The Laughing Spider #24
The factory doors groaned like dying animals. Metal scraping metal. Echoes bouncing off corroded walls.
Jake's head snapped toward the sound, neck moving too fast, vertebrae popping. Everything was angles and vectors now. His brain calculated trajectories before his conscious mind could catch up.
The interface wavered in his vision like heat shimmer, text swimming in and out of focus. His chemically-soaked brain couldn't parse the meaning, but his body understood. The hunger. That magnetic pull toward--
His eyes snapped to the shelf. The green rose. Perfect and poisonous. Singing to him.
Need it. Have to have it. The clocky-clock thing. The hungry-yummy. Make the numbers go.
"Two," he giggled, tearing his gaze away with physical effort. "Two little piggies coming to the market."
Harley's grip tightened on her bat. "Stay behind me, bug boy. Let me handle--"
"No no no no NO." His broken hands flapped uselessly. The fingers were setting wrong, bones knitting at angles that would make orthopedists weep. "That's boring. Boring is bad. Bad makes the angry-me wake up and I'm trying SO HARD to keep him sleeping."
She looked at him. Really looked. Something flickered across her face, calculation mixed with curiosity.
"You got your webs, right?" she asked slowly. "Your sticky-shoot-things?"
Webs.
The word triggered muscle memory. His wrists twitched. Something in his forearms contracted, glands squeezing, biological mechanisms engaging--
Green.
The webbing that shot from his left wrist was green. Not the clean white of before. This was toxic. Luminescent. The same color as the chemicals still burning in his veins.
"Ohhhhh," he breathed, watching the strand dangle from his wrist. "That's new. That's different. That's--" He touched it experimentally. It burned his fingers. He giggled. "Spicy."
"Can you use them?" Harley pressed.
Could he? His right hand was mangled. His left was fractured. His shoulder still wept blood through the tatters of his suit. But the webs didn't care about injury. They were biology. Instinct. Pure.
"Always could," he said. "Just better now. Everything's better now. Except the parts that are worse. But those are hilarious."
Footsteps echoed through the factory. Closer. Deliberate. Professional.
Then: screaming.
High-pitched. British. Cut off abruptly by the sound of metal teeth snapping shut.
Jake and Harley moved as one, creeping toward the sound. His broken body protested every step but the chemicals pushed him forward anyway. Pain was just information. Information was just noise.
They found Lady Vic first.
The trap had been elegant in its brutality. Pressure plate triggering a bear trap -- industrial-sized, designed for machinery, not flesh. It had caught her left leg mid-stride, steel jaws punching through kevlar and bone like tissue paper.
She lay on her side, rifle three feet away, fingers scrabbling uselessly toward it. Blood pooled beneath her in a spreading lake that reflected the factory's sickly lights. Her face had gone paper-white. Shock setting in. The kind that killed if left untreated.
"Help," she gasped when she saw them. British accent strained to breaking. Each word cost her. "Please. Medical attention. I can pay-- anything-- please--"
Her leg. Christ, her leg.
The bear trap's jaws had punched clean through. Jake could see the femur -- white and splintered, jutting through muscle that had been compressed into hamburger. The foot still twitched. Nerves firing randomly, the body not yet understanding it was destroyed.
Blood pulsed from the femoral artery in rhythmic spurts. She was bleeding out. Minutes, maybe. Her hands pressed against the wound uselessly, fingers slipping in the blood.
"SHHHHHHH." Jake pressed a broken finger to his lips. It bent wrong. He didn't notice. "The grown-ups are talking."
Ten feet beyond her, King Snake hung suspended from the ceiling. Another trap -- tripwire triggering a net that had yanked him up, leaving him dangling and spinning slowly. The blind martial artist's face was calm despite the situation, head tilting as he tracked their approach by sound.
"Harley Quinn," King Snake said quietly. "I should have known. Only you would turn the Chemical Factory into a killing floor."
"Only ME?" Harley preened. "Aww, you're sweet. But I can't take all the credit. Mister J set most of these up before-- before--"
Her voice caught. Pain bleeding through.
Jake's chest tightened. The pheromones screamed at him to comfort her, make her smile, fix whatever was broken.
"You have your webs," Harley repeated, voice harder now. Focused. "Show me."
Show her.
Make her proud.
Please her.
His left wrist rose. The angle felt wrong but his body didn't care. Green webbing shot from his wrist: thick, viscous, glowing faintly in the factory's dim light.
The strand caught Lady Vic's torso, wrapped around her chest and shoulders. Stuck.
"What are you--" she started.
Jake pulled.
Not gently. Not carefully. With every ounce of enhanced strength his broken body could generate.
The physics were simple. Acceleration equals force over mass. Lady Vic weighed maybe one-forty. Jake could bench-press a truck.
Her body yanked toward him like a fish on a line. Fast. Too fast.
The bear trap held her leg in place while the rest of her body tried to travel fifteen feet in half a second.
The sound was worse than any scream could be.
RRRIP.
Flesh tearing. Not cutting. Tearing. The leg separating from the hip like pulling apart overcooked chicken. Ligaments snapping with wet pops. Muscle fibers shredding. The ball joint dislocating with a meaty thunk that echoed through the factory.
Lady Vic's scream was inhuman. Pure animal. The sound a body makes when the central nervous system reports catastrophic damage from too many sources at once.
Her spine compressed as she accelerated, vertebrae crushing against each other with rapid-fire pops that sounded like bubble wrap. Ribs cracked. Her shoulders dislocated simultaneously -- both joints giving way under the force.
She flew through the air trailing blood -- arterial spray painting an arc across corroded machinery. Jake caught her -- broken hands and all.
The body in his arms was wrong. Boneless. A sack of meat in the rough shape of a person. Her torso bent at angles that shouldn't exist. Both arms hung limp, shoulders sitting four inches lower than they should. Her head lolled back, mouth open in a silent scream that had no breath behind it.
Her eyes were open. Wide. Staring at nothing.
Alive, but gone. The brain had mercy-switched her off. Couldn't process that much damage and stay conscious.
Her chest hitched. Shallow, irregular breaths. Ribs grinding with each one. Blood frothed at her lips -- internal bleeding, probably a punctured lung from the fractured ribs.
"Look look LOOK!" Jake turned to Harley, holding Lady Vic's body like a child presenting a crayon drawing. The woman's ruined leg was still in the trap fifteen feet away, twitching. "I got her! I pulled and she came and I didn't even-- I didn't know I could do that!"
He was laughing. Couldn't stop. The sound bubbled up from his chest, effervescent and wrong.
Lady Vic's body jerked in his arms. A seizure, maybe. Or just nerves misfiring. Her face was gray now. Lips blue. Going into shock proper.
She'd be dead in minutes. Maybe less.
Harley had gone pale. Actually pale. Her makeup stood out stark against suddenly bloodless skin.
She'd seen death before. Caused it. Laughed through it. But this--
This was different.
The casual brutality of it. The way he'd pulled a woman apart like she was a toy and then presented the pieces for approval, still giggling.
"You--" Her voice cracked. "You killed her."
"No no no!" Jake shook Lady Vic gently. Her head flopped. Neck probably broken too. "See? Breathing! That means alive! Very alive! Just... sleepy."
He giggled again, the sound too high, too manic. Lady Vic exhaled -- long, rattling, final. Her chest stopped moving.
"Oh," Jake said, looking down at the body. "Now she's sleeping. The forever kind."
He dropped her. She hit the grating with a wet sound, body crumpling into an impossible shape.
Harley took a step back. Then another.
"Bug boy, what have you--"
The question hit him like a brick through a window.
'What have you become?'
The words triggered something. A memory. A cascade. Neurons firing in patterns his chemically-soaked brain had forgotten it knew.
He'd asked himself that question. Recently. When?
The docks. Tommy's broken nose. The workers webbed against containers. His hands shaking after. The fear that he was becoming something he couldn't recognize.
And then--
The vat.
Green swallowing him. Burning him. Rewriting him.
Jake looked down at himself. Really looked.
His suit was gone. Just rags hanging from chemical-scarred skin. His skin was wrong: too pale, mottled with green stains that wouldn't wash out. His hands were broken sculptures of bone and meat. His body was held together by enhanced healing fighting toxins, creating something neither human nor stable.
He looked at his hands. Lady Vic's blood covered them. Cooling. Sticky.
He'd done that. Those hands. His hands.
No.
NO.
The laughter died in his throat, strangled by something clawing its way up from the depths of his fractured mind.
"You did this," he said. His voice came out wrong. Raw. The chemicals tried to smother it but for one moment -- one desperate moment -- Jake Cross broke through. "You did this to me."
Harley's eyes widened. "Bug boy--"
"DON'T CALL ME THAT!" The rage was volcanic. Pure. It burned through the pheromone fog like a blowtorch through cotton candy. "I had a NAME! I was SOMETHING and you-- you dropped me. You DROWNED me in that-- that--"
His hands went to his head, fingers clawing at his scalp. Drawing blood. The pain helped. Cleared the fog for just a second longer.
"I can't-- my brain won't-- everything tastes wrong and I can't stop LAUGHING and I just--" He looked at Lady Vic's body. At what he'd done. "I killed her. I pulled her apart and I LAUGHED."
Tears mixed with the blood on his face. Real tears. Human tears. Jake Cross crying through the chemical corruption.
"Please," he gasped. "Please fix me. Make it stop. Make my brain work right. I don't want-- I can't be-- PLEASE--"
His wrists rose. Green webs shot toward Harley without his conscious command. The body moving before the mind could intervene.
Harley tried to dodge. Too slow. The strands caught her torso, her arms, wrapped tight.
"UNDO IT!" Jake was screaming now. Not laughing. Screaming. The sound raw and desperate and human. "FIX ME! MAKE IT STOP! MAKE THE LAUGHING STOP! MAKE ME REMEMBER WHO I WAS!"
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I made a posting error but it's corrected now. All Chapters are chronological now.