He laughed with delight as the transformation overtook him. His chest began to bulge outwards, ripping his T-shirt right between his now-meaty pecs. I silently watched as Noah grew upwards a few inches, and outwards. “Oh shit!” He began to laugh as his arms started to bulge, too. Noah finally noticed something was happening. But suddenly, his pants began to strain as his legs expanded. He was a lanky guy, at 6'3" and 170 lbs (on a good day). My heart sunk as Noah began to slowly change. He yelped and it flew off him, but not before leaving him with a nasty red welt. The spider crawled out onto his arm before he could react. “Don’t be fucking ridiculous.” He grabbed the jar from my hands and opened it up. Is that a spider? What’s he doing in our apartment? How’d he get up here? Why is he so big? Kill it!” I wasn’t sure if this was the radioactive spider, though. I dashed to scoop him up in my hands, and quickly transferred the little guy into a jar.
It was pure coincidence that a few minutes after seeing the Spiderman crawl up my building, I turned around to see a small, faintly glowing spider crawling through my living room carpet. One of the Spidermen was apparently a large guy in his previous life– following his spider bite, weight had melted off him like water, quickly replaced by muscle.
After biting a human, they passed away, but transferred some sort of superhuman powers to them. While carrying them through the halls in either a jar with a lid screwed loose or a box with the top on crooked (depending on who’s telling the story to you), they slipped out of a researchers hand and escaped into the world. The lab had created about 15 of these spiders for initial research. For some reason, I guess the spiders were able to do more than that. Some sort of genetics lab at a local university was working on horizontal cross-species transmission of DNA, using spiders as a vector to inject certain genes into lab mice. Although most of the information surrounding them was classified, bits and pieces of the story had leaked out here and there. His whole body was clad in one of the spandex suits, showing off his well-defined muscles. His acrobatics were incredible– about 30 feet down from my window, he jumped off, shot a web and swung away. All of a sudden, it leapt into the air, straight towards my apartment, and started sprinting up the wall of our building like it was a contest. It swerved through cars, moving with inhuman speed. Most of the dots were dull colors– brown, black, beige– but this one was a bright red. Once, as I was staring entranced out this window, I watched one of those dots make its way into the street. Oh, the things we could do if we learned to overcome some of our simple genetic setbacks. Here I was, in a giant tower of steel and glass, hundreds of feet off the ground, when the highest up my ancestors ever got was 10 feet off the ground, on top of a fucking apple tree. Like when a dog stares at its reflection in a mirror.
It felt like my brain just didn’t know what to do. It made me sick, but I couldn’t stop staring. The tiny dots on the sidewalk, each a different person, bumping and swerving around each other. The way the steel stretches down for hundreds of feet. Looking out the window of our new apartment gives me vertigo to this day. “Everything looks so small from up here,” Noah said, when we first moved in.