Chapter 56: A wrong turn, part 2

Parker's call caught Bobby in the old lab at the Wilson house, right in the middle of a ranked game. Some cloistered virgin, spending fifteen hours a day playing the game, had displaced her from the first position on the North American server, overcoming the two hundred ranking points that had previously separated them.

Not that Bobby has been too keen on gaming lately. Thanks to the brain-enhancing power of the symbiote, any game had lost any competitive edge for the girl. Under Venom's influence, Bobby could think and make decisions much faster than before, as if she were an ordinary player only with the ability to slow down the passage of time. No mistakes, no hasty decisions, and no misskicking in combat.

It was cool at first, but it quickly became annoying. It felt like a cheat, winning one rank after another. At the moment, the only game in which Bobby has failed to take the first rank in legend is the notorious Hearthstone, but everyone knows that this game takes no account of player skills, relying entirely on chance.

To Barbara's surprise, it wasn't Parker himself, but Mary Jane on the other end of the line. Their acquaintance with this girl had so far been limited to one brief encounter, with the redhead flaunting Peter's naked T-shirt, unequivocally declaring to the stranger that this guy is mine. Nevertheless, she showed her good side when she heeded the request to leave them alone. Parker, though, knows how to be persuasive.

A flame of concern flickered in Bobby's heart - why would Peter's girlfriend be calling her from someone else's phone? And M.J.'s first words confirmed her fears.

The attack on the school, the shooting, and the kidnapping.

Stay where you are, call the cops, we'll..." Bobby remembered the state Deadpool was in, "I'll be there in five minutes.

Not caring a bit about the unfinished game, Barbara rushed to Peter's school, and she remembered the address from the first time they had met, because it was on the way home that they had picked him up. On her way to the scene, mercilessly cutting off other cars and ignoring traffic lights, Barbara tried several times to call her friend and partner in superhero stuff, Spiderwoman, but her phone was unavailable.

"Damn it!" In all the time they had been heroes together, the Spiderwoman had never disappeared like that, always staying in touch, so why had she decided to disappear today? And Wilson's in no condition to fight: Wanda was only brought out of her medically-induced coma yesterday under the care of Connors and Parker. Not to mention the fact that she's still under the influence of Peter's modified suppressor and all her physical and mental energy is going into her battle with cancer.

What bad timing!

Already on the way to the school Barbara almost had an accident, and it was not her fault - the sedan in front of her suddenly swerved to the side, exposing the girl to several bumper-to-bumper cars. Abruptly depressing the brakes, the woman tried to stop the car, but it was too late and her old Ford joined the jam in the middle of the roadway. Without wasting time trying to figure out what had happened, Bobbie jumped out the windshield, already in Venom's guise, continuing toward the school.

Jumping over the crowd of stunned onlookers, the girl could only marvel at the enormity of the accident-more than a dozen cars in a wide variety of poses indulged in road lovemaking.

"Did it have anything to do with the attack on the school?" thought Bobby, "anyway, there's no time for that!"

She managed to get there before the cops and ambulance. The scene before her was a real beating. The first thing that caught her eye was the bodies of two women with their throats torn open, dressed in military-style gear. Next to them, curled up in the fetal position and twitching her whole body, was a wounded woman in a tight suit. Someone was clearly trying to give her first aid-the wounds were bandaged with scraps of clothing, but it wasn't enough.

"Several gunshot wounds, a wide and deep gash on her face," Bobby stated, "how is she not already dead with these injuries?" The reflection, however, didn't stop the girl from beginning to treat the victim.

"Probably one of the attackers," the symbiote in the girl's head said.

"It was unlikely, judging by the clothes, that it was someone on the school staff, perhaps a teacher, though it was possible that she was an undercover agent... Peter had been waiting for S.H.I.E.L.D. to come to his attention for a long time."

"He's finally got it," the symbiote's voice had a strange tone to it, either gloating or regretting, "are we going to save him?"

"Of course," Bobby said without thinking for a second.

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"Good," and once again the girl didn't understand what was behind her closest partner's words. Either the symbiote had simply accepted her decision, or it was expressing its own approval.

"This woman is not human..." the symbiote suddenly remarked, "her body is fine, she is capable of healing herself, but something strange is happening to her brain... in fact, I don't even know how she thinks... no, if she thinks at all. Leave her alone."

That's when Barbara's heightened hearing reached the familiar sound of web-shooters running, and the next second Spiderwoman landed next to her on the school lawn.

"What's wrong?" She asked, with concern in her voice, distracting Venom from analyzing Sarasti's condition.

"I just got here myself," Bobby told her, "I got a call from Peter's girlfriend, the school was attacked by some terrorists."

"Where is he?" Gwen looked around the schoolyard again in panic, as if afraid of seeing Parker's body.

"He'd been kidnapped... it was probably all a planned attack..."

"It looks like they came down from there," Stacy concluded as she pulled herself together, pointing to the obvious signs of battle on the third floor, "we'd better hurry, the police are on their way, I can barely outrun them."

She shot the cobwebs toward the building and leaped deftly through the broken window. It was even more chaotic inside than outside-the moaning of the wounded on all sides, the pervasive smell of blood. There were several more bodies lying by the window, with wounds similar to those of the two outside, as if they had been killed with their bare hands...

"Did Peter really do this?" - Gwen was horrified.

Then she spotted Mary Jane, just as she was bandaging Liz Aaron's side with a piece of her own blouse. Three other wounded girls boasted bandages of a similar nature. In another corner of the classroom, a dark-haired guy was trying to stop another girl's vein bleeding. Gwen immediately noted her unhealthily pale complexion; by the look of her, she had already lost an awful lot of blood and was the closest to death of all the wounded.

"Don't look at me like that, Osborne," the girl hissed at the boy, easily recognizable as Thompson the bully, "you don't think I'm going to die from a fucking scratch, do you?"

"Yeah... sure," Harry agreed, stammering for a second, "you're strong..."

"Better use this," Gwen said, seeing that the girl's condition was near critical, and she spared her an ampoule of blood-stopping gel.

"Holy shit," she whistled when she saw Spiderwoman, "it was worth taking a bullet for!"

But Stacy wasn't paying attention to the couple anymore; a quick glance around the classroom made sure no one else needed immediate attention, or an ambulance was on its way.

"Watson," she called out to her friend, "what happened here? Where's Parker?"

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