Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “It’s disgusting,” Peter said. “When I win the lottery, I will keep you for the rest of your life in sinful luxury. You will lie in bed on silk sheets all day and eat chocolates.”

  “None of this Godiva junk, either,” MJ said. “Teuscher or nothing.”

  “And you’ll never have to lift another finger—”

  “Boooring!” she said. “But anyway, I know the agency can find someone to place me with down there—just enough to keep me going while I case the joint. And if I hit something larger—say, a steady contract—it’ll pay back more than the costs of the trip.”

  Peter sat down and sighed. “I guess we have to, don’t we?”

  MJ sat down by him. “Yes. That’s life at the moment, Tiger. But it’ll sort itself out eventually. You wait and see. Meanwhile… Florida.”

  And so it had come to pass. He had put her on the train, Am-trak indeed, though from Penn Station rather than Grand Central. MJ had been disgusted at that. “Romance is dead,” she said. “There is no romance in going anywhere from Penn!” But she had climbed on readily enough, ensconcing herself in the unassigned seat on which she had insisted when Peter started making noises about the price of the train ticket. She had waved good-bye as the train pulled out, and dabbed at one eye expressively as she went, making a sad-happy mouth as the train pulled off down the track.

  For the first couple of days, there was no mistaking it: he moped around. He went out and had a pizza, and it tasted like paste. Life just wasn’t the same without her there—or, rather, without her available to be there; knowing that even if she wasn’t across the table at the moment, she would be later that evening. The next day was about the same. He couldn’t bring himself to go out: he puttered around the apartment developing some contact sheets, reveling (however briefly) in the knowledge that he could use the bathroom as a darkroom without having to clear curlers off the counter, and knowing that MJ wouldn’t come barging in despite the fact that he had put the Red Light sign up outside. But none of the contacts looked any good when he processed them.

  This is silly, he had thought. I was a bachelor for years. Did just fine on my own. Why is this so difficult?

  The next day, though, at seven-thirty in the morning, the phone rang. He wasn’t able to get to it before the machine went off. By the time he came staggering out of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes and lurching into the living room, all he heard was a few words in Kate Cushing’s voice: “… here pronto. Bye.”

  His editor at the Daily Bugle rarely called him herself: usually her assistant did it. Peter hurriedly wound the message back and replayed it.

  The machine beeped, then said: “Parker, Kate Cushing. I’ve got a work opportunity for you up here today. I’d appreciate it if you’d present yourself about nine, or if you can’t make it here by then, just get up here pronto. Bye.”

  After wrestling with the shower and clambering into his Spidey suit, he leaped across the rooftops and swung along weblines at about eight-thirty, wondering what was quite so urgent. Kate had told him that it would be all right for him to have a couple of weeks off, after that stupendous set of pictures he had brought her of Venom and the Hobgoblin.

  He sighed. It seemed about five minutes ago, some ways. He had had an interesting couple of days last month when first Venom and then Hobby had shown up in New York, with (literally) explosive results. It hadn’t actually been Venom, at first, but someone who looked like him… and killed, not what Venom would have considered the deserving guilty, but the uninvolved innocent. Venom himself had turned up on the scene fairly quickly, certain that someone was impersonating him, and determined to stop it. It still amused Peter, in a crooked way, that Venom had been concerned about having his reputation ruined. As Spider-Man, Peter naturally had to try to deal with Venom when he showed up: the man/symbiote team was a criminal by everybody else’s lights, if not by Venom’s own. And then, on top of that, Hobgoblin had shown up, first getting involved in a few odd thefts, and finally presenting the city with a nasty fait accompli hidden under its streets: a small nuclear weapon, but plenty big enough to leave a glass-lined crater where Manhattan had been. He had attempted to hold the city hostage, and a most peculiar set of circumstances had stopped it: a not-very-holy alliance between Spider-Man and Venom, and the intervention of a bizarre extraterrestrial creature—the very same being that had been misidentified as Venom—that had gotten loose in New York and considered radioactives, even a nuclear bomb, to be tasty dinner fare.

  When that dust settled, Peter had presented himself at the Bugle—rather sore and the worse for wear—with a spectacular set of photos of the final battle royal involving Spider-Man, Hobby, Venom, and the eater of fissionables. Kate had been very impressed and had noticed Peter’s very worn-out condition and told him to get lost for a little while. I wonder why she wants me found so soon? he thought. But I’ll find out soon enough….

  He came to a graceful landing on the roof of the Bugle building, right behind the huge sign that declared the identity of both edifice and newspaper to the city at large. A quick, long-practiced change of clothes, a trip down the stairs from the roof access, and he was in the City Room.

  That room was in its usual stir and roil of activity, heading for the deadline for the mid-afternoon edition. Peter made his way through the many lined-up desks of editorial. The air was full of the earnest miniature-machine-gun sound of many people all pounding frantically at their keyboards. Only a few heads looked up, and only a person or two waved, as Peter went by.

  He made for the rear wall, where the glassed-in offices were, Kate’s among them. Coming to her door, Peter checked his watch: just nine-oh-five. Not too bad, he thought.

  From inside the office, a hand reached into the Venetian blinds covering the window, pulled them down: eyes peered out at him, and then the hand let the blinds spring up again. The door opened, and a voice from inside said, “On time for a change. Come in, sit down.”

  Peter did so, perching himself on her sofa in an alert edge-of-the-cushion position: one good way to get yelled at in Kate’s office was to sprawl, especially as there was nowhere much to sprawl in—the sofa, along with every other flat surface, tended to be covered with books and papers and photos and all other kinds of whatnot. Kate went back to her desk, and started (or, Peter thought, resumed) pacing back and forth behind it as she talked. This mannerism Peter knew well: almost everybody associated with J. Jonah Jameson seemed to pick it up sooner or later, so that an editorial meeting at the Bugle looked very much like feeding time in the lion cage (and with JJJ there, it tended to sound like one as well).

  “I can’t do it, Jim,” she said to the speakerphone. “You know I can’t. Certain parties will have my head on a plate.”

  “Not my problem,” said Jim, whoever he was, on the other end of the conversation. “You’re just going to have to cope.”

  Kate muttered something incomprehensible, chewed her lip for a moment. “All right. On your head be it. But unless you get the goods, I am not going to reimburse. And until you get the goods, I’m going to assume this is some sleazy scam to get more time on the beach at La Croisette.”

  “Aww, Kate…”

  “Don’t aww-Kate me. Get out there and ask him when he’s running for President. And get an answer, you hear me?” She punched the hang-up button on the speakerphone forcefully, then sat down behind her desk and started rummaging for something. “This is a nuisance,” she said. “That’s the man I was going to send to Florida with you.”

  “What?”

  “You are free to go to Florida?”

  “Uhh,” Peter said, flabbergasted. “For how long?”

  “Till the story breaks,” Kate said. “Knowing you, it shouldn’t take forever: I’m sending you partly as a good-luck charm this time.”

  “What’s the story?”

  She came up with her address book, started paging through it. “The Space Shuttle Endeavour goes up week after next,” she said.

  “That’s good ne
ws,” Peter said—he had forgotten about the semi-impending launch in his post-MJ malaise—”but why send a reporter to cover it? Or a photographer, for that matter? The local stringers have been good enough in the past. And the NASA publicity staff have some of the best photographers around—”

  She waved at him in annoyance. “I don’t want pretty pillar-of-fire pictures, Peter. Do you know Vreni Byrne?”

  “No.”

  “She’s a stringer who came over from the Chicago Tribune a few weeks back,” Kate said. “She was doing overseas work, mostly… wants to do some at home now. Investigative, by preference. She’s good, doesn’t need her hand held. Now—” Kate chewed her lip, that nervous mannerism again. “Some of the local press down in the Miami area, down near the Space Coast, have been reporting some odd things going on around Canaveral. Nothing huge, nothing obvious or definite, but all the same… Security down there has been a lot tighter than usual. The press officers at KSC haven’t been as forthcoming as they usually are. There’ve been these funny reports of sudden changes of ID, people being ferried in and out of Canaveral AFB, all very hush-hush. And at the same time, there’ve been some disappearances down that way. Not the usual missing-persons stuff, but people who are characterized as being otherwise very stable, very dependable—just gone. And some odd thefts and attempted thefts, all in the same general area, about a hundred miles across.” She shrugged. “I don’t know that there’s a connection, but when things like this start happening in a physical location so close to each other, it just makes me wonder. Anyway, the sudden boost in security down there is reason enough to be interested, especially since no one’s even attempting any explanations. Usually they tell you flat out that something classified is going on: NASA does enough missions for the military, after all, putting up spy satellites and so forth. This mission is innocent enough, at least on paper: they’re putting up some new power equipment for the space station, doing some experiments on bees…” She shook her head. “It’s all sort of odd. I want it looked into.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows. “Are they letting people in as usual? Tours and so forth?”

  “Yes. Naturally I’ll want some fresh pictures. No, I don’t expect you to try to get into any place that’s restricted—I don’t want the paper’s credentials pulled just on a hunch. But I do want you to get out and about with Vreni—mooch around the rest of the Space Coast area that’s being affected by these thefts and disappearances.

  “You’re good at catching the unexpected stuff, the slightly cockeyed angle…”

  “So we’re going to be staying in the Miami area?”

  Kate nodded.

  Peter’s heart leaped then. “Uh, well, yeah! And until the story breaks…”

  “This one may take some rooting around,” Kate said. “Vreni is not a fast worker, but she’s thorough, and I’m reluctant to hurry her. She will drag you all over the countryside, though: be ready for that. We’ll give you a travel stipend before you go, and you’ll pull company credit cards for this run. Don’t go overboard, either,” she said, looking sharply at Peter. “I’ve been catching merry hell from Himself over abuse of cards.” Peter smiled at the reference to JJJ. The publisher had always considered company credit cards to be little more than an excuse for reporters to take money right out of his pocket. “And why shouldn’t I,” Kate continued, “with Jim suddenly announcing that he’s the only one Arnie wants to talk to at Cannes? So I have to put up with his shenanigans, and the damned hyperinflated hotel bills—” She caught herself, and sighed. “Never mind. I’ll put up with yours as well, to a point.”

  Peter grinned.

  “Oh, I neglected to mention,” Kate said then, with a small smile. “An old friend of yours has been spotted down that way…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Peter said, grinning sheepishly. “She’s visiting her aunt—”

  Kate looked at him cockeyed. “‘She’? He’s had a sex change?”

  “Sorry? Who’d you mean?”

  “The Lizard.”

  Peter’s mouth dropped open. He closed it again.

  “Since you’ve consistently gotten the best pictures of him,” Kate said, “it occurred to me that you would be good for this job. To Robbie, too, for that matter—in fact, he specifically recommended you.”

  Peter smiled. A recommendation from Joe “Robbie” Robertson, the editor in chief, was always welcome.

  “And of course for the other reasons as well,” Kate said with a lopsided grin.

  Peter blinked and started running over the conversation in his mind, wondering which reasons she meant, exactly.

  “The sex change is just a rumor, then?”

  “Oh! Yeah, it is, sorry,” Peter said hurriedly.

  “You and MJ haven’t had some kind of falling-out, have you?”

  “No! No, it’s just a family visit. She planned to be down there for just a couple of weeks.”

  Kate looked at him for a moment. “If necessary,” she said, “when your card bill comes in, I will overlook a few nights’ worth of extra meals and, shall we say, double accommodation.”

  Peter actually blushed. “Kate—thanks.”

  She waved him away. “I was young once, too, but it was hard to get any work done then with the damn dinosaurs all over the place. Just make sure you bring back the goods. Meanwhile, Vreni’ll be along in an hour or so. Come back here around quarter of eleven and I should have finished talking to her.”

  “Right. Thanks, Kate!”

  Peter went out, wondering.

  He headed across the street to the little Stadium Deli across the way, got himself a coffee and a cheese Danish, and sat down at one of the Formica-topped tables in the back, half listening to Julio, the deli’s owner, singing something low and mournful in Spanish. The rest of his thoughts were elsewhere, well back in the past.

  How many years had it been, now, since that trip to Florida with JJJ? It was only a little while after he became Spider-Man. He shook his head, sipping the coffee and grimacing. It seemed like forever since the tragic saurian shape of the Lizard had first burst across the path of his life, and Spider-Man’s. It had unfolded into yet another of those stories which seemed all too common in the world these days. A scientist named Dr. Curtis Connors, hardworking, dedicated, brilliant—maybe too brilliant for his own good—wandered down an avenue of research that would soon enough prove deadly for him. Having lost an arm during a tour in the Armed Forces, he had experimented with a method of regenerating the arm in much the same way a reptile could grow a new limb.

  But this particular experiment, which might have been innocuous enough, went terribly wrong. It had left Connors saddled with a new kind of glandular dysfunction that the world had never seen before, one which, at unpredictable intervals, twisted his body backward down the evolutionary scale into a dreadful and untoward mixture of reptile and man, a bipedal saurian of astonishing strength, speed, and size, locked into a mental state of uncontrollable rage. The change came and went with little warning and could not be put off or cut short, turning a brilliant man into a crazed monster. What this did to his family life… Peter shuddered.

  Sometimes he liked to complain to himself or to MJ about their problems. Their life together wasn’t always easy: being a super hero’s wife was no picnic, Peter knew. He rubbed his ribs absently; they were just now reknit after the last time Venom had cracked them. But whatever other problems they had, MJ did not have to worry that Peter would turn into a giant lizard without warning and tear up everything in sight.

  Curt Connors’s wife and children did, though. His wife Martha had been married to an intelligent and sensitive man, a leader in his field of biology in a quiet sort of way. Now she found herself having to try to hold the family together when Curt quit his day job, couldn’t hold or find another, and tended to vanish for prolonged periods, driven by his curse, or his attempts to find ways to cure it. Peter knew, too, Curt’s own fear that in one of his rages he might hurt the family he loved. Connors had taken to v
anishing for longer and longer periods, driven as much by that fear as by the monster.

  Both as himself and as Spider-Man, Peter had met the family on various occasions, and had forged a kind of friendship with them. It wasn’t entirely pity. He knew that Curt Connors was no evildoer, no criminal by choice: he knew that the things the Lizard did weren’t Curt’s fault, that the Lizard was manipulable, terribly vulnerable for all his rage and strength. True criminals and villains were all too willing to make use of so blunt but effective a tool, if it should chance to fall into their hands. Curt’s shame at being so used was one of the things that kept him away from his family and drove him so relentlessly to find a cure… not that the problem itself wasn’t reason enough.

  Peter kept in touch with the family every now and then to see how things were, checking to see whether they had heard from Curt, and how they were doing in general. It was about all he could do for them. Curt’s wife was too proud to accept any other kind of help, even from the most well-meaning of their friends.

  He checked his watch and sighed. It was pushing ten-thirty. Surprising how fast time could go when you were musing over something like this, but Peter felt very sorry for Curt. His own bizarre accident with the radioactive spider, so long ago, had at least left him with abilities he could control and master. Curt had not been so fortunate, and Peter was determined to do anything he could to help him.

  “Hey, Mister Peter, you look sad today! Whatsamatter, is the coffee no good?”

  Peter looked up. It was Julio, who ran the place: a big, friendly, florid, dark-skinned, mustached man, making his way down the Formica tables and wiping them off as he went along.

  “Nah, just thinking, Julio,” Peter said.

  “Aah, too much of that’s bad for you,” Julio said. “Sours your stomach.”

  Peter smiled and kept to himself the thought that Julio’s coffee was more likely to take care of that job. It wasn’t very good as a rule, and it was amazing that he sold so much of it in a city full of coffee freaks; but at the same time there was so much caffeine in it that it could practically raise the dead, and the hacks at the Bugle prized it above gold when they were fighting a deadline. “Yeah,” Peter said, “I’ll watch out for that. Hey, Julio, I’m going to Florida.”