That last bit was too much for him. Something in him snapped and he let out a roar that shook the street beneath me, his anger driving him wild. He flung the cars hard enough to free his hands, sending each of them flying with one arm, inflicting more collateral damage, and charged me with murder in his eyes.
Like I said: He almost makes it too easy.
When you get right down to it, that's how I beat the Rhino every single time. His anger gets the better of him, makes him charge ahead, makes him clumsy, makes him blind to anything but the need to engage in violence. He's stronger than me, grossly so, in fact, and he isn't a bad fighter. If he were to keep his head and play to his own strengths—overwhelming power and endurance— he could take me out pretty quick. That kind of thinking is hard to manage, though, once the rubble starts flying, and he's never learned to control his temper. If he could do it, if he could work out how to force me into close quarters where my agility would be less effective, he'd leave me in bits and pieces. He just can't keep his cool, though, and it's always just a matter of time before he blows his top.
Maybe it's the hat.
I evaded the Rhino's charge, and he kept coming at me. I let him, leading him into the street and as far away from the buildings and storefronts as I could—some of them would still be occupied, and I didn't want the fracas to set them on fire or knock them down. Once the Rhino goes… well, rhino, it's possible to turn his own strength against him, but it takes an awful lot of judo to put the man down.
He batted aside a car between us, just as I Fris-beed a manhole cover into his neck. He flung a motorcycle at me with one hand. I ducked, zapped a blob of sticky webbing into his eyes, and hit him twenty or thirty times while he ripped it off of his face. He clipped me with a wild haymaker, and I briefly experienced combat astronomy.
He chased me around like that while the police got everyone out of the immediate vicinity. Give it up for the NYPD. They might not always like it that they need guys like me to handle guys like the Rhino, but they have their priorities straight.
I led the Rhino in a circle until one of his thick legs plunged into the open manhole and he staggered.
Then I let him have it. Hard. Fast. Maybe I'm not in the Rhino's weight class, but I've torn apart buildings with my bare hands a time or two, and I didn't get the scars on my knuckles in a tragic cheese grating accident. I went to town on him, never stopping, never easing up, and the sound of my fists hitting him resembled something you'd hear played on a snare drum.
Once he was dazed, I picked up the manhole cover and finished him off with half a dozen more whacks to the top of his pointed head, and the Rhino fell over backward, the impact sending a fresh network of fractures running through the road's surface.
I bent the manhole cover more or less back into shape over one knee, nudged the unconscious Rhino's leg out of the manhole, and replaced the cover. My Aunt May taught me to clean up my messes. I checked the Rhino again, and then gave the nearest group of cops a thumbs-up.
That was when the trap sprang.
My spider sense is an early warning system hardwired into my brain. It can somehow distinguish between all sorts of different dangers, warning me of them in time for me to get clear. A few times, my spider sense has become a liability, though. I was so used to its warnings that when I went up against something that didn't trigger it, for whatever reason, it made me feel crippled, almost blind.
When Morlun had come after me, my spider sense did something new—it went into overdrive. Terror, terror so pure and unadulterated that it completely wiped out my ability to reason, had come screaming into my thoughts. It almost felt like my spider sense was screaming "HIDE!" at me, burned in ten-foot letters upon my brain. It had been one of the more terrifying and weird things that had ever happened to me.
It happened again now.
Only worse.
The terror came, my instincts howling in utter dread, and the sudden shock of sensation made me clutch at my head and drop to one knee.
Hide.
Hide!
HIDEHIDEHIDEHIDEHIDE!
"Move, Spidey," I growled to myself "It's fear. That's all it is.
Get up."
I managed to lift my head. I heard myself making small, pained, frightened sounds. Danger. It couldn't be Morlun. It couldn't be. I saw him die. I saw him turn to dust.
They came out of the New Amsterdam, where
The Lion King was rolling onstage. Maybe they'd been watching the fight from the lobby. They came walking toward me, their postures, expressions, motions all totally calm amidst the chaos. Two men. One in a gray Armani suit, the other in Italian leather pants and a silk poet's shirt. Both men were tall and pale. Both had straight, fine black hair and wore expressions of perpetual ennui and disdain.
And both of them bore a strong resemblance to
Morlun.
The third was a woman. She wore a designer suit of black silk and had on black riding boots set off by a blood-red cravat. She too was pale, her black-cobweb hair worn up in a Chinese-style bun. She, too, looked a bit like Morlun—especially through the eyes. She had pale eyes, soulless eyes, eyes that neither knew nor cared what it was to be human.
She came over and stopped about five feet from me, her hands on her hips. She tilted her head and stared at me the way one might examine a messy roadkill in an effort to determine what it had been before it was squashed.
"You are he," she said in a low, emotionless voice.
"The spider."
"Uh," I said.
I found myself at a loss for words.
She narrowed her eyes, and they flickered with cold, cold anger—and inhuman hate, something that could roll on through a thousand years without ever abating. 'You are the one who killed our brother." Her eyes widened then, and a terrible hunger came into them as the two men stepped up to stand on either side of her.
She pointed a finger at me and said, "Kill him."
Chapter 6
It dimly occurred to me that at this point, if I was Han Solo, faced with a genuine threat to my life, I would officially have moral license to shoot first.
The thought flashed through my mind as swiftly and lightly as a wood chip passing over the surface of a rushing river, but it gave me something to grasp toward, and I was able to get my head above the surface of my instinctive terror long enough to grab on to another thought:
If one of them touched me, just touched me, I was as good as dead.
Right then. Don't let them touch me.
Tweedle-Loom and Tweedle-Doom stalked forward with a predator's economic grace, but I didn't want to give them time to shift gears when I scampered. I waited until the last second to pop them both in the face with bursts of webbing and jump back out of reach. A quick hop landed me twenty feet above the road on an enormous billboard, and I crawled up it, turning to study them. If they were anything like Morlun, they'd be walking tanks with nearly limitless endurance—but not a lot swifter, on foot, than anyone else.
As it turned out, the boys were apparently a lot like Morlun. They tore off the webbing with about as much distress as I would feel wiping off shaving cream, gave me dirty looks, and continued stalking toward me.
The woman had evidently stood in a different line when they were handing out superpowers. She hit the spot where I'd been standing with one foot and leapt—with grace and elan—up to the top of the sign I was scaling. She crouched there, her head still tilted at that odd angle. "You must know this is pointless," she said dispassionately. "You cannot stop us. You cannot save yourself."
My spider sense was still gibbering at me, but enough of my voice had come back for me to say, "Now let me think. Where have I heard someone like you say something like that before? Hmm."