Strange Mammals by Jason Erik Lundberg Read Free Book Online

catches up to the young exec with a sharp laugh. “Hey, puta ,” he sings, drawing the sound out, pooooooooo-tah , “dint you hear me back there? I’m talking at you, girl.” He grabs her by the elbow and she recoils at the touch, causing him to lunge forward and grip her at the triceps. “Bitch, gonna learn you some respect,” he growls and pulls her into the alley between a McDonald’s and a Jiffy Lube.
    Spider-Man’s heartbeat thunders in his head and sweat trickles down behind his ears under the stuffy mask, but he does not slow his pace as he follows them into the alley. At the far end, the tough—whom Spider-Man can now see is white rather than Latino, a poseur, play-acting the part of the machote —has pinned the exec to a Mickey-D Dumpster, and is whispering something intently in her ear, still unaware of Spider-Man’s presence.
    “Stop, criminal!” Spider-Man shouts, the words slightly muffled behind the mask, and the machote falso looks up with a start. “Unhand that young woman, scoundrel!”
    The tough just stares at him for a moment, then barks out a laugh.
    “Why don’t you go mind your biz elsewhere, ese? Eh, araña loco? This don’t concern you.”
    “I’m afraid all law-breakers are my business,” Spider-Man says, striking a heroic pose with fists on hips. “Now, unhand her or suffer the consequences.”
    “Ah, fuck this noise, yo,” the tough says, then reaches into his pants pocket, withdraws a revolver, and fires. The impact knocks Spider-Man off his feet, and he crashes to the concrete, landing on his back hard enough to rattle all the bones in his body, vaguely aware of the tough now yelling, “Ha! Spidey-sense not tingling now, eh, motherfucker?”
    Spider-Man lies on the ground for a long moment, dazed, slowly regaining his wits, then with a grunt he rises to a sitting position. His right arm doesn’t seem to work anymore, and a dull throbbing pulses from his shoulder, but he is otherwise unharmed. There is no pain. Spider-Man doesn’t feel pain.
    The image of another white man with a gun abruptly imposes itself onto his mind’s eye, a different tough, older and unshaven and twitchy, a year-old image that won’t go away no matter how much he blinks or shakes his head. The likeness of the twitchy tough was accompanied by the recalled report of an accidental gunshot, an aural rupture in the world, an incongruous sound that at the time he thought was a car backfiring, but then in his memory the ten-year-old biracial girl who was standing next to him tumbled slowly to the ground and the gunman was running away and the primal roar of grief and disbelief that erupted from Spider-Man’s throat sounded as if it were coming from all around him.
    And now, as Spider-Man rises from the concrete and charges the machote falso , the roar comes again, his entire body filled with rage and vengeance even as he watches the tough raising the gun once more, not caring not caring because his little Thalía is dead dead dead and he couldn’t do anything to stop it and he doesn’t deserve to live in a world that would cruelly snuff out a being of such light and humor and love, and he braces himself for the second bullet to punch through his body, when the black woman suddenly throws an elbow into the tough’s throat and he drops the gun in surprise. She sweeps his leg from under him, and he topples to the ground of the alley just as Spider-Man arrives to give the tough a sharp kick to the ribs with his booted foot. The tough screams and Spider-Man kicks him again, harder, feeling something give way in the young man’s chest. He steps back, the energy abruptly drained out of him, and the woman takes his place, aiming and then driving the pointed toe of her expensive executive shoe into the attacker’s balls.
    Spider-Man pulls off his mask and leans against the alley wall, watching as the tough just writhes on the ground, his face turning purple at the pain. Spider-Man uses the mask to mop the