Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Jim swore, and ignored the pain the best he could, and clumsily used his hands to sit Harry up and shake him a little. “You okay? Say something!”

  Harry said something, all right: words that would have made Flora mutter something about being a bad example to the kids. Then Harry added, “I was feeling better until you started shaking my head back and forth. Cut it out!”

  “All right. Can you get up? We’ve gotta get out of here. I haven’t got my Swiss army knife with me. Go on over to the bit and cut those off you. Tom?”

  Tom was still unconscious. “We’re gonna have to carry him out,” Jim said, “and I don’t like the look of that head. We’re gonna have to be real careful with him. I wish we had a backboard or something.”

  “There’s a piece of plywood over here,” Harry said, sawing away at his binders with the herringbone blade. “I guess we could use that—”

  “Okay. Get it. Hank—”

  Hank sat there, shivering. When Jim came to him, he said, “They said they were gonna burn me. They said they were gonna burn me, I couldn’t do anything else!”

  “Of course you couldn’t do anything else,” Jim said, furious that “they” should so casually reduce a nice, kind man to this trembling shape. Bastards! Let me catch you sometime without your fancy guns.… “Forget it, Hank. Except for the boss, no one’s going to talk to you about this—we’re gonna see to it. All right? Now get up and get over there and get loose so you can help us with Tom.”

  Harry got himself cut free and went over to get the “backboard” while Jim helped get Hank free. Then carefully, the way they had been trained, they lifted Tom onto the piece of plywood. “Pity we can’t go up as fast as they came down,” Jim muttered.

  “No, thanks,” Hank said. “I saw you guys come down, after the first batch jumped us. Damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  “Well, don’t have one now, for God’s sake,” Jim said. “What time is it?”

  Harry looked at the sky. “Near enough to dawn—” He glanced at his watch. “Damn thing’s not going,” he said. “Yours going?”

  Jim and Hank looked at their watches. Both of them were stopped as well. “Like something out of a movie,” Jim said morosely. “Guys dressed like aliens…. Never mind, let’s get going. He needs a doctor.”

  They walked up the switchback road as fast as they dared. It was not fast enough for Jim. He couldn’t get rid of the idea that, down in the crater, something very bad was going to happen. And about halfway up the road, halfway up the terraces, the feeling grew stronger than before. “C’mon,” he said to the others, “we’ve gotta hurry, let’s hurry!”

  To his great relief, none of them asked, “Why?” Hank and Harry saw him look over his shoulder, and they looked too—and they hurried. Tom, lying on his back with their jackets wadded on either side of his head to hold it still, never moved, only moaned a little every now and then. Jim hoped he wouldn’t wake up just now. He was likely to slow them down, and if there was one thing Jim was sure about right now, it was that it would be very bad if they slowed down.

  He could barely believe it when they actually came out at the top of the switchback road onto the ring road that led around the site.

  “They’ve killed the phones,” said Jim, “but there’s that cell phone in the office. I don’t think they got that. Come on.”

  As quickly as they dared, and making better speed now that they weren’t climbing, they made their way around the ring road to the little security hut near where the chain-link fence and the gate met the road. There was no point trying to bring Tom into the hut; he was just as well left outside. Carefully, in the slowly growing light, they put him down on the ground, and Jim ran in to get the cell phone.

  As he came out again he hurriedly dialed the emergency day-or-night number for the district Consolidated office in New York. A somewhat bored voice said, “Consolidated security…”

  “Jeff? It’s Jim Heffernan. Listen, there’s been a break-in at the site.” He looked out across the diggings in dawn’s early light, wondering at how peaceful it seemed now after all the madness of the night.

  “Break-in? Who was it?”

  “A bunch of guys dressed in black like commandos or ninjas or something—and one guy who was really strange. This is gonna need a major debrief, Jeff, and we need a doctor right now for Tom. One of these guys hit him hard with a gun, and he’s been unconscious for half an hour at least. These guys were fooling around with the new bore, Jeff, the deep one.”

  “All right, all right, listen. Let me get Ralph Molinari on the line, he’s the one you want to talk to about this kind of thing. You tell him everything that’s happened, and—”

  Fizz. And a dead phone.

  Jim, looking out over the site, saw it happen: something he thought he had seen films of, and more recently, videotape of, in the South Pacific, when people who should have known better were playing with their toys. He felt it, too—the ground booming and jumping under his feet as if a giant had kicked it, the ground rippling like a liquid thing. He saw the top of the wave, where it touched the surface of the earth, radiate outward like the ripple from a stone chucked into a pool, watched the ripple travel, the dust puffing up behind it. And then as the shock wave passed them by, making the ground right under them jump again, he saw the whole site sag. The crater subsided into itself as if half the stone and gravel and dirt in it were suddenly pulverized finer than they had been before, settling deeper, sagging down, subsiding into a shallow, churned-up crater. Dust arose and blew gently off to one side. Jim found himself desperately grateful that the dust wasn’t blowing toward them.

  Jim shook the cell phone again, half hoping that it would come back to life, but it wouldn’t. It was dead—and why wouldn’t it be, this close to an electromagnetic pulse? He doubted it would ever work again.

  “Not my hundred fifty bucks, anyway,” he said softly and put it in his pocket. Then he went over to one of the logs that separated the parking lot from the site proper and sat down on it.

  Hank and Harry joined him. They sat there quietly, the three of them, for what seemed like a long while, none of them saying out loud what they were thinking. Jim thought he knew what those thoughts were. If that was what I think it was, were we far enough away? Are we going to be alive in five years, or ten? I don’t feel any burns—but then early on, you wouldn’t.…

  It took about twenty minutes for the police and the ambulance to get there, called by the New York office. One of the cops was Rod Cummings, who Jim knew fairly well. They drank and played pool together down at Bob’s Bar in town. Rod looked down at the hole and said, “Dear God on a moped.”

  “Yeah,” said Jim.

  The ambulance people got busy with Tom. As they carried him away. Rod said very softly, “CalTech called the station and the state emergency services. Asked whether there had been an earthquake.”

  “Nope,” Jim said. “Nothing like that. A disaster, though….” He couldn’t get rid of the image of that stocky shape with the metallic arms, looking down at Harry as if from a great distance, and saying, “Ah, the human condition. Easily remedied, fortunately.”

  Jim shook all over as he watched the paramedics put Tom into the ambulance, on a real backboard this time. “He’ll be okay, won’t he?”

  “I think so. The question is,” and Rod looked down at the crater, from which vague plumes of dust still very gently rose, “will we?”

  ONE

  “PETEY?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Where’s the hand cream?”

  Peter Parker was in his apartment in New York. It was one of many things for which, at the moment, he gave thanks. He was in the tub, up to his nose in suds. He lay there staring at the ceiling, and considered briefly that it was going to need repainting again soon; the dampness was making the paint over the tub bubble.

  “Which hand cream specifically?” Peter said after a moment.

  Mary Jane Watson-Parker, resplendent in a calico cotton bathr
obe with a torn pocket, put her head around the bathroom door, looking vaguely worried. “It’s the apple one, with the cuticle stuff.”

  “What’s the bottle look like?”

  “It wasn’t a bottle. It was a kind of little bucket.”

  Peter sighed. A week ago, he had been washing Everglades muck out of his Spider-Man costume, thinking that if he could just get back to New York, he’d never complain about anything again. How quickly things can change, he thought, and said aloud, “A little bucket…”

  “It had a design on the top,” MJ said. “A little apple.”

  Peter closed his eyes, thought for a moment. The house had been filling with peculiar cosmetics recently, but he really couldn’t complain about that, as it meant that his wife was working, rather than merely making herself more attractive than she already was—a tough job, if you asked him. “Bucket,” he said, and opened his eyes. “Kind of a little tub thing? Okay. In the kitchen, on the counter by the dishwasher, there are about six pots and tubs and so forth there. All the little short squat ones were there.”

  “I looked,” MJ said fretfully. “It’s not there.”

  Peter closed his eyes again, trying to see where he had last seen the thing. “Not there, huh? Okay. Try on top of the refrigerator.”

  “The refrigerator? Why would I put anything there?”

  Peter restrained himself from suggesting numerous possibilities. “Just go look.”

  A brief silence ensued. A moment later, MJ reappeared, smiling a little sheepishly, with a pot of hand cream in one hand. “It was behind the Rice Krispies,” she said.

  “Yeah, I thought I saw you use it first thing this morning,” said Peter.

  He sank back into the bubbles, and MJ smiled at him, less sheepishly this time. “You’re being awfully good about all this.”

  “It’s money,” he said, smiling back. “Why not?”

  She went off, probably to do something about her cuticles. MJ’s hands had become more than usually useful in the week since they had come home from Florida. In a way, Peter regretted it. He had half hoped they would have at least a week or so to themselves to sit quietly, not doing any more work than they had to, and trying to recover a little from the rather frenetic period of heat, humidity, and super heroing without skyscrapers. But it seemed that fate had intended otherwise.

  It had been a lively time. Work had taken them down there initially. First MJ’s intention to hunt for more modeling work in the Miami area with one of the new PR or modeling agencies relocating down that way, and then, on Peter’s end, when he was sent down by the Daily Bugle to help investigate some strange goings-on at Cape Canaveral, things that wound up involving not only his old acquaintance the Lizard, but Venom as well. That business was now cleared up, or as much as it was going to be anytime soon. The Lizard had vanished again; Venom had taken himself away with what Peter knew he would consider “unfinished business”—namely the killing of Spider-Man—still incomplete. But even Venom, Peter thought, must want a few days off every now and then.…

  While Peter, as Spider-Man, had been swinging all over the countryside—a matter not made simpler by the generally low-lying quality of Floridian flora, and the fact that only in Miami proper were there skyscrapers worthy of the name—MJ had been modeling away at her best speed. She had been working, among other things, on magazine shoots and some other light photographic work. She had also been indulging in her usual fairly frenetic networking—it would not have been MJ’s style to ignore the possibility of future work, even though she was presently working her butt off. Between work sessions in a bar in South Beach, she had met, completely by chance, another model who knew someone who knew someone in New York who needed a hand model.

  Peter had blinked at her when she told him about this the first time. “You mean to tell me,” he’d said, “that there are actually people who just show their hands and nothing else?”

  “Sure,” MJ said. “You see them on TV. I bet you’ve just never thought about it before. Commercials for jewelry and softer-than-soft dishwashing liquid and hand creams and rubber gloves—things like that. It’s all hand models.”

  They had been sitting in a restaurant at the time. MJ had been admiring her nails in a general sort of way. “Mikey—he’s the underwear model I was telling you about—Mikey said that it’s really hard to find a hand model without any wrinkles or spots at my age, the way the ozone layer’s been changing the past ten years. It seems everyone suddenly has freckles and stuff. Whereas I”—and she glanced again at one hand in bemusement—“I just don’t seem to have had that problem.”

  “That,” Peter said, “is because you always keep your hands in your pockets. Most unladylike.”

  “Yeah.” She giggled. “That’s what they all said when I was growing up. If I’d known then that I could get a thousand bucks a day for it, I’d have ignored them even harder than I did.”

  “A thousand—! You’re kidding, right?”

  She shook her head. “If you can find the work,” MJ said. “It’s very specialized, and there just aren’t that many people who can do it—whose hands still look perfect up close to the hot lights and the big sensitive camera lenses. Once you start doing it”—she smiled; it was a slightly feral look—“they tend to keep you on, and they tend to give you as much more of that kind of work as you can take.”

  “A thousand bucks a day. I think you can probably take a fair amount of it.”

  Peter sighed at the memory and blew out so big a breath that bubbles blew off the top layer of suds. From the next room came the sound of a cheerful woman la-laing to herself as she rubbed cream into her hands. Peter had to be amused by it. Normally MJ couldn’t have cared less about her hands, at least in terms of doing anything to them in the course of a day. But the photographer on the shoot she was presently working had yelled at her that she needed to be “moister,” and after some confusion on all sides, it was discovered that he meant he wanted her to use more moisturizer. So she had begun doing so, and had started meeting a couple of other hand models whom the director of the present project suggested she have a chat with. Suddenly, on their advice, the house had begun filling up with—Peter rolled his eyes a little, in amusement—tubs and pots and bottles and heaven only knew what else.

  Still, the timing suited him. Peter had made a fair pile of money from the pictures he took of Spider-Man in the attack on the Space Shuttle at the Cape, and the resolution of that attack. The picture that had caught the bomb going off after it had been dropped into the flame-suppression tank at the bottom of the Shuttle launch facility had made the front page of the Bugle, much to his delight, and he had picked up a bonus for it. But that bonus and the money from the AP wire wouldn’t last him forever. MJ had satisfied herself that the Miami modeling scene wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be in terms of steady work, so, happily enough, they had come home again when both their assignments were done—only to find that instead of having a few days to call their own, MJ had to go straight out and spend ten to twelve hours a day with her hands artistically decked in what the ad described as “Ever-Lovin’ Bubbles.” It was just dishwashing detergent, which Peter found it beyond his ability to love even temporarily, let alone forever. But at a thousand bucks a day….

  He felt around under the water for the soap. Things could have been a lot worse. They had been a lot worse, but after this last stint of work, each of them had managed to contribute enough money to the household kitty to get the credit cards paid down—at least to the point where they could use them—and to put a small but reassuring lump into their joint savings account. It was a little bit weird, actually, to feel somewhat secure, to feel that for the next little while, they didn’t have to scramble desperately just to keep groceries in the kitchen and the landlord happy.

  Peter looked forward to spending the next few weeks doing assignment work at the Bugle again, and having the leisure, as Spider-Man, to webswing normally again, among proper tall buildings placed close together,
in a city where he knew his way around, and in a place where you could be fairly sure that if you hit the ground suddenly, you wouldn’t be on top of an alligator. He had found Florida pleasant enough for a short visit, but it was a little too flat for his taste, and there were things living in the wet part of the flatness that considered human beings, Spider-Man and others, to be perfectly acceptable hors d’oeuvres.

  He heard the front door clunk and glanced up at the clock on the top shelf above the towels. Nine-thirty: MJ was going down to get the mail. Peter lay back in the tub again, gazed up at the ceiling, and thought, We could try a new color in here next time. That beige is really beginning to look like masking tape.

  After a few minutes the door went clunk again, and he heard the jingle as MJ chucked her keys onto the telephone table. “Anything interesting?” he said.

  “Mmnh,” she said, going through whatever she was carrying as she came toward the bathroom. “Junk mail, junk mail, restaurant menu…”

  “Which restaurant?”

  “Uh.” A pause; she appeared in the bathroom door in jeans and T-shirt. “The Blarney Rock.”

  “That’s a restaurant? I thought it was a bar.”

  “The bar’s opened a restaurant. Real Irish food.”

  Peter made a bemused expression. “Corned beef and cabbage?”

  “Nope, it says specifically they don’t do that. ‘Boxty’—” She furrowed her brow. “What’s that? For that matter, what’s ‘champ’? Or ‘colcannon’?”