by Diane Duane
The flatboats passed under I-75, where the arching piers of the freeway took it over the canal. Venom shot web at the supports and swung under, attaching more web to a couple of cypresses, then dropped again to the reedy ground as the flatboats roared down the canal, and went on following.
Well, he thought, we will do some serious work tonight. No more than one of these people will be allowed away to bear the news. Of all the rest of them, we will make a memorable example. Remembering his own days as a journalist, he added to himself with a smile, The media will have a field day.
Now the mercenaries were picking up speed. Venom increased his pace to match. He was unsure of the actual mileage they had covered since he and Spider-Man parted. It might have been twenty, maybe twenty-five. He hadn’t run this much in some time, but his anger was giving him energy to spare, and the symbiote, sensitive to that and eager on its own behalf, was doing most of the work for him.
Venom was fairly certain he knew where they were headed. As Spider-Man had said, the Miami Canal went mostly southward and finally to Miami Beach, with connections to various other canals along the way. He thought they would most likely head into Biscayne Bay—possibly trying to lose themselves among the normal night traffic in the water—and from there, make their way down the coast to some quiet beach well south of Miami, avoiding the police attention the nearer beaches were getting at the moment. They might go as far south as Perrine or Goulds, or even Florida City. No matter: he would follow.
But now his problem became somewhat more complicated, for instead of following the Miami Canal all the way down, they turned right, due south, on one of the minor canals near Opa-Locka. Inland again; he swore softly to himself as he followed, and the symbiote caught the anger and started to get hungry for blood. It was a sensation Venom could feel on his skin, strange as it was to be able to taste something there—but ever since he and the symbiote had taken up company, Venom had gotten used to paraesthesias of various kinds, seeing or hearing or feeling things the way the symbiote did. A small price to pay, he always thought, for the advantages it gave him, and the constant sense of wordless companionship. Now, though, its anger fretted on his nerves. No surprise, since its nerves and his were inextricably intertwined.
The route their quarry now took was a more convoluted and twisting thing, always trending southward, but using smaller canals, less direct routes. Once again they had to slow down, and gratefully, Venom slowed down as well. No telling how long this may last, Venom told the symbiote. We must pace ourselves. He felt it agree, which was good; by his reckoning, they still had at least another forty or fifty miles to go before reaching the southern coast.
He shrugged, kept following, and endured, wondering idly as he went how Spider-Man was doing. Though he might despise him, his strengths were not to be sneered at; of the heroes that Venom knew personally, he was one of the best fitted to handle a chase like this. He wondered, too, whether Spider-Man had been right—whether the target of that northbound group was indeed the Shuttle. If so—despite his preferences—Venom had to wish him well. Like many others, Venom had bitter and painful memories of a morning in the mid-1980s when, at the seventy-fourth second of a seemingly routine Shuttle launch, something had gone very wrong. The memory of Challenger’s bizarre, Y-twisted contrail was something that would not go away. At times, when Eddie Brock had watched Shuttle launches since, he would find himself holding his breath until that seventy-fourth second was past. He did not want to see something go wrong with another one. If he can stop some such thing from happening to Endeavour, Venom thought, it will have been worth letting Spider-Man go.
The symbiote stirred uneasily. Oh, you needn’t fret, Venom said silently. We’ll have him yet. But there’s no harm in letting him do this job first.
Southward the mercenaries went, and Venom followed. They plunged into the Chekiko State Recreation Area, another webwork and tangle of canals and reedbed and scrub, another river of grass. From there, they went straight into the Everglades National Park. Here the trees became much fewer, except for low stands of dwarf cypress, more bushes than trees. Great flat wind-wrinkled sheets of water quivered under the moon, rippling and troubled in the still night where the flatboats’ wakes tore through them. Still Venom came after, exploiting what little dry land was to be found, and leaping from island to island, staying low and far enough behind not to be seen, the symbiote changing its coloring to blend with the background.
On the flatboats went, crossing under Route 27 and making for Florida Bay. Far off, at the very edge of the horizon to the east, the lights of Homestead and Homestead Air Force Base were a soft yellow glow. Venom started to close up the gap between him and the flatboats, smiling a bit as he went at the thought of the coastline where they were heading, just north of the Keys and sheltered by them from the open sea. It had been one of the great stomping grounds for smugglers of all kinds for nearly half a millennium. Pirates had used it first, for a staging area; they had gotten water from the freshwater streams there, hunted for victuals. Men like Henry Morgan and Bat the Portuguese and the dreadful L’Ollonois had provisioned their ships there—some apparently by trading with the Seminoles—bought and sold slaves, and unloaded hot cargoes. Later, during the Revolutionary War, blockade runners had sought refuge in the Spanish ports there. Some desperate traders eager for a fast buck had brought munitions and raw sugar up the length of Florida from there, helping the southernmost colonies break the chokehold the British had on the “triangular trade.” Then later still, during Prohibition, rum had been sneaked in from the Caribbean and dropped on these shores, having run the gauntlet of government vessels in and around Key West. The running of contraband continued to this day: little clandestine seaplanes, in the dead of night, would make landings there in the “river of grass,” or just offshore, drop their cargoes, and go out loaded with cash.
And now these people. Venom was very sure he knew what they would be picking up—and sure they would treat it as cavalierly as any other cargo, as something to be dumped without a second thought to save their skins. The thought of barrels of this being tossed overboard to rust—It would be a bad situation even in the open water of the bay, where the delicate coral ecosystem was already under threat from pollution and changes in water temperature, and a concentrated spill of almost any kind of pollution would strain the system to the breaking point. To destroy everything, all that would be required would be a gram or two of plutonium in this water. The sea bottom for miles around would become a sky-blue desert. And if spilled in the ’Glades.…
It would not happen, he swore. Venom would not let that happen.
The first hint he had that they were coming close to the sea was by the smell of the salt in the air. Looking past the boats he pursued, Venom could see the first thin silver line of moonlit sea to the south. To tell the truth, he was relieved to see it. He was tiring, and the symbiote was fretting against his consciousness in a way that suggested it was getting weary too. He had not often had a chance to push it so close to its limits. Take it easy, he said silently.
Venom made a little more speed, to close up the gap between him and his quarry. Then he heard the sound he had been waiting for—the engines slowing down as the flatboats dropped speed, to feel their way through the marsh where the wetlands proper merged with the littoral marsh, the salt marsh that ran down to the dunes, and after them, to the sea.
He grinned. Venom was resolved to let as much of the exchange take place as he could before he acted. One or another of these people might drop information that he would find useful, and he intended to give them the chance. He was particularly interested in any details which might surface about the actual location of this waste-reprocessing plant. Venom was sure that such a thing, which would have to be highly secret, would be hidden away somewhere inaccessible, so there would be no chance of it being found by environmentalists, or politicians, or annoying ordinary people. Venom also suspected that—from the point of view of the people who would build suc
h an unattractive facility—the most sensible thing would be to put it right in the middle of the Everglades. It would not be the little base from which Curt Connors was working. That was much too small, and he would deal with that himself, and with either Connors or the Lizard, in fairly short order, but right now.…
He looked down at the shore. The flatboats had slipped into a little tributary stream, which led down among the dunes to the shore. Softly they cruised down it, their engines putt-putting quietly, and the fans muted to a lawn-mower buzz. The sea grass went sparse around him in the salt water as Venom took to the shallows and followed them, and here and there white sand from the dunes shoaled up in little bars and spits. The flatboats made for one bar that was bigger than the rest.
It was low water now. Later on, by the time any daylight showed, tracks or other traces of their presence would have been washed away by the rising tide. Very clever, Venom thought. But not clever enough.
There was no cover to be found any closer to the shore. The salt grass grew only a foot or two high. Venom slipped into the water, making his way into the little stream and sinking into it until there was only enough of his head showing to let him breathe. The stream was fairly deep: there was a strong current running in its depths, one strong enough to carve a channel deep in the sand, and right down to the shore. The flatboats came one after the other into the shallows of the bay and edged up to the broad spit of sand off to Venom’s right. Very slowly, so as not to ripple the water, Venom caught up with them, instructing the symbiote to blend with the background, and got as close as he could to see what was being done.
The bay was quiet. Pseudopodia questing for some distance beneath him told Venom that the bottom here shelved only very gradually, perhaps no more than one foot in a hundred. The shallow water lapped at the boats, but made little other sound. Venom caught the sound of several bursts of static from walkie-talkies as the flatboat crews beached them on the spit and shut down their engines.
“Operation Grab Bag is go,” said one voice, tinny, from a good distance away. One of the men on the spit answered on his own walkie-talkie: “That’s a roger. Triple Scoop is going ahead.”
“Roger,” said the other voice. Was it his imagination, Venom wondered, or did he hear, before the burst of static that ended the second message, the crack of gunfire? He wasn’t sure. Well, if he had, let Spider-Man handle it himself. Venom had his own priorities just now.
One of the mercenaries, a tall, thin man, said to another, “All right, Joe, give ’em the light.”
“Right,” a shorter, stocky man said. He came up with a long, thick, police-style MagLite. In the other hand, he held something smaller. A compass, Venom thought. Joe began to turn carefully in an arc from southeast to southwest, then paused, taking a bearing, and began flashing the light in that direction, probably in Morse code.
Some of the men sat down to wait then. Joe and his companion stood, looking out southwestward. What with the roil and dazzle of the water under the moonlight, it was hard to make out anything definite. But sound traveled. And faintly, Venom could hear very soft, muffled engine noise approaching from the southwest.
Now, then, he thought. Slowly, dark shapes began to show themselves against the silver of the sea and the indigo-black of the horizon. Shortly Venom could identify two separate sources of engine sound.
Under his “mask,” half under the water, Venom smiled. They were boats of the same kind as one he had met off Matheson the other night. That attack had gone awry, much to his annoyance. When he boarded the boat, one of the men who had been there—at the sight of Venom, understanding quite well what was going to happen to him—had shot his companion, and then had defied Venom’s questioning to the point where it could no longer be restrained. Blood it had to have, and blood he had given it—sensing clearly that there was nothing further he could do with the man, anyway. He was some kind of fanatic, to have shot the other man out of hand. Now Venom could feel the symbiote’s growing excitement. It recognized the boats, too, and knew, in its limited way, who was in it, and what was likely to follow.
Not just yet, Venom thought. Tonight, my friend, we practice patience.
The boats approached more slowly. On the spit, one of the men pulled out a spotlight and started to make a quick sweep. Venom ducked hurriedly all the way under the water well before it hit him, so that any ripples would disperse. Under the water, he saw the bloom of the light go over, lingering for a moment, then moving on. Venom stayed under for a few seconds more, then slowly, carefully, put his head up again.
The boats drew in from the bay. One of them now was close enough to make out detail. It had a big, tall man in camouflage standing in its bow holding something blocky and dark: another searchlight. Venom submerged again, waited until the beam swept past, then surfaced once again.
The boat was a thirty-foot speedboat, with significant cargo capacity—made to be able to run fast if it had to. Probably has a good-sized fuel tank as well. One could run a good way in a boat like that. Cuba? Haiti? Further? He would find out soon enough.
Meanwhile the first boat drifted up to the edge of the spit. There was a muffled splash as someone softly let down an anchor. The man in the bow of the speedboat said, “Everything all right so far?”
“Dead quiet,” said one of the men on the spit. Venom grinned.
“Okay,” said the man in the speedboat, and turned to call below deck. “Let’s get the stuff up.”
The transfer began. Barrels again, as Venom had expected. The second boat came in behind the first, and it too began to unload. Three men on the first one, Venom thought, four on the second, and then four each on each of the flatboats. He started taking careful notice of who was armed with what. The symbiote was resistant to bullets, but he didn’t care to put it in harm’s way any more than he had to; that was no way to treat a friend.
One by one the barrels were lowered cautiously from the boats bobbing at anchor, onto the spit. They were rolled across to be stacked up in the flatboats. Venom watched this process with some concern. They were loading both boats at once, which was good, in that it gave him a little more time to consider his options. There are quite a few of them, he thought. If we move too quickly, though, they’ll take off in all kinds of directions, and it would not do to let this cargo escape northward. If these people get the sense they’re being pursued, they’ll dump it. And if it leaks into the ’Glades.… A leak into the bay would be bad, too, but the bay would purge itself far more quickly than the Aquifer. And no one drank the water from the bay.
The loading progressed. The men were talking desultorily but not saying anything that was particularly useful to him. None of them seemed to know the others any too well, and he got the sense that none of them wanted to. Probably wise: the less you know about your co-conspirators, the less you can spill about them if the police or the feds catch you.
This did Venom little good, though. He edged as close as he dared, wishing that the man piloting that first boat would say something. But his speech consisted mainly of “Hurry up!” and “We don’t want to get behind schedule, keep it going.” But after a few minutes he reached down out of sight, saying, “Here, might as well do this now. One of the hot ones.”
“Right,” said another of the men, and took charge of a surprisingly small barrel, maybe the size of a one-gallon beer keg, the kind available in grocery stores. Venom looked at it curiously. It didn’t seem unusually heavy, and the man carrying it didn’t seem at all nervous to be holding it.
The first flatboat was gaining a little on the second in terms of being loaded. Venom started watching it carefully. One man, its pilot, stayed seated where he was, by the boat’s control panel and its tiller. The other boat’s pilot was not in reach; he was down helping the others load the barrels on.
All right, Venom thought. Time to move.
Softly, staying low in the water, he made his way to the first boat, coming at it from behind. The pilot, sitting there, looked thoroughly bored with
the whole affair. “Julio?” he said to one of the other men. “You got a light?”
“No smoking!” said the man on the speedboat, quite sharply.
“What’re you, allergic or something?” muttered the pilot. But he shrugged, finally, and settled back to watching the others.
He never saw the pseudopod that slipped up behind him. Spasm froze him for the moment where he sat, then he slumped, but not so much that anyone noticed.
Silently, Venom boosted himself up onto the back of the boat to the left of the fan, peered around it. Another tendril rippled away from him, found the ignition key in the boat’s control panel, slipped it out, and chucked it overboard.
“Oh, c’mon,” said one of the other flatboat crew, “I’m gasping for a smoke, too. If nobody’s seen all those spotlights we’re using, then no one’s going to see a match!”
“Oh, all right,” said the man in the speedboat, the apparent commander. “Way out here, the boss won’t know. Go ahead.”
“Mac?” said the man who was gasping for a smoke. Possibly this was Julio. “Mac, you still wanna light?” A pause. “Mac?”
They looked at him. “No point in sulking,” somebody chuckled.
That, however, was the point at which the tension of the spasm started to go out of Mac’s muscles, and he began to slump noticeably.
“What the—” said one of the other men loading drums onto the boat. He made his way astern and bent over Mac.
Venom couldn’t wait any longer. He boosted himself up onto the second flatboat and paused only long enough to look for its ignition key. It wasn’t in the control panel, and which of the other men had it, there was no telling.