Spider-Man: The Sinister Six Combo by Adam-Troy Castro

Author:Adam-Troy Castro [Castro, Adam-Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 074348715X
Publisher: BP Books
Published: 2004-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

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Chapter One

Winter in Manhattan.

The sky was the color of asphalt. A cold, bitter wind whistled down the avenues, whipping the coats of the miserable pedestrians hugging themselves as they rushed toward places of shelter. The filthy remains of the most recent snow sat piled on street corners, like islands connected by the black slush oceans that accumulated at every slight depression. Wind chill ruled the streets; even folks who preferred the cold walked facing the ground, their lips chapped, their cheeks flushed, their expressions contorted into the grimaces of people who could feel the very air around them transform into a creature with frigid, gnawing teeth.

It was an exceptionally harsh New York winter, after several mild enough to exacerbate fears of global warming. Nobody was ready for it. The streets were a mosaic of hacking coughs and runny noses and stares of pure misery. Homeless people who usually preferred the parks to the city’s notoriously dangerous shelters fought each other for beds, warm alcoves, and heating grates. Tenements burned one after another from fires caused by faulty space heaters. Coffee and tea were consumed by the bucket. And weathermen kept a constant look at the skies, warning of fronts poised to turn all of this into a winter storm capable of dropping not inches but feet of snow on the city streets.

Max Dillon, strolling down 3rd Avenue on this most beautiful of all days, felt positively balmy.

He was balmy, of course—in the psychological sense. Some would have called him insane. But he was also balmy in the meteorological sense. Had be been any more balmy, he would have been giving off steam. Warmed from within, he’d dressed for weather thirty or forty degrees warmer than the actual temperature dictated: dungarees, sneakers, a long-sleeved shirt, with nothing but a light trenchcoat to function as his sole concession to the expectations of everybody required to feel the cold. Some who saw his goofy, daydreaming smile imagined that it must have been his mood alone that warmed him. And they weren’t entirely wrong, but his mood enjoyed substantial support from his own version of central heating.

Dillon was a dull-looking crewcut man of average height and moderate build, possessed of the kind of face that one would assume to have been specifically designed for frustrated scowling. But today his eyes were bright; downright electric, in fact. Together with his smile, which betrayed a warmth normally alien to his personality, they made him look downright likeable—a quality he had not possessed since the accident that had befallen him on his very last day of his job as a power company lineman. That accident had somehow turned him into a human dynamo, able to harness and project the power of electricity. Since then, in his career as the super-criminal known as Electro, he’d been so very far from likeable that he actually qualified as frightening. But today people smiled at him as he passed by, as if the very sight of him warmed the heart of anybody lucky enough to pass within his sphere of radiant happiness.

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