Chapter 57: A wrong turn, part 3

Only now noticing the newcomer Mary Jane broke away from the wounded and told about the part of the shooting she witnessed. To Stacey's disappointment, the girl couldn't give a single clue, even the only identifying feature of the van was its color - navy blue.

"Give me his phone," Gwen demanded when M.J. mentioned Peter's last instruction, "Did he say exactly how to trace it?"

"No... all he said was that B... Venom would take care of it."

"I have no idea what he meant," Bobby, who had just climbed into the classroom, interjected into their conversation, "what happened to that woman downstairs?"

"That's our physics teacher, Jukka Sarasti...I think she killed all those people, they wanted to take her body with them when they thought she was dead...I saw her kill two soldiers in a second and then she had a seizure..."

"And how the hell are we supposed to track him down, there's a fingerprint scanner," Stacy cursed, trying to figure out Peter's phone.

"Give it to me," MJ put her finger to the screen and the phone obediently unlocked.

"There's almost nothing on it. Other than the standard apps, just some modifications for the camera... did he use it at all?" Stacy wondered aloud as she looked at the guy's phone, "he must have left us a clue... there's a dump on the road so bad, there's no trace of it..."

"Wait," Bobby interrupted her, "that accident, didn't it seem strange to you? Just outside the school a few minutes after the shooting!"

"Right!" Gwen exclaimed, and without further ado, jumped out the window, Venom followed her, leaving Mary Jane to wait for the police to arrive with the rest of the students.

"Who'd have thought?" Thompson remarked behind her back, "at least Jamison was right about something."

Meanwhile, Gwen and Bobby made the short drive to the crash site, only to find themselves the center of attention of an angry mob of drivers and interested bystanders.

"Hey, look, there's the Spiderwoman!" shouted someone in the crowd.

"I can hear the sirens," Bobby, whose hearing was a little sharper than Gwen's, remarked, "we have to hurry."

"Hey," Stacy called out to the woman next to her, clutching the abrasion on her forehead with a sterile bandage, "do you know what caused the accident?"

She clearly was not in the mood for conversation and was about to send the pesky heroine away, but then she noticed that the smiling symbiote was looking right at her from behind Spiderwoman, licking its ugly, massive tongue. This sight immediately motivated the woman to help the investigation.

"N... no, there was already a dump... ask her," she pointed a finger at a young Indian woman, judging by the clothes and the bindi on her forehead, hanging around the overturned cab.

The girl in question, who happened to be the driver of the car, did not need Venom's silent persuasion, and began to tell her what had happened. According to her, something happened to the tire, which caused the car to lose control and almost fly into the oncoming lane. To prove her point, she kicked the front wheel of her cab a couple of times-it wouldn't turn.

"Don't you think that's strange?" Bobbie asked, walking to the overturned cab. "A bunch of cars, but not one of them darted out into the wrong lane, like something was holding them back."

"Hold..." Stacy said thoughtfully, running her hand over the wrong tire, "there it is!"

"What is it?" Venom and the driver, who was so interested in the cause of the damage that she even tried to push the symbiote aside, perked up.

"Hmm," Venom coughed and, taking the pesky Indian by the collar of her jacket, moved her to another spot.

"It's an invisible web!" meanwhile Stacy groped for the cluster of threads that caused the accident, "Peter had made it recently, I have one just like it."

"Oh, I get it!" Bobby exclaimed, "it's like a trail of breadcrumbs."

"Only invisible and in the middle of a busy road," remarked Stacy.

"It's not that busy," Bobby protested, "traffic is paralyzed all the way to Queens because of the accident."

"This is our chance! If we wait any longer, the web will dissolve or just get torn apart by the cars. We've got to make it visible somehow, so we can trace the route."

"Don't look at me! Unless you've got some invisible spiderweb spray in your tights..."

"Right! We need a spray! A can of spray paint! Paint the web, make it visible..."

"I hear you, but it'll be too slow!" Bobby interrupted Stacy's explanation, "can we set fire to the cobwebs?"

"No, it doesn't burn well...exactly! Peter had infrared and ultraviolet camera modifications on his phone, maybe that's how you can see it!"

"Hey, you two!" suddenly interrupted their dialogue with a woman screaming, "hands up, get away from the car!"

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"Seriously?" With distrust in her voice Venom looked at the pair of policemen who were pointing guns at them.

"I got this," Gwen said and turned to the cops, "hey, weren't you told that there was an attack on the school?"

"Don't move, or I'll shoot, I warn you-I can't shake a hand, I've been through two wars."

She apparently did not watch the videos with Venom on the Internet, otherwise she would have understood that threatening such a creature with a gun, at least, stupid.

"I'm serious, soldier, you're fighting the wrong way!" Gwen tried to reason with the cops, "You need to hurry to the school, there are children wounded, they need help right away! And we're trying to track down the criminals."

"I think you are the criminal!" The policewoman protested stubbornly.

At this point Venom finally succeeded in her vision experiments and, ignoring the cops, informed her friend:

"I got it, I can see the cobwebs! We must hurry, it's almost blown away by the wind, you didn't tell me it was so light."

Frightened by the monster's sudden movement, the young policewoman shot Venom in the chest. Naturally, the symbiote protected the host, and in the hanging silence the clang of the bullet falling to the pavement was clearly audible.

"Damn it, we don't have time for this!" Gwen shot the two cops dead with two clean shots from the web sharpshooters, and stuck them in the nearest car.

Bobby was already running toward her one apparent destination, and Gwen had no choice but to trust her friend and follow.

It wasn't long before the trail Parker had left behind led the girls to a littered alleyway that barely fit the car the kidnappers had abandoned.

"This is the van!" Gwen concluded.

Bobbie, meanwhile, pulled a crumpled cartridge out of the side of the car, from which the threads of spiderweb floated like the tail of a kite.

"I'm opening it," Gwen warned her partner and, throwing aside all finesse, broke open the van's double-barred rear doors.

The entire interior of the car was covered with scraps of cobwebs, some of the threads had been cut with something, some had clearly been removed with solvent, indicating that Peter had had a hand in this, but, neither Parker himself nor the kidnappers were anywhere to be seen.

"At least there's no trace of blood," Stacy noted with relief. Seeing the bullet holes in the wall of the car, she feared the worst.

"Look," Gwen climbed inside and noticed a hole cut into the bottom of the car, the edges of it melted, "that must be how they got away."

"Gone?" She squeezed her way in, and Bobby tried to peek through the hole, too.

"There's some kind of tunnel under the car, let's go down!"

Deftly sliding down a long, seventy-meter metal staircase, the girls found themselves on some secret underground route.

"What was this place?" Bobbie put her hand to the tiled wall with excitement, "We're twenty feet below the deepest subway line in the city."

The tunnel was clearly not part of the city's sewer system. It was a clean and well-maintained place, well-lit, too. Fortunately for the girls, they didn't have to guess which direction to run: the exit to the surface was the only end to the tunnel. Had the kidnappers run away through a normal sewer, it would have been much harder to pursue them.

What's more, the manhole also had no branches, which deprived Bobby and Gwen of any practical possibility of going astray. In strenuous silence, they hurtled along the long corridor until they came to a massive double door with the symbolic image of an eagle spreading its wings.

"Some kind of secret lair," Gwen concluded.

She'd found a couple of such hideouts before, but this one looked more impressive than the others-some clean, well-groomed tunnel, right under the city limits, in a densely built-up area, and at this depth-she wondered how it could have been kept secret.

"It doesn't look locked," Venom remarked, pushing the door slightly, "Ready?"

"Open up!" Nodded the Spiderwoman, ready to engage in an unequal battle with the superior forces of the enemy.

***

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