Marvel Classic Novels--Spider-Man, page 19
The Rhino ripped out of the cocoon as if it had been made of tissue paper—and parts of it were—and seized Mortia by the ankle. Then he grunted, rolled, and threw her.
Here’s a business secret not everyone knows: Super strength, after you get to a certain point, suffers from a case of diminishing returns, especially in combat. That’s just physics, old Sir Isaac rearing his oversized melon. When you lift something heavy, you’re pushing up at it, but it’s pushing down at you, and through you to the earth. That downward force eventually gets to the point where it starts forcing your feet into the ground.
Sure, the Hulk can free-lift better than a hundred tons, but when that much weight is pushing down on a relatively small area—like his feet—it tends to drive them down like tent stakes. (Not to mention that there just aren’t all that many hundred-ton objects that won’t fall apart under the stress of their own weight when lifted.) Similarly, the Thing can throw a big punch at a brick wall, but if he uses too much of his strength, the impact of the blow will shove against him, pushing his feet across the floor or even throwing him backward. He has to brace himself if he’s really going all-out.
(Which is one reason I’ve done pretty well in slugfests against guys a lot bigger and stronger than me, by the way—my feet always hold on to the ground, or wall, or whatever, allowing my punches to be delivered far more efficiently than those of most of the powerhouses.)
Anyway, once you get into the heavyweight division of super strength, the differences are kind of academic, and they only really stand out in a couple of different areas.
Ripping an object apart between your hands is one of them. It’s isometric.
Throwing things is another.
The Rhino can trade punches with the Hulk. He can flip an Abrams main battle tank with one hand. And, apparently, he can throw gothed-out brunettes halfway to Jersey.
Mortia shrieked and flew out of the junkyard like a cruise missile in a red cravat. She clipped the edge of a ten-story building a block away, sending up a cloud of dust and a spray of shattered bits of masonry. The impact didn’t even slow her flight down. She just kept on going, tumbling end over end, over the nearest buildings and out of sight, screaming in feral rage all the way. The scream faded into the distance.
For a second, the remaining Ancients were stone-still in surprise, and it was time enough for the Rhino to come to his feet in a fighting crouch, arms spread. He might have looked intimidating if he hadn’t been facing approximately ninety degrees to the left of his foes.
Malos moved, quick and certain, his body darting for the Rhino, dropping, spinning, so that he kicked the big man’s legs out from under him. The Rhino had far too much of a mass advantage on the Ancient. Malos’s kick was viciously strong, but he wasn’t properly braced to transfer enough of that strength into upsetting the Rhino’s balance, and all he was able to do was kick the Rhino in the ankle hard enough to annoy the big guy.
The Rhino kicked him back. It was a blind kick, and didn’t land with full force, but it was still strong enough to send Malos flying into a half-stripped old pickup truck, slamming him through the safety glass to a painful impact with the steering wheel and dashboard.
We had to work fast. The Rhino had taken Mortia out of the equation, at least for a little while. I had no idea how far he’d actually thrown her, but if she didn’t hit something solid, wind resistance would slow her down eventually—say, within half a mile. Then she’d land and head back. Given how fast I’d seen her move, we had maybe a minute to take out at least one of the other Ancients; ninety seconds, tops.
That made me eager to mix it up as soon as I possibly could—but that wasn’t the plan. We had to see if my theory was correct, and to do that I had to let them start on the Rhino. So I clenched my hands into fists and waited.
Thanis closed on the Rhino in perfect silence, and as a result slammed his first couple of hits in without opposition. Hits like that probably would have broken my neck. The Rhino just grunted at the first, and was a savvy enough brawler to roll with the second. He swiped one huge hand in an arch and got lucky, more or less. The blow landed, and Thanis staggered back a pair of steps.
Great. Of all the times to have a great opening round, the Rhino picks now, when he’s supposed to be losing. At this rate, he’d probably rough them up just long enough for Mortia to return. I debated tripping him or something. It wouldn’t be like I was trying to get him killed. I would just be sticking to the plan, which was everyone’s best chance of survival.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to do it. Malos came back into the fight with a vengeance, literally seizing the Rhino by the horn and sweeping him up and over to slam the big guy’s back onto the ground with earth-shaking force. The impact stunned the Rhino. Malos stepped forward and, with brutal efficiency, stomped a heel down on the Rhino’s head, a motion similar to that of a man crushing an empty can of beer. The Rhino’s thick skull withstood the impact (of course) but the sheer power of it drove his skull six inches down into the gravel and mud of the junkyard’s ground, and it seemed to daze him even more thoroughly.
“Take him,” Malos snarled, and lifted his eyes to me.
Thanis bared his teeth in a nasty smile, lifted a hand, fingers spread, and then drove it flat against the Rhino’s chest, where another burst of sickly light flared out between his fingers. The Rhino screamed again, and the sound sent a surge of adrenaline and rage through me.
I went into a swan dive, aiming for the Ancient kneeling over the Rhino. As I expected, Malos threw himself in the way, leaping up to meet me in the air. I folded into a roll and, as the Ancient met me, brought both heels into a lashing kick that tagged him squarely on the forehead and killed both his momentum and mine. We dropped the last fifteen feet or so to the ground and landed ten feet apart, facing one another over one of the chemical-spill puddles of various auto fluids.
On the way down, I hit the top tire of a stack behind me with a short webline, and used the elasticity of the line and my own strength to fastball it into Malos’s chest. The blow knocked him back—because super strength doesn’t mean you suddenly have more mass. Malos might have checked in at around two hundred and fifty pounds, and the tire hit him hard enough to take him off his feet and dump him onto his butt. Best of all, the old tire had been half-full of stagnant water, and it splashed all over his fancy clothes. He looked up and directed a snarl of hatred in my direction.
“Welcome to New York, chump,” I said. Then I bounded up onto the tire stack, and from there went over a twelve-foot-high wall made of crushed cars.
Malos let out an angry snarl and chased me. He came sprinting around the corner, focused entirely on my red and blue costume, intent on catching up to me and neutralizing me before I could take a swing at his brother.
Of course, if I had been in the costume he was chasing, it probably would have worked better.
Instead, I hopped up to a shadowy section of the wall of cars and froze, while Felicia bounded through the predawn dimness in my backup costume. In better light, or if she’d been still, there would have been no way anyone with eyes would have mistaken her for me—but wouldn’t the Ancients have thought of that kind of thing before they set up the time and place for the showdown?
Malos ripped free a heavy mirror that had somehow survived its parent truck’s crushing, and flung it after Felicia. The Black Cat dodged it with contemptuous grace, cleared the wall of cars, and hit the car crusher with her grappling line, then retracted it, hurtling through the air as it pulled her, just ahead of the enraged Ancient, leading him away from the Rhino.
I went back over the wall and flung myself at Thanis. Once upon a time, I probably would have said something cute to make him turn around before I hit him, but wasting time on such a thing in this kind of fight could get me killed.
That said, though, I’m freaking Spider-Man.
“Warning!” I shouted. Thanis blinked and half-turned his head, just in time for me to lay a haymaker directly across his jaw. He flew back from the Rhino and slammed into the side of a junked school bus, and I followed right on his heels. “The surgeon general has determined that attempting to eat the Rhino may result in unanticipated side effects.” He bounced off the bus and ran into my fist. I heard teeth break, and felt a rush of furious satisfaction. “Including but not limited to dental problems.” I gave him a double-handed sledgehammer blow to the guts. “Nausea.” I sent a flurry of jabs at his head, pretending it was a speed bag, and bounced his skull off the bus maybe fifty times in seven or eight seconds. “Headache.”
Thanis wobbled forward, his eyes gone glassy, his face broken, bleeding, swelling. He could barely keep his feet. “And,” I said, drawing back. “Drowsiness.”
It’s rare for me to go all-out, but I hit the jerk with every fiber of my body and sent him clear through the bus’s metal siding.
The bus rocked a time or two, but the Ancient did not arise. He lay sprawled and motionless inside.
Not bad. Maybe it wasn’t as impressive as a Rhino-strong blow, but for a guy who weighs in at one sixty-five, it was a pretty good hit. Even better, my hypothesis had been proven. Thanis had indeed been vulnerable as he fed.
“Don’t let me down, Doc,” I muttered, and flicked one of the three Alhambran agates at the downed Ancient.
There was a whisper of sound, no louder or stranger than that of a door sliding closed, and Thanis—and the agate—vanished. Gone. Poof. Just like . . . well. Magic.
Hot diggity dang, it worked!
I threw myself over to the Rhino’s side. He lay on the ground, his breathing labored. “Aleksei,” I said. “You all right?”
“I,” he wheezed, “think I do not like these Ancients. Did it work?”
“Yeah. One down. Can you move?”
He shuddered, and after a second I realized that he was trying to get in a sitting position. He gave up with a groan. “It would seem not.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“No!” he wheezed. “You must finish them before they realize the danger. You may never get a second chance like this one.”
“I can’t just leave you here. Mortia won’t be gone long, and she’ll be angry.”
The Rhino growled, and swiped an arm weakly at me. It was an improvement, of sorts. “Will be fine in a moment,” he said, glaring in my direction. “Now, you must fight. You are using your wits. Speed. They have only strength. And they do not know the danger they are in. This is your kind of battle, Bug Boy. Take it to them.”
“Bug Boy?” I said, and felt myself grinning.
“Spidey!” called Felicia’s voice from the other end of the junkyard. “I lost him! He’s heading back to you!”
A vise-clamp settled on the back of my neck, and bounced my head off the nearest car. Which was twenty feet away. It hurt.
An undetermined amount of time later, I managed to sit up, only to find Malos standing over me. He leaned down and grabbed the front of my costume, hauling me to his level. “You forget that you touched me,” he said in a quiet voice. “It struck me that while I seemed to be pursuing you, my sense of your presence told me that you were, in fact, behind me. A clever enough ruse, little spider. But your bag of tricks is now empty.”
My spider sense’s terror-reaction was nothing to that of my mind, as I scrambled to gather up my wits and try to defend myself.
I was too slow, the blow to my head too severe. Malos held me high off the ground with one hand, made a talon of the other, and his fingers suddenly dug into my abdomen.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
White hot. Ice cold. Nauseating. Terrifying. My senses were overloaded, the pain something that somehow gained sound and taste, color and texture and scent. The pain was as fundamental, solid, and real as I was—in fact, more so. I tried to scream, but the pain had priority on reality, and no sound came out. This was worse than what Morlun had tried to do. He’d barely touched me for a second. This went on for an eternity, and mixed itself with a horrible sensation of something being ripped out of me, like someone had shoved a blender into my belly and turned it to puree.
Somewhere behind the pain I could dimly sense the real world, but it was disconnected and unimportant, a shadow play being performed far away. I saw it all through a hallucinogenic haze. Saw myself running atop a wall of crushed steel. Saw myself take off my mask and become Felicia. Saw her look up at the power lines passing by on the street, saw her raise her baton, saw a thin black line extrude from it as the hook arched up and up, sailed over the power lines, and then fell—onto Malos.
The Ancient’s expression was quite calm—except for the maddened frenzy of hunger dancing in his eyes—and he paid the shadow-play world no mind. But his expression turned to shock and sudden agony as the Black Cat’s line touched him and electricity from the power cables surged through to him.
I felt it, too. It hurt, but not necessarily in a bad way. The burning tingle was an honest pain, a real-world pain, not the nightmare agony of the feeding Ancient. I felt my body contort along with Malos’s—and then the agony was gone and I was in my body again, burned and breathless and utterly exhausted.
I lifted my head enough to see Malos stirring, attempting to rise. I had to get on him right away, knock him out before he gathered his wits and focused his power into his defenses. I managed to wobble upright. Then I staggered over to him and kicked him in the chops. The blow was weak, and it knocked me down, but it got the job done. He fell to the ground in a pile of loose limbs beside me.
I fumbled out the second agate and flicked it at his nose. It missed and struck his cheek, but once more, without a flicker of showy lights, with barely more than a whisper of sound, the Ancient simply vanished.
I heard Felicia come running toward me. “Spidey?”
“Mmm, fine,” I slurred. “Jusht ducky.” I started to stand up and staggered again.
Felicia had to catch me. “Is that all of them?”
“Two,” I managed to say. “We got two.”
“What about Mortia?” Felicia hissed, looking around.
She turned her face directly into a blindingly swift blow. The Black Cat went straight down, body gone instantly and entirely limp— unconscious or dead.
Mortia, her dark clothes and hair soaked from her landing in the river, looked coldly down at Felicia for a moment. “Don’t worry, darling,” she purred. “I’m sure she’ll turn up.”
TWENTY FIVE
I managed to keep my feet and throw a punch. It wasn’t a fast punch or a strong punch, but it was the best I could do.
It wasn’t good enough. Mortia slapped it aside, seized me, slammed me into the same car her brother had not two minutes before, and then threw me through the air to land near the Rhino.
“Quite the interesting morsel you are,” she murmured, regarding me with amused eyes.
I counted birdies and stars. At least she’d hit the other side of my head. That way, my brain could be equally bruised on both sides. The agony of the Ancient’s devouring touch was fading as my heart kept on beating, and I felt some of my balance returning.
Mortia flicked a bit of debris from her sleeve. “But all things in their due course, trickster. First, the tart little aperitif.”
With that, she turned and walked deliberately toward Felicia.
At which point I found myself suddenly angry enough to chew barbed wire and spit nails. I’ll say this for the bad guys: Just when they pound me the worst, they have this ongoing tendency to provide me with oodles of motivation.
So I motivated Mortia right through a mound of scrap metal by way of saying thanks.
She came out on the other side furious, her jacket and pants in tatters. The steel had torn the expensive clothing to rags, though it hadn’t broken her pale flesh. “Do you have any idea,” she snarled, “how difficult it will be to replace this outfit?”
“You’re one to talk!” I shot back. “At least you can get someone else to make yours!”
She came at me hard and fast, leaping from the ground to propel herself off the fence around the yard and straight at me.
This time there was no dodging, no webs, no tricks. I stepped forward to meet her and swatted her out of the air with a punch that killed her momentum cold. She bounced back from it with a spinning kick imported straight from Hong Kong that nearly took my head off. I managed to get away from it with nothing worse than a chipped tooth, but was reminded that I couldn’t fight stupid against Mortia. She was too fast.
I ducked a second whirling kick, knocked her ankle out from underneath her with one leg, and got in a good stomp on her stomach, but then she drove her knuckles against the side of one of my knees, forcing me to hop away before I got knocked to the ground. After that, she came in close and brought a lot of hard, vicious, swift punches with her, throwing everything from less than a foot away, and all of it aimed at my eyes and nose and neck—Wing Chun, I think it’s called. She’d had formal training somewhere.
I’d done all my learning in the school of hard knocks, and even if I don’t have a pretty martial arts sheepskin, I can get the job done. I did a lot of bobbing and weaving, more boxing technique than anything else, spoiling the occasional blow with a quick slap of one hand. We closed and struck and counter-struck and parted a couple of times, each exchange several seconds long.
Whether it was the formal technique or just her sheer weight of experience and untiring speed, I missed a beat and took a chop to the side of the neck, followed by a stiff blow from the heel of her hand to the tip of my jaw that snapped my head back in a sudden whiplash.
I barely blocked a haymaker of an uppercut, and in a single motion splashed a blob of webbing into Mortia’s face and followed up with a hard, driving strike with the same hand. I caught her on the forehead and knocked her tail-over-teakettle into one of the toxic-looking pools of the junkyard’s liquid refuse.
She rose from the pool, her pale eyes cold and angry.
“There’s something on your face,” I told her.
