"No," I said. "I can't let other people do my chores for me. If I wait for the FF to show up, or the Avengers, he'll scamper and do it all again another day." I felt myself getting a little angry, talking about it.
Like I said: I have issues with people who pick on those who can't protect themselves.
"I'm taking this guy down," I said. "Thank you for the warning. But I'm going."
Felicia didn't look happy with me as she jammed the visor back onto her face. "You stiff-necked…" She shook her head. "Go on. Go. Be careful."
I nodded once, dove off on my line, and flung myself from building to building down the street. I swung around the last corner, rapidly gathering momentum, and found a scene of pure chaos. Emergency units were trying to cordon off the square. Fires burned. Smoke rolled. Several police cars had been flattened—literally flattened—by blows of superhuman strength. Many of the lights were either out or flickering wildly, giving the place that crazed, techno dance club look. Broken glass lay everywhere. Car alarms and fire alarms beeped and wooped and ah-oohgahed. The air stank of burning plastic and motor oil. People shouted, screamed, and ran. "It's like the mayor's office in an election year," I muttered.
At the center of it all, in the thick plume of black smoke, stood a single, hulking figure. I altered my course, spat a new line from my web shooters, and swung down to give whoever it was a big old doubleheeled mule-kick greeting on behalf of the citizens of New York.
Did I mention that I have a tendency to get in over my head?
Chapter 5
I HOLLERED, "BOOT TO THE HEAD!" as I swung through the black smoke and slammed into Newtonian physics.
Newton. Isaac Newton. You remember him. White wig, apple tree. Played poker with Einstein, Hawking, and Data in an episode of
Star Trek.
You can't really say he discovered the laws of physics, since they'd pretty much been there already, but he was one of the first to actually stop and look at them and get them written down. And while the next several centuries of scientific advancement proved that in certain circumstances he had dropped the ball—bah-dump-bump-ching!—he did a good enough job that it took the computer revolution to knock him off his pedestal a bit. Even then, pretty much anywhere on the planet (for example, Times Square), for pretty much everything you might bump into (for example, rampaging bad guys), Newton's material is a darned good rule of thumb.
One of them applied here: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I came swooping down and delivered my doubleheeled kick all right. Right into the Rhino's breadbasket.
Granted, I'm smarter than most, and I always have something pithy to say, and I can just be a gosh-darned wonderful person when I put my mind to it. But all of that fits into a pretty small package. I'm not big. I'm not heavily built. I weigh about one sixty-five, soaking wet.
The Rhino, now, he's built like a brick gulag. He's huge. Huge tall, huge across, huge through. Not only that, but whatever process was used to ramp up his strength, it mucked about with his cellular makeup somehow, because he weighs on the heavy side of eight hundred pounds. I'm sure some of that can be accounted for by the stupid Rhino hat he wears, but bottom line, he's an enormous gray block of muscle and bone, and even with my ohso-stylish spider strength, I wasn't really set for this kick. Super strength is all well and good, but if you don't have yourself braced—like if you're swinging on a webline—you're at Sir Isaac's mercy.
But my Aunt May always taught me to make the best of things, so I let him have it.
The kick took the Rhino off guard, even with me shouting and all. Granted, he isn't exactly the shiniest nail in the box, and there were all kinds of bright colors and sounds around to distract him, but still. I think I might have caught him on the inhale, because the kick made his face turn green and threw him fifteen or twenty feet back and smashed him into a storefront.
Of course, the same amount of force came back at me. And since the Rhino weighs four or five or six times as much as me, I got flung a lot farther than fifteen or twenty feet. Then again, I'm the Amazing Spider-Man. Flying around in the air is what I do. So I hit a streetlamp with a webline as I flew by, hung on to be whipped around in a circle twice, arched up into a tumble, and came down in a crouch on top of an abandoned taxi about sixty feet away—where I could see the Rhino, enjoyed a clear field of view around me, and had plenty of room to move.
Felicia is no dummy. If she said that this was a trap, she probably had a good reason to think so.
"Well, well, well," I said. "The Rhino. Again. I thought maybe poachers might have shot you and ground you up to sell as medicine on the Chinese black market by now. They're doing that for all the other rhinos."
The Rhino lumbered back to his feet. Lots and lots of broken glass slid off of his suit and tinkled to the concrete. Rhino wore his usual—the thick gray bodysuit made out of some kind of advanced ballistic materials that I'd heard could blow off armor piercing rounds from antitank guns. I can understand the insecurity. I mean, when your own skin can only handle heavy explosive rounds, you want a little insurance in case some enterprising mugger comes along packing discarding sabot shells.
He had on the hat, too. It was made of the same heavy material, encasing his head in armor and leaving only a comparatively small, square area of his small, square face vulnerable. The horn on it was heavy, tough, and sharp enough that when he put his weight and muscle behind it, he could blow through brick walls like they were linen curtains. All of which is imposing.
But at the end of the day, the hat still looks like a Rhino's head. Good Lord, I keep hoping the NFL will approve a start-up team called "The Rhinos," because then he'll actually look like a comedic team mascot. I wondered if the Chicken could take him.
"Spider-Man," growled the Rhino, presumably after taking a few moments to collect his thought. His consonants were clipped, the vowels guttural, Slavic, though if he really was a Russian, he spoke English pretty well. "We meet again."
"Rhino." I sighed. "You have got to get some better writers for these high-profile events. How are people ever going to take you seriously if you go around spouting that kind of hackneyed dialogue? What you do reflects on me, too, you know. I've got an image to think about."
His face flushed and started turning purple. It's almost too easy to handle this guy. "It will be pleasure to squash you, little bug man," he growled. He seized a mailbox, ripped it up out of the concrete, and threw it at my head.
I moved my head, webbed the mailbox as it went by, and slung it around in a circle, using the elastic strength of the webline to send it back at him twice as hard. The impact made him stagger back a step. "Whoa there, big fella," I told him. "Throwing down with me is one thing. But you do not want to tick off the Post Office. They don't goof around."
"I will shut your mouth!" he bellowed. He rolled forward at me, and to give the guy some credit, he moves better than you'd expect from someone who weighs eight hundred pounds. He swung fists the size of plastic milk jugs at me, a quick boxer's combination, jab, jab, cross, but I was fighting my kind of fight and he never touched me. Instead, he pressed harder, throwing heavier blows as he did. I popped him in the kisser a few times, just to keep him honest, and he grew angrier by the second.
Finally, I wound up with my back against an abandoned SUV, and let the Rhino's next punch zoom past my noggin and right through the SUVs door. I hopped around to his rear, and he swung his other hand at me, sinking it into the engine block of another car, and briefly binding his hands.
I popped up in front of him, held up the first two fingers of my right hand in a V shape, poked him in the eyes, and said, "Doink. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk."