Chapter 7
“It looks so normal,” commented Parker.
Alechmax sat before them, a modern glassy structure squatting incongruously against the snowy Hudson Valley forest, looking very much as it had in Miles’s universe. Pretty ballsy of Fisk to keep shop so close to the Avengers compound.
“I’ve never seen so many Teslas in one place,” added the kid. “For a bunch of scientists working at an evil company, they’re sure environmentally conscious.” He squinted. “That license plate’s from Hawaii. How’d they get that car from Hawaii?”
“How bout this guy?” Peter asked Stark, nodding at an approaching car. “He looks nerdy enough for an all-access pass.”
Stark made a face at the man driving his Chevy Volt down the long drive from the main stretch of road, heading to the parking lot. “I guess. Look at that beard. I guarantee you he brews craft beer in his basement.”
“You passed up the last two, how long we gonna wait?”
“Fine,” grumbled Stark. “Let’s just do it. You’re on, Pete.”
Peter sprang from behind a tree and stumbled into the drive, wrist to his forehead like a fainting heroine, and swooned as the Volt screeched to a halt before him. He collapsed on the hood and groaned, then giggled when Parker webbed the man as soon as he exited the car to clear the obstacle.
A minute later the man was napping in the bushes and Stark had donned the stolen white lab coat over his Black Sabbath T-shirt. “This is so tragic,” he complained of the shapeless coverall. “I’ve never made my employees dress like this.”
“Well, not everyone’s got the legs for a miniskirt,” said Peter.
Stark gave him a disparaging look and plucked a pair of glasses from a case in his pocket. As he drew it slowly over the unconscious man’s face it emitted a glinting sort of webby light, mapping the contours of the forehead and brow, down the nose to his collarbone. Fortunately the scientist’s height and build resembled Stark’s own and didn’t require a lot of scanning.
Standing, Stark brushed his knees and said, “Okay, that should do it. The charge on this will last about an hour.”
He tapped a discreet place on the glasses, and Parker made an impressed noise as Stark’s features were overlapped by an incredibly realistic hologram parroting the scientist’s face. Something in the expression was still very Stark.
“Is that the emitter from the B.A.R.F. project?” the teenager asked interestedly.
“Yes, and don’t even think about using it to skip school,” said Stark.
His voice was heavily modified, a tone higher and raspier. Before tapping the scientist’s head nighty-night, the captive had spluttered enough threats for Stark’s tech to record, analyze and extrapolate the man’s voice to emit one that was practically identical. Yet as with his face, the cadence of the words was pure Stark.
Stark looked at the man’s employee badge. “Stuart Halberstadt.” He grimaced as he entered the Volt. “Sandalwood air freshener? This is so undignified,” he said, checking the side view mirror. “A real low point in my career. See you inside.”
Accelerating, he headed down the drive to the Alchemax parking lot. He’d suggested that Peter and Parker stay outside and Peter had suggested Parker and Stark stay outside and Parker had suggested they all go inside, so that’s what they did.
Peter shivered slightly in the snow. As usual he did a few stretches to wake up the hammies and crack his back. Parker watched, then windmilled his arms unconsciously and swung them around.
“How come you’re not just dressed in your suit?” asked Parker.
Peter wore the suit beneath his outer clothing out of habit, but wasn’t going into Alchemax as Spider-Man. “The bad guys have already seen my face. If I show up in a suit alongside another Spidey they’ll put two and two together. Even if they don’t know my name, they’ll figure out to look for a version of me in this dimension.” Peter would get to leave this universe—he hoped—but Parker would get stuck mopping up any mess he left behind.
That was, Peter suspected, also the reason Stark hadn’t invited any other Avengers along for the field trip. At least he did have concern for Parker’s secret identity in this universe.
“Ah. Cool. Thanks. Nice suit, by the way. Classic red-and-blue. I see you didn’t rebrand.”
Never for long, anyway. Peter decided not to mention he was technically wearing a dead man’s suit. Instead he touched his toes and twisted, trying to remember some of those yoga stretches MJ had taught him. They helped his back. He’d always been pretty good at them but never got the hang of controlling his breath right. MJ said it was because he had to stop letting his thoughts bounce around like jumping beans.
“Well, I’d hate for all the knockoff tourist gifts to end up in the landfill. That’s a lot of cheap Halloween costumes to toss,” he said.
“I saw a Spider-Man themed popsicle,” the kid confided. “Did Mr. Stark make your suit too?”
Peter stood and frowned at him. “No…he made yours?”
“Do I look like I know how to sew?”
“I learned. I can double-stitch the crap out of a seam.”
“Well, I can’t,” said Parker defensively, shifting his feet. “I mean, I was gonna try and learn more, but then Mr. Stark showed up and I hadn’t gotten much further than goggles and a hoodie in six months…”
Six months, huh? That explained a few things. They shot a series of webs and swung quietly to the facility’s roof. Peter led the way over to the workman’s entrance and easily broke the lock, lifting it up to reveal the service tunnel beneath.
He’d already informed Stark as to the location of Ock’s lab but warned him he wasn’t sure it’d be in the same place or whether Ock kept a regular office in Alchemax at all. Peter had also given him her password, which again was subject to change. They’d meet at the lab, if it existed, grab everything they could find, and exit through the roof. Iron Man couldn’t sneak in inconspicuously, hence Stark’s disguise, but getting out was easier.
If Kingpin turned up Stark intended to apprehend him on the spot and blast out of there. He also mentioned Fisk Tower as a possible fortress, speaking of the other architectural monolith with some disdain. Neither of them really expected Fisk to run for the hills; he was New York to the bone and had built an empire there, only some of which was visible from the surface.
As usual, it was the glamorous vents for Spider-Man. Vents were for heroes who wouldn't show their faces and didn't kick down every door. Parker followed behind.
They scooted along in silence for a minute until Parker whispered to him, voice tinny against the metal sheeting, “I gotta ask. If you’re not an Avenger, how come you know so much about them? I mean,” he went on, stifling a sneeze, “for someone who was never in the club, you know an awful lot about the club.”
Peter didn’t really want to have this conversation, now or ever. “We run into each other at Trader Joe’s.”
“And karaoke?”
“New York’s big, smart ass, but when you get this many ‘enhanced individuals’ running around one city we might as well be breathing each other’s carbon dioxide.”
They paused while some scientists lingered beneath the nearest grate, chatting. Ock’s death had yet to make the rounds, but it would soon. Not even Stark could hush that up forever.
This was the kind of place Peter had expected to work at, once. Midtown High had seemed the auspicious start to a career dedicated to science. In a way, his career was dedicated to science, except it tended to wear capes and monologue and try to take over the world. Maybe he would have even ended up at Stark Industries, or here at Alchemax wearing one of the white lab coats Stark hated, rather than laboring as a poorly-paid research fellow in the physics department at Empire State where they were always trying to strong-arm him into teaching undergraduates. Surely not all of Fisk’s employees started their first day of work at the firing range; he remembered Alchemax recruiting his classmates from the university.
It wasn’t that Peter felt unfulfilled as Spider-Man. Like he’d told Parker, he put his degrees to good and inventive use in far more interesting ways than he might at Alchemax.
It was more that he felt unfulfilled as Peter Parker.
He’d been vaguely aware of this but had been pinning the tail on the wrong donkey for years, something he hadn’t understood ’til he’d met that bright, gawky, decent kid in the last universe and said he loved him and realized with a shock he was even capable of the same love his aunt and uncle had felt for him, their child.
Suddenly Peter got impatient with the whole caper and kicked it into high gear, shimmying in the direction of Ock’s old office. Maybe he’d beat Stark there and they could get this over with.
Soon he spotted it and knew by the blue ball chair it was definitely the late Ock’s lab. It seemed weirdly forlorn and her computer still stood on the desk, waiting for a ghost to type in the password.
Wrong ghost, thought Peter.
He clambered down the weird modern-looking light setup and dropped languidly on the bouncy exercise ball.
“What a weird choice for a supervillain,” said Parker, landing silently after him. “You’d think they’d all have, like, an Iron Throne or something.”
“Well, she probably needed the lumbar support,” Peter said absently, clicking around and bringing up the password prompt.
“Lumbar support?”
He didn’t look up while he rapidly typed the password he’d recalled, hoping it was the same one. The previous incident at Alchemax had somewhat drilled it into his memory. “If her background is the same as ol’ Otto Ock’s from my universe, those adamantium tentacles were fused to her spine in a lab accident years ago.”
“Oh.” Parker’s voice was quiet.
“Damn,” said Peter, shoving away from the desk, “password’s different. Must have been randomly generated. Okay, we’ll just take the computer.” He disconnected it from the tangle of cables and propped it on his shoulder like a boom box. His atoms fritzed for a moment before he wrangled them back into the sheep pen.
“We’re good to go, Mr. Stark,” said Parker quietly, touching a hand to his ear. Peter listened for Stark’s reply in the earbud Iron Man had supplied on their journey to the facility. All he heard was silence.
They looked at each other.
“Mr. Stark?” the kid tried again.
The abbreviated flow of conversation filtered through their earbuds. “—Well, if Monica thinks she can just take over the Christmas party planning again, she’s got another thing coming.” The words were coming from Stark’s borrowed voice, and they were met with sounds of agreement from his audience. “I mean, an escape room? Really?”
Peter sniggered. “He got caught up in the office gossip mill.”
“And you know she dyes her roots,” said a conspiratorial woman’s voice.
“Good genes, my ass,” said Stark. “You don’t find that shade of toffee in the wild.”
“Hey, Just for Men, you’re one to talk,” Peter said into the earpiece.
“Poor Monica,” said Parker.
“Stark, we’ve got the computer. We’ll meet you back at the woods.”
They turned to head back up the vents. “I still can’t get over how normal this place is,” said Parker as Peter shifted the computer on his shoulder, preparatory to leaping. “I mean, they have a cafeteria. They drink lattes. I can’t imagine Thanos drinking a latte. Maybe the Maw.”
Peter stopped. “Thanos?”
“Yeah. Oh! Did you face him too?” the kid said excitedly. “Did he snap you? Man, that was bad. I mean, I wasn’t around, but I heard it was bad.”
“Snap?” Peter asked, slowly, then: “Holy crap. You used the Infinity Stones.” For a moment he rocked on his heels. Then he threw up his free hand before slapping it to his head. “That’s it! That’s why this universe is so freakin’ twitchy!”
“What?”
Reality had changed. Peter strongly suspected they were now in the redo, the second chance, and the reality it had wiped out had not yet faded from the cosmos. Stephen Strange would have putzed around in Earth’s collective memory of the incident because there would otherwise have been a whole lot of PTSD in the streets. He’d had to do the same for Peter’s world—save for the Avengers, lest history repeat itself.
Peter gesticulated to the world at large even as he kept his voice down. “Ever since I landed, my spider-sense has been going haywire. This whole reality is like a computer screen that needs re-calibrated. I thought at first it was just that weird intuition that I was in the wrong universe.” He paused in the act of pacing, the kid’s words from a moment before sinking in. “What do you mean, you weren’t around?”
The kid seemed confused. “Well, we got, you know…” He snapped his finger. Peter stared at him. “Unless—weren’t you?”
“No,” Peter said strangely, “I wasn’t.”
He’d died later on.
“Oh. Well, I guess it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Parker with a slightly nervous shrug. “You, uh, you think any of this other stuff is important?” He waved his hand around.
More equipment lay scattered about the room, including that deeply freaky chair.
“Not unless you need a new microscope,” said Peter, feeling disconcerted. Maybe the snap was a fifty-fifty chance, but Peter Parkers sure seemed like they generally didn’t have a great life expectancy. He felt like he’d unwittingly gone past his expiration date.
They jumped back into the ventilation shaft and Peter began pushing the cumbersome computer ahead of him.
“Is your spider-sense better than mine?” Parker wondered aloud once they were crawling along again. “I mean, mine does the same stuff as yours—I think—but I don’t always know what it means.”
“Comes with experience,” grunted Peter. And independence. He brushed a normal spider out of the way and continued to push the computer forward. “Maybe lose your suit every once in a while.”
“Huh?”
Peter tried not to inhale a cobweb. “You started relying on Stark’s tech too early. Six months in? You were still figuring out what you could do.”
Parker had told him some of the suit’s modifications, and mentioned he’d even donned the Iron Spider already. From what Peter could tell the kid had a fairly good handle on his own abilities, both superpowered and intellectual, but they lacked refinement. Parker had developed his own web fluid and system to fire it but wouldn’t advance much further if all the support tech he’d developed himself in every other universe was supplied to him in this one by Iron Man.
“It’s a good suit,” said Parker, uncertainly, from behind.
“It’s a training wheel you don’t need.”
Not to mention a debt of gratitude. In all his own history with the Avengers, Peter had never accepted more than he gave. He’d FedExed his own Iron Spider suit back to Stark Industries years before and never bothered to check whether Stark had received it.
But Peter wasn’t in this dimension to stomp around the garden, either. Parallels and divergences. "Would you play nice?" he could almost hear MJ and Miles saying in united exasperation. “Listen, it’s good you’ve got help,” he added reluctantly. “Really. Just be careful how much you owe.”
Uncertainly, the kid muttered, “Sure.”
From below them floated the sound of a tech’s uneasy voice. “It’s all this way. It’s all on her computer, like Mr. Fisk ordered…she’s really…dead?”
The Spider-Men stopped dead and stared at each other. A familiar growl answered the tech: “Yes. And she was never here.”
Tombstone came into view, chewing on his toothpick and looking like he was waiting for an excuse to put it through someone’s eye. Peter felt his nose throb and was glad to see a bandage casing the henchman’s own nose bridge. Then a long, metal tail swung into view, heralding its owner, the Scorpion. Evidently the lunatic’s gear had been broken out of the precinct with the rest of him.
“They’re here for the research,” hissed Peter. Fisk wasn’t giving up on that collider. Ock laid the groundwork, but he’d find some other bright-eyed and adamantium-tailed scientist to finish the work. Peter was willing to be he’d already cleared out a space beneath his own tower.
Parker touched his hand to the earpiece. “Mr. Stark,” he said with quiet urgency, “Two of the guys from the convention center are here. Jaws and the Scorpion. Think they’re here for the same reason as us.”
“Jaws?” said Peter.
Parker gestured toward his mouth. “He’s got those sharky teeth, you know?”
“Where are you? Where’s the research?” Stark’s words were lowered and they could hear chatter in the background.
“Back in the vents, just outside the office. Had to take the computer with us.” Parker chewed for a second, glanced at Peter, then breathed: “We gotta take them back into custody.”
Peter stifled a groan. “What? We’re not here to wreck the place! This is an intelligence mission, remember?”
“I can’t just let these guys wander the streets again,” whispered Parker, gesturing animatedly at the two henchmen, who were looming over the Alchemax employee.
“We don’t know where the Prowler is,” Peter pointed out. “If we stick them back in jail now, he could just bust them out again and this would be for nothing.”
“They’ll go to the Raft this time. Not even that Prowler guy can break them out of there right away.”
“And who do you think the police will ask to make sure they get there this go-round? There’s no time to babysit them! If we let them go, you can probably follow them to wherever Fisk is hiding. Tombstone’s his bodyguard; he won’t stay away for long. We’ve gotta be smart about this.”
“And if they hurt someone in the meantime?” Parker demanded. “That’s on us! If we nab them now maybe they’ll flip on Kingpin. We already figured he’s at his tower anyway!”
Peter blew out his breath. “Sorry, kid, but that’s your problem. I didn’t ask to get sucked into this universe but I’m asking, really nicely, pretty please can I get out? I’d stick around but I can’t stick around. I’m kind of on a deadline here and I didn’t pencil in taking out half your rogue’s gallery for you!”
It was bad enough he'd had to deal with them all in his own universe, now he was expected to do it in this one? He wanted to go home.
With his mask on, Parker’s expression was indecipherable. Peter didn’t care. One side of his head glitched, then his jaw. He rubbed at them, wondering if he was imagining it aching worse. After a moment the kid said, “You should take the computer and go. We’ve got this. If there’s a problem, I told you where the compound is.”
Peter shook his head in frustration. “No. Just stick a Tracer on ‘em and track where they go.”
Miles would have listened. So would Gwen, however reluctantly. Though Peter had never thought of himself as much of a team player, he’d assumed the responsibility of leadership within the group of Spider-Things with an instinctive authority he hadn’t analyzed at the time.
Throughout this conversation the third party had remained silent. Probably there was no good way to weigh in without alerting stray ears on his end of the line.
“Mr. Stark?” asked Parker, deliberately not looking at Peter.
Possibly Iron Man hesitated. Or perhaps he had to remove himself to a safe distance, outside the range of eavesdroppers, so he could say, low and firm: “Web ‘em up. On my way.”
“On it,” said Parker.
Peter tried very very hard not to take it personally and it almost worked.
Seeing the kid start to move, he snarled into the crook of his arm. “Fine. Fine! You win. I’ll take Jaws. Make it quick, at least?”
He had to leave the computer there, hanging out in the vent. Crawling around in the ceiling was getting old anyway. They doubled back to the office, where Tombstone and the Scorpion were waiting for the employee to unlock the door with her keycard. She did so nervously and sprang back as soon as the lock unhitched.
Tombstone and Scorpion walked a step inside and stopped. Some martial instinct made every muscle in Tombstone freeze save for his eyes, which tracked the area quickly. The Scorpion drew a little closer, looking around, and rumbled: “Where is the computer?”
The tech peeked inside. “It stays right on that desk—look, there’s the monitor,” she said.
Scorpion tapped the desk with his Xenomorph tail. The sharp point cracked the glass top. “I see the monitor. I don’t see the computer. You were supposed to give us the computer.”
At a loss for words, the tech could only splutter in surprise. Still searching the room, Tombstone drew a Glock from holsters on either side. They weren’t meant for her but the tech stumbled back in fear, turning to scramble away, attracting the attention of the Scorpion as movement might draw a predator’s ire in the wild. He lunged and sank the end of his tail in the glass directly in front of her, cutting her off.
“Going somewhere?” he growled.
“I don’t know where it is!” she cried.
A web took the Scorpion out at the ankles. He crashed forward against the glass wall and left a bloody smear down its side, a bright white tooth tumbling to the carpet. Parker swung out of the ceiling, firing a blast of web that pinned the Scorpion’s tail to the glass. The tech charged out of the room, hollering at the top of her lungs.
Peter was in motion too. He dropped directly on Tombstone, knocking the Glock from one hand and seizing the henchman’s other wrist so that the shot fired straight into the exercise ball chair, which rocketed around whizzing its last breath. Tombstone was strong but Peter was plenty stronger and he pried the gun away while kneeing the man in his stomach. Then he hit the jackass square in his nose bandage and was rewarded with a rare howl of pain.
“Fisk must have you on pretty good health insurance,” Peter taunted.
Tombstone’s eyes intensified at the sight of the shabby man from the convention center who’d reset his nose bridge. He went for another weapon strapped to his side with lightning speed.
Peter made to catch the man’s hand—
Then he seized in midair, paused in motion like an ACME character who hadn’t yet realized they’d run off a cliff, before crashing to the ground in a fit of colors and shapes. The attack was so swift and sudden it distracted him from the sound of the Glock going off and when his shoulder erupted in fire, it was indistinguishable from the rest of the frenzy.
He struggled to slam up his defenses again. All sound was drowned out by the static in his head and he heard snatches of noise and conversation from a dozen different universes. When at last he managed to open his eyes and saw the blood staining the linoleum he wasn’t sure at first whose it was. Then he looked into the barrels of two matching Glocks.
These were soon joined by the sounds of more than a dozen other weapons being cocked. Several scientists had crowded into the office, each holding up a blaster that Fisk was almost certainly intending to sell to some Third-World dictator and pointing it directly at him and Parker, who had just managed to web up the Scorpion before getting distracted by Peter’s attack.
Now, one bullet—even two—Peter could handle. Fifteen weapons presented a stickier challenge.
Speaking of sticky—he clasped a hand to his shoulder, from which blood streamed in small rivulets. He’d had such injuries before. Usually MJ patched them up—she was no stranger to a double-stitch herself—and he’d wake up the next morning to find the wound nearly healed.
Which required him to live long enough to wake up the next morning.
Annoyed as he was at Parker and Stark for going ahead with this, he felt a little bad for screwing it up.
“Where is the computer?” demanded one of the scientists, and Peter was outraged to see it was the woman they’d saved from the Scorpion’s anger.
“You are so ungrateful,” he told her indignantly.
She squared her laser rifle’s sight between his eyes. Evidently she wasn’t happy about getting blamed for the theft. “Where. Is. It?”
“THERE THEY ARE!” roared someone from the hallway.
The speaker shouldered their way through the crowd and emerged to tower over Peter, who had been dissuaded from standing by the warning clicks of every weapon in the room. He wore the face and beard and voice of Stuart Halberstadt, the man they’d bushwacked in the driveway, but not the white lab coat. Stark had stolen the lab coat.
"I thought you webbed him up," he told Parker.
"I thought you did!"
“These guys AMBUSHED me in the parking lot and stole my Volt and my coat and my I.D.!” Halberstadt screamed at the vicinity, red-faced beneath his beard. “There’s one more here! Someone go FIND him!” He brandished a laser handheld weapon at Peter’s face. “If there’s one scratch on that car you are DEAD!”
“They’re dead anyway,” snarled the Scorpion from against the wall. Several scientists were working to detach him from the webbing but Parker’s web fluid stymied their efforts. “I will put my blade through their throats.”
“Hey, pal, that plan didn’t work too well on Ripley,” Peter shot at him, then turned back to the man whose identity they’d hijacked. “And Chevy doesn’t deserve this level of brand loyalty.” Knowing Stark, he’d parked it halfway on the curb and busted the front axle.
Was it really Halberstadt glowering at him? Or was it actually Stark playing for effect, trying to buy time and split up the assembly to look for a third intruder?
Tombstone said in his low, gravelly voice, “They both die.”
Head shots didn’t heal the next morning. Peter’s mind raced. Parker stood poised to fight, but if everyone started shooting at once, both Spider-Men would wind up as pincushions. He grimaced at the kid as if to say, “See?”
He gestured at Halberstadt. “Here’s your guy!” he insisted. “You want the third? Here he is! It’s a hologram! How else do you think the third guy snuck into the building? It’s Tony Stark!”