Drip. Drip. Drip.
Peter awoke in what appeared to be a makeshift home. It was a broken tent covered with a few colored plastic tarps. Some holes were crudely stitched together with pieces of other tents. Underneath was a floor of stacked cardboard and a thin, dusty mattress covered with a dirty bedsheet.
He smelled of blood and rain and filth, and the metallic tinge of copper mixed with something both sweet and vile lingered in his mouth. The aftertaste alone forced him upright with his mouth wide open in a reflexive gag.
He rushed out of the tent like his life depended on it.
I did it. I actually went out and did it. Oh god. What the fuck did you do, Peter? What did this change for him? Could he even call himself human anymore? He did it. Didn't he? Aunt May and Uncle Ben's murderer was dead.
He gagged harder as saliva mixed with bile and drool erupted from his throat. He could still taste him, he could taste that disgusting thing that wore the face of a man—Poindexter was sweet, disgustingly so.
Bile built up in the back of his throat as that thought settled in.
That wasn't all.
He had his memories. Flashes of Poindexter's childhood and adulthood streamed into the forefront of his thoughts. His obsession with his neighbor, Julie—his North Star, his angel. His habits and everything he had learned throughout his life. He could think like him. He could feel the psychopath swimming around in his cranium. His skills too were at the tip of Peter's fingertips. He knew the angle and the force needed to turn a pencil into a sharp projectile that could damage a person's brain through their eyes. He knew how to curve and bounce a soft ball so that it could crack a person's skull, how to twist and flick his wrist so a penny, fork, or bread knife could mortally wound someone.
Peter now knew the soft parts, the vital parts, the arteries and intricate nerve endings and body parts he could damage to physically disable someone. He had training, physical and mental conditioning. FBI, CIA and U.S. Army training. Torture tactics, combat tactics, military strategy, military lingo, bureaucratic jargon—everything was just there as if it had always been there.
He knew how to fight. How to really fight.
Bladed weapons suddenly became second nature to him. He knew the difference between a push dagger, a Karambit and Navaja. Which bladed edge was preferable for melee or curving up flesh, and which one he could throw at range with efficient accuracy.
And weapons. He knew weapons, too. He had preferences among the Long Knife Flechette, Republik 450, and LMDA 7.72 Nato. He could take apart a KMP9, KKMP45 and a SAA-58 and put them back together at roughly the same time. He could do the same to a Glock in even less time.
These… These were all Poindexter.
[Slot Resonance: Unkillable Blasphemous Reptile & Ajin]
[Trait Gained: Predation]
[Grants the host a chance to gain skills, characteristics, memories, powers, and abilities of an individual after consuming their flesh. Percentage of flesh consumed is directly proportionate to the chance and quality of gain.]
[Trait Gained: Death Shadow: Envoy]
[Ability to summon the Death Shadow Envoy, a separate Ajin that takes the form of an individual with their skills, memories, and personality intact after consuming their flesh and killing them.]
Ah. So that's it…
Last night's events burst forth in his mind like a wave accompanying that mental tsunami containing everything that was Poindexter, breaking what little control he had left as he vomited his guts out.
He felt oddly satisfied despite puking the contents of his stomach out here.
Peter had eaten him. Peter had eaten Poindexter in the rain. He had eaten him, lost in his hunger and emotions, he had devoured his bones and guts and sinew and brain and skin. He had eaten him until the cops arrived, he did something to them… he hurt them, he didn't mean to but he had little control over himself, at least they were alive when he fled over the rooftops.
Everything after that was a blur.
Peter tried to gather himself. He pushed Poindexter—and everything remotely related to the man—into the deepest reaches of his mind. He dug a hole and tossed him in there for now. Poindexter Death Shadow took shape in that hole. A hollow thing that took the shape of a man and became everything Poindexter was.
Peter took a breath and centered himself. Poindexter was gone for now. He could feel the bond that bound them. It was much like his with death, the only difference was that this Ajin, while an extension of himself, possessed the identity of someone else entirely.
Wiping his lips with his sleeve with one arm and using the concrete wall he was leaning on for support, he pushed himself up. He took in his surrounding with a cautious gaze.
Moss filled walls. A field of trash, grass, pebbles, rocks, and weeds caged in by walls of concrete and separated by a drain that cut right through the center. He was under a bridge, in a literal trash heap. It seemed he found someone's abandoned makeshift home after escaping the cops and had taken a nap inside last night. Probably scared the poor homeless soul off too.
Peter found a path through the trash pile, a footpath through concrete, and followed it towards the road.
First order of business was to get his ass home. He glanced up at the bright morning sun glaring at him from the clear blue sky.
——0000——
An hour had passed, maybe more. Peter couldn't have said. Time had gone soft on him somewhere between the bridge and the streets.
The sun sat low and gold over the rooftops, gilding the fire escapes and the pigeon shit and the rusted water towers, and beneath it the city went about its business as though nothing at all had been eaten the night before.
His body was fine. Better than fine, and that was the sick joke of it. Every joint moved, oiled and easy. Every bone sat where God intended. His lungs pulled deep and clean, his heart kept its steady traitor's rhythm, and his skin was new as a christening gown — not a scratch, not a scar, not one honest mark to show for seven bullets and a brick wall. A man ought to carry something out of a night like that. Some limp, some ache, some proof. He had nothing.
His flesh had forgiven him completely, and flesh had no business doing that.
His head was another matter entirely.
The cop kept coming back to him. The muzzle flash first, small and bright as a struck match. The round punching through his shoulder, hot and rude, an insult more than an injury. And then her — folding at the knees, the red spreading across her shirt too fast, far too fast, blooming like spilled wine on a tablecloth while the thing inside him lifted its head at the smell.
He didn't mean to put a hole in her chest with his arm or brutally beat the other cops too. Poindexter was the target. Poindexter was supposed to be the only target, but lost as he was in that warm, crimson, frothy and viscous liquid. Lost in the madness of the act, the fulfillment of a promise kept, of his family avenged and his first taste of flesh, control was an afterthought.
When he felt pain, his first thought was to eliminate the source causing him pain.
He remembered that part with a clarity he'd have paid good money to lose. The hunger rising, patient and interested, and beneath it something smaller and older and entirely his own, screaming at him, struggling against the urges as it wrestled for control — and his hand moving before he'd finished the thought.
Something had torn loose from him then, too. Torn loose and gone into her chest like a seed into turned earth, following his desire to save her from his mistake, and her breath had caught and rattled and held.
He had forced a sin shard into her, hoping it would heal her. Hoping he could fix his mistake, and when more red and blue and sirens drew near around him—he ran.
Whatever he was, whatever he'd become, he still had lines. He desperately wanted to believe that he still had lines he wouldn't cross.
She was alive.
He knew it the way he knew his own pulse, some new thread in him humming faint and sure as a plucked wire, and he did not ask himself how he knew. The answer would come with questions, and the questions would come with more, and there was a hole in the bottom of his mind already crowded with things he wasn't looking at.
One more wouldn't hurt.
The rooftops were better.
They were honest, at least — gravel and tar paper and old antennae bent like beggars' fingers, and nobody up there to walk around him in a wide fearful circle. He'd gone up the side of a building without deciding to, fingers finding holds in brick like they'd been born knowing them and from that height the city flattened out into something almost manageable. Patrol cars crawled their routes below, dutiful as beetles. He marked their intervals without meaning to. Marked the gaps in the net, the camera angles, the three separate lines of retreat off this block alone — Poindexter's eyes doing the seeing and Poindexter's brain doing the chewing, all of it laid out neat as a place setting. Useful. God help him, but it was useful, and he hated how easily he wore it.
A dead man's skills fit him like a dead man's coat: warm enough, and stinking of its last owner.
The laundry hung on the seventeenth floor of a building one block over, strung between a window latch and a rusted hook some optimist had driven into the brick a generation ago. A dark hoodie. Jeans near enough his size.
He really did need a change of clothes to move through the streets with ease.
His old clothes were… Yeah, they weren't gonna work.
He took them with a muttered apology to whoever went without, dressed in the shadow of the water tower, and rolled his old clothes tight as a secret. They reeked of rain and copper and that street smell you couldn't wash off. He stuffed them down a dead flue and let the dark have them.
The wet sound tried to surface again, then. The chewing. Rising up from the hole where he'd buried it, patient as everything else inside him seemed to be now.
He shoved it back down and walked on. There was a lie to build, and only seventeen floors and forty blocks to build it in.
What he did last night seemed to have spooked the city into high alert. The streets were significantly less crowded than normal, and those who walked around moved with an eerie air of caution.
Peter wouldn't be surprised if some of them were armed. Actually. He wasn't. Thanks to Poindexter, he could tell who was armed and who wasn't based on their movements. His observation skills and threat assessment abilities were significantly heightened. His body integrated whatever skills Poindexter had to offer like a sponge in water.
The streets hummed with a quiet bustle that usually settles in after a disastrous event.
Every five to ten minutes throughout his walk, Peter would note an NYPD vehicle that drove by. They probably had a city-wide perimeter, a large net with each NYPD patrol car probably two to ten minutes out from the one nearest to him.
Probably had a chopper on standby along with armed and ready response units.
He clocked every visible camera from his position and angled himself so his face was obscured under the cap he had borrowed from one of the stalls he had walked past. He spotted possible exit routes and took mental notes of weapons he could make from the mundane things around him.
People went about their business under the illusion of normality perpetuated by their need to live a 'normal' life. Shops opened and prepped for the day ahead, and clean-up crews moved around, going about their normal duties.
Can they see it? Peter wondered as he crossed the street, seamlessly blending into the crowd of pedestrians like some aimlessly wandering teen. Can they see what I am? What I've become…
Could any of these 'normal' people tell the difference between a monster wearing human skin and a human when one was standing right in front of them?
Should he show them? He could.
For a moment he paused in the center of the crossing. The world slowed to a crawl as dark urges began rearing their heads, swelling like a balloon inside him, and the streets muted around him. Black miasma oozed out of him, invisible to the naked eye. His predatory organ twitched at the base of his spine. His eyes narrowed into something tittering at the edge of insanity.
He could, couldn't he? Who would stop him? Spider woman? He could take her now. End her too. After what he did last night. After what he did to Poindexter, why not just take it all the way. Be the monster instead of trying to play normal 'Peter Parker'.
Just kill them all and be done with it.
Huh?
Suddenly, sound and motion returned to his senses.
He blinked owlishly when he noticed. Everyone had avoided him. Everyone walking on this crossing had somehow unilaterally decided to walk around him like a large school of fish weaving around a sleeping shark. They moved while keeping a distance of at least half a meter from him, and none of them seem to acknowledge him. No, they knew he was standing there and they just instinctually inched further and further away from him until he was left standing in the middle of a diamond like circle.
All except one.
Standing right in front of him was a girl his age. Long strands of platinum blond hair framed her face. Soft, pale skin complimented her electric blue eyes that seemed as if they glowed under the light. Her red lips were parted, and her eyes were wide. As if she had been caught speechless by something, she stood a few steps from him, marking the other end of the curve as people walked around them.
Her hands were out of her black leather jacket and held at her side with her nails out, they looked sharp. Her white undershirt and jeans accentuated her rather fit figure.
If Peter didn't know any better, she looked like something had slammed into the flight or fight responses of her brain and had short-circuited it.
Oh, right… That was probably him. Curiously, she didn't seem all that terrified, startled maybe, curious even, but there was no fear in her gaze.
Was this what he wanted? No, not even close. What the hell am I even doing? Peter resisted the urge to cringe at his own thoughts. He wasn't some mutated comic book villain. He wouldn't go on some random killing spree. He wouldn't do that. He was raised better than that. He wouldn't do that to those he cared about.
Poindexter deserved what he got. A moment of weakness forced him to act—that act did not define him. Whatever he was now, that was for him to define, for him to decide.
With a thought, the black miasma around him dissipated. The balloon of urges within him popped into nothingness, and his predatory organ settled. Then, just as suddenly as they had parted around him, the crowd closed in on him.
The blonde-haired teen looked as if she wanted to say something to him, whatever it was, Peter had already moved before she had the chance to verbalize her thoughts.
Using his new speed and stealth skills he slipped past the still girl and continued on his walk home. Peter could only hope that they would never run into each other again. New York was a big city, so he wasn't that worried.
No, what he was worried about was the red-head waiting for him at home with lizard mutagen in her veins—and her aunt.
He had this walk to formulate a believable lie. For Anna, at least. MJ, on the other hand…
He'd cross that bridge when they got there. Sooner rather than later, from the looks of it.
—Chapter End—