by Peter David
Well. Wasn’t this an interesting development?
A female voice boomed over the sound system. After a brief squeal of feedback that was quickly adjusted for, the attractive blonde on the podium said, “I’m here today because I fell sixty-two stories and someone caught me. Someone who never asks for anything in return. Someone who doesn’t even want us to know who he is.”
The girl—whom Mary Jane knew was Gwen Stacy since she’d certainly had her name and picture plastered in enough places since her near-death experience—continued, “So, I ask you, when you’re dropping without a parachute, or your store’s being robbed, or your house is on fire, who is it that breaks your fall and puts out the flames and saves your children?”
Peter Parker, thought Mary Jane. Peter Parker, who always has time to be the guy you’re here to worship, and never time for me… and I’m such a creep for being upset about that…
“Spider-Man!” bellowed the crowd.
Atop a nearby building, Peter Parker—clad in his red-and-blue costume—listened to Gwen Stacy’s introduction and decided that it was a hell of a lot better than the quick here he is that he’d suggested.
The crowd shouted Spider-Man’s name, and he murmured to himself in amazement, “They love me.”
“And who,” Gwen was saying, “with astounding courage puts his life on the line every day for justice and fairness?”
“Spider-Man!” they screamed yet again.
“Then let’s hear it,” said Gwen, expertly playing to the crowd, “for the one, for the only, for the fabulous, the sexy… Spider-Maaaaaan!”
The music swelled; the crowd roared. Had there been a roof, the energy level would have been through it.
And all that from people who still didn’t know if Spider-Man was actually going to show up. It was a celebration of more than just the hero; it was all about the city’s appreciation for him.
Well, then… how could he possibly let down his adoring public?
Firing a webline, Peter swung out high over the crowd. It took only seconds for people to spot him, and if the cheers had sounded loud before, they were now positively thunderous, spectators just out of their minds with glee.
He drank it in hungrily, greedily, like a man dying of thirst coming upon not simply an oasis, but an Irish pub. He was giddy with the adoration; it was intoxicating.
And like a man who was genuinely drunk…
… he went further than he should have.
Gwen Stacy clapped her hands in delight as she saw Spider-Man hurtling down toward her. She had prepared an entire second half of the speech in the event of his being a no-show, although she hadn’t been looking forward to it. She knew what the crowd wanted, and it wasn’t a longer speech. They wanted their hero, in person, live, large and in charge.
Now they were getting their wish.
Spider-Man swung high above, twirling his body as he soared in an upward arc. It was pure showing off. Not that it mattered in the least; the crowd was eating up every moment. Someone had written a catchy little song about Spider-Man that had been in heavy rotation on the local radio stations. The marching band struck it up, and Spider-Man now dropped down at dizzying speed. There were gasps, some of shock and fear that he was going to hit the ground like a rock, and some in excitement as they anticipated his pulling out of it just in time. The second contingent were naturally correct as he fired a webline behind him that snagged the top of the City Hall archway.
Spider-Man lowered himself so that he was upside down and facing Gwen. Face-to-face, Gwen put her arms around him and posed for the battery of cameras that flashed away.
Under his mask, Peter was grinning like a lunatic. Suddenly, to the sound of wolf whistles and cries of “Kiss him!” Gwen gave him a kiss on his masked cheek.
With his ego swelled almost to bursting by the unparalleled adulation of the crowd, Peter proceeded to seize the moment full-on.
“Go ahead, lay one on me,” Peter told her.
Gwen looked startled, but not in a bad way. “Really?”
“They’ll love it.”
She leaned in toward him and pulled down his mask so that it cleared his mouth. Then she kissed him with a startling ferocity that Peter wouldn’t have expected from the normally sedate Gwen Stacy.
For an instant it took him out of the moment, and he remembered that improbable, deliriously romantic kiss he’d shared with Mary Jane while rain poured down upon them in buckets. That kiss seemed long ago and far away, and this was very much happening in the here and now. All he was thinking about were the shouts and cheers, and that his head was probably going to explode any moment.
The thoughts of that rain-soaked kiss also caused him to dwell on Mary Jane, but he wasn’t concerned. She was a working actress—he’d watched her kiss other guys onstage, and it hadn’t bothered him because he knew that she was performing a character. That’s all he was doing as well.
Certainly Mary Jane would understand all that, right?
Mary Jane watched with her eyes wide, filled with disbelief, hurt, anger. What the hell was Peter playing at? Was this some sort of… of sick game to try to make her jealous? As if she hadn’t been feeling low enough, inadequate enough… now this? Now this?!
Harry, like everyone else around him, was focused on what was happening onstage. “Wow! Hope Pete’s getting a shot of this,” he said.
Not like the shot I’m going to want to give him.
The band had switched to a punchy “college fight song” version of that infernal Spider-Man tune, as if their hero had just scored a touchdown. Mary Jane, unable to take it anymore, felt tears stinging her eyes. She turned away and wiped the moisture from her face, praying that it wouldn’t cause her makeup to run.
She couldn’t imagine this day getting worse.
She was about to discover just how limited her imagination was.
Gwen was only partly playing to the crowd as she affected a swoon. She stepped away from Spider-Man, swaying a bit, and grasped the standing microphone as if it were the only thing preventing her from falling over. “Wow!” she sighed.
A shadow fell over her.
At first Gwen thought that some errant clouds had moved in and blocked out the sun, but, no—the sky was clear. Meanwhile the shadow continued to spread, darkness covering the crowd, Spider-Man, the entire district.
People began to scream and point, and then Gwen saw what was causing it. Even when she did, it made no sense. She could imagine something like this in the middle of the Sahara, but not in downtown Manhattan.
But there it was, unmistakable: a cloud of sand, hundreds of feet high, barreling toward them, blotting out the sun and hurtling at high speed down the narrow canyons of the city.
Spectators started to run, prepared to stampede over whoever was in their way to get clear of it, and then suddenly—impossibly—the sandstorm made a sharp right three blocks shy of overwhelming the celebration. Rounding a corner as if it were a combination of sandstorm and tornado, the sand cloud disappeared, although a distant roaring could still be heard.
“What was that thing?” Gwen asked, forgetting that she was still at the microphone and her question was going out to the entire crowd.
Spider-Man’s determined declaration of, “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out!” resulted in another roar of support from the crowd. He bounded upward, fired a webline, and swung off after what would more than likely turn out to be some sort of weird atmospheric condition.
Yet the science student in Gwen told her that it couldn’t possibly be that simple.
Her inner science student, as it turned out, was absolutely right.
* * *
Chapter Eleven
SON OF A BEACH
Flint Marko was brimming with confidence. It was a pleasant feeling, one that he was unaccustomed to, given the usual assortment of people criticizing him, beating him down, or at least trying to.
Now, as he strode down the streets of New York City, he looked back on all the
people who had made his life miserable, people who had loomed so large in his day-today existence. Cops, wardens, his wife, teachers, his parents… especially his father. Indeed, the crappy way his father had treated him had compelled him to be the best parent he humanly could for Penny’s sake.
It was odd. All those loomed-so-large people now seemed small, pathetic… even irrelevant. How could he ever have been so concerned about them? They were nothing. He was now a giant, bestriding humanity like a colossus, and if they didn’t like him or despised him or thought he was beneath them… what did it matter? All they could do was shout at him or try to tear him down, and that just wasn’t going to be happening anymore. Not to Flint Marko.
Because Flint Marko was no longer there. He had left the building, gone on to a better place. The man that he was now—the being that he was now—had as much in common with Flint Marko as Flint Marko had in common with an amoeba. Thinking of himself as merely Flint Marko would be limiting.
He scratched his ear thoughtfully, wondering… if he wasn’t Flint Marko, who was he? A few grains of sand fell out of his ear. Feeling as if something was still in there, he pounded firmly on the side of his head as he tilted it, and a stream of sand poured out. That wasn’t surprising—as he had trimmed away excess sand so that his features would appear more and more normal, the grains had simple retreated into his body. Because of that, he now had too much sand between his ears. Once he’d extracted it, though, he felt a lot better.
Some blocks away he heard music and cheering. He snorted and wondered if it was to celebrate his return to New York City and somehow doubted that was the case.
He walked past two policemen who were sitting in a cop car. Marko barely afforded them a glance as he kept on going. He heard one of them say, “Isn’t that the guy from the prison break?” and the other replied, “Fits the description. Hey, you! Halt!”
Marko didn’t feel like bothering with them. They were too little and simply not worth his time. Walking quickly across the street, he ducked behind a construction truck. The police officers, pursuing him on foot, split up and came around the truck from two different directions, knowing there was nowhere for him to go.
To their confusion, they came from either side and met on the other end of the truck. There was no sign of him. However, a large tarp covered the back of the truck, and the two cops looked at each other and nodded together. Clearly they thought they had him.
Seconds later, one of them had whipped the tarp aside and both of them had their guns leveled, fully expecting to see Flint Marko charging them in a hopeless attempt to escape.
There was nothing there except a truckload of sand.
One of the cops grabbed a shovel and stepped forward, about to push it into the sand. That was when Marko suddenly thought, Why am I hiding? Why am I waiting for them to go away? Why am I afraid of them? That’s the old way of thinking. That’s Flint Marko’s way of thinking. I’m not Flint Marko anymore. I’m not a man of flesh and blood. I’m a man of sand.
Yes. I’m… the Sandman. And the Sandman lies down for no one.
Before the cop could start probing, a giant sandstone hand thrust upward, launching him into the air. He soared a short distance and came down hard on a car windshield.
A patrol car rolled up and several more cops sprang out. It’s like a clown car, the Sandman grimly thought, and he decided to make clear to them just how hopeless the situation was. He rose, having merged his form with the load of sand that was already in the truck, and towered over them, twenty feet high and growing with every passing second.
The cops stepped back, goggle-eyed, and went for their weapons. Instantly Sandman was filled with concern…
but not for himself. Unlike the cops, he knew their bullets would be useless against him. They were in a populated area, and flying bullets didn’t discriminate between criminals and law-abiding citizens. He had an image of a little girl, not unlike Penny, standing up at her window somewhere to see what all the noise was about and getting an errant slug square between the eyes.
He opened his mouth to tell the police they should put the guns down, but no voice came out. He was still working on being able to speak without normal vocal cords or a tongue when the cops opened fire. Bullets tore through his chest and out his back. He looked down and saw daylight streaming through the holes.
“Don’t!” he finally managed to say. “I said don’t!”
You’d think they’d have learned. Instead they kept shooting. He couldn’t believe that he was more worried about citizens being hurt than the cops were.
His physical form imitated his thoughts, and he transformed into an angry sandstorm that blasted down the street. Overwhelmed by the force and fury of it, the cops were knocked flat onto their backs, clawing at the air, unable to breathe. Nor were the police cars spared Sandman’s wrath as they were flipped over from the sheer power of his onslaught, their wheels spinning.
Seeing no point in continuing to screw around with the fools who thought they had a chance in hell against him, Sandman blasted down the narrow canyons of the city. He never knew how much free-floating dirt and dust there was in New York. He gathered it all to himself, like a nurturing father, and grew larger and larger until he was a living sandstorm sixty stories high. People ran screaming from his advance, which was fine by him. He wasn’t out to kill anyone—he simply wanted to help his daughter, and having cops wasting ammunition on him wasn’t going to accomplish that.
Satisfied that he had left his pursuers behind, Sandman reconstituted himself, drawing in the grit tighter and faster until he looked like a stationary whirlwind. Seconds later the sand and wind faded, leaving him standing there looking at his hands. They appeared fairly normal and he smiled with satisfaction. It was taking him less time to sculpt himself to human specifications. Clearly he was ahead of the learning curve.
He smiled as he stood outside his target: an armored car outside the First National Bank. The words Manhattan safe armored car CO. were emblazoned on the side, along with the assurance that the company had been PROTECTING NEW YORK SINCE 1925. That was laughable. They didn’t give a damn about New York. They cared about protecting New York’s money. Not exactly the same thing.
As he stood there, the armored car—oblivious of his presence—roared to life and pulled away from the curb. Either they had just discharged their contents, so the car was empty and useless… or else they’d just made a pickup, in which case it was ready to be picked like an overripe grape.
With a single thought, he caused the grains of his body to separate slightly, making him light as air. He vaulted to the top of the truck and instantly brought them all back together tighter than they originally were. Far denser than a normal human, Sandman landed with a heavy thud atop the roof, the paneling creaking and groaning beneath his feet.
He heard a voice from within—a guard, no doubt—saying, “There’s something on the roof,” followed by an electronic crackle of static. The guard was probably communicating to the driver via walkie-talkie. Fine. Let him call for help, for all the good it would do him.
Sandman stared at his right arm, willed it into the shape he wanted it, and was pleased to see it reform into a giant sandstone mace. He raised it high and then slammed it down, tearing into the rear of the armored car and shredding it like tissue paper.
The one guard inside looked up at him with a face that had gone the color of curdled milk. Then Sandman spotted what he’d been after: the huge sacks of bank cash piled in a corner like so much laundry. Jackpot.
Sandman glanced back to the guard just in time to see the shotgun being pointed at him before it went off.
He tried to avoid the blast out of reflex and was only partly successful as the left side of his face was blown away. Howling in fury at the pain he didn’t feel, Sandman let his cohesion go. The guard was instantly besieged by a tidal wave of sand, smashing him against the Plexiglas partition that separated the cargo section of the truck from the cab.
The d
river turned, his eyes wide in alarm, as he saw the back section fill impossibly fast with cascading sand. The partition was designed to withstand direct shots from bullets, but not the sheer unyielding amount of weight that was piling up against it now. A ribbon of cracks appeared in the Plexiglas, and before the driver could think of what he should do, the partition shattered and sand gushed into the cab. The driver let out an alarmed shriek, but the sound was overwhelmed by the roar of Sandman’s onslaught. Pouring into the cab without letup, sand buried the driver up to his neck.
It also buried his foot on the accelerator, pressing it to the floor.
Even enveloped as he was by sand, the driver desperately fought to keep the armored car on course. He was only partly successful.
The armored car careened wildly down the street, sending pedestrians scattering. A taxi veered to get out of its way, but the speeding truck dealt it a glancing blow and sent it skidding to the side.
Sandman, meantime, had reformed part of his body into its human proportions, even as the rest of the sand kept the driver immobilized and the armored car moving.
Only a short time earlier he had been so concerned about the safety of others in regard to flying bullets. But the more he used his power, the more he found such concerns to be quaint, even irrelevant. He had the power of a god… and what use did gods have for worrying about the safety of mere mortals?
He could do anything now… anything…
A jaunty voice broke through his musings on omnipotence. “What sandbox did you crawl out of?”
Sandman looked up and saw the masked face of Spider-Man staring down at him. The wallcrawler was leaning against the rear doors of the armored car, apparently having dropped through the hole that Sandman had created. He had a cocky demeanor, like a blue-and-red-clad Bugs Bunny, that immediately irritated the hell out of Sandman.