The Darkest Hours

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."

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."