WHO: Kaine and some very unfortunate criminals. WHAT: Kaine demonstrates why it’s a bad idea to poke a spider with a stick. WHEN: Tonight! WHERE: A warehouse on the outskirts of town. STATUS: Complete! RATING: PG-13 for language and strong violence.
God, Kaine mentally cursed, I could write a book about how much I hate cryptic psychic crap.
He was perched on the edge of a building in downtown Lawrence, invisible to the world thanks to the incredibly handy Stealth Mode that Peter built into this costume of his. Anyone with the special lenses that were specifically designed for it would’ve been able to see a black costume with green lights arranged in a spider pattern on the torso and back, but since Kaine hadn’t “borrowed” any of them from Peter, the only pair was the ones built into the costume’s mask. Despite liking it up high, Kaine wasn’t just out here for his health. His frustration over the little psychic girl’s post had sent him on a private pub crawl the last three nights, but tonight his intoxication therapy had been interrupted before it could really get started. He’d always had the skill, or maybe just the dumb luck, to walk into the seediest bars in the seediest parts of town in just about any city he’d ever been to, and Lawrence was no different. The girl’s words kept replaying over and over in his mind, like an itch that just wouldn’t go away or that one annoying song that would get stuck in your head. Tonight, while trying to drown them out in the kind of bar he used to frequent back during the days when he stalked Ben and took contract kills to make money, he’d overheard two young men discussing an apparently large meth deal. One was wearing entirely too much plaid and seemed to have some Rogaine-related problems, the other looked like he’d never met a tattoo needle he didn’t like and couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to be a farmer or a west coast rap star.
Even Kaine wouldn’t have been able to say why he suddenly shifted his plans for tonight from intoxication therapy to violence therapy. Maybe it had something to do with Web’s whole shpiel about his destiny, or the Web of Life, or being the Spider that could do what none of the others could. Yeah, that wasn’t anywhere near as cherry as it sounded; what none of the other Spiders could do was kill. Kaine still wasn’t entirely sure how much of this Spider Totem bullshit he bought into, beyond the undeniable fact that he’d made a deal with something in order to come back to life after the crazy Russian hunters killed him, and that it had looked entirely too much like some great big spider goddess for his comfort. Maybe there was something to what Carpenter was saying. Maybe he was the Destroyer Spider that Pete could never, or more accurately should never, be. Or maybe Julia Carpenter got tortured and watched the first Madame Web bleed out on a posh carpet and lost her fucking mind. Kaine wasn’t sure which thought he was most comfortable with, at the moment.
Still, he was here now, casing what appeared to be an empty drug den from across the street. He’d followed the two over-eager junkies part of the way on the ground, blending into the background with the skill that had once made the Queen of the Assassins Guild “offer” him a job. As the crowds on the streets started to thin out he took a moment to don the mask and strip out of the rest of his clothes. One other thing he’d taken from Peter, after making the decision to stay in Houston and be a whatever-he-was, was wearing the suit under the clothes. It just saved time. After his quick-change in the alley he’d taken to the rooftops and quickly caught up with his prey, still entirely unaware that they were caught in a web they had no hope of getting out of. Twenty minutes ago they had entered a seemingly-abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. Kaine had scoped the place out and discovered a series of skylights that he could see into from across the street, and had then taken up a position on a burnt-out neon sign belonging to a closed-for-business truck stop across from the warehouse.
This is where they had been for the last twenty minutes. Kaine was really beginning to get annoyed. He’d given up drinking the night away to come down here and beat the crap out of some meth dealers, and now it seemed like it was just going to be these two junkies arguing in an empty warehouse all night. For the last twenty minutes that’s all they had done, argue until they were about to brawl, calm down for a few minutes, and start all over again. Kaine was just about to give up and go home, content to let the two junkies smack each other around, when he heard the slight screech of brakes from a big vehicle. The junkies heard it too, and from what Kaine could see from across the street, it cut their argument off mid-sentence. Okay, he thought, it’s about damn time. One webline later and he was on the roof of the warehouse, crouched down at the edge of one of the four skylights on the roof. He didn’t bother waiting outside. From here he could see that the vehicle that had pulled up was a large unmarked van, or possibly a small truck, about the size of a U-Haul. He could hear noises from that end of the roof that sounded an awful lot like muttered commands and a door coming up. The junkies down below were focused on somewhere Kaine couldn’t quite make out from this position, but he guessed were the loading dock doors. It was the perfect opportunity for Kaine to get inside without notice, and he proceeded to do just that. He placed the tip of one finger at a point about midway up the skylight and, a second later, the tiniest hint of white smoke began to waft up from under it. His burning touch, sometimes called the Mark of Kaine, could come in handy for more than just shaving, these days. Using his finger, he cut a half-circle in the glass and then switched hands, using the index finger of his other hand to finish it off. About halfway through that one, he stuck his free hand onto the glass and adhered to it, so that when he finished cutting this five foot circle in the skylight, the glass wouldn’t fall.
The whole thing took him only a few seconds, after which he gently lifted the glass cutout out of the newly cut hole and placed it down just as gently on the roof. He could now hear commotion coming from down in the warehouse that sounded distinctly like multiple sets of footsteps. They sounded more organized than Kaine would have expected from a drug dealer and his posse. The balding junkie was making excited noises now, but the other one was trying to shush him and play it cool. Kaine was beginning to suspect that this wasn’t just a random drug deal, but he held back from drawing any definitive conclusions yet. Instead he simply slid into the warehouse through the new hole in the skylight, quickly adhering his hands and feet to the roof and crawling out of the grimy moonlight filtering in from the skylight and into shadow. Now that he was inside, Kaine could see that there was also a dim electric light in the center of the warehouse hanging by a thread, but the bulb looked like it had at least an entire geologic layer of dust coating it and its light couldn’t get much farther than a few feet out. Through the moonlight from the other skylights, Kaine watched as four heavily armed individuals took up a square formation. The final nail in the coffin of this being a regular drug deal was the heavy ballistic armor these four men were wearing, along with the assault rifles each carried. This most definitely wasn’t just a regular drug deal. Whoever these men were, they were professionals.
One of them, in the lower right corner of the square, tossed off a quick hand signal. From the shadowed recesses of the warehouse that the dim light couldn’t quite reach, where Kaine assumed the loading dock to be, came another set of footsteps, though it was only one this time. Kaine watched and waited as a figure slowly took shape out of the shadows. The figure was wearing a cowboy hat, Hawaiian shirt, a pair of faded denim jeans, and cowboy boots. He was maybe five-five, five-six, and he was chomping a thick cigar in one corner of his mouth. The other corner was turned up in a too-friendly grin, that smarmy fake-familiarity grin you usually only saw from door-to-door salesmen and shrinks.
Most people would have been worried right now. Kaine had only planned on a minor scuffle with some junkies and a dealer. In the kind of circles he moved in, that was about the closest thing to a cakewalk you could get. The addition of four heavily armed guards to that scenario would have led some people to call for help, or to abandon the situation entirely. Kaine just smiled. This is going to be fun. He had a pretty good picture of what was going on already. This wasn’t a drug deal at all. The two guys he’d suspected of being junkies were dealers, and this was a supplier, possibly from a major gang, a mob organization, or a cartel. The fact that the supplier was sending an emissary rather than just the goods meant that either this was a new deal and this was the first shipment, or these two chuckleheads he’d been following screwed up big and this was their “fix it or we’ll cut your balls off” meeting. Given that they looked like junkies, Kaine was betting the latter. Dealers sampling the product were a no-no.
He kept one ear on the conversation, well enough at least to determine that he was right, but focused most of his attention on the warehouse itself. It was a 20x20 box with a small section of drywall in one corner, probably an office. Kaine couldn’t actually see the loading dock, but judging from where the guards and Hawaiian shirt had come from, it was in the upper left. Behind him was a set of double-doors where the dealer/junkies had entered from. Between that and the back wall were six evenly spaced shelving units, going up about ten of the building’s twenty foot height. There was a space of about five feet between them and very narrow piping that served to connected and shield electrical wiring needed for the industrial strength AC unit somewhere on the fall wall. Two of the shelves were shorter than the others, only about five feet across, while the others were ten feet. The meeting was going down in the spare space to the left of the shelves. Satisfied that he’d heard all he needed to hear, Kaine climbed along the ceiling until he neared the back, and dropped down into a crouch on top of one of the shelves far from the light.
Some nights, he felt very sorry for the bad guys. Tonight was one of those nights. …………………………………………………..
Jim and T-Bird didn’t like this man in the Hawaiian shirt. He was from the organization, and he was here to cut off their balls. They knew it as surely as they had known that skimming from the top of each shipment would get them in trouble, but just like then, they went along with it anyway. Jim wasn’t very smart, and T-Bird was but he was a follower. They made a pretty poor pair, but faced with the notion of losing something very important to them, they were sure they could make it up to the man in the shirt.
That is, if he were still there.
“So that’s the deal boys, either you shape the fuck up or I will personally cut off your fucking baAAAAAAAAAAH!” One minute he was there, and the next he was gone. Jim and T-Bird both flinched away like they had been shot. The guards immediately turned in the direction their employer had flown off in. The last thing any of them saw of the man with the Hawaiian shirt, he was flailing like a ragdoll and soaring into the shadows behind him. The guards, as professional as they looked, immediately swung their weapons in the direction their boss had just flown off to, but even they weren’t quite sure what to make of what just happened. After a moment, the guard in the back corner of the formation removed a flashlight from a pocket of his Kevlar vest, clicked it on, and then tucked it between his last two fingers so that he could still grip the end of his gun with three fingers. Then he proceeded slowly deeper into the darkness. Jim and T-Bird, shocked and concerned, began meandering backwards toward the door, but only for about two seconds before they were both staring down the barrels of two different assault rifles. Jim swallowed loud enough that it echoed. “W-What the-”
“Shut the fuck up,” the guard with the flashlight snapped over his shoulder. Too bad for him, because before he could get his head back around, something smacked into the barrel of his gun and then it was yanked out of his hand so hard that he stumbled forward. Jim, T-Bird, and the other guards all gasped in shock as the gun came whipping back so fast it blurred and, with a sickening crack, smashed into the guard’s face. The echo of the cracking and the thud as the guard’s body flipped backward and smashed into the ground was drowned out by the sound of three assault rifles opening fire at once. The guard’s light skittered away, its cracked lens throwing out imperfect beams of light on the walls of the warehouse as it skittered and spun away. The muzzle flashes of the remaining three guards’ guns lit up the warehouse like a strobe light, and while the guards were too focused on hitting a target to see anything, Jim and T-Bird both clearly saw a man-sized web cocoon attached to the top of one of the shelves.
“Jim we need to get the fu-” Jim turned to listen to his friend, but by the time he was turned to face him all Jim saw was his friend’s body flying toward the far wall hard enough to make a five foot dent in the concrete. Jim’s eyes widened and he turned to run toward the guards. He only made it a few steps before he came skidding to a halt as what appeared to be two thick strings of web, fucking web could you believe that, smack into the man’s legs. A second later the man was flipping end over end through the air and, a second later, he was slamming back into the hard concrete ground hard enough to crack his helmet. A second later his body seemed to fold like a card table, and for just a second Jim saw something crouched on top of his midsection. It was there and gone in a second, but in that one instant Jim saw what he was sure was a giant spider poised over the downed and severely wounded guard. A second later and the shadow-spider was gone, and the two guards that had been in remaining were turning to face their downed colleague. Before they could even swing fully around to open fire one of them was stumbling backward, apparently yanked by the back of his head, and a second later he was horizontal in midair, his legs taken out from under him by a shadow no one could see. In the next instant he was smacking bodily into the ground, cracking the concrete beneath him and quite possibly his skull. The sole remaining guard opened fire on the air above his downed friend, but when Jim blinked again he heard the sound of bone crunching and, when he opened his eyes again, the guard was two feet in the air and clutching his groin. Jim stumbled back from the sheer shock of it and could only watch with his hands over his mouth in abject horror as something smacked into the guard’s back and he was yanked through the air into the nearest shelf. The force of the blow was hard enough to start a domino effect, knocking over all of the remaining shelves and leaving the guard in a crumpled heap on top of the pile.
Jim couldn’t believe it. In less than a minute, four heavily armed guards, their very dangerous and possibly sociopathic boss, and his bitchy partner had all been brutally incapacitated by some kind of invisible spider. For a handful of seconds that felt like a lot more, Jim could only stare in shock as his brain tried to process what he’d just seen. His heart beat in his throat as he looked from one guard to the next to the next. The guard that had taken his own gun to the face was just barely visible, but even from here Jim could tell his lower jaw was a mass of bloody muscle and his head was bent at a bad angle. The one that had been driven into the ground had curled up into the fetal position and not moved since. The third guard was lying motionless on the ground, one arm twisted around behind him the wrong way and a pool of blood seeping out from under his head. The fourth was a shapeless crumpled heap on top of a twisted, broken steel shelf. Jim couldn’t see any blood from here but just from the horrible bone-crunching sound, he knew the man’s pelvis must have been decimated, not to mention whatever damage slamming into the shelf that hard had done. T-Bird was still lodged in the wall and had not even so much as twitched since, though Jim could at least make out a faint rise-and-fall to signify breathing.
That was what finally did it. None of these men were dead, but they could have easily been and might still be, and while Jim wasn’t the brightest bulb in the shed, even he could do that math.
It was a pity he couldn’t do it faster.
He made it two steps before he saw a figure simply melt out of thin air, crouched on the wall directly above the double-doors. Jim attempted to skid to a halt but the figure’s hand flashed out and, quicker than Jim could follow, a thick line of web discharged from the back of its hand and smacked into his chest. The next thing he felt was a hard yank that propelled him up and forward, snapping his head back so hard that he could feel the whiplash set in. He screamed about as loud as he could for just about half a second, and then the hand that had discharged the web was grabbing his collar and the other hand was buried in his gut. Jim felt all the air rush from his lungs and something inside him tear. Unable to even scream, Jim tried to curl up on himself but couldn’t when the figure shook him bodily. “Don’t pass out on me yet, you miserable piece of shit,” the figure snarled. The harsh sound of its voice hurt Jim’s ears and he tried to flinch away, but the figure either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “When you get out of jail, the first thing you are going to do is get the hell out of this city. You will not stop to pack whatever meaningless shit a pathetic junkie might have collected over the years. You will get in a cab and you will hand the driver your wallet and you will get the hell out, because if you don’t I will hunt you down like a dog and break every bone in your body. Slowly. Do you understand me?”
Jim got half of a nod out before he saw the concrete rushing up at his face and it all went black. …………………………………………………..
Kaine let the now unconscious body of Jim the idiot meth dealer go, watching as it flopped to the concrete floor about seven feet below. Satisfied with his handiwork, he kicked off the wall and hopped down to the floor. He took a few minutes to web up the arms and legs of the goons, just in the off chance that one of them woke up and found themselves capable of movement. Then he gave Jim’s flabby body a good kick to turn it over and then rifled around in his pockets for a moment until he found the balding junkie’s cell phone. He made one quick swipe, preparing to try and brute force through the lock only to discover that the moron hadn’t even bothered to lock his phone. Smirking behind the mask, Kaine quickly tapped three buttons and then put it to his ear. “911, what is your-”
“Yeah, I was just walking by this warehouse on seventh and I heard a lot of gunshots, I think something’s going on. I saw people inside and now it’s quiet and I think there’s blood!”
“We already have a car on route sir. May I have your name please?”
“My name? Oh, sure. My name’s-” And that was when Kaine carelessly dropped the phone on top of Jim’s beer gut, flicked his wrist toward the skylight he’d entered from, and was gone.