Authors: Peter David
THE EYES OF EDDIE BROCK
Unaware that all hell was about to break loose, the photo shoot in the law offices of Miller and Ingersoll, Esq., continued blissfully along with music blaring and photographer clicking.
The offices had been rented for the day—no big deal since both attorneys were in court—by the publishers of an office supply catalog. Three comely models… a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead… were draping themselves over the latest-model office copier and desperately trying to make mundane photocopying look sexy.
They were oblivious that, just outside at a construction site, a crane operator had been hoisting a massive steel girder above the street. Warning lights had flashed on the control panel within the cab, and the crane operator had struggled desperately to bring things back under his command. His efforts were well-intentioned but futile, and he had screamed into the microphone connecting him to the foreman, "I've lost control! Shut it down!"
His foreman tried to do just that, but was thwarted by the very problem that had caused the controls to go out of whack in the first place: a short in the transformer. Sparks flew out of it, several of them bouncing against a sign with an interchangeable number slot on it that read: seventy-NINE DAYS accident FREE! leaving small scorch marks. The foreman had yanked the shut-off override switch and, instead of shutting down the crane, had received a sizable jolt that blew him backward.
The crane began to swing wildly, and all its erstwhile operator could do was watch in horror and wish for a miracle.
Meanwhile, the three models alternated chatting about guy matters while tossing smiles at the photographer. The brunette was an exotic-looking Latina named J. J. Sachs, with a mane of curly, black hair and olive skin. She exuded sexuality the way that other mere mortals exuded sweat. The redhead, Wendy Goldstein, had a slightly round face and short-cropped hair. Of the three, she was having the toughest time making upbeat expressions. Clearly, a good deal was on her mind, and the smile that she plastered onto her face at the photographer's command seemed forced.
The blond model attempted to forestall any problems that Wendy might be having by offering advice. The blonde was Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's lab partner at Empire State University, and as she struck a pose in which she was caressing the photocopier, she urged Wendy, "Don't fight with him. It doesn't fix anything."
"But that's all he wants to do," Wendy complained.
"Well, tell him if all you do is talk about the relationship, there's no time to have one."
"Everybody hold it!" called Ernie Schultz, the heavyset and increasingly annoyed photographer, liking the position they were in. He fired off a few quick shots, but when Wendy opened her mouth to address Gwen, he anticipated it by calling out, "Stop talking! Hold it!" Wendy's mouth snapped shut like a lobster trap, and he continued, "Give me office efficiency but with bedroom eyes. Not sleepy, Wendy!"
Gwen was beginning to feel exhausted. She had no aspirations toward being a model. She'd just answered the call for the gig on the university bulletin board as a means of picking up some extra money. She'd figured,
How hard could it be to stand around and get your picture taken while smiling
? Gwen was getting the answer. Her face was starting to hurt, and she was certain that her smile looked as artificial as it felt. She was copping a feel on a photocopying machine, for heaven's sake. How was someone supposed to get enthused about something like that?
Clearly Ernie was getting a sense of her frustration. He lowered his camera and said impatiently, "Look, I know you're new at this, but you're not giving me what I need. I need"—he groped for the right words—"I need mystery… I need…"
"A new personality?" Gwen suggested with wide-eyed innocence.
Wendy and J.J. choked back laughter, but the photographer completely missed the veiled insult. "Yes!" he declared as if the Holy Grail had just been presented him. "Some life! Some…"
He had been peering through the viewfinder, trying to compose a different shot, and now he was looking up in annoyance. "Now what's that thing doing in my background?"
His "background" consisted of a New York skyline visible out the wide windows behind them. Gwen turned to see what he was talking about, and at first she wasn't clear on what she was seeing either. It was moving quickly, but the shadows of the skyscrapers were obscuring it and she couldn't…
Then her eyes widened in horror as she saw the massive arm of a construction crane swinging toward them at high speed. Dangling beneath it was a teetering girder.
Gwen was paralyzed with denial, certain the thing wasn't going to hit. Or perhaps she was dreaming of something that she had seen in an action or disaster movie.
She remained that way for several precious seconds until her mind processed reality. Then, as the wildly swinging girder hurtled toward them, she screamed, "
Get down
!"
Everyone dove to the floor as the spinning girder shattered the window. Glass flew everywhere. Gwen kept her eyes shut, terrified of being blinded by flying shards, as small pieces of broken window littered her hair. The girder kept going, smashing lighting fixtures, sending sparks flying, and annihilating a row of desks, reducing them to splinters. Then, just as quickly and surreally as it had appeared, the girder was whisked out the window.
Ernie Schultz, Gwen, J.J., and Wendy slowly got to their feet. Standing in the middle of the office wreckage, they quietly marveled at not only the amount of destruction, but that they were still alive to see it. Still stunned, they picked their way through it, inspecting the damage. Impressed by the photographic possibilities the devastation offered, Ernie snapped off a few shots.
A high-pitched whistling of wind filled the wrecked office. As one, they turned and saw a massive shadow sweeping over them.
"It's coming back!" shouted Ernie.
Having no desire to press their luck and uncertain they'd be fortunate enough to survive a second pass, the four bolted for the door. The girder suddenly dipped, swung low, and slammed into the building one story below them.
That was way too close
, thought Gwen.
Ernie was leading the way or, more likely, was just trying to save his own ass, as he threw open the door and charged through. Wendy was right behind him, with J.J. and Gwen bringing up the rear.
Suddenly the entire office violently tilted, as if it were constructed on a gigantic seesaw. The girder must have taken out the structural support columns in the floor below them, and now the entire office structure where they were was pitching downward at a forty-five-degree angle.
J.J. had been sliding as well, but she had grabbed hold of a metal strut in the floor that had been ripped open by the girder's initial pass through. She threw her arm out, trying to snag the sliding Gwen… but Gwen went right past her.
The open window yawned before Gwen as she went toward it, grabbing at the smooth floor and unable to find purchase. She tried slapping her open hands flat on the floor, perhaps in the vain hope that she might suddenly acquire adhesive powers like Spider-Man. This only slowed her down for a few seconds. Meantime, pencils, cans of soda, and rolling chairs skidded past her, tumbling out the smashed window and falling to the street below.
She would inevitably have followed, save that a ringing telephone of all things grabbed her attention. It had fallen off one of the smashed desks, and the cord was jacked into the wall. She snagged the receiver as she slid past, and receiver, phone unit, and Gwen all started to slide toward oblivion. Miraculously the cord, all of $ 2.49 at RadioShack, remained affixed to the wall, stubbornly refusing to release its hold.
Everything that wasn't bolted down slid past Gwen and out. Clinging wildly, she heard a tinny voice coming through the phone receiver.
"
Hello! Hello
?!" she screamed.
The voice on the phone came back at her with sunny cheerfulness that didn't exactly match the moment. "You've got the rockin' sound of WKRQ! If you can name our last two "Two for Tuesday" songs, you could be our grand-prize winner!"
"
Help! I can't hold on
!" she shrieked at the receiver.
"Right you are!" chirped the DJ."'Help' and 'I Can't Hold On'! Pack your bags, 'cause you're going on a trip!"
With a remarkable, if morbid, sense of comic timing, the telephone cord chose that moment to give up the ghost. It snapped, and Gwen continued toward the open window. It waited for her like the maw of a great beast, knowing that sooner or later patience would pay off, and it would swallow her up.
She slid right out the window but, at the last second, snagged a jutting piece of the steel window frame.
Dangling in midair, her legs pinwheeling as if she were riding an invisible bicycle, Gwen Stacy hung one hundred stories above the street.
In an insane digression, her mind flashed to when she was a little girl and had leaned too far out the bedroom window of her Queens home. Before she could tumble out, a hand reached out and grabbed her. The terrified child, realizing how close she had come to seriously injuring herself, sobbed into the chest of the man who had saved her. "I'm sorry, Daddy!" she had wailed, afraid that she was going to be punished. Instead her father had simply held her close, whispered that it was going to be okay, that her being all right was the only thing that mattered, and he assured her in that low, gravelly voice of his, "I'll never let you fall."
The frightened little girl in Gwen Stacy now irrationally wondered where her father was, and if he was going to make good on his promise.
Half a dozen police cars were already on the scene when police captain George Stacy leaped out of his vehicle. He was tall, with an angular face and eyes that alternated between being kind and understanding or fiercely penetrating and threatening, depending upon whether he was dealing with a victim or a suspected criminal.
Now they were filled only with concern.
A police officer, DeFalco, rushed up to him. "They got some kind of short up there, and they can't shut down the crane."
"Get Con Ed on the phone," Captain Stacy ordered. "Have them kill the power to the whole block."
"Yes, sir!"
"And get me a rescue team up there!" he shouted.
People screamed as debris started hitting the streets. The crowd, pressing forward like curious sheep to get a better look, almost stampeded trying to get back out of the way, as various pieces of office furniture tumbled from high above and either crashed to the pavement or ricocheted off parked cars. Car alarms howled in protest as the vehicles' roofs and hoods were crushed by plummeting furniture.
The crowd scampered backward. Stacy looked at the falling debris and thought,
Dear God, please, no bodies
.
Dear God, please, let's see some bodies.
Fresh-faced, short-cropped-blond Eddie Brock, camera equipment hanging from a strap around his neck, with an expression like a starving dog seeing fresh meat dangled in front of him, came rolling up to the site of the crane emergency in a yellow cab. He'd practically had to throw himself in the taxi's path to grab it.
Anyone else would have considered it a fluke that Brock, tossing back drinks in a local bar, had seen the unfolding crisis on a news report and realized it was only ten blocks away. But Eddie Brock didn't believe in luck—he believed in destiny, and he further believed that he was destined for greatness. And no cab with the pathetic excuse of being off duty was going to deter him from getting over to the scene of an accident as fast as humanly possible, camera at the ready.
As he clambered out of the cab, telling the driver to keep the change, he slapped his
Daily Bugle
identification on his sweater so that the police could tell at a glance that he was not one of the mere masses. He was a man with a job to do, same as they had. With any luck, neither of them would get in each other's way while they were doing it.
Brock approached the scene with a very different mental attitude from Captain Stacy's—he was looking for the most dramatic shots. He heard someone shouting, "Get that taxi out of here!" but the cab was already on its way out. Brock sidestepped a police rescue team and brought his camera up, looking for something truly juicy. He fired off several quick shots of the girder flapping around in midair, but he knew even as he did so that it was boring. The almighty newspaper axiom was
if it bleeds, it leads
. The ideal situation would be to get a shot of someone plummeting to his or her death. That was page-one material. That was the stuff that Pulitzers were made of.
Never once did Eddie Brock question the ethics or morality of his way of thinking. Why should he? It wasn't as if he had set these events into motion. People were going to die or not as the fates decreed. But there was no escaping that pictures of their plunging demise were going to be incredibly memorable. The most memorable pictures in the world depicted innocent people suffering, like the famous shot of that screaming, naked Vietnamese girl fleeing her burning village. Eddie Brock desperately wanted his own piece of immortality, and if it came at the expense of someone else's mortality, well… he could live with that.
Scanning the building exterior, he was suddenly certain he saw a tiny form high above. It wasn't falling, but it was on the verge of doing so. He pulled out his extreme telephoto lens, brought it up to his trained eye, and zoomed in on what now appeared to be a helpless blonde fighting for the last few seconds of her life.
Good. That was good. Dying females were even more compelling than dying males, and this looked to be a gorgeous one too—
He lowered the camera, all the blood draining from his face.
"My God, that's Gwen!"
Shock pounded through his brain. No longer was this some anonymous woman whose death might, if photographed properly, help make his career. This was Gwen Stacy… his Gwen.
Briefly, he considered not taking the picture.
Then he brought the camera back up to his eye and refocused.