Imagination is the doorway to this universe and many others  
 
 

Original Fiction Page.

Bob likes telling stories. This is a page where he can. He hopes you enjoy them. If you like telling stories too and would like to share them here, e-mail them to him at the address on the contact page, and maybe he'll post them here. Please feel free to comment.

The Brown Tarantula

Copyright Robert F. Sacco

The Brown Tarantula Part 1

The Brown Tarantula Parts 2, 5, 8 & 11

The Brown Tarantula Parts 3 & 6 Are Below On This Page

The Brown Tarantula Part 4

The Brown Tarantula Part 7

The Brown Tarantula Part 9 is below on this page

The Brown Tarantula Part 10

Part 12: Suddenly, it's not so Easy

The Tarantula prowled the streets of Little Italy exacting justice as brutally and efficiently as he had scoured Dunnbrick. He continued the tack of cornering gangland soldiers and skewering them with the spikes of his two natural and four mechanical arms while deftly avoiding their bullets. This night however he was also hiding in the darkness, climbing up walls, listening, unseen, to street dealers, pimps and prostitutes. Trying to get a better idea of who the street level bosses were and where they might be. He went through windows into massage parlors and crack houses and beat those bosses till they either gave him information he could use, in which case they lived, or, it became apparent that they wouldn't talk in which case they died. He was beginning to become exhilarated. In the past few nights he had been aware that the thrill he felt came from the exercise of super human power and as a reaction to the near death experience of being shot at but he was beginning to suspect that some of the thrill came from stepping outside of the established order of things. This made him fear that he was actually beginning to enjoy the killing of these criminals. This troubled him but, he was constantly on the move and didn't have a lot of time for reflection.
By the witching hour he had learned the location that most of the money made on the street that night would be taken to. He didn't accept that as fact from just one source. He acquired the same bit of intelligence three more times before he set his sights on the abandoned warehouse that had been implicated as the site.

He approached the warehouse in Spyder with the headlights out. His first impulse was to drive right through a wall into the building, deal death and mayhem with the car, and then exit the vehicle once the gunfire died down a bit. Before he could implement this plan his enhanced intuition kicked in. His gut told him that something was wrong here, that this was another trap. However, his enhanced intelligence had nothing to go on. So, he decided to use stealth. He hid the car in the shadows cast by the roof of an adjacent building and exited Spyder. He moved impossibly quickly to the warehouse and using the spikes and the mechanical arms, climbed the side of the building to a second story window. The frame of the window was pretty rotted so he slowly and quietly used his enhanced strength to break the whole window free of the wall and place it inside. He stepped into the building over the window to avoid the sound of breaking glass and looked around. He was on a catwalk that ringed the entire building and that looked down over the main storage area of the warehouse. This was the only part of the building big enough for a large money sorting operation to be underway but it was silent and dark. There were no signs of movement or life. This wasn't the place. There also wasn't an army of thugs here waiting to take him out. It wasn't a trap either. It didn't make sense. Why was he lead here?

He looked around a little more, finally spotting what looked like a supervisory office built to extend out from the wall of the second story with a large window from which a manager could look down upon the warehouse floor. Inside there were occasional brief flickers of light. Light where there shouldn't be any light. The flickers didn't seem random but he couldn't deduce a pattern. "A bomb?" He thought. His gut screamed to get out now. His enhanced intelligence wanted a closer look. He went with his curiosity and made his way along the catwalk to the window into the office. He peered through the window and the next time the light flickered he briefly saw a man in a fedora sitting behind a decaying desk. The flicker was brief and the hat obscured some of the face but based on the jaw and mouth, his enhanced intelligence was sure that it was Charon himself. The window didn't provide a full view of the office and he was well aware that there could be men with guns to the right and the left who would open fire immediately if he entered. His intuition began to fail him but he barely noticed as he calculated the spatial geometry of the room and figured out where all of the theoretical gunmen could be hiding.

When he was sure that he had deduced the layout of the room he smashed through the window into the room in a spray of broken glass and immediately leapt into the air to avoid gunfire. He looked down to see where the gunmen were positioned but to his surprise, there weren't any. Suddenly he found himself tangled in some sort of filaments. Time seemed to move slowly, he hadn't started dropping to the ground yet as he looked up and saw five floating, greenish brains with tentacle like nervous systems dangling from them and wrapping around him. Before he could react those nervous systems began to pump some sort of energy that felt like an electric shock into him. He fell to the ground, not on his feet but on his back, vulnerable and convulsing with the shock.  The pain of electrocution was not his biggest problem. His armor pulsed with energy of its own. The energy from the brains also pulsed. The rhythms of the brains and of the armor were different and when they conflicted, the armors pulse cut out. At those moments he could feel the armor become dead metallic weight, but worst of all, his enhanced intelligence would cut out and pop back on causing him a devastating psychological and sensory trauma.

The armor had several powers that he had never used in combat because he hadn't mastered their control yet. One of those was the ability to electrify the outermost layer of the armor. Part of the problem with that power was that it required an enormous amount of concentration to control. Lose concentration even for a moment and the intensity of the electricity would very rapidly between slightly painful to utterly devastating. Now, he didn't have time to play games with power levels, as soon as his armor pulsed on, he turned the electrification on and up all the way. There was an explosion of electricity in the room and power pulsed from the armor up the nerves into the brains. The armor pulsed off again almost immediately but he saw that the shock he had produced had an effect. The brains' flicker of electrical energy seemed to have been effected in the same way that their shocks had effected his armor. They fell to the ground temporarily helpless.

Before Brent had a chance to take a breath, Charon leapt over the top of the desk and landed in a perfect position sitting on top of the Tarantula with his legs straddling the struggling vigilante. With the same motion he had pulled a gun, pointed it in Brent's face, cocked it, and was already beginning to squeeze the trigger. The power pulsed back on in the armor and Brent used all six arms to smash apart the floor below him. It was old and rotted and crumbled completely under the assault. Brent, Charon and the brains began to fall from the second story of the building towards the warehouse floor, surrounded by falling debris and office furniture. The gun went off and the bullet only missed Brent's head because the fall was jolting Charon's hand. Charon had not released the grip that he had on the Tarantula with his legs.

Brent took in several things at once: The armor hadn't pulsed off again but, it only seemed to be at about half of its normal power. He could only speculate that it had a finite amount of energy and that he had used an enormous amount of it in his attack on the brains. He had no idea how to re-charge it or even if it could be recharged. He was still reeling from the psychic damage done by the on again off again of his intelligence increasing and decreasing so many times over the last few seconds. Charon's hat blew off in the fall and revealed that the top of his skull had been removed and a greenish brain like the disembodied ones was sitting in his head with the top visible. Charon seemed to be as fast and as strong as the Tarantula, Brent had to assume he was as smart and as intuitive as well. He didn't seem to have the electrical power of the brains. He had an advantage having a gun. Brent had an advantage having the six arms and spikes. The other five brains had recovered and had stopped falling and were instead gently floating down towards the ground.

Before they hit the ground Brent punched all six spike covered fists into Charon's body which caused Charon to lose his grip. They would land separately but unfortunately Charon didn't seem to be bothered by the holes in his body. He wasn't even gushing blood, although he was slightly seeping some viscous looking green fluid. Like cats Charon and the Tarantula landed on their feet face to face, debris and office furniture crashing down around them and the five brains slowly began forming into a circle above them. Charon shot again, Brent dodged but not quite fast enough. A slug passed through the armor and through Brent's left shoulder. That wound would have made the arm useless but Brent discovered that he could move it as easy as the armors mechanical arms. He responded to the shot by moving fast at Charon, one arm knocked the gun from his hand, the other five moved to shred his head but Charon did an amazing backwards summersault away from Brent. He lost the gun but he was still in the fight.

Three of the brains behind Brent whipped out with their tentacles to try and entangle him again but he dodged in the direction of Charon who met that charge with a perfect side kick to Brent's face. The Tarantula's six arms reached out and grabbed the leg that had kicked him in the face and ripped it free from Charon's body tossing it casually aside. The leg was still twitching, Charon though unbalanced was still functional, Brent had a split lip, could taste his own blood in his mouth and thought that all of his front teeth were loose. He felt like he was close to passing out. This had been so easy from the very start and now he was fighting for his life.

He charged at Charon again, again hoping to rip his head apart, Charon again prepared to dodge and offer some counter attack but he couldn't compensate for the missing leg, Brent successfully ripped the head with the weird protruding brain to pieces. The two brains that had been floating slightly behind Charon moved in to entangle him but he took a step backwards and took a deep breath. This put him in range of the three brains behind him and the other two continued to move in. He wanted them all to be able to attack him at once. He was prepared but not one hundred percent sure that he would survive this. They wrapped him in their nervous systems and blasted. He simultaneously let loose all the energy he could. He blacked out with a popping sound for about a second. He came to as he was falling on his face. The Armor was now powerless and he was pretty sure he had a broken nose. It took a huge effort that he was barely up to, to struggle to his feet. He saw that the brains were down on the ground too but still slightly moving. Even the pieces that had been Charon's brain were vibrating as if they were trying to crawl back together. He wasn't sure that they couldn't.

It was only a matter of time before the brains became functional again so he dragged his heavily armored body from brain to brain and stomped on them with his foot until there were only pieces, trying to crawl together. He threw out a mental call to Spyder but it didn't come. Not sure what to do he looked around and saw that the warehouse had a large number of metal storage drums lying around. So, slowly, he pried twenty of them open and scooped as much brain as he could into different drums before sealing them again and dragging them as far apart from each other as he could. He knew this wasn't a permanent solution but it was the best he could come up with.

Exhausted and battered he staggered outside and made his way to Spyder which had reverted to its normal form, a black and brown cube of solid metal. Brent was filled with despair. He wasn't sure what any of tonight's events meant, but, he was afraid that whatever was going on, he was out of it. He collapsed with his upper body draped over the cube, when, to his surprise, as the armor touched the cube, the armor filled to full with whatever energy it used. The familiar pulse was back, as was the strength, the speed, the intelligence, event the intuition was back. He felt a tingle in his wounds and he felt in his gut that the armor was somehow healing him. He willed Spyder back into car shape. Slipped inside and drove home.
He could barely keep his eyes open as he pulled into the garage. He knew there was a lot of work still to do but he was spent. He took off the armor, threw on a robe and headed upstairs. Before climbing into his bed he looked for the guest room that he had given to Delia. She obviously couldn't go home until they knew how the authorities were going to deal with the fact that her car must have been found at the scene of the meth lab explosion, but she wasn't there. He tried to call her cell, but she didn't pick up. This concerned him. It was conceivable that she had lost track of time and was still in the cave and it was possible that she couldn't get a signal down there, but, she would have wanted to know how it went. More than that, she was eager. He went back downstairs and woke up his butler and confirmed that she had not returned from the dig.

This Story is 15 Parts Long. Now, get the whole story including chapters 13, 14 & 15 at: The Whole Story

 


The Brown Tarantula

Copyright Robrt F. Sacco

Part 1

Parts 2, 5, 8 & 11

Parts 3 & 6 Are Below On This Page

Part 4

Part 7

Part 9: The Cavern

Brent had to admit that he was impressed by Delia's rock climbing and spelunking skills. On the southern edge of his estate was a hole in a hill that led to the cavern where his grandfather had discovered the armor and vehicle of the Tarantula. He had also found an enormous cache of precious gems which he used to buy the land after the discovery. It was a steep narrow ascent treacherously lined with loose rock that shifted and slid when touched. He had only been down here once before, at his grandfather's insistence, and had never been inclined to visit it again. He was more of a suit and tie behind a mahogany desk kind of guy. On the previous visit his grandfather had worn the Tarantula amour, held him and jumped into the hole, landing with incredible ease in the cavern. He was wearing the armor now, just assuming that this was the best way to enter, but Delia had insisted on climbing down the hard way. Her argument was a good one. If there was a lot of research to be done down here, she'd have to be able to come and go without having him around, so she might as well start getting used to the climb now. She had all the requisite equipment, so, he watched as she felt for stable spots, hammered in spikes, tied off her line and lowered herself until it was time to start looking for a new stable spot. It took over two hours for her to climb down, but he was filled with a dawning respect for the girl.

The cavern itself was of course completely bereft of light. Delia had lots of small but amazingly bright glow sticks in her pack. Brent had thought that the kids only used those for raves and concerts and hadn't thought that they would have practical applications but in a few minutes she had produced enough light that they could take a good look at the cave. Brent showed her the spots where his grandfather had found the gems, armor and block of metal that became Spyder but what she seemed the most interested in were the ancient Indian cave paintings that showed some sort of human sized spiders talking with natives. "I can't believe your grandfather didn't do any research on these." She muttered. Brent said "He assumed that they were religious. Demons or Gods of some sort giving the Indians secret knowledge that either included giving them the Tarantula armor or the formula for making it and that this was where they kept it hidden." "Or aliens." The girl added. "Aliens?" Brent queried. "Well," she said "I don't know if I believe in ancient Indian gods or demons… or aliens for that matter, but Chariots of the Gods was written after your grandfather's time and one seems as likely as another to me." "Hmm, aliens." He muttered. She pointed to some markings on the wall "These symbols actually look like rough geological plate diagrams that could give us the date of this encounter. Now, the Indians wouldn't have known that, and some of the tectonic theory involved was developed after your grandfather retired so he might not have realized what they were either, but, aliens might." She started taking pictures of the markings. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to keep a record of this." Brent said. "I'm making enemies and this would be the creation of clues." "yes," She agreed "but, I have to look up some stuff to make sense of this and we don't want to trust my memory. Hell, if we wanted to do this right we should bring down an anthropologist, a historian, an archeologist." Brent didn't like where this was going but figured the pictures were less dangerous than the involvement of a group of underpaid academics.

"Did your grandfather ever say why he didn't include the scientific community in this? He was a scientist himself?" "yeah, he did. He didn't trust anyone. World War II was breaking out and the world was gearing up for war. Local government was corrupt and run by mobsters. All the academics that he knew were hungry for recognition or grant money and all the money flowing around had to do with the war effort. He just felt that he should do the maximum good that he could do by himself, who, he knew he could trust."

Delia had reached the end of the pictographs, pulled some brushes from her pack and was brushing dirt off another section of wall. "There's more of these pictures than your grandfather found here. God only knows how many more." Brent was sort of stunned. He had always believed his grandfather to be more thorough than that but he wasn't an anthropologist or archeologist. Delia pointed to an enormous pile of rocks against a wall and said "That looks like it was probably a tunnel into another cave. The land slide blocking it looks like it happened while your grandfather was still superheroing.  Any idea what the deal is?" "yes, he said that there's a whole system of caverns that way but they move out under the Winthrop estate. He didn't like the Winthrop's very much and figured it was best to seal the border so to speak. I can't say I disagree, Caleb Winthrop has been a thorn in my side all of my career and I don't like the idea of his people finding out about any of this." "Your Grandfather and Caleb Winthrop are hiding something." She said. Brent flushed, ready to take offence and defend his grandfather's honor but the added intuition that the armor granted him told him that she was right. The added intelligence demanded more. "Why do you say that?" "Because I work for Winthrop. He needs geologists in his energy exploration ventures. A few years ago I happened to see a report from before I took the job. He was building a basement to his mansion and needed a geological survey as part of an environmental impact statement to get the building permit. The survey was pretty thorough and would have had to mention caverns under his estate but it showed the area to be completely solid. He must know there are caverns here and must not want anyone else to know."

His armor enhanced brain demanded more information. "We've got to get going." He said. "Tonight is going to be very busy, I need to be on the streets messing with Charon and trying to draw him out into a trap so I can get him off the streets. I also have to find out what local officials are working with him. But, now I have to make finding out what's going on with Winthrop a priority too and right now, I think I need to get to my office computers to look for info." She responded "You go. I can climb out of here on my own. I'd like to uncover as many of these pictographs as I can before calling it a day. When I'm done I'll climb out and head for the mansion. "Alrighty… be careful… and Delia… good work."

This Story has fifteen parts. I will post links here to new chapters as I post them.

The Brown Tarantula Part 10

The Whole Story of the Brown Tarantula Including Chapters 13, 14 & 15

 

 

The Brown Tarantula

Copyright Robert F. Sacco

The Brown Tarantula Part 1

The Brown Tarantula Parts 2,5,8 & 11

The Brown Tarantula Part 3 is below on this page

The Brown Tarantula Part 4

Part 6: Dealing with Delia


Brent didn't feel the need to hide his identity from Delia. Rocky, her great grandfather, had known that Brent's grandfather was the Tarantula. He had no doubts that she already knew who he was. Given the speeds the car could travel, the trip from Dunnbrick to the Donaldson Estate was quick but it seemed to take forever just because he couldn't believe how inane the conversation was. This girl had almost died, had almost gotten him killed, but all she wanted to talk about was "what's the cars name?" "The car should have a name." "Tarantula Mobile sounds too much like Bat Mobile." "Black and Brown Beauty sounds too unwieldy…" and on and on. Eventually she had decided to call it "Spyder". Simple, to the point, creepy and by spelling it with a "y" it suggested not only the silence and deadliness of a spider, but also of a spy. Brent was in no mood to think about it or to care one way or another. He was trying to figure out what to do about her. Briefly, an adolescent fantasy had flamed to life. The Tarantula and his beautiful young side kick, lovers and warriors against crime. This ended quickly. She was beautiful but she was also young enough to be his daughter. He also suspected that her appearance during the ambush was a sign of stupidity.

As they pulled into the garage and Spyder's doors opened to let them out he pulled off his helmet and began to scream at her. "What the hell did you think you were doing back there? You almost got us killed! Did you have any plan at all? Do you care that you screwed up my plan?" He was going to shout some more but with the helmet off, his intelligence and intuition had decreased to their normal levels. This always had an effect on him. It was like going blind or deaf, suddenly, he was just, less. It hurt, mentally and emotionally and left him feeling as stupid as he believed her to be. Further, she didn't seem to be listening. With the helmet disconnected Spyder was morphing from invulnerable vehicle/weapon to block of inert metal, a spectacular transformation when seen for the first time. The additional strength granted by the armor also evaporated and he found himself less than completely mobile, encased as he was in metal. Without thinking about it she moved around him and started to help him take the armor apart. He realized past the cloud of ignorance and confusion descending on him that she knew where and how the armor came apart. Either Rocky had kept a complete record of his knowledge of the armor, which was dangerous for Brent, or, she remembered things he had told her when she was very young, in great detail, which meant that she might be a lot smarter than he was giving her credit for. Of course, at the moment, he was in the undertow of his own intelligence flowing from genius to normal and he felt as if he were the completely stupid one.

She said "Look, Mr. Donaldson, all I want to do is help. I believe in you and your mission. My whole family did. After reading this morning's paper I realized it must have been you out there fighting to free Dunnbrick from Charon and I came over here as soon as I could to offer…. But your Butler said you were out for the night. I knew you must have gone to Dunnbrick, so I headed there too. Once I realized where in Dunnbrick you were headed, I realized that the mob must have figured it out too. I thought you might be in trouble. I'm sorry. I just wanted to help. I know that I don't know what I'm doing 'in the field', but I didn't know what else to do." "Okay" he said as the last piece of armor came off. "You know who I am, my grandfather trusted your great grandfather so, it looks like I don't really have a choice. We'll have to find some way for you to help. But you can't ever come into the field like that again. I had a very detailed plan that just got flushed thanks to your interference. Plus, I can't put your life in danger, I just can't, I'd rather quit." He stumbled to a chair and all but collapsed into it, feeling totally drained. "Did Rocky tell you how the armor comes apart?" he asked. "No." She smiled. "It's actually fairly obvious, it's designed to mimic the way that geological strata link together…" She continued but she lost him, since he knew next to nothing about geology and still lost in the Tarantula hang over, cared even less. He wondered why his grandfather had never mentioned this since he had been a geologist and in fact had found the armor on a geological expedition. "Wait." He interrupted. "You're a geologist?" "Well… " She replied "I have a BS in geology and I'm currently working in the Energy Exploration department of Winthrop Industries, mornings, and studying for my Masters in geology in the afternoons." "My Grandfather was a geologist." "Really, I don't think my great grandfather knew that, or, if he did, he never passed it along. Hmm… do the armor's powers have something to do with geology?" "I don't know. My grandfather said he didn't know, but he must have known what you just said about the… what was it.. stress…?" "Strata. Hmmm". "Maybe that's where you can help. Maybe you're just the person to help me figure out how the Tarantula and… Spyder… work." She smiled triumphantly as he called the car Spyder.

This Story Is In 15 Parts. I Will Post Links Here To The Other Chapters As I Post Them

The Brown Tarantula Part 7

The Brown Tarantula Parts 9 & 12 Are Above On This Page

The Brown Tarantula Part 10

The Whole Story Including Chapters 13, 14 & 15

 

The Brown Tarantula

Copyright Robert F. Sacco

The Brown Tarantula Part 1 

The Brown Tarantula Parts 2, 5, 8 & 11 

Part 3: The Tarantula

As the sun set Brent Donaldson stood on the second floor balcony of his mansion enjoying the fresh smell that followed a hard rain. He noted with some satisfaction that the cloud cover was still thick and would successfully blot out the light of tonight's full moon. The sunset did, in defiance of the clouds, cast a dull red orange glow over downtown which he could see across the lake at the southernmost tip of his estate. He took a last sip from the small glass of scotch that he was allowing himself before another night of murdering violent men. He had intended to go over the plan one more time. It was simple. Charon would have the Spinoli gang split their forces between the neighborhood that they already controlled and the one that Brent had taken from the Vampire Bats last night. The Spinoli's were old school and had a greater degree of subtlety than The Bats. Still, they would be making the rounds tonight, shaking down business owners in the early evening, numbers runners, hookers, pimps, massage parlors, gambling dens, crack houses and street dealers later. For insurance Charon would have thugs pulling crimes in middle class neighborhoods just to keep the cops from a preemptive strike in the rougher parts of town. Unlike the poor, the middle class would make politicians pay if crime got out of hand in their hoods. So, he would face the Spinoli's and whatever trap Charon would surely have laid for him and after two nights of freedom for the "Dunnbrick" neighborhood, Charon would have no choice but to devote all of his resources to tracking and killing him, Brent Donaldson, The Tarantula.

However, his mind drifted from the plan at that last point. He wasn't sure why the plan was to focus Charon on him. The Tarantula armor didn't make him bullet proof (although, as far as he knew, the car was invulnerable). It had some nice weapons and it did make him, faster, stronger, smarter and more intuitive. He couldn't remember all the ideas that came to him with the increased intelligence and intuition when he wasn't wearing the armor and, not for the first time, he began to wonder whether or not the plan was really his own doing, or if, in some way that he didn't understand, he had become the pawn of the armor itself. His grandfather, the original Tarantula had never had these sorts of thoughts. He was sure that the armor was just an object, a tool. His father had been sure that the armor had a sinister intelligence of Its own and that he had been a victim of that intelligence, but, his father in the very short time that he had used the armor, had been a drug addict and eventually had succumbed to a mental illness that had left him institutionalized for most of his, short, adult life. Grandpa had put off his ravings about the armor as an entity to that mental illness. Brent wasn't so sure. At least, he wasn't as he stood here lost in thought. When he put the helmet on, he would be filled with a brilliant clarity that would remove those doubts, a clarity that he held suspect when it was absent.

His grandfather had lived in a different world. The individualism and lawlessness of the old west was still a living memory, World War I was over and World War II was coming over the horizon and gangsters roamed freely with automatic weapons as prohibition tried to enforce the moral will of a minority on the majority. A mystery man protecting the common good through physical force seemed warranted. He sympathized with his father. Grandpa had always wanted him to take up the armor as a legacy and tradition, but the times were very different. Youth was in open rebellion against the morality of "The Greatest Generation" and their politics. Drugs and sex were openly available. The good guys and the bad guys weren't as easily distinguished. Brent wasn't sure that his father's illness hadn't been the result of conflicts between the mind expansion of hallucinogens and the very different mind expansion provided by the armor. Further, he wasn't sure that the clarity of the armor could sort out the moral and ethical tangle of the early seventies.

Brent had also felt pressure from his grandfather to take up the armor and the tradition but Brent hadn't been interested. The family fortune had been acquired accidentally in the same geological exploration that had first unearthed the Tarantula armor and "the car". The gems and jewels that grandpa had found produced so much money that little thought had gone into its management. Dad had been born rich in an era of privilege and had also not given the money much thought. Grandpa was a geologist, dad a dilettante. Brent had been a businessman and that was all he had ever been. The family had needed a businessman. As the twentieth century had entered its twilight, a personal fortune in the millions was no longer enough to maintain such a large and beautiful estate. Billions of dollars were necessary and Brent was the man to take the family business from the twentieth to the twenty first century. He was proud of that.

The first time he had put on the Tarantula armor, long after the deaths of his forbears, had nothing to do with heroics or legacy. The family business had been faced with hostile takeover. He had been out foxed by a better player. He didn't know what to do. His own intelligence and acumen had failed him. He needed the added mental ability that grandpa had said the armor offered. On some level he had thought that using the armor in this way would be a cheat, but, his nemesis, Caleb Winthrop, would use all of his resources to win the battle. Brent could do no less, and, it had worked. The armor had allowed him to deduce Winthrop's stratagems, and had made him smart enough to outfox the fox. What he hadn't counted on was the expansion of awareness both morally and intellectually. He had been faced with the fact that all people in a community (communion, commune, company, co co co) were interconnected and that, to have whole neighborhoods ruled by drug gangs negatively effected everyone. It even made bad business sense. While the nations' businessmen scrambled to make money in markets that were ascending out of poverty in India, China, Brazil, they were ignoring the fact that there were many micro markets right in the USA that would become very lucrative if only the gangsters were driven from power. These periods of enlightenment had become addictive and with that enlightenment had come a sense of responsibility.

With the decision to dethrone Charon had come another addiction, the thrill of living on the edge of life and death. He recognized that his grandfather had this addiction. His father had it too but before he had put on the armor he had already been feeding it with skiing and auto racing. It took Brent by surprise, he was still only partially aware that he was an adrenaline junky. He also failed to make the connection between the rush of facing and dealing death with the spin of the wheel that was the stock market.

What Brent didn't remember when he took the armor off was unfortunate. If life was a chess game, with the Vampire Bats and the Spinoli as pawns, then gangsters like Charon were at most castles and he was, at best, a knight. The real danger wasn't even from kings and queens, but from the hands that moved the pieces around the board.

While he stood lost in thought the sunset had faded and the blackness of night had blanketed the city. He went inside and descended to the hidden basement room that served as the Tarantula's lair. He took sharp nervous breaths as he affixed the armor to his body a piece at a time. As he placed the last piece, the spidery faced helmet, over his head and snapped it into place, what had been lifeless, shiny, brown and black metal began to pulse with an unknown energy. His mind expanded and Brent was gone, replaced by the much smarter, much more aware, Tarantula. At his merest thought the nearby large slab of similarly colored black and brown metal flowed into the shape of Brent's idea of the perfect, futuristic two seat sports car. The door opened, silently, at his will, and just as silently, the car glided out of the hidden exit from the sub-basement onto the roads of the estate, aimed for the city and the war.

This Story Is 15 Parts. I Will Post A Link Here To The Next Part When It Is Published

The Brown Tarantula Part 4

The Brown Tarantula Part 6 is above on this page.

The Brown Tarantula Part 7

The Brown Tarantula Parts 9 & 12 Are Above On This Page

The Brown Tarantula Part 10

The Whole Story Including Chapters 13, 14 & 15

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