Chapter Fourteen: Final Exam
When the phone rang, Mary Jane jumped to answer it before Aunt May woke up. The old lady had dozed off while watching the on-going news coverage. MJ had continued to watch, guiltily hoping for another glimpse of Spider-Man on film while she tried to work out her feelings about Peter. She'd been so wrong about him. It made her question a lot of things—like, why was he always late or missing, if he wasn't running around in tights? Watching Aunt May gently excuse him for letting her down made MJ angry, made her wonder about her own delusion that Peter was Spider-Man. Was she covering for Peter too, just because she loved him?
What do you mean, "just because you love him"? Is there any better reason to give someone the benefit of the doubt? MJ bit her lip at the thought. Right. I bet Mom told herself the same thing before she married Dad. Then she was horrified with herself. Peter was nothing like that, whatever was happening in his life. And whatever was happening in his life, he didn't want her there.
By the time Harry called MJ had worked herself into a funk of depression and doubts. She was almost glad to hear Harry's voice. At least this would distract her from crying.
"MJ? Figures," Harry said. "Let me talk to Peter, 'kay?"
"Are you drunk, Harry?"
"Just get me Peter, c'mon." Mary Jane rolled her eyes and silently patted herself on the back for getting out of that relationship. Harry was slurring his words and sounded mean.
"Peter isn't here yet. I'm sitting with Aunt May, um, until he gets here," she explained, tugging on the phone cord.
There was a pause and she could hear Harry breathing hard. "I need to talk to him."
"Yeah, well, looks like he isn't going to be around when you need him, either," MJ snapped. "So, why don't you take a break from Spider-Man and go looking for Pete instead? Do you both a world of good." Slamming the phone down, MJ took a deep breath. That felt good. She was so tired of getting jerked around by the guys in her life.
"Who was that, dear?"
Jumping, MJ turned to face Aunt May, who was struggling to sit up straight in the faded armchair and who had both eyebrows raised. "Oh. Um, sorry it was Harry..." Mary Jane blushed. "I didn't mean to wake you up." Did she hear what I said about Peter?
"Maybe you should lose your temper more often, dear. It sounded to me like you gave Harry some good advice," Aunt May said softly. MJ laughed a little and tugged her bangs out of her face.
"Well, I didn't want to—"
The television interrupted her with a loud fanfare and eye-catching graphics. "We have a new development in the attack on the Colonial Rotunda at City Hall Park. Part of Frankfort Street, next to the park, has collapsed, apparently due to an underground explosion. We join Marisol Gutierrez at the scene..."
Aunt May picked up the remote control and clicked the television off. "You know, I think I've heard about enough of that," she decided, pushing herself up slowly. "Would you like something to eat, MJ?"
In the tunnels beneath City Park, Cheap Shot coughed politely into his hand and raised his head to look at Spider-Man. His face was grey and his white hair covered with dust. Still, as he stood to offer his defense he had all the dignity of the senator he once had been. His soft, raspy voice was filled with emotion as he addressed the uneasy but fascinated vigilante.
"I know something about your exploits, Spider-Man. Like me, you have been labeled a criminal for acting in the interests of peace and justice," he began.
Spider-Man spluttered. "Are you insane? Peace? Do you even know the meaning—" Cheap Shot raised a hand.
"Please, let me continue." He looked down, frowning thoughtfully. "Yes, I can see how ironic that must sound to you. Consider the irony of your own position, then. You bring petty criminals to justice, catching minnows and the occasional big fish without impacting the sea of crime in the slightest. You run around patching holes while the city crumbles to the ground. Tell me," Cheap Shot looked up with a serious expression, straight into Spider-Man's mask, "tell me honestly, can you say that all your efforts have changed anything? That you have really made a difference?"
Spider-Man remained huddled, silent and motionless, against the ceiling.
"You've felt it," Cheap Shot stated. "The frustration, the futility of it all? Yes, like you I use violence to achieve my ends, but only out of necessity. You see, I have found the solution, the solution to all the ills that eat away at this city, and at our country—the way to have 'peace and justice for all'.
"We concern ourselves with properly educating children, with what they see and hear and learn. Every child hears his teachers, parents, all adults talk about right and wrong. From infancy he is told to respect people of all colors, taught not to steal or fight, to recycle, warned not to take drugs, asked to help others."
Cheap Shot paused, and his expression turned venomous. "But they don't listen!" he spat. Spider-Man started and curled his fingers against his palm.
"I'm not even talking about the lost ones, the drug-soaked gun-toting thugs that roam the streets—although my plan will save them, as well," he continued more calmly. "I mean the housewife that votes for the man who is the right color. The executive who gouges his employees to swell his own bank account. The student who cheats on her exams. The everyday hatred and greed that has swamped us."
Spider-Man understood too well what Cheap Shot was saying. For months now he had been plunged into the darker, dirtier side of New York. It was a casually brutal, tragic thread running through the texture of life that people chose not to see. He cringed as the images flooded through his mind—gangs shooting or knifing each other in the streets, a sixth-grader with a drug problem, the battered wife defending her husband—all he had seen in the endless fight he had chosen to wage. It wasn't invisible, and it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was made possible with every little act of meanness, ignorance, and fear. What difference had he made? Was it hopeless?
But this couldn't be the answer. He listened in growing horror as Cheap Shot explained his Consensus Plan, striding back and forth and gesturing eloquently. As Spider-Man had thought, small hypnotic devices were set in backpacks, calculators—anywhere students would be in range of their mind-altering waves. But while Spider-Man had focused on the advertising gains Fisk would receive from using the devices, he had missed the obvious: that the children would become entirely suggestible, accepting everything they heard. He remembered Lamont commenting on the platitudes contained in the textbooks, not realizing they were the whole point, as far as this megalomaniac was concerned. Didn't Cheap Shot realize how his 'solution' could be misused—was already being abused by Fisk? But that wasn't the point. Even if the devices had only the results Cheap Shot dreamed of, Spider-Man knew it was wrong.
Cheap Shot leaned forward. His politician's delivery was passionate, carefully calculated to persuade. "The idea is so brilliant in its simplicity. Always, power has come from the people, and where has it gotten us?" He waved dismissively. "Now, that can change. The adults are already lost, too set in their ways to be permanently affected. But the children," he smiled, "they will hear each and every lesson with all the power of my hypnotic devices opening their minds. Each moral principle will sink deeply into their subconscious and become part of who they are. All of them will grow into responsible, righteous citizens to guide us where we need to go," he finished jubilantly.
For a long moment, Spider-Man was speechless, trying to bring his anger under control. "You know," he said finally, "that's the sickest thing I've ever heard."
Caught up in the fervor of his vision, the old man actually blinked and stepped back. He quickly recovered his poise, shaking his head sorrowfully. "I have been impressed by your intelligence, your commitment to your cause. I expected you understand how my plan will work to turn people away from what is wrong and to follow what is right," he said.
"Who are you to decide—"
"Please don't give me that tired argument about who gets to decide what is right and wrong," he snapped. "I'm not talking about controversial subjects here. No one wants racism, theft, pollution. The children will learn what everyone agrees they should learn." Cheap Shot folded his arms.
"That's not—you're not talking about learning. Learning is when you think, when you receive information and evaluate it. Learning means you make mistakes." Spider-Man chose his words carefully. "Kids—people—they don't always do what is right. When they do, it has meaning, because they're—we're—not robots. Not brainwashed, not hypnotized. Because we chose to do what is right."
"That's it? That's your argument? Is all the misery you see worth it for some academic right to free will?" Cheap Shot was sneering now.
"What about the people you've killed?"
"Aren't a few lives a small price to pay for a city free of hatred and destruction?"
Spider-Man took a deep, shaky breath and bowed his head. He wouldn't convince Cheap Shot of anything, he knew that. But for himself, for his own peace of mind, he needed to put his convictions into words.
"I made the wrong choice once," the young man who'd become a vigilante remarked painfully. "A life was the price paid for my mistake. Now I do make a difference, no matter what you say, with every life I save and with every crime I stop. Because everyone's life is more than a price to be paid." Spider-Man felt his spider-sense buzz to life. He lifted his arm and aimed at the former politician. "And the only choices I have the right to make are my own."
A web spun out and around Cheap Shot's thin body, pinning his folded arms to his chest. Unseen, one of Cheap Shot's hands pressed hard against his jacket, against the switch of one last transmitter tucked into his breast pocket. Far down the tunnel, there was a rumbling explosion. Cheap Shot tumbled inelegantly to the ground, wrapped like a mummy.
"I just blasted a hole through the wall between this tunnel and the river, Spider-Man," he said, voice muffled against the dusty brick floor. "The water will reach us within moments. I know the quickest way out of the path of the flood. I'll show you if you set me free, and we will both live." Spider-Man felt his ears pop as the air pressure between the brick walls increased.
"Yeah, right." Ignoring the ultimatum, Spider-Man scooped Cheap Shot up. He ripped his way through the web blocking the tunnel back to the Rotunda, and moved fast through the dank corridor. Springing from wall to ceiling to floor, he raced against the sensation of danger and the sound of water rushing toward them. Cheap Shot struggled and flailed in his arms, slowing him down.
"Stay still!" Spider-Man yelled. He turned right down the next corridor and raced back toward the Rotunda basement. As he came around the last corner, carrying his prisoner under his arm, he flipped forward on one hand before seeing the rubble that filled the doorway into the basement. Shock from that last explosion, must've brought more of the Rotunda down. Unable to break his forward momentum, he let his feet continue over his head to hit the floor and then pushed off again, spinning midair to land running back the way he had come. Cheap Shot screamed and gagged, apparently finding Spider-Man's acrobatics hard to take.
"Which way?" Spider-Man demanded. "Come on, is there still a way out?"
"Go, go straight," Cheap Shot managed to cough weakly, bouncing limply in Spider-Man's grip.
Frantically, Spider-Man leaped through the tunnel intersection, glancing to his left as he passed. He saw a wall of green water crash through the corridor, smashing from side to side with unbelievable force and moving toward the crossing like a speeding car. He flipped to the ceiling and sprinted forward, his eyes darting back and forth across his path, searching desperately for a manhole, access to an upper tunnel—anything to get out of the path of the flood. Come on, come on. The water shooting through the tunnel behind him, as if it were being squirted through a giant water-pistol, was right on his heels and Spider-Man found himself mentally calculating the cubic volume of water in the Hudson River with one detached part of his mind while the rest began gibbering in panic. Then the lights went out.
Oh, great, the panicked part of his mind whimpered. The edge of the water hit him from behind, tossing him forward like paper in the wind. Spider-Man held his breath, tightened his hold on Cheap Shot and scrabbled at the ceiling, unable to resist the rushing force that closed over him. Suddenly, the back of his head hit something slender and hard, and before the relentless water could carry him past it, he grabbed and held onto the bar. Letting his body float, he pulled against it and drew his head back upstream, feeling upward with his forehead in the dark. Yes! There was a second bar above the first. Lungs burning, he fought the current and clung to his limp—drowned?—burden. Slowly, he hooked a leg through the first bar and swung his free hand up to the next, then strongly pulled himself upward, only to hit his head hard against the roof. The pain and fear made him gasp in river water. He choked, but refused to give into the terror, and fought the urge to breathe in more water as he steadied his grip on the bars. This had to be a way out.
Feeling along what he realized must be a ladder, he found a water-filled opening overhead on the other side. Awkwardly, Spider-Man managed to squirm his way around the narrow edge of the ladder and hooked his legs back through the bars on the right side. Gripping the rungs, he hauled himself one-handed upward into the shaft. He was growing lightheaded from the lack of air. The current pushed him hard against the ladder, making each rung a v