Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Beyond it was chaos. He had only a second to take in the scene: scientific equipment smashed and trashed, everywhere shattered glass, twisted metal, the walls of the prefab structure itself deeply dented, here and there punched right through. Splashed liquid, overturned machinery, a slight chemical smell… No question but that this was yet another attempted cure for the Lizard gone wrong. And at the far end of the room, there was the Lizard himself, roaring, the desperate roar of a beast which does not want to be a beast, which once again suffers the curse of existence and can find no escape.

  The Lizard saw Spider-Man. It flew at him, so fast he couldn’t even jump aside. It grabbed him by the throat and flung him headfirst at the wall. Spidey tried to shoot out web and catch something so that he could stop himself, or at least turn. The web caught and adhered, but on a part of wall that had been weakened by blows, and broke loose. He only managed to turn himself enough to take the impact partially on his shoulder and neck, instead of head-on. He slid down the wall, nearly blacking out, trying desperately to stagger to his feet, feeling pseudopodia whip past toward the Lizard, but he could do no more than roll blearily over to at least see what was going on.

  The Lizard swatted Venom’s tendrils out of the air as fast as they came for him, then grabbed a great clawful of them and yanked Venom toward him. Off balance briefly, Venom stumbled—and the Lizard hit him a huge double-fisted blow in the side of the head. Venom staggered, and the Lizard picked him up as effortlessly as he had picked up Spider-Man, and threw Venom right at Spidey.

  Spider-Man rolled over to try to protect his head, still woozy. Venom crashed down on top of him, slamming his head into the floor. The two of them lay there in a heap, while behind them the roaring went on and on, ever more loud and desperate. Spidey tried to rise but couldn’t. He wondered whether he had broken something, or whether Venom had broken something of Spidey’s on landing, and also bemoaned the Lizard’s increased strength. This latest “cure” had apparently served only to make the Lizard more dangerous.

  “Curt,” he tried to croak, but he couldn’t even speak. His vision was going dark around the edges, not that he could see much but a litter of black limbs and limp tendrils, trying and failing to rise. Venom stirred, then sagged, slumped again.

  Oh, Curt! Spider-Man thought miserably, as his vision went completely. Martha. I’m so sorry.…

  And everything went away.

  The sound of moaning intruded. Spider-Man tried to open his eyes and finally managed it.

  He still lay on the floor with Venom on top of him. There was no telling how long he had been out. He tried again to push himself up, and this time had more success. Venom rolled partially off him. Unconscious? Dead? No telling.

  Spidey managed to make it to his hands and knees. Venom rolled the rest of the way off him, to Spider-Man’s right, and Spidey looked at him in concern. He didn’t much like the idea of touching the symbiote, but nevertheless he put a hand to Venom’s throat, felt for the pulse. It was there.

  Just knocked out, then, he thought, and snatched his fingers away.

  “Unnnhhh—”

  A moan from off to one side. Spidey got to his knees, looked around. Over there, sprawled against a wall, lay Curt Connors, human again. He looked terrible. He was ashen, and his arm was bleeding. “Curt,” Spider-Man said.

  Curt opened his eyes and looked at him, registering shock. He glanced up—

  —and Spidey’s spider-sense went off like someone banging a garbage can lid behind his head. He went straight up, straight for the ceiling—and it was just as well, because as he leapt, machine-gun bullets stitched the floor where he had been.

  * * *

  MJ woke up with terrible suddenness, and sat up in the bed in the hotel room, sweating, eyes wide, breathing hard. It had been an awful dream, involving Venom. That it had also involved the Cookie Monster was no help, though now that she was awake, she could not get rid of the memory of a voice saying, “Ooo, me impressed!” at the sight of Venom’s teeth.

  MJ found a smile somewhere and plastered it on, more out of reflex than anything else. She had been doing little but smile for the past few days. It was generally accepted that she was no good as the “pouty” sort of model. All the same, smiling was hard. She had not heard from Peter since fairly early yesterday evening, and at the moment that was bad news. He had promised to call her and check in but hadn’t done so. She had resisted calling him, last night, as long as she could. Finally she had succumbed to the temptation, but to no avail. Her attempts to call his mobile phone had been rewarded with the sweet recorded Southern voice of the Bell Florida operator repeatedly saying, “I’m sorry, but the mobile you have called is turned off and does not have access to voicemail services. Please try again later.”

  “Why didn’t I get him the voicemail?” she muttered as she got out of bed. It was still dark out. The bedside clock said 5:10, or rather, 5:1C, since the zero was missing a piece; it was that kind of hotel. Maurice’s indecision had landed them here instead of the Marriott, and this place, the Splendide, was in a state which could best be described as “faded glory.” “Why am I up?” MJ said, fumbling her way into the bathroom. “What color is this wallpaper supposed to be? What’s the meaning of life?”

  No answers seemed forthcoming, but the shower was good and hot, and she got under it, washed her hair, and came out about ten minutes later, feeling at least human if not particularly beautiful, charitable, or intelligent. Peter, MJ thought, where the heck are you?

  She had never learned to stop asking herself that question when there was likely to be no answer forthcoming. Useless, she thought. And here it is oh-dark-thirty in the morning, and there’s no room service in this dump, like there would be in the Marriott, and breakfast won’t start for another hour and a half, like it would at the Marriott. Grr. At least there’s a TV.

  MJ sat down on the bed in her towel, and flicked the TV on, getting the usual amount of early-morning snow from the local channels. There were numerous Pay-TV channels, but she flatly refused to watch any of the choices, ranging from ill-advised sequels to mindless action flicks. Cable was marginally better: at least there was the Weather Channel, the Landscape Channel, the Irish Channel, the Cuban Channel, the news channel, and the InfoMercial channel.

  MJ flipped from the automotive arsonist, to a restful prairie landscape, to an Irish rural soap, to a lady talking very fast and demonstrating how to make a Cuban fried steak, to last night’s sports scores. All these were relatively hopeless. Finally she settled on the Weather Channel and settled back to watch one of the nice people who worked one of the most intractable night shifts anywhere in broadcasting getting all excited about a big fat high which had positioned itself over Florida, and promised good weather for the Space Shuttle launch later this morning.

  “The Shuttle,” she muttered, “I can watch that, anyhow.” The news network always watched the Shuttle launches pretty closely—or let you look at the thing standing on its pad, anyway, while it was getting ready to go. The sports update gave way, though not to news, but to a commercial about an exercise machine, being operated by a man who, if anything, needed to stop exercising and go out and get a life of some kind.

  “Argh,” MJ said, and got up and went to the window, or rather, the door. This was possibly the Splendide’s only good point: it not only had windows that opened (relics of a time before air conditioning), but terraces you could go out and stand on to catch a breath of breeze, and the hotel was genuinely on the beach.

  MJ went out and stood there, gazing out to sea. There was a three-quarter moon high up, and its light began to be visible out on the waves. The soft restful hiss of the water and its salt smell came up to her, and MJ breathed it in and sighed.

  She looked down at the sand—and was surprised to see Maurice down there, walking along toward the waterline.

  It was impossible not to recognize him. Maurice had a peculiar stumpy walk for someone who otherwise looked so tall and graceful. Apparently,
according to the AD, it was because Maurice had actually had polio as a kid—one of the last cases, apparently, before it was almost completely stamped out. Or so people had thought then. Watching him, MJ breathed out unhappily at the thought that the disease was making a comeback. Not good, she thought. People should do something.

  Meantime, what’s Maurice doing out there at this hour of the morning? MJ thought. He hates early. That’s why we’re not doing the launch, he said.

  He stopped where he stood on the beach. He just stood there for a minute, then there was a soft bloom of light at his feet. And again; and again, repeated.

  He’s got a flashlight. He’s signaling someone.

  Far away, in the pale moonlit dazzle of the water, MJ saw something move. A boat?

  Suddenly MJ understood. Peter had told her about his own suspicions regarding that mess down south of the city, the other day. That boat out there could very well be tangled up in the same business.

  And Maurice?

  MJ swallowed hard. She didn’t understand what his position was. She didn’t know him at all well. Could he willingly be an accomplice of these people? Or had he perhaps been blackmailed into it somehow? He was always so nervous. He had been increasingly nervous about coming here. I.ike someone who expected something very bad to happen to him.

  She heard her own voice suggesting to Peter that she would feed him to sharks, or to Venom. Well, yes, she told her accusing mind angrily, he’s a dreadful little overbearing power-mongering loathsome indecisive toad!

  Yeah, another part of her mind said, so what? If that’s something bad out there, do you want it to come ashore without the authorities doing anything? Do you really want Maurice to go to jail for something he might have, say, been blackmailed into?

  You don’t know that’s the case.

  Look, said the back of her mind. So you hate intuition. Fine. You don’t have to take a position on it. Just go out there and stop what’s happening. Get Maurice out of it and give him one more chance—a chance never to be stupid again, no matter what’s happened to him. And cover for him, while you’re at it. If those are bad people out there, make sure there are plenty of witnesses here that whatever happens now, it wasn’t his fault.

  MJ slipped back into the hotel room, turned down the TV, and went over to the phone. She rummaged in the drawer of the bedside table for the yellow pages. In the front of the directory, among the numbers for Fire and Police and Ambulance, there was also a Coast Guard number, toll-free and confidential, for people who thought they had stumbled into something nasty and wanted to stop it. MJ dialed the number.

  “Good morning, confidential help line.”

  “Uh, yes. I think there are some people about to drop something, uh, questionable, off Cocoa Beach.”

  “Street address, please?”

  “Uh—” She rummaged around the table for the hotel’s stationery, and said, so as not to pin herself down, “Fifteen thousand block of Collins.”

  “Could you—”

  “Nope,” MJ said cheerfully, and hung up. She then threw clothes on as fast as she could—a T-shirt, shorts, flipflops—took her key, and ran out, locking the door behind her. She never even glimpsed the picture of the Space Shuttle appearing on the TV, or the banner that said “KSC ATTACKED BY TERRORISTS—SHUTTLE LAUNCH CANCELED” which spread itself across the screen. MJ was too busy running downstairs to ground level, out past the half-dozing desk clerk, and out the back of the hotel onto the beach.

  Just on reaching the sand, MJ paused for a moment, took a deep breath, thought for a second. Then she took another deep breath and screamed, “Maurice!”

  It echoed. She had never heard an echo at the beach before; it was impressive. Maurice turned as suddenly as if someone had shot him, and stared at her. She would just be visible, silhouetted against the hotel doors and the light above them.

  Upstairs, she heard windows and a couple of doors open. This was the moment. “Maurice!” she shrieked again. “I have had it with you, this shoot, this beach, this state, everything! I want to talk to you right now, and you are going to do some serious listening, or else I quit, and I’m going to sue, and then I’m going to the media, and Entertainment Tonight, and anyone else who’ll listen, and I’m going to tell them how you’ve mistreated me and everybody else in this operation!”

  More windows opened. In fact, they started slamming open so fast, it sounded like automatic-weapons fire.

  This should definitely be classified under “guilty pleasures,” MJ thought. In her TV work, she had seen some world-class tantrums thrown. She had always, herself, felt scornful about the prima donnas who threw them. Anybody who couldn’t get what they wanted by quiet reasoned discussion and negotiation, MJ thought, was probably stuck at the mental age of three. However—now visiting that age for the first time in a while—she had to admit it felt absolutely lovely.

  Maurice stood frozen, staring at her. MJ threw her wet hair back, squared her shoulders, and marched over to him like an invading army. He looked completely astonished and very frightened, though MJ suspected that was an effect mostly due to the people out there in the boat.

  “MJ—” Maurice said.

  “No sweet talk!” MJ shouted, for it was indeed the first time he had called her that since the shoot began, having constantly called “MaryJa-a-a-ane” in that nasal tone that drove her nuts. “You come inside right now, because we’re going to have a little chat! Or else I can deck you right here where you stand, you insignificant little—” Now, now, said another voice inside her, which MJ suspected was the voice of Damage Control, don’t go overboard “—little man!” She came down hard on the last word, as if it were insult enough. “Now get your butt in here!”

  She turned and marched away.

  Maurice stared, openmouthed—threw one glance out at the water, and then came after her.

  From the floors above came a patter of applause, and the sound of subdued laughter and shutting windows.

  They headed for the doors together. “And for pity’s sake,” she muttered to Maurice, “shove the flashlight down your pants or something. And afterwards, lose it.”

  They went in together, Maurice looking at MJ very strangely. So did the desk clerk, as they went by. MJ nodded to him as might a queen passing a minor courtier. She and Maurice got in the elevator together and went upstairs.

  As the elevator doors closed, from outside, MJ faintly heard a sound she had heard several times over the past few days: the whoop! whoop! whoop! of a Coast Guard cutter out in the water, followed by the two-tone Miami police boat sirens, and the faint crackle of someone using a bullhorn.

  There now, MJ thought. All I have to figure out now is what the heck it is exactly that I’m going to say to Maurice.

  * * *

  MANY miles to the west, Spider-Man dropped from the ceiling again as machine-gun fire raked up toward him. “I don’t even know you,” he said, leaping for the wall, and clinging there somewhat uncertainly. The wall had buckled when the Lizard hit it last. “Why are you shooting at me?”

  The man with the gun laughed nastily. “Breaking and entering?” He swung the gun toward Spidey again.

  Spider-Man jumped again, for the other wall this time. Out the corner of his eye he saw Curt roll groaning under a fallen table, and he hoped it was enough protection. “I didn’t have anything to do with the breaking,” he said. “The entering, yes—”

  He kept moving, though there wasn’t much room to do it in. On the floor, Venom began to stir. The man with the gun glanced at him. Guns, Spidey corrected himself. The camouflage-clad mercenary had a weapon braced against each upper arm—one of them an Uzi, the second with a heavy power pack and an odd bell-like nozzle that Spidey didn’t like the look of. The mercenary sprayed Venom with the machine gun, then made an annoyed face and shrugged when it had no effect—conscious or unconscious, the symbiote protected its master, though Spidey found himself wondering how long that condition might last.

  Bullets ricoc
heted in all directions. Enough of this, Spider-Man thought, and shot a webline at the machine gun, yanked it out of the mercenary’s grip, wrapped it up as useless, and dumped it behind some furniture. “Oh,” the man said, and actually grinned as Venom too began to get to hands and knees, glared at him, and the symbiote began to reach out pseudopodia in his direction. The mercenary pulled the trigger of the other gun.

  Spider-Man’s eyes widened and he froze as a knife of sound went straight through his head, from one ear to the other. He could feel it, a horrifying sensation, as physical as a blade. His muscles stopped working, and he fell off the wall and lay there in excruciating pain, unable even to writhe. Venom fell over sideways too, and a horrible high shrilling filled the air. The symbiote, always susceptible to sonics, stripped itself partially away from Eddie Brock’s body in a tangle of blind writhing tendrils, whipping around, desperate to escape and unable to, withering in the screeching torrent of sound.

  Another sound began to cut through the racket. For a moment Spider-Man, dazed and blinking, having trouble even seeing, let alone moving, thought it was the weapon again. But it was not. It spoke.

  “No,” it said, in a low roar. And “No!” again, and furniture rattled and crashed as it was pushed aside at the end of the room, and a figure rose up there. Six feet tall, Spidey thought dazedly. Green. Scales. Tail. But mostly teeth, at the moment. They flashed, and the tongue inside them fought to make words, and the eyes above them narrowed, looking at the mercenary.

  “Stop—it—Fischer,” the voice said—a terrible tangle of Curt Connors’s voice, the Lizard’s old voice, and the hiss of something more ancient, more dreadful, the voice of the serpent. Fischer, if that was the man’s name, stood still for a moment, staring in surprise at the clawed forearm it held out for him to see. The back of it was terribly torn, perhaps by gunfire, and the edges of what seemed an old scar showed above and below the torn place. Spidey wanted to moan just at the sight of it. But why did the Lizard look—pleased?