Again.
I sigh. Maybe I could just… you know… call, and ask him for advice? I could keep it hypothetical and maybe he won’t suspect anything? Yeah, that’ll work! I pull out my phone and hold it close to my chest so the growing crowd of spectators below—and the news choppers—can’t see what I’m doing. I can see the headlines now:
Spider-Man: Texting during a heist?
Even Spider-Man can’t resist a text
Or even worse, JJ spewing his smut at the camera, “See?! I told you our leading law enforcement aid shouldn’t be left in the hands of a teenager! Can’t even stay off his phone long enough to fight crime properly!”
But in seconds, my earpiece is ringing with a call to Peter, and my phone is tucked back into my pocket. An ear-piercing crash! emanates from somewhere deep inside the building, and I know I’m running out of time. I pull myself up floor after floor, glass window pane after glass window pane, until I’m crawling through the hole fraught with loose wires and sparks and concrete dust, and into another mostly dark office space. A single fluorescent light dangles from the center of the room, flickering as weakly as a camping lantern.
“Miles?” comes Peter’s whisper through the phone. In the background, I hear… something… sounds like… soft music. Is that a violin playing back there?
“Yo, Peter!” I say, not really having time to ask where he is. “Got a second?”
“Uh, now’s not really the best time. I’m at the Photo-journalism Gallery Gala with MJ. She’s won an award! Stole away for a second to talk, though—oh, what is this one?” He must be asking someone else something. “Ooh, I love duck pate, thank you… Miles, sorry about that. They just brought out tiny food on tiny plates, and I got distracted. Crunch!” I cringe and recoil from my own ear bud at the sound of chewing—I hate that—before he continues talking around a mouthful of food. “What’s up?”
“Uh—” I’m interrupted by a blast of red metal exploding up through the floor in front of me. The force knocks me to the ground. “Ahh!”
“Miles?” comes Peter’s voice, panicked now, although still a faint whisper. “Uh, no sir, I don’t have a lint roller on me, sorry. Miles, where are you? I’ll be right there.”
“No!” I say, panicked. There’s no way I can let Peter think I can’t handle this myself. This is my chance! My first big hunt, my graduation from cub to fully grown member of the pack. “No, no, I’m good,” I say, trying to relax my voice as Pigeon zeroes their hooded face in on me, and begins approaching. I realize I have to talk quickly, and I’m pretty sure everything I say next comes out as one word, so I hope Peter is listening closely.
“Listen-hypothetically-speaking-if-a-super-tall-guy-were-to-show-up-in-a-big-red-metal-suit-and-attack-the-S.H.I.E.L.D.-building-downtown-and-he-had-a-mask-and-he-was-like-six-feet-tall-and—”
“You mean Tony Stark?” he asks.
Before I can answer, a grappling hook shoots forth and grips my ankle, and I shriek and claw my way backward along the floor, but it’s no use. I’m being dragged across the carpeted floor past staplers and stress balls and a half-eaten cupcake, and I realize I might have to attack this situation from a new angle.
Instead of pulling against Pigeon, which is a fight I know I’m going to lose, I flip over onto my back, web the ceiling with my left hand for support, and web a refrigerator across the room with my right hand. Pigeon realizes what I’m doing far too late, and by the time they glance in the direction I’m reaching, the fridge is coming at them at 200 miles per hour. They go flying through a cubicle wall, then another, then another, then clean out of the building.
Panic sets in.
Oh god.
Oh god, did I just kill this guy?
I instinctively dive through the hole in the side of the building I just flung them through, and plummet right behind them. The wind pries my lips open, flapping them against my gums, but I have to get to Pigeon before they hit the ground. Spider-Man does a lot of things to villains in the way of hurt, but he doesn’t kill them.
“Miles?” comes Peter’s voice through the phone, fully panicked now. I’m sure he’s halfway into his own suit by now and coming to find me. That is, until I hear a ringing clanging of metal through the phone from his end.
“Peter?!” I shriek. “What’s going on over there?”
I realize I’m not going to make it to Pigeon in time, so I slingshot my web down to catch them as a last-ditch effort to save their life, but at the last minute, they extend their huge red wings out and dart left, and suddenly I’m the one zooming toward a sheet of concrete.
I web something—anything north of the ground—and latch on, swinging so fast at the last minute I don’t have time to dodge people on the ground, and trees, and dogs. I narrowly miss a mail truck and slam right through a wooden fence in someone’s backyard, sending wood splinters all over the street.
“’Scuse me! Out of the way! Runaway Spider-Man coming through!”
These powers have me really wishing gravity had brakes! I hear a voice through the phone I don’t recognize.
“Ahaha, Spider-Man, we meet again, under slightly more glamorous circumstances.”
“Peter?!” I ask again as I manage to miss a lamppost and tuck and roll into a huge mess of bushes in someone’s backyard.
It feels like the world is spinning, so I take this moment to lay here in these bushes and shake my throbbing head before pushing myself up. I hear full-blown screams on his end now, and loud crashes from all directions. Now I’m the panicked one. “Who is that? What’s going on?”
“Uh, can’t talk, Miles, gotta go, okay? You sure you’re okay over there?”
“I was hoping to get some advice, actually,” I say, blinking my eyes open dizzily to see a huge red blurry blob sailing back up the side of S.H.I.E.L.D. “What do I do about this guy? Hypothetically, I mean. If he had… huge wings and grappling hooks, and seemed like he was having a really bad day—”
“Sounds like what I’ve got going on over here, actually!” grunts Peter, indicating he might be mid-swing. “MJ, get these people to a safe place and wait for me there,” I hear him say. “Miles, Vulture’s back.”
I freeze, petrified, but not because of what Peter said.
It’s because I’m being stared at. The source? An old man with gray hair, a pub cap, glasses, and a mustache that swishes as he stares at me. Strangely, he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I thought we were headed into autumn here, but this guy seems to think it’s still warm enough outside to be in his yard in shorts, watering the plants like he’s headed into a flourishing summer bloom with them.
“Uh,” I say, pushing myself up out of the scratchy bushes with as much dignity as I can salvage. “Sorry,” I say, holding out my hands. “Sorry about that.” His eyes travel from me to his grass, where I see a large brown skid mark right through his otherwise perfectly green landscape, as wide as I am, and twice as long as I am tall. He looks back up at me with a flat, unamused mouth. “So sorry,” I whisper, “I’ll just uh… I’ll just be going.”
And I web myself the heck up outta there, straight up onto the roof, over to the next roof, and back up onto the side of the S.H.I.E.L.D. building, sticking my hands and feet to the side again.
Round three.
Way to go, Miles, I think to myself. Thanks to you, Spider-Man: Bringer of Justice is now Spider-Man: Destroyer of Lawns. That poor man looked like his garden was the only thing he cared about in the world, and here I am messin’ up his whole day. I sigh and decide that if I can bring Pigeon to justice, then at least I can justify it. But when I finally get back up inside the building, like thirty stories high above the city, Pigeon is nowhere to be found.
“I know you’re in here!” I holler, having no idea if he’s in here.
But I hope he is. Because if I let him get away while I was busy flinging myself through fences and tumbling through bushes, I’m not going to sleep tonight. Noise has been echoing through the phone all this time, sounds of shatte
ring glass and rushing wind and hollow thumping like someone’s being punched.
“Peter?” I whisper. “You okay? You said Vulture’s back?”
“Um, yeah,” he grunts. “Back like a gas station bean burrito.”
“What do we do?” I ask. “My guy—Pigeon’s what I’ve been calling him—wants something at the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. He’s tearin’ this place up.”
Speaking of.
A crashing noise rings out from somewhere deep in the building, on one of the lower floors.
I can’t lose them again.
I dive down feet-first through the several-story hole Pigeon made in the floor, flying past desks and chairs and sparking wires and short-circuited electronics. And what luck, Pigeon decides to peek out from whatever floor they’ve landed on, arm wrapped around a briefcase, and look up the hole. I smirk.
Gotcha.
I throw my arms around their neck and suck them down the hole with me until I feel a force against my back like a freight train, which knocks the wind out of me, along with my soul, and leaves me lying here coughing amid the dust and debris we’ve kicked up now that we’re on a floor that doesn’t have a hole smack dab in the middle of it. Pigeon looms over me, pinning my shoulders to the floor, but I’m ready. I spring my feet up and kick them firmly in their ribcage, tossing them over my head to the floor with the force of what I hope is a thousand wrestlers, rolling to my feet and bouncing up and down like a boxer out of habit.
I’ve gotta admit—for my first month or so of being Spider-Man, that was pretty dope.
But the joy doesn’t last long. Pigeon sits up groggily, holding their head, and that’s when they realize… their hood’s fallen back.
Exposing their Afro-puffs.
I gasp.
Is Pigeon a… a she?
“Uh,” I start saying into the phone, hoping Peter is available enough to hear me still. “Woah, hey, this guy’s a girl.”
“Yeah?” comes a light, airy, yet sharp voice from behind the red metal suit of armor that I know as Pigeon. “What’s it to ya?”
Those claws shing out again and suddenly I’m dodging finger knives from all sides. A crash, louder than any others I’ve heard from Peter’s end, rings out.
“You okay?” I ask, unable to say his real name out loud since Pigeon is still right here.
“Vulture!” he calls out. “Dammit… Vulture’s escaped. I’m pinned down here.”
“Are you okay?”
Slice! Pigeon’s still coming at me, backing me up across this floor, but I’m still dodging.
I ask him something else this time. “Need me to come get you out?”
Man, that felt good. And all this time I thought I’d be the one asking for help.
“No, the police will be here soon, but… Vulture made off with one of the exhibits. I… I couldn’t catch him. He was way too prepared, and I very… wasn’t.”
Swipe!
“You so surprised I’m a girl because I’m tall, or because I’ve been whooping your narrow butt?”
“Hey, my butt’s not narrow,” I argue, dodging another swipe, “and I’m surprised you’re a girl because even Spider-Man isn’t immune to internal bias, and I should probably take time to unpack that. Sorry!”
Another swipe of those claws and I’m backed up against a wall with nowhere to go. Before I can even dodge it, one of those grappling hooks is around my upper arm, claws lodged into the wall. Firmly. Just high enough for my feet to dangle inches from the ground. Shing! Crash!
There’s the other hook, around my left upper arm, locking me in place.
Pigeon presses closer until she’s standing only feet away.
“Allow me to ask you a question, Spider-Man,” she says bitterly. “How many times have you thought about Vulture in the last six months while he rotted away in his prison cell?”
Well, now that I think about it… not at all.
In fact, why would I? After Vulture teamed up with Doc Ock and the Sinister Six and landed his own pitiful self in jail, he set out on a long journey waiting for a court date, probably before being carted off to prison, because he’s a menace to society, and because good riddance.
But clearly this girl is working with him, so I can’t say any of that without getting clawed across the face. Instead, I gulp nervously.
“Um…” I say, “I mean, I guess I could’ve written a card to check in or something—”
“Because I,” she says, pressing a button on her left shoulder, “thought about him every day.”
I grit my teeth as the hooks squeeze around my arms so tight it feels like my bones might snap. I grunt and yank my arms forward against them, but it’s no use. I’m stuck up here, doomed to listen to her soliloquy for as long as she deems necessary.
Or long enough for me to think of an escape plan.
“Every long day of those one hundred and eighty he spent in Rykers before my Crows and I showed up. That’s four thousand, three hundred and twenty hours. Two hundred fifty-nine thousand two hundred minutes.” She pauses, and her eyes dart up to the ceiling before returning to me. She looks a bit frazzled suddenly, lost. I decide to help her out.
“Fifteen million—”
“Fifteen million seconds!” she interrupts, as if she arrived at that number herself. “Do you know how that must feel for an old man? Not knowing where your family is, knowing you may not have minutes left on this planet?”
Guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. Vulture is getting up there in years, and to imagine him sitting alone on a concrete block in Rykers, maybe even in solitary, knowing he won’t be on earth much longer, is pretty bleak. But maybe he should have thought of that before he became a menace to Brooklyn and put lives at risk.
Both grappling hooks tighten around my arms, and I struggle against them, pointlessly, getting more and more frantic by the minute, feeling my own seconds slipping away. I know the fight routine. This is the part where the bad guy goes on and on about their personal gripes with my past behavior, and my chance to look around for a way out.
Come on, Miles, think!
“But see,” she continues, “I can’t be mad at you. You and me, we’re not so different. We both know what it’s like for people to look at us like we’re freaks.”
That catches me off guard and makes me stop struggling against the grappling hooks for just a moment. I remember that old man’s face as he watered his plants, looking up at me like someone would look at a stray dog that wandered onto their lawn. Or in my case, crashed onto their lawn like a fallen asteroid. He looked at me like he didn’t know whether to scream, call the cops, spray me with the hose, or all of the above.
“And to be attacked for doing what’s right,” she says.
The look on the store owner’s face will forever be burned into my mind, and a pang of hurt spreads through my chest as I remember getting smacked over and over again with the broom, and the scathing words that came out of her mouth: you worthless hooligan, she’d called me. I’ve been called worse. But to be called that by the person I was trying to protect… to be hated so deeply by someone who I was trying to defend… That hurt.
“And hated for not being perfect,” says Pigeon, her voice almost a whisper this time.
She’s talking about JJ now.
She’s talking about the headlines.
“With such a public image, people must think they know everything about you. But they don’t, do they, Spider-Man? Not even your closest friends. Nobody really knows you but you.”
I hate the smile of satisfaction that spreads across her face, and it ignites a new flame of drive within me to resist her words. Number one rule of bad guy monologues: don’t let them get to you.
“I know you’re a long way off from joining the right side, with me and my grandfather.”
My ears perk up at that.
Grandfather? Is this girl not only Vulture’s accomplice, then, but his… granddaughter?
“But when you finally see it,” she continues
, “when you realize that the only one who looks out for you is number one… when you realize you can’t trust anyone but you… call me.”
Rrrrrrrip!
The grappling hooks squeak their way out of the plaster in the walls, dropping me to the floor. At the same time, a tiny white feather flutters to the ground in front of my face, landing between my hands on the ground as I catch my breath. And then I realize, it’s not a feather at all, but a feather-shaped white business card that just says a phone number, and then…
…a red wing.
Pigeon swipes up the briefcase she’d been holding earlier from where we’d landed and sprints to the hole in the wall.
Just like that, I see the villain getting away, with the thing she came to get—whatever it is. I didn’t even get to figure out what “it” is, or stop her from getting past whatever security scanners or steel vaults or motion detectors she had to get around to get it. Whatever “it” is, she has it, and now she’s about to escape with it.
“No, wait!” I call, panic setting in where shock used to be. I web myself across the room and out to the ledge.
But she’s gone.
I see her in the distance now.
She’s an ever-shrinking red mass of metal wings soaring so high into the sky and out over the bay that I know there’s no way to catch her. Not even if I were to swing across all of New York. My hope sinks like a rock in my gut, and I lean against the gaping hole that used to be the window of this floor, and rub my sore arms. I bend one leg up and let the other dangle out into the night, kicking my foot. Dammit. So close. I was so close to catching her. If I hadn’t been so slow figuring out a way out of those grappling hooks. But no, Miles, you just had to wait and let her finish talking. You had to wait to escape so long she actually let you go!
I sigh.
“Pete, you still there?” I ask feebly into my earpiece.
“Yeah, Miles,” he groans, his voice weak and sad this time. “Any luck on your end?”
Whatever Pigeon came to get, she got. And now I’m sitting in the middle of a warzone’s worth of rubble staring out at the moon rising in the distance. The top half of the super-secure S.H.I.E.L.D. facility is all but destroyed. And it’s all my fault.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Page 8