happening?”
Techs shrank away. Ock responded: “What’s happening is the timeline is moving up—”
Another scientist burst into the room with reading glasses flying about his neck. “He’s gone! The guinea pig is gone!”
“Guinea pig?” grumbled Peter.
“Vess is down! There’s no sign of the subject! He’s probably halfway across the city by now!”
Several techs began murmuring fearfully among themselves. “If the Avengers weren’t coming before, they are now,” Peter heard one say to their nodding companion. “We have to get the hell out of here.” They began edging toward the door, wary eyes on the enormous industrialist. He made no motion to stop them from clearing out of the room. His eyes were fixed on Octavius’s back.
“Trial two,” she said without looking at him. “Right now.”
Her words sounded strangely exhilarated, excited by the prospect of action.
“Have you fixed the issues?” Fisk rumbled in his rockslide voice.
Octavius hardly acknowledged the question. “Stark won’t destroy this place; it represents too much work, so much brilliance…he’ll keep it, and he’ll need me to run it,” she said feverishly. “This is not the end!”
Her collider was the ship and she intended to go down with it. Peter glimpsed the mania she had suppressed so well underneath batty intellect and scientific enthusiasm. In the end mad scientists were birds of a feather. He had a bad feeling about this.
“What is she going to do?” Spider-Man whispered to him in alarm.
She was going to reach into a dimension she had no right to and pluck from it the wife and child of Wilson Fisk. Like fruit off a tree branch. Peter realized with a sick stomach it did not matter that Spider-Man hadn’t toppled that first domino in this universe.
He’d assumed that Spider-Man was the connective element in each instance, but he’d been wrong. Spider-Man was incidental. In every universe where the wife and son of Wilson Fisk had died, they’d been the victims of Wilson Fisk.
The industrialist faced away from their hiding place but Peter could well imagine the warring indecision playing across that granite face.
Finally Kingpin said, “Do it.”
Peter put a hand up to punch out the grate.
Spider-Man buzzed, “Now what are you doing?” even as he scooted out of the way.
“They can’t do this,” said Peter, and he slammed a fist through the grate. It shot out like a cannon and he dropped to the floor, rising to the shocked stares of the few people left in the room. From the ground Kingpin loomed even larger. Peter was fleetingly reminded of how the Peter Parker in the last universe had died.
Octavius looked outraged. A second later Spider-Man followed him down to the linoleum. One of the remaining scientists dropped his computer in surprise.
Nothing in Miles’s universe had suggested even the remote possibility of reasoning with Fisk but Peter tried it now. “Don’t do it,” he said. “It won’t work—not for long.”
Octavius rose like a deity upon her tentacles. “You should have run when you had the chance.” Eager tendrils writhed in midair. Peter ignored her.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said, locking his gaze with Kingpin. “Bring back your wife and son, right? You’ve tried it before. It doesn’t work. You can’t just rip them out of their universe like this!”
“Who is this?” rumbled Fisk without taking his eyes off Peter.
Before Ock could answer Peter said, “I’m Trial One. She snatched me from a dimensional rift as I was heading home from another universe. And the technology isn’t ready!” he shouted at Octavius. “She hasn’t perfected how to keep transdimensional atoms here! Vanessa and Richard—” and here Kingpin’s eyes widened at the name of his wife and son—“won’t be stable. Before long, they will start to glitch.”
“Don’t listen to him!” Octavius retreated protectively to her control panel and activated the particle accelerator.
Every head swiveled to the viewscreen upon hearing the units lumber into motion. A low moan emanated from the machine, as if deriving from deep within the earth itself. No wonder this place had to be hidden underground where the noise could be written off as passing subway trains. Fierce light shone from the two mouths of the collider, aimed at each other like gladiators in an arena; he heard the hair-raising hum of the many superconductors channeling energy in concert.
Kingpin made no move to stop her. He watched in fascination as the colors began to swirl like a desert storm.
“You’ll kill them all over again!” snapped Peter.
Fisk turned slowly, a mountain shifting on its foundation.
“I can fight the instability for a while, but if my body is unstable, theirs will be even worse—their atoms will split apart over and over and it will hurt, it will hurt so bad that by the end, they won’t be able to do anything more than cry on the floor, begging for it to stop, to die—”
“SHUT UP!” roared Kingpin, his face twisted horribly. For a moment Peter thought the man would cave in his rib cage in this dimension, too. “I never—never killed them…”
Yes, he had. But Peter knew better than to push it just then. “If you do this now, you will.”
“I can fix the splitting!” Octavius insisted wildly.
“It’ll be too late for them,” said Peter.
“Then I’ll get more!”
Kingpin looked at her with small dark eyes. Peter was aghast. More? More Vanessas and more Richards, as many as she needed?
“Is that how little you love them, Fisk? Can you just kill them over and over until you get it right?” he asked incredulously. “Look at what you’re doing. My God, she’s talking like they’re ice cream cones.”
Behind him he was aware of Spider-Man tensing for action.
Peter took a breath and lowered his defenses against the atomic misfiring. Almost at once his hand began to fracture into shapes and colors and he held it up against the pain to the now-frozen Fisk. “Do you see?” he said, and slammed up the bulwarks once more. With one last spasm his hand resettled into this reality.
Kingpin’s indecision gave way to resolution.
“Stop the trial,” he said to Octavius.
Her cascade of frizzy hair shook in her agitation. “Don’t listen to him! You can’t—”
Kingpin roared. “I SAID STOP!”
He lurched forward and slapped a hand the size of a cement block down on the Emergency Stop panel. Octavius’s howl of rage was drowned out by a horrible screech.
“NO! What have you done?!” she screamed at him.
The machine was not designed to brake like a car. An emergency stop was to be used only in the most dire circumstance, not to power it down; Peter’s eyes were jerked to the collider’s rotating points, which staggered and tripped. Superconductors began to pop off the machine like buttons.
Oh my God…
If it had stopped there it might have been salvageable, but it didn’t. Everyone stared in growing horror as small explosions began to ripple down the length of the machine, escalating in speed and intensity.
Then the collider burst apart.
The viewscreen protected them from flying parts but they hit the glass with such speed a spiderweb of cracks bloomed across the bay. In a weird way they stood united in shock as the particle accelerator, and Peter’s only way home, dismantled itself systematically into irreperable pieces.
When at last it had stopped, everyone stared at the destruction with saucer-wide eyes. Peter forgot to breathe for so long that the next breath his chest forced came as a surprise.
It was gone. He was never going home.
Kingpin was frozen to the spot. Abhorrent as his dream had been, it had represented his last hope.
The first one to give way was Olivia Octavius. Her chest heaved as she was raised higher than ever on her tentacles, for a moment bearing down with as much terrifying menace as Kingpin himself.
“You bastard,” she breathed, “you destroyed everything. All my work…You killed it! You BASTARD!”
And she attacked Fisk in a raging storm of tentacles, every one of them aimed at the man’s eyes and throat and heart, every strike designed to end the life of the man who, not a minute before, had been her benefactor. Initially surprised, he raised his arms to fend them off. Spider-Man started forward to do…something…but the tentacles whirled in such a frenzy that there was little opening before Fisk seized one tendril trying to wrap its way around his throat.
He yanked the tentacle, dragging Octavius with it, still screaming, and slammed his fist in her chest, anything to make the strikes stop—
There was a horrible sound. Peter’s first thought was to wonder if that had been what it sounded like to Miles, when that Kingpin had brought down his hands in all their power upon Peter Parker’s ribs.
“Oh God,” mumbled Spider-Man, backing away from the sight of Olivia Octavius laying motionless on the floor, her ribcage caved in like a mouth of broken teeth.
Her tentacles took longer to die. One by one, they fell limp upon the floor. Kingpin himself seemed not to immediately realize what he’d done. He just stood, staring down at Octavius’s body. What few scientists were left fled the room in a panic, save for one who didn’t seem sure how to edge around the massive industrialist to escape into the hallway.
Peter might have stood there for ages, too. Vaguely he became aware of Spider-Man tugging his arm.
Fisk looked up at them. Seeing Spider-Man raise his wrist to pin him with a web, he drew out a gun and grabbed the remaining scientist, cocking the Glock at her head. The woman started to cry and Spider-Man’s hand stalled. The big man edged out of the control room, into the hallway, and they heard him throw the woman aside and felt the earth shake as he ran.
“We have to go,” said Spider-Man. “We need to get out.”
Peter couldn’t stay in that room a moment longer with the horror that had been Olivia Octavius. He followed Spider-Man out of the bay area, with one last look at where the collider had been. Fisk was nowhere in sight. The woman he’d thrown aside scrambled up and disappeared with a flash of her lab coat, losing a shoe in her haste.
They followed her out.
No one stopped them. No one cared. They didn’t even have to go down the tunnels. They followed the retreating tech up to the main lab and into the night, where snow was falling.