A distinct lack of crashing crunches told me I'd been right, and I breathed a little sigh of relief—right up until Thanis stepped out of the shadows of a stairway in his expensive Italian suit and threw a haymaker at me.
I didn't sense him coming until the very last second. I got a little lucky. If he'd just reached out to touch me with his near hand, it probably would have been fast enough to land. He'd gone for the whole enchilada, though, and I had time to get my head out of his way. I danced to one side with Thanis breathing down my neck and dodged another pair of quick blows. He was good at throwing them, but I was better at getting out of their way. I could keep this guy from laying a glove on me, if I was careful, and if he didn't get any help—and if he didn't realize that I had no intention of hitting him back.
But he figured that part out—and within a few seconds, to boot—and the shape of the fight altered. It's like that in hand-to-hand combat. If you can simply discard the notion of protecting yourself from counterattack, it's a whole heck of a lot easier to get through an opponent's defenses with a focused, concentrated offensive, and it was suddenly everything I could do to keep him off me—until I ducked under a sledgehammer blow aimed at my neck. Thanis's fist hit the wall behind me, and shook loose a fire extinguisher from its mount on the wall.
I caught it on the way down and hollered, "Batter up!"
I swung with both hands and hit him. I didn't hold anything back. I don't do that very often, but for Morlun and his kin, I cared enough to send the very best.
There was a sound halfway between the ringing of a gong and the thump of a watermelon hitting the sidewalk, and Thanis left the garage by way of having his head line-drived through a section of concrete wall.
Without pausing, I cleared the pin from the firing mechanism of the extinguisher and sent a cloud of white chemicals billowing out behind me—right into the face of Malos, who had emerged from the stairway in pursuit. He came through blind and aggressive. My second swing of the extinguisher lifted him from his feet and into the concrete roof above me, sending a web-work of cracks about twenty feet across it, and leaving the extinguisher bent into the shape of a boomerang.
"G'day, mate!" I shouted in a cheesy Australian accent, and whipped the extinguisher at him in a sidearm throw. The impact slammed his head back into the front grille of an old Impala, driving his skull into the body of the car up to his ears. "Spider-Man! That's Australian for 'Headache!' "
The ground started to shake in rhythm, and the Rhino came pounding up the car ramp at a modest pace of thirty or forty miles an hour. He'd ditched the coat, the broad-brimmed hat, and his bag, and he had the silly rhino-head hat on. The fashion slave. He doesn't corner well, and he had to windmill his arms to keep his balance as he bent his course around the ramp. Then he saw me, bellowed, and came my way, picking up speed fast.
Figures. Someone I can actually punch finally shows up and it's already time to leave.
I charged him right back.
He wasn't expecting that, but after a fraction of a second of surprise, he simply lowered his horn and came at me faster, letting out a bellow as he did.
I waited until the last second, then bounded straight up and over him, and clung to the ceiling. As he passed, I tagged his broad gray butt with a webline, then sent another web at Malos, who was just then regaining his feet. And since it had already worked once, I merely joined the lines together.
The Ancient looked down as the webbing plastered itself to his silk and the belt area of his leather pants. Then he tracked the line of the web-strand back to the thundering Rhino.
He closed his eyes in irritation and sighed. "Oh, bother."
I gave him a cheerful, upside-down wave from where I crouched on the ceiling.
The Rhino tried to brake, but he had too much momentum going. He went out through the wall.
The line stretched a little, so that there was a Looney Tune instant of motionlessness, and then it snapped back like a bungee cord and dragged Malos out of the garage after the plummeting Rhino.
"Sometimes I amaze even myself," I said in a cheerful voice. Then I hurried to the far side of the garage and beat a hasty retreat. I'd delayed the Ancients long enough for Felicia to get MJ out of there, so there was no point in staying. It was time to fade out and fight another day.
Except that in the middle of fading, I saw Mortia running down the street back toward me, running on top of the power lines as if they were as wide as a city sidewalk. She spotted me, bounced like a diver on a board, flipped through the air, and landed at a bounding run. I saw that she was wearing one of those tiny headsets some cell phones have, and she was speaking into it as she pursued me.
Maybe thirty seconds later, the Rhino caught up to us and joined her. He's a lot lighter on his feet than you'd think—he can top out at better than a hundred miles an hour, even if he can't change course much while he does so. Mortia looked like something out of Japanese anime, streaking along in a bounding run that would have run me down in about ten seconds flat on level ground.
I could use that speed against them, to keep them separated from Malos and Thanis.
So I poured it on, zipping down the street, using every trick I knew to move as fast as I possibly could. I didn't have an infinite amount of webbing, and I was burning through it fast, using its elasticity to maintain my momentum and add speed, while taking a lot of turns to prevent the Rhino from getting enough momentum to catch up.
Mortia came after me the way the Lizard always chased me—fast and nimble, bounding over cars and passersby, her feet hardly touching the ground. She leapt to sprint along window ledges occasionally, when traffic on the street was too high-volume.
The Rhino lumbered along the road in the mid-dle of the right-hand lane, passing cars and at one point shouldering aside a cabby who had tried to change lanes and was crowding him. The cab flew into the side of a building.
I made sure to keep the pace down just enough that they seemed to be catching up with me, always gaining a little ground, and as a result they never slowed. We left the other two Ancients to trail along blocks behind us—because while they were superstrong, they just didn't have the raw speed necessary to keep up with Mortia and the Rhino. I started changing the pace as we pulled away, hopping over a block this way, then doubling back and heading three blocks the other way, until I was sure Malos and Thanis were nowhere in the immediate area.
I went by Shea Stadium on long, slingshot-style weblines, zoomed over a line of docks filled with small commercial fishing vessels and largish pleasure boats, and came down in the hangars on the eastern end of La Guardia. Ongoing renovations had several of the enormous buildings gutted and under repair, separated from the rest of the place by those orange construction fences, so there wouldn't be many people around. It was nice and dark there, plenty of three-dimensional space to play in, and not many people.
I swung over the fence and landed on a little open space between acres of yawning buildings, bounced up onto the side of one of the hangars, and made myself scarce and sneaky in the abundant shadows.
Mortia came down practically in the same spot my feet had landed in and froze, her stance a marvel of liquid tension, her eyes open wide. The Rhino wasn't far behind her. He had to jump over the fence to get to her, maybe a seventy-five-foot hop, and nothing his enhanced muscles couldn't handle. He landed on the concrete beside her. The impact sent several cracks running through it, and it took the Rhino a few steps to arrest his momentum.
Mortia gave him another contemptuous look. Then she turned in a slow, slow circle, looking for me. But I'd kept downwind this time.