by Diane Duane
“Over by the Garden?”
“By the Garden,” said Alma. “The place is usually fairly busy because of all the traffic in and out of Penn. You can get in and out of the tunnels there without being noticed, usually. These days—” She shook her head. “A lot of the ‘residents’ are clearing out, heading over to Grand Central instead.”
Eddie was opening his mouth to ask how things were over there, when footsteps echoed from the other direction. Everyone’s head but Chuck’s whipped around. Linda’s hand went into her pocket without trying to look as if it did so. Eddie sat quiet. The symbiote, without doing so visibly, was moving against him, eager. Now calm down, he said to it silently. You don’t know—
But it did know, sometimes. He suspected it knew now.
Up the tunnel, three men came stalking around the corner, stopped, and stared. Because of the way the little bays were built into the side of the tunnel, and the way Alma and her people were tucked into the one they shared, all the three could see at first was Eddie. The men, though hardly more than shadows at that distance, looked briefly at each other, and the soft sound of snickering came down from that end of the tunnel.
It does know, Eddie thought. All right… let’s be ready.…
The three sauntered down into the light, easy and confident. None was older than about twenty-five, and they all, to some extent, looked like a bad cross between goths and the Hitlerjiingen. They favored the present style in soiled urban camo, and black leather with as many studs and zippers hanging off it as possible. There was not much else to choose between them, other than that the first one coming along had a brash cut which appeared to have been done with a weed-eater. The second one had apparently gone for the bald look, which didn’t do much for him, since he had pimples on his skull. The third had lank greasy hair hanging down so far in front of his eyes that he could have passed for a Yorkshire terrier.
“Well, well, well,” said the putative leader, he of the weed-eaten hair, “what have we here?” His hand was in his pocket too, and Eddie studied the pocket for bulges. It was hard to tell, in those baggy pants, what was concealed. It might have been a gun. It might have been a knife, either for the practical reason that knives are more complicated to take away from people than guns are, or the nastier reason that knives are intrinsically more frightening than guns, and many people who can deal with being shot will nonetheless run away screaming at the thought of being cut.
“Were it not for the possibility that you’re as deaf as you’re possibly blind,” Eddie said mildly, “we might tell you. But why waste time or breath?”
“Oh, a wise guy, huh?” said the leader. The other two snickered behind him. “A wise guy, huh, huh, heh heh, yeah—”
The symbiote was beginning to twitch with excitement, and Eddie knew exactly what was coming, but could only laugh. “My God,” he said, “we’ve fallen into a Three Stooges movie. Not only are you three the most hopeless and pitiful excuses for human beings that we’ve seen in a month of Sundays, but you don’t even know how to be threatening properly! We suggest you go out and try it again. Better still”—and he eyed the leader—”we suggest you just go out.”
Now the leader pulled his weapon. Yes, it was a knife, one of the little brass-collared Italian-style switchblades. Venom smiled gently, for he had seen this particular model several times before, back in San Fran, and it had a tendency to jam. Several of them had also been jammed into him, with responses that varied from useless to amusing. It didn’t matter: all those knives’ owners were history.
“Man, you’re gonna get slice-n-diced now,” said the Little Hitler leading the group. Behind him, the bald one doing the II Duce impression said, “Hey, yeah, slice-n-dice.…”
Not the Three Stooges after all. Venom thought sadly. Nothing so high-class. More like MTV. “Pitiful,” he said. But there were certainly people up on the streets, and down here in the tunnels, who would be frightened by these idiots.
He spared a glance for Alma and Linda. The two of them wore the flat, straight faces of people trying to decide how they’re going to fight to save their lives. Afraid, but resigned. The third of them, old Chuck, simply sat looking blankly at the floor.
“Well, come on, Cyrano,” Venom said, grinning at the leader. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The leader moved, with what he probably thought was a strike as fast as a snake. But he was hardly half-wound up for what was going to be a roundhouse slash to Eddie’s gut before a thick tentacle had whipped out and caught his arm, wrapping around it exactly as one of those striking snakes might have. The young man’s eyes bugged out somewhat satisfactorily, then bugged harder, and he screamed at the top of his lungs. The tendril twisted and broke the arm straight across the radius and ulna, leaving two perfectly matched greenstick fractures sticking up out of the flesh of the arm, blood spurting from the torn brachial artery which the splintered bone of the radius had sliced on its way out.
All right, Eddie thought to the symbiote. But it was already flushing dark all around him again, its protective mask growing and stretching up over his head, growing all its teeth. It whipped out about thirty more tentacles, pinioning the three from elbows to knees, their arms strained behind them, a few tentacles wrapping around their mouths for best effect. Their muffled moans and shrieks that couldn’t escape were music to Eddie’s ears.
He turned his head quickly and ordered the symbiote back off his face for a moment, shedding the teeth and tongue again just for the moment. To Alma he said, “Look… I’m not going to mess up the area with this—” He gestured at the straggling three. “What’s the saying? ‘Pack out your trash’?”
She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and finally managed a curt nod.
“The place where Chuck’s been,” he said, “it’s over by the Garden?”
“That’s right. Listen,” she said.
Eddie stopped as the symbiote lifted the three punks in its tentacles, and he prepared to carry them away. “Listen now,” Alma said. “You be careful. Whatever it is over there—”
“I think I can manage,” he said gently. “Thank you, Alma. You take care too.”
As he lifted the punks up high, the teeth and talons and long slavering tongue settled upon him again. Venom carried the three a good way into the darkness. He waited until he was at least half a mile further down the tunnel, and a level further down, before he allowed the screaming to start. Even then, he muffled most of it, not wanting to alarm Alma too much, or her young friend with the gun, and most of all not wanting to alarm the silent man who didn’t speak or look up.
It took him a while to clear away the bodies, but he did it with some care. He had no idea how many others like Alma and her group—innocent refugees from the world above—might be down here. Those people he had no desire to frighten. The others who roved this world—the predators, the cruel ones—he didn’t mind scaring them as badly as possible. But at a distance, they were sometimes hard to tell apart.
Once he was finished, Venom went on. It was slow work, finding his way. Even though his memory of the maps was good, the tunnels twisted, confusing even someone who knew where he was supposed to be going. With care he worked his way upward and over into the general neighborhood of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street.
For courtesy’s sake, and in case he should meet any more innocents, Eddie returned to his “street clothes.” But he met no more people. Perhaps it was early for most people to be heading underground, yet. He saw enough signs of where they had been; not everyone down here was as tidy as Alma and her group. He began to see, as well, indications that something else had been down here.
He started finding scraps of metal on the floor, and splashes of—it was hard to say what. It had no specific color, coming in dark sludgy splashes here and there on walls or floor. The metallic pieces, though, had definitely been torn from barrels or canisters.
In one long dark corridor where many of the lights were gone, he found four or five scraps of the same color�
��that sort of bilious yellow which marks the barrels in which toxic waste is stored. Using the symbiote’s tendrils to handle them—as far as he knew, the symbiote was radiation-proof—he picked up two of these scraps and examined them as closely as he could in the dim light. On one, the edges were sliced clean, as if someone had used a knife sharp enough to cut steel. On another, though, one of the edges was jaggedly cut. You could almost use it for a saw, Venom thought, looking at it carefully. He knew the bite pattern of a mouthful of big fangs by now. But to see it in metal was a bit of a surprise.
He put the fragments down and continued, going very carefully and listening constantly. As he had gone along, there had been several places where two or three tunnels conjoined and ran together—different utilities, usually, phone in one, cable or steam in another. Then after a quarter-mile or so, they might part again. Normally, these multiple-joint tunnels were better lit—probably, Venom suspected, because the utility people had to be in them more often. But as he continued now, he noticed that there were progressively fewer working lights in the tunnels.
He examined several of the lights as he passed them. They were not smashed, but appeared to have been cut open cleanly as if someone had come along with a diamond-bladed glass saw, slashing both the bulb protector and the bulb itself.
The tunnel was growing very dark now. Venom came to one of those places where there were almost no lights, where several tunnels met again. Ahead of him he saw, although most dimly, walls which were further apart, a ceiling higher than the one he stood under now.
Into that space Venom came, stopped, looked around him. All the floor of the place was littered with tom and shredded metal; here and there, almost invisible, was a splash of something darker than the walls. Not blood, he thought, something else. There was a rank, chemical smell about the place.
Now then, he thought, and stood very still, and listened.
He heard a faint scraping sound—coming, not from further down the tunnel, but from somewhere nearby. He cast around him. Off to one side, he saw another access shaft, with a ladder reaching straight down into the next level.
He listened hard. With the echoes down here, it was sometimes hard to tell, but the noise seemed to be coming from down there. All right, he thought. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s just check this quickly.
The symbiote was shivering with excitement now. It flushed dark again, surrounded him with its full complement of fangs and the flickering, slavering tongue, blazoned itself with the white spider-shape across his chest. It was eager; it wanted more of what it had just had.
Patience, he thought to it. He went over to the open access shaft and stood looking down, listening. There was only the very faintest light down there—perhaps just one of these dim bulbs left burning. And he could hear the sound of something scraping, rattling, rustling—metal against metal. Not rats—too big for rats.
This is the point, he thought to himself with a slight smile under the cowl, in a horror movie, when the person hears those noises and goes down to see what’s making them, and the audience immediately understands that the character in question is brain-damaged. But never mind. In this movie, I am the monster.
Very slowly and softly, using tendrils and hands and feet, he went down the ladder. Halfway down, he reached for the next rung—and found that there wasn’t any more. Air gaped under him. The tentacles let him down, but not too softly. He came down with a clang, some three or four feet further down than he’d thought the floor would be. The ladder might have had an extension once, but it was gone now.
Venom stood dead still in the near-total darkness, letting his eyes get used to it as quickly as they could. The rustling stopped abruptly, and then, very slowly and softly, started again.
Should have brought a flashlight, he thought. But it was too late for that now. He could have cursed his eyes for taking so long to adapt, but cursing wouldn’t have helped and would only have attracted more attention—and he already had more of it fixed on him than he wanted.
He found himself staring at a shape so black it nearly vanished into the darkness. He gaped at it in shock. Slowly it opened great pale moons of eyes, and by their glow he could see, though dimly.
It is unnerving enough to come around a corner in a big city, even one as big as New York, and nearly run into someone who looks so much like you that you’re tempted to stop with your mouth hanging open, and stare. It’s worse yet to run into such a person deep under the ground, in near-total darkness. And, Eddie discovered, it’s worst of all when you are Venom.
The creature at which he was staring—and open-mouthed, for whether out of generalized bloodthirstiness, or specific jealousy, the symbiote was slavering at the sight of the thing—was bipedal, with bilateral symmetry and a head at the top. At the moment, it was crouched slightly, looking at him, and line after line of writhing tendrils wound away from it, wreathing in the air, reaching toward him. Its head was up, and the weaving motion was too swift and purposeful to have anything hypnotic about it. Smelling, Eddie thought. Smelling for what?
Reluctantly, after that, came the second thought: It’s not Hobgoblin himself, then. Possibly some creature of his, though. “We don’t know what or who you are,” he said softly, moving toward it, “but you’ve picked the wrong person to impersonate.”
Those pale eyes stared at him. Some of the tentacles, he saw, were still clutching the remnants of a torn-up canister. “Who are you?” he said. “Some new punk super villain who doesn’t have the guts to work out an identity of his own? Some kind of shapechanger? There have been some of those around every now and then. But it doesn’t matter.” He stalked forward. “You have been killing innocent people,” Venom said, “in our likeness… our name. And for that”—the symbiote began reaching hungry pseudopodia toward its rival—“there can be only one punishment!”
He let the symbiote go. Instantly it flung a hundred tentacles at the thing, wrapping it around. Venom was not surprised when the creature wrapped as many around him. But he was very surprised when it effortlessly picked him up and threw him halfway down that tunnel, to land with a bone-bruising crash among the torn pieces of canister.
He struggled to his feet, the symbiote helping him with outflung tentacles that whirled and writhed around him now like angry snakes. The symbiote was not used to being tossed around like this. Come to think of it, neither was he. The symbiote caught his rage, and after a breath or two he could hardly see his quarry for the storm of tendrils streaming out toward the fake-Venom as he headed back toward it.
“How many other innocents have you killed?” Venom hissed angrily. “People who won’t be missed because no one knows that they’re here and no one cares? How many—” He reached out, directing the symbiote to make the tentacles thicker, stronger this time. He wrapped them around the creature like vines around a tree, exerting an awful pressure to crush, and the tongue lanced out too, meaning to wrap around the head and rip the top of it off, anticipating the sweet brains inside.
Only something else grabbed his tongue, and nearly pulled it right out of the symbiote. The symbiote screamed soundlessly inside him, a feeling like a nail through his brain, a sound Venom had heard in fights before, and had learned to dread. Physical pain was something it rarely felt until it was driven very close to what it could no longer bear.
It was definitely time to worry now. The creature he was fighting still had him by the symbiote’s tongue, and was pulling with such brutality that he thought his own head would be pulled off, no matter how the symbiote resisted. It was pulling him toward its fangs, fangs which had had no problem dealing with metal canisters full of nuclear waste. He tried desperately to push himself away, his bones cracking with the strain.
The creature pulled him closer and closer, its tongue flickering out, wrapping itself around Venom’s head in a parody of what the symbiote had planned. The pressure began crushing in on him.
Sheer revulsion did what calculation hadn’t been able to do, as the symbiot
e caught his terror and despair. It flung out tendrils to either side, anchored itself to the walls, insinuated other tendrils between him and the creature, and simply pushed all at once, one mighty leverage-breaking movement that shot him right across the tunnel again and into the far wall. He hit hard and slid to the floor, the tentacles unable to react quickly enough to cushion the impact.
The cure’s almost worse than the disease, he thought, struggling back to his feet again. There was a roaring in his head, partly the pounding of blood vessels recovering from a moment of much-increased intracranial pressure, partly the rage of the symbiote—occasionally he would hear it this way, frustrated, angry. It pushed him to his feet and launched itself toward the creature.
He tried to stop it, preferring a more considered kind of attack, but the creature’s tentacles and the symbiote’s were already tangling together. Venom found himself at the far end of an increasingly violent tug-of-war—wreaths and ropes of pseudopodia knotting and pulling. The symbiote had anchored itself behind some cable conduits on the far wall. They were beginning to creak dangerously as the stress of the tug-of-war began pulling them out of the wall. All right, Venom thought savagely, let’s finish this!
He began to coach the symbiote, showing it where to put the tentacles around their adversary to best advantage—head, limbs, waist. They pulled. The pains in his joints began again, and the pains in his back, and still they pulled. Venom was braced as well as he could be, as well as the symbiote could manage, but it wasn’t enough. He felt the pains as his knees, helping to brace, started to bend forward the wrong way; in his arms, as his shoulders threatened to dislocate; in his neck and upper back, as slowly, slowly, the creature pulled him closer. The pair struggled, as each tried to get another grip on the other’s head. Come on! Venom urged the symbiote. Save us! Help me save us! Only you can do this—only we can do this—come on!
