The Amazing Adventures of the Sensational Squirrelman

Spine-tingling Issue Number Three!

They call me… the Sentinel! I see all that is, all that was, and all that might be! And recently I have witnessed the unfolding tale of Matthew Mattheson, once a normal, every day accountant, now trapped in a body not his own, fighting crime as the Sensational Squirrelman! Since his arrival here in Action City Matthew has believed he lies in the so-called real world, victim of some massive coma-inducing head trauma and that all he is experiencing lies in his imagination! But he will learn that in this world, Squirrelman has many enemies, and they hunger for vengeance upon the grey-clad guardian… In fact, it’s practically…

Open Season on Squirrels!

It had been almost a week now since Matt – he’d begun to think of himself as Matt now, since that was what everyone called him – had arrived in Action City. Since the attack on the Museum of Pre-Reconstruction Memorabilia, he’d foiled – stopped, he thought to himself, foiled is so corny - six hold ups, one attempted rape, and two break-ins. In addition to capturing the Bod Squad – whoever convinced body builders and runway models to become costumed criminals was a mastermind or a nut job – and accepting an invitation to a Grade School Picnic Day at Lower Uptown P.S. 111. He’d discovered that Lower Uptown was called Lower Uptown because Uptown consisted of buildings over one hundred stories, connected by skyways and aerial landing pads, and Downtown consisted of a network of subterranean buildings connected by tunnels and the subway that had survived the city being sunk underground in 1975 by Lord Hades and his Shade Army. He’d found unlimited sources of information on the worldnet public terminals that everyone in Action City had access to at every street corner, free of charge.

Not that Matt had to worry much about money – Mr. Accountant was doing just fine, with a staff of twelve and twenty or more student interns hired each tax season. Of course, personal taxes, Matt’s specialty, were a snap since the simplified tax form was introduced in 1966 – just about anyone could figure out how to do their taxes. So Mr. Accountant had never been much into personal accounts – mainly business and some corporate stuff. Matt was also able to find out he had been devoting some of his time to the District Attorney’s Finances Department. The memory-flashes still came, a little less frequently now, a little less disorienting. He was glad of them, if he was honest with himself – it saved him having to bluff through meeting people, or asking silly questions about basic things, like how to access his bank account using the personal computer terminal in his office without a keyboard or mouse.

Matt had also noticed he was getting all kinds of compliments and comments on his new cheerful disposition – people remarked that he seem to be smiling a lot more, had a kind word or even said Hi more often. Even Stretch commented that he wasn’t acting like himself these days and accused him of having found a new girlfriend. He didn’t think he was being cheerier than usual but he supposed he would be the last to know if he had been surly with the dream people this dream world previous to his coming to ‘unconsciousness’ on the rooftop with Ragdoll that night with the Caper Crooks.

Ragdoll. He’d caught up to her the same night as he’d stopped the Bod Squad. He seen her on a wall ledge and crawled down the wall behind her.

“We’ve got to stop meeting this way,” he had said, smiling under his mask.

She had turned to him and sneered.

“What the hell do you want?” she had snarled.

“Look, Ragdoll,” Matthew had said. “I wanted to… apologize. About what happened. Between us.”

She had looked at him skeptically.

“Apologize? You?” she had said, sounding surprised.

“Yeah… look. I know I said I’d call, and didn’t. I was a jerk.” He lowered himself to the ledge beside her. He’d wracked his brains trying to prompt memory-flashes of what had happened to make her so mad at him, and a few hours and a headache later, he’d discovered what he had done – the night they had celebrated under the elevated train, they had traded real names and contact numbers – apparently a very big deal among costumed crimefighters, a level of trust that implied a rather serious commitment to each other. “I can’t explain why I didn’t… I just don’t know. I’d have to be nuts to pass up a chance to get to know you better.”

Ragdoll had smiled despite herself.

“Did I say something funny?” Matt had asked her.

“Squirrelman’s nuts, that’s pretty funny,” she had answered. “Look… Matt. I never gave my name out before. It was a big deal to me.”

“Kimmy… it was a big deal to me too. What can I say… I wasn’t my normal charming self.”

Ragdoll had sort of snorted a chuckle, then smiled at him. The first genuine smile he’d seen. Then a pair of police cruisers had flown past in opposite directions, and they had looked at each other a little regretfully. They had stood to leave, each toward an opposite emergency, when Matt had grabbed her wrist impulsively and pulled her toward him and they were kissing, a little awkwardly since he hadn’t pulled up his full-face mask, but she didn’t seem to mind, and she pushed away from him, grinning.

“I’ll call you,” she said, and ran along the ledge and jumped off toward the emergency she’d chosen, and Squirrelman scampered along the wall and had a wonderful evening stopping crimes. She’d called him not the next day but the day after, and had gone out for drinks that night in their secret identities. She was a legacy crimefighter – her mother was the sixties’ Rag Doll – and her day job was as a marketing analyst. And she wasn’t a natural redhead – she wore a wig as Ragdoll. Her natural hair was short, stylish and blonde.

So things were definitely going quite well for him, here in his dream world. He didn’t even mind reading corporate accounts, which had been one of the reasons he’d left corporate practice and started his own firm with Stretch. It made him a little nostalgic for his real life.

The day passed quietly – outside his wall-length windows, the sun was shining and he even got some direct sunlight for a bit of the afternoon, through a canyon between two huge towering Uptown skyscrapers – the Byrne Tower and the Perez Centre. Matt was able to have lunch with Kimmy – Uptown no less, Kim’s offices were on the two hundred level of the Ordway Spire. Things were going remarkably well. Around 5:30 Matt packed up his files and headed out of his office. He passed the common room on his way out, and most of the staff were gathered around the flat screen wall television.

“What’s up, guys?” Matt asked, entering the common room.

“Inmates escaped from Kane Sanatorium again,” one of the interns said.

Memory-flashes filled Matt’s mind
(*a huge gothic manor, dark and brooding, filled with anger and hate and remorse and grief, the cries of the insane falling on deaf uncaring ears, a sprawling asylum on ten acres of forested lands at the edge of Lower Uptown and the borough known locally as Weirdsville, where the dead walk and the nights are filled with fear, the former hospital turned city morgue turned prison for the criminally insane, once a Native American burial plot and later a spot where witches had been burned in the seventeenth century and where traitors had been hanged in the eighteenth, where the Kane family had built a huge ancestral castle manor to house their incestuous brood, where dozens of construction workers had died during the building thereof, all to the precise specifications of Robert Thaddeus Kane, the patriarch of the clan, filling each support each beam with the metal that had made the family so wealthy, and where they and their children and grandchildren had lived for over a century, copper barons of the 19th century who were secretly a coven of black mages whose last scion was the doctor who presided over countless unnecessary operations in the nineteen-tens and twenties and thirties, where the dead and dying from the Indianapolis Crash Incident of 1947 had bled out their last drops of blood, breathed their last breath, screamed in agony and whimpered in misery, where the conductive properties of the building’s support framework attracted lighting to its lofty spires with frightening intensity, so that during a storm the whole building fairly vibrated with the electro-magnetic charge that ran through it, a low keening moan running through the whole hellish building, where in the early sixties a distant relative of the Kane mercifully extinct dynasty had opened the Hospital for the Treatment of Mental Illness, which rapidly became known as the place to store costumed lunatics, and soon enough was renamed the Kane Sanitarium, for it was said the restless spirits of the Kane Family walked the darkened corridors, where the insane shrieked and gibbered and rambled their minds away, locked in the dark with the memories of the dead*)
while on the television screen, an attractive brunette woman in a trenchcoat and holding her index finger pressed to her earlobe was reporting. The superimposed text read “Lena Lemar – Channel Twenty Seven ACTION News.” She stood in front of the dark brooding ivy covered west wall of the Sanitarium, which had a huge hole gaping in the side which was not included in Robert Thaddeus Kane’s design. Police cruisers were patrolling the cloudy, almost stormy skies, and officials were trying their best to seal the damage off.

“-most notable among the escapees are Squidface Calamari and the Arachnid, but there were several others, all to be considered extremely dangerous,” Lena Lemar was reporting. “For more information, a full list of escapees can be downloaded from the ACTION News site. Police Officials advise all residents of Lower Uptown to remain in their homes and stay off the streets. Repeat: The Arachnid has escaped from the Kane Sanitarium, aided by her slavishly loyal henchman, the Webmaster.”

One of the interns said “Set: download list” and a scrolling window opened inset in the larger picture. Perhaps two dozen names scrolled up the list, but six filled Matt with fearful memory-flashes. Squidface Calamari. Jungle King. Dust Devil. Ram-Man. Black Crow. And the Arachnid. Each filled him with a particular dread, and he knew that each had been fought and defeated by Squirrelman. But none as relentlessly as the Arachnid, who hated Squirrelman with a relentless obsession. The dark haired, pale skinned, curvaceous, completely sociopathic, mass murdering beauty was dedicated to the subjugation of the male half of the human race, with herself as queen of all women, and fancied herself a black widow in human form, for she had a tendency to cannibalize men.

Matt felt the adrenaline being to pump into his system. He knew Squirrelman would be needed tonight. He knew he would have to go patrolling for some of the worst costumed criminals that Action City had ever known, most of whom were out for his blood. He knew what he had to do. And he knew he’d do it. After all, that was what heroes did, wasn’t it? Heroes weren’t the people who were relentlessly courageous. Heroes were people who were afraid but did it anyway. Because they had to. Because no one else would, or could.

Matt shouldered his gym bag and headed out of the common room. He took the bus home and got into costume in his secret hideout office, while Farrah the PSYFERRET gave him a complete case file on each of the escaped inmates. He sat there in his costume, leaning back against his padded tail, his mask in his hands, feeling dread fill his stomach. He’d fought these insane idiots dozens of times, it seemed. Each was quite a match for him – the Arachnid and her loser wannabe boyfriend had almost killed him at least a dozen times. He didn’t know why his dream had taken such a dark turn, but it had, so he had no choice but to ride it out while he waited for the doctors to wake him up and then he could get the therapy he so obviously needed.

“Okay Farrah, that’s enough,” he said, standing. He pulled on the mask and went to the secret door that led to the ladder to the roof.

As he ran along the roof, he thought about the criminals who had escaped, the so-called costumed villains who had a specific grudge against Squirrelman. Of the many escapees, six stood out in his mind, as significantly ‘his’ criminals. Squirrelman had fought them all many times, but now they were all on street at once.

Squidface Calamari had once been known as Otto Dent, a noted forensic scientist, with both a law degree and a medical degree. He had worked for the District Attorney. But what was less well known about him is that he had come from the noted Ukrainian organized crime family the Dentavius clan… he had changed his name when he had gone to school, turning his back on the crime that had funded his schooling. When the family patriarch had ordered him to return to the fold, he had refused, and as payment for his disloyalty, the notably vain scientist had had squid tentacles grafted to his face by a drunk back-alley geneticist who owed the Dentavius clan a large sum of money. His hideous disfigurement had snapped Otto’s mind, and he had discovered, with some experimentation, that he could control his new tentacles, and the back-alley geneticist had also endowed him with the ability to stretch his tentacles to almost unreal lengths. He had taken over the family criminal organization, and become the proverbial thorn in the city’s side. No matter how often Squirrelman put him away, the brilliantly insane former forensic scientist would find a way out – a legal loophole here, a dead witness there, a masterfully planned escape when traditional methods failed.

The Jungle King had been world-renowned big game hunter Kyle Kraven, but increasing regimentation and regulation over the stalking of big game had forced him into the black market – and using the skills he’d developed in the hunt, he turned out to be an excellent cat burglar as well. He’d hunted them all – big cats, giant apes, the residents of Dinosaur Valley, and even the greatest game of all… humans. And when he wasn’t hunting the big game, he was stealing from the fat cats. But his favourite had always been big cats – he enjoyed that which could stalk him as he stalked them. He was so good at preying on the huge cats that he had begun to think like them… and had used the majority of his considerable fortune on illegal experiment to develop a serum that would grant him the strength, agility, and powers of the big feline predators he had so often turned into prey. After ten years of trial and error, he had perfected the serum, injecting himself with it right away… and watched into horror as his body grew tawny, mottled fur, claws, and a dark mane, while a glance in the mirror showed him that his face had become elongated, his mouth fanged… he was fully felinoid. He was horrified at first, but came to revel in his new-found strength and agility… he was a big cat with a man’s mind- The Jungle King! But he found he needed occasional administration of the serum or he would revert back to human form, and so he returned to the life of crime. He no longer felt the need to hunt the big game, but the payoff was considerable… and cat burglary was simplicity itself now he had strength and agility to spare. But his activities had brought him to the attention of Squirrelman, and he had wound up in the Kane Sanatorium when he’d reverted back to human form and still thought like a big cat.

A small-time crook and goon, William Fries had been in and out of jail ever since he ran away from the juvenile delinquent home he’d been placed in. Determined to go legit, he found himself working with a group of Tornado Chasers who were working on a way of tracing dust particles in a windstorm, when an accident with the equipment left them all suffocated on dust and nearly frozen solid from hurricane-force winds… all but William Fries, who found himself with the ability to turn his body to dust and generate gales of freezing wind. He wasn’t responsible for the deaths but a many times over loser like him couldn’t get an even break so he took it on the lam and never looked back, taking the name Dust Devil and hiring himself out to bigger costumed criminals as the goon for the villain on the go. He was working for Squidface when Squirrelman had taken them both down, and the Kane Sanitarium’s unique incarceration facilities had been perfect for keeping a man who could turn to dust out of trouble.

The man who became famous as the hideous Ram-Man had been pro wrestler Wayland “Headbutt” Reineau. His skill had been enough to gain him some notoriety, especially with his signature finishing head butt move, but the real money was in the Powered Wrestling League, and so Reineau had paid for the augmented mutagenic steroids by becoming muscle for hire for professional criminals. But he was no genius when it came to following the very specific instructions on the steroids, and he mixed up the order they were supposed to be taken in and wound up growing huge curled horns and thick hooves, his face deforming into a hideous goat-like beast… but he had the incredible strength, thickened skin and resistance to pain he’d wanted. Of course, his horns and hooves qualified as weaponry and subsequently disqualified him from the Powered Wrestling League. Now his only recourse was a life as a deformed goon. He’d tried to go it on his own once, smashing down bank vault walls with his signature head butt move, but Squirrelman had stopped him in a hurry. His unreasoning hatred of Squirrelman ever since – no way a puny pipsqueak like that would get the best of Ram-Man Reineau – and uncontrollable rage had landed him in the Kane Sanitarium.

Oswald Toomes was a gentleman born and bred, from a family of long and illustrious fame. An electrical engineer and Edgar Allen Poe afficionado who realized he’d never attain greatness with his invention, a suit of fully functional wings capable of sustaining a human in flight. Who wanted a pair of wings strapped to their arms when they could buy anti-gravity belts and flight rings and other paraphernalia that allowed mere mortals to soar the skies? When the average middle-class family could afford flying cars, and the super rich and famous had personal teleportation systems installed in their homes? So, without much ado, but decided if he couldn’t be famous, he’d become infamous… as a costumed criminal, The Raven! He developed a ray that would stimulate the fear response in the human mind and incorporated it into a stylish monocle. He managed to remodel his wings so that when not in use they looked like an evening cloak, and, wearing an elegant, impeccable suit of white tie and tails, he embarked on a career of crime… only to be humiliated by Squirrelman on his very first caper. And to make matters worse, he never had a chance to make a statement to the press, who labelled him the Black Crow. As though a pitiful carrion eating crow was capable of eliciting such terror as was the Raven! His insistence on his own brilliance despite his utter failure gave the criminal psychiatrists more than enough justification to place Toomes in the Kane Sanitarium.

The last, the most feared of them all, was the serial killing sociopath known only as the Arachnid. She had stalked Action City’s rich and powerful first-born male heirs for the vast fortunes the elite commanded, stalking them and eating them, was called the Black Widow Killer as a result, but when she had finally been stopped by Squirrelman in one of his first cases, she had proved to be utterly unhinged from reality, hating all men, advocating the supremacy of the female, and the ultimate supremacy of the arachnid. She had no discernable identity other than her nom de guerre, and even the deepest telepathic probes wouldn’t reveal anything more… most telepaths wouldn’t go near her mind for fear of the dark skittering things that crawled there. She managed to seduce and spare the assistant of one of her psychiatrists, convincing him of his own worthlessness and turning him into a devoted slave… who took the name Webmaster to honour his spider loving mistress, because her web had mastered him. She was a case study at the Kane Sanatorium, escaping time and again, always to be stopped by Squirrelman, whom she hated with a passion bordering on lust… she lusted for his blood, for his heart, to watch his skin part under her nails, to feel his hard lean muscles crushed and sliced between her teeth.

Squirrelman scampered up a wall seeking higher ground, a better vantage point to spot any police cruisers speeding to an emergency… for surely tonight they would be needed. He made a mental note to try and finish building that personal police band radio so he wouldn’t have to spot them flying to the scene of a crime. He leaped across the concrete canyon of Ross Avenue and ran along the rooftops. He wanted to call Kimmy and try to co-ordinate their search, but it would be a little awkward trying to get into a phone booth down on street level in his Squirrelman outfit, and besides, if anything happened, he and the other Lower Uptown costumed crimefighters would be there in minutes if not sooner.

As he leapt the across Theft Alley an updraft of wind gusted him so hard he was knocked off trajectory and had to scramble to get a grip on the roof edge. As he pulled himself up he felt his muscles twitch, but, since his feet had little purchase on the brick wall, he didn’t jump high enough and he felt something strong and long wrap itself around his ankle and pull hard on him, bringing him crashing to the alley floor below, knocking the wind out of him.

Matt tried to get to his feet but whatever was holding him by the ankle jerked him into the air and held him upside down. Matt looked around and got a glimpse of what was holding him – a purplish green tentacle the thickness of a thumb, extending up above him and coming back down… there.

“Hiya Squidface,” Squirrelman said, as the dapperly dressed criminal stepped out of the shadows. The crime boss was wearing an exquisitely tailored double breasted pin striped suit. One of the purplish green tentacles extended up and away from the side of his face, while the other nine writhed and twitched under his once-human eyes. The two longer tentacles that ended in barbed paddle-like fins reached out eagerly. Matt’s research led him to know that the barbs were filled with a paralyzing venom. “You’re lookin’ good.”

The fish faced fiend clenched his fists in rage.

“Oh, thish ish gonna be shweet,” the cephalopodic criminal lisped. The tentacles extending from his face made his words mumbly and indistinct.

Squirrelman slashed at Squidface’s tentacle and the deformed crook’s tentacle twitched away from Squirrelman’s claws. The grey clad guardian flipped mid-air and landed on his feet and hands, then leapt away from the flailing tentacles. Squirrelman jumped onto the wall and stared down at Squidface.

“Aw, c’mon, Squids,” Squirrelman said. “You know I’m gonna mop the floor with that face of yours. Give up now and we’ll call it a night and you won’t be too embarrassed.”

“Yeah, I’ll admit you could beat me, shquirrel vershush shquid…” Squidface’s tentacles writhed angrily as he looked up at grey clad guardian of Lower Uptown. “But ya shee, I ain’t alone…”

Squirrelman felt his muscles twitch away from the wall, flipping midair. He saw a older man in white tie and tails soaring through the night sky, perform a perfect graceful 180 and turn to hover, facing him – the Black Crow. The Squirrelman felt a blast of wind catch him mid-air and twist and turn him in circles and he caught a glimpse of the green-and white containment suit of Dust Devil. As he tried to gain a hand hold on the wall, a tawny mottled clawed hand grabbed him by the ankle and slammed him on the rooftop. Matt let out a grunt as the wind was knocked out of him again, and pain bloomed along his side. Jungle King’s felinoid face looked down at him and the cat-like criminal rumbled a menacing rumble deep in his chest, bright amber eyes glowing in the twilight of the city lights, tight animal print leotard incongruous with the urban setting they were now in. Beside him, the huge deformed goat-faced goon Ram-Man, dressed as always in navy t-shirt and jeans, stared down at the grey clad guardian. Ram-Man lifted one huge hooved foot and slammed it down hard onto Squirrelman – or would have, if Squirrelman hadn’t twitched out of the way at the last second. The three other costumed deformed escaped inmates joined their erstwhile criminal colleagues on the roof, surrounding Squirrelman.

Matt was disoriented, hurt, and winded. Something in his side hurt with every breath. Memory-flashes kept hitting him with past moments in which Squirrelman had defeated these guys, each individually in their own turn, time and again. But now that they were working together… he wasn’t sure he could take all of them.

“Teamed up, eh?” Squirrelman quipped lightly to try and hide his injury. “Now you can get health insurance, and group endorsements. But just five? Couldn’t get any others?”

“I only needed these five,” came a woman’s voice behind Squirrelman. It was high and girlish and sent corkscrews of terror up his spine. He twitched around and saw the sociopathic siren known only as the Arachnid, wearing her habitual outfit of black leather dominatrix gear, the white laces on her corset making a distinctive spider web design, long white opera gloves, the hands stained red with blood, her long dark hair pulled into a top knot, blood red lipstick smeared across her face so that her insane smile seemed to be bleeding. Behind her, dressed in a purple and grey web-patterned bodysuit, Webmaster kneeled, holding a black case aloft, supplicant, an offering, eyes worshipping his mistress.

“Oh hey hon, they followed me home, should we keep ‘em?” Squirrelman quipped.

Arachnid smiled and her perfect white teeth glittered out of her bleeding face.

“Oh beloved, how I hate you so,” she smiled sweetly, giggling like a little girl. “When you love me then I shall eat your heart… with fava beans-“

“And a nice Chianti, I know, you keep saying,” Squirrelman interrupted tiredly, nodding. It was an old taunt of hers. Getting men to ‘love’ her meant when she had killed them. He had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
He kept looking around for an opening – he was surrounded by six of Squirrelman’s fiercest enemies. Webmaster had no martial prowess and was in essence a coward, unable to do anything without his mistress' permission, and so Squirrelman didn’t even count him as a threat. The other six though… Each of them had been defeated by him. Each of them had been defeated in turn. Now here they all were – out for his blood.

Squirrelman got to his feet slowly, deliberately, balancing himself on the balls of his feet, ready to twitch in any direction at a second’s notice. When the attack began, Matt wasn’t sure who had started it – probably Squidface, his tentacles were the most unpredictable. Matt was twitching and jumping, leaping and slashing without thought, reacting to multiple attacks, dodging and ducking and flipping and somersaulting, cartwheeling and kicking, punching and slashing. Hooves and horns, tentacles and gusts of wind, beating of wing and slashing of claw, the five male criminals attacked and attacked and attacked, relentless in their hatred, focussed in their intent. Arachnid, part of Matt’s mind realized, was staying out of the fight, idly twirling a large syringe she’d taken from the black case Webmaster still held. He jumped off Ram-Man’s shoulders and flipped mid-air, dodging under Black Crow’s hard pointed old man dress shoes, only to be slashed across the back by Jungle King’s claws. Squirrelman fell to the ground with a grunt, then he flipped himself back onto his feet.

“Play time is over,” Arachnid said in a sing song voice. The five men stopped their attacks, angry at the intrusion on their vengeance. Arachnid smiled sweetly at Squirrelman “They can’t kill you, beloved. That’s my job. I broke them out, and I get to kill you.” She looked down at the syringe. “But I realized that the only way for me to kill you is to become more like you… so, I convinced my royal colleague” - she waved a hand at Jungle King - “to help me develop a serum, like his, for me… So, as you are a squirrel… I shall become … a spider.” She smiled that sweet little girl smile again and jabbed the syringe into her arm, depressing the plunger.

The change was almost immediate… the lushness of her body became less sensual and more muscular, she grew a few inches, claws tearing out of the fingers of her gloves, the bones in her face becoming sharper, more defined, her mouth widening, thick white fangs sprouted out the sides of her mouth, dripping with thick milky white substance before retracting into her mouth again… Her eyes rolled over white, and when she looked back, they had gone completely black, dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes. Two lumps appeared on her forehead and split apart and two new, smaller, eyes stared out of her face.

She screamed, and, horrified, her allies stepped back.

“Yessssss,” she hissed, her voice raspy now. “Now I have the speed and strength of a spider… and I have its – VENOM!!” She spat at Squirrelman, who barely dodged the wad of greenish spittle. Where it landed on the rooftop it hissed and bubbled and burned a hole in the roof.

“Oh beloved,” she rasped, “It’s so glorious to know I’ve been right all along… that spiders are inherently superior… and that the female is the most superior of them all… when you love me you see that, I know you will…”

“Yeah… right,” Squirrelman said. “You’re going to have to buy me drinks first, maybe take me to dinner and a show… you know, the usually stuff normal people do before they fall in love…” He was stalling for time, looking for a way out of this mess. He was hurt and bleeding, he had probably broken a rib or two, his ankle was hurting and probably at least twisted if not sprained, and his six worst enemies were still good to go, the worst of them with newfound powers she wanted to test on him to kill him. Things did not look good for Squirrelman. If he woke up right now, he wouldn’t mind one bit.

“Oh, beloved,” she rasped. “I don’t need all that to make you love me. I don’t even need knives any more.”She was admiring her new claws, the way they glinted in the light from the street lamps below. “Soon your heart will be filled with love for me… and I shall eat it raw.”

“Yeah, that’s the whole part that doesn’t work for me, toots… See, I’m kind of attached to my heart. I like it where it is.”

She attacked him then, relentlessly, remorselessly. The attack came so fast and furious that Squirrelman barely had the strength, speed, and agility to defend himself, much less try and take her out. Arachnid was right – a spider in its prime was much faster and more vicious than a wounded squirrel. He kept flipping and dodging and blocking her blows, but she was too fast, too strong, too agile for him. As his five other nemeses watched on, Matt realized there was only one thing he could do – run.

He flipped over her and ducked under her high kick, dodging past Webmaster and jumping off the roof without anyone stopping him. He ran along the next rooftop and headed into a part of town, older and more decrepit. He was too hurt, too disoriented to hear Arachnid’s parting shot.

“Run beloved! Run! You’ll love me all the same!”

Dust Devil wanted to go after him, but Black Crow stopped him.

“He’s heading into Weirdsville, my friend,” the dapper scientist explained. “No one goes into Weirdsville at night… and lives.”