Eddie came up in one motion, no hesitation at all. His eyes swept the room instantly. With his right hand, he grabbed a gas can full of fuel. With his left, he snatched up a pipe wrench.
Bang!
Eddie kicked the tire in front of him across the floor to block their line of sight, then used every ounce of strength he had to hurl the fuel can straight at Gargan.
Gasoline sprayed through the air.
At that exact moment, Eddie yanked a lighter from his pocket, sparked it, and threw it without a second thought toward where the can was about to land.
"Shit!" Gargan roared, trying to move, but it was already too late.
BOOM!
The explosion ripped through the garage in an instant. Flames swallowed everything nearby, igniting spilled motor oil and all the junk littered around the shop.
Smoke and fire filled the whole space.
Sal was blasted off his feet and started screaming immediately. Gargan's men were hit hard too, most of them left half-dead by the blast.
Only Gargan managed to hold on, thanks to the protection of his combat suit and exoskeletal rig. He came striding out of the flames already intent on killing Eddie.
Eddie had come terrifyingly close to doing something most ordinary people would never accomplish in their entire lives:
soloing a supervillain.
Unfortunately, he had failed.
And now his own life was about to be the price.
"You worthless little gutter rat!" Gargan snarled. "I'm going to rip your spine out one vertebra at a time and use it as a cane!"
But Eddie never turned to admire the explosion.
He did not have time.
Using the firelight and smoke as cover, he sprinted as hard as he could toward the garage's back exit.
He had already thought it through.
The front way out was death.
The side door was blocked by their vehicles.
Only the rear exit offered even a slim chance of living.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Outside, Gargan's men had already reacted. They drew handguns and started firing wildly at Eddie's blurred shape.
Bullets ripped past him, smashing into old windshields and spraying glass shards across his face. He rolled behind a wrecked car for cover.
"He's not getting out! The back door's locked!" Sal screamed from inside the burning shop.
Eddie knew perfectly well the back door was locked.
He had locked it himself.
That was why he had grabbed the pipe wrench.
Instead of going for the door, he smashed the window beside it and hurled himself through.
But the instant he cleared the frame, a shadow ripped past him.
The mechanical tail tore across his body. It didn't punch all the way through him, but it still clipped him hard.
That one strike alone sent Eddie flying.
He heard the crack of his own ribs breaking with horrifying clarity. A mouthful of blood burst out of him as the rain came down around him.
He crashed into the alley behind the garage, rolled several times, and ended up spilling out onto the street.
"God... that bastard... cough, cough..." Half his body felt numb. Every breath was agony.
But he knew he couldn't stop.
Couldn't stop, couldn't stop.
If he stopped, he died.
Clutching his wound as if that might somehow dull the pain, he dragged himself back to his feet and staggered deeper into the maze of side streets.
A few seconds later, with a deafening crash, Gargan blasted the rear of the garage apart with his tail.
Looking at the blood splashed across the pavement, Gargan already knew how to track him.
"Move!" he barked, throwing out one arm. "He can't have gotten far! The kid's badly hurt, and he does not leave Brooklyn alive tonight!"
His men spread through the rainy dark at once.
The rain kept falling harder and harder, but it still couldn't wash the blood away.
Sin was just as stubborn.
Eddie stumbled through alley after alley, gasping for air. His vision was already blurring, whether from rain or tears brought on by pain he couldn't tell, but the truth was simpler than that.
His footing was going.
His strength was almost gone.
And he had no idea whether the men behind him had closed in yet.
He pulled out his phone and looked at it.
The screen was cracked from the hit and the fall, and the battery was nearly dead.
A body only a little tougher than an ordinary person's wasn't worth much in a situation like this. Hurt this badly, there was no way he could outrun the monster behind him.
"I have to... have to get it out..."
Eddie looked around frantically.
Then, lit for a second by a flash of lightning, he saw it.
At the corner of the alley sat a red fire hydrant. It was old and poorly maintained, and near the base there was a tiny split in the metal, almost impossible to notice unless you were looking for it.
Grinding his teeth, Eddie forced himself toward it.
With blood-slick fingers, he pried open the back of his phone and pulled out the black SD card that held the photos and video.
He jammed the card into the crack at the base of the hydrant, then scooped up mud and rotting leaves to cover it.
Once it was hidden, a huge weight lifted from his chest.
"All right... now I just have to figure out how to stay alive."
He couldn't stay there.
He had to pull the pursuers away from the evidence.
Using the last of his strength, Eddie kept moving. He turned two more corners, only to end up trapped by a chain-link fence over ten feet high and a row of overflowing dumpsters.
He had nothing left.
A dead end.
Eddie looked up.
Under the streetlight, Gargan's broad silhouette was already casting itself into view.
Eddie backed himself against the dumpsters. He knew this was it.
He pulled out his phone again.
At the very end, he didn't call the police. In a New York already riddled through with Kingpin's influence, calling the cops might only get him killed faster. He didn't call Ben Parker either. He refused to drag his uncle into even greater danger.
Instead, relying on pure muscle memory, he punched in the number he knew best.
The one for the friend who always looked a little skinny, a little nerdy, but who had never once failed to stand beside him when it mattered.
Peter Parker.
Beep...
The ring tone felt endless.
Finally, Peter picked up.
"Eddie? What's wrong?" Peter sounded confused. There was even the faint sound of a sewing machine in the background.
The moment Eddie heard Peter's voice, his vision blurred even more, and his own voice shifted with the strain.
"Peter... man... I don't have time to explain..."
Peter instantly heard that something was wrong. The rain in the background, the state of Eddie's voice, all of it screamed danger.
"Eddie! What happened to you? Where are you right now?!"
"Brooklyn... intersection of 42nd... dead-end alley behind the abandoned factory..." Eddie could already feel the edges of his vision going black.
"Someone's trying to kill me... some monster with a mechanical tail..."
At the mouth of the alley, Gargan had stepped in, the tail rising behind him.
"Found you," Gargan said, his voice echoing through the alley.
Looking at death closing in, Eddie used the last scrap of strength left in him and shouted into the phone:
"Peter! The fire hydrant at the third corner... get it to Uncle Ben! You have to—"
"Eddie! Hang on! I'm coming right now! Eddie!"
Beep—beep—beep—
The phone slipped out of Eddie's hand and hit the ground. The screen flickered once, then went black.
Battery dead.
Gargan stopped in front of him and looked down at the half-dying street punk at his feet.
"Got your last words out?" he asked. "Then go to hell."
The mechanical tail behind him drove down hard toward Eddie's heart.
Eddie closed his eyes, ready to take the end head-on.