Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “Come on, Connors,” he said. “They’re helpless. They’ll be dead in a minute. Let’s get out of here—the Boss has work for us.”

  “No,” the Lizard said, and tossed the furniture aside, and made slowly for Fischer. He may have been suffering from the sonics, but not so much as Spidey and Venom were. Then again, Spider-Man thought, still very dazed, lizards don’t depend a lot on hearing, by and large.

  “They came here to kill you!” Fischer yelled, starting slowly to back toward the door. “Finish them and come on!”

  Spider-Man tried to get up on hands and knees but couldn’t even manage that. His nerves and muscles seemed to be refusing to answer him. The shrieking of the symbiote was getting more deafening all the time, heading for crescendo. Spidey wasn’t sure how long it could survive this onslaught.

  “They—did not,” the Lizard said, struggling to get the words out; he glanced at Spider-Man as he passed, stepped over him, and headed for Fischer. “He—did not.”

  “But, Venom!” Fischer yelled, still backing up. “He thinks you’re an animal, a nut—he’s a monster, kill him!”

  “I doubt he is—so—simplistic,” the Lizard said. Spider-Man tried to roll over again, feeling that he wanted to either cheer or weep. That was certainly Curt’s voice showing through there, and Curt’s words forcing their way through the saurian throat. “Venom—might kill me for his own reasons—but he would not—think me an—animal, Fischer. As you have. As you—have taunted me—again and again—even when in manshape—with being really the animal, and humanity—just a disguise. As you wear—yours, Fischer. Just—a disguise.”

  Fischer backed up a couple of feet more. The Lizard reached out claws to him. Fischer ducked back from them but didn’t see until too late, and couldn’t avoid, the huge sharp tail which came lancing around from the side and knocked the weapon out of his hands, smashing it against the wall. Immediately the horrible shrilling of the symbiote stopped, its many twisting strands fell back toward Brock’s body and started to reunite, consolidating once again into the costume. Venom stirred, moaned.

  “You’re crazy!” Fischer screamed. “They’re here to kill you!”

  “They—made—no such attempt,” the Lizard said, still advancing while Fischer backed away. “You, however—have made—your intentions plain.” He glanced over his shoulder, saw Spider-Man getting to his feet again, saw Venom rolling over to get onto hands and knees. “You had better—get out—while there are still only—two of us, who are—prepared to deal with you humanely. The third—will not trouble—”

  Venom staggered to his feet, threw a most bemused look at the Lizard, who returned it. Spider-Man swore he saw the two of them nod to each other. Then Venom turned his attention to Fischer. He opened his mouth and grinned with every fang. The symbiote’s tongue flicked out.

  Fischer turned and fled. Spider-Man, still weak, went after him. As he stumbled through the doorway, he saw Fischer slap a hand down on a control box in the next room, then throw himself out the door and go pounding down the stairs.

  His spider-sense stung him hard, and he saw the glimmer of an LED in the next room, saying, 6… 5… 4…

  “Get out,” he yelled at the other two, “it’s a bomb, come on!” Behind him Spider-Man got a confused image of movement, but he didn’t linger to see who went where. In a situation like this it was every man, lizard, or symbiote/human team for him-or theirself. He dove out the door, the way Fischer had gone, and got the briefest glimpse of the man making quite literally for the tall timber, slipping through the trees.

  Life went white. The blast caught Spidey in the back and threw him at the trees, but it propagated fast enough to catch the trees, too, and throw them out in front of him. He was dumped headfirst into a morass of moss, mud, and water, and the air whined above him as cypress wood and ripped-up orchids and pieces of prefab architecture went flying by at speeds which would normally have required filing a flight plan. The thunder of the explosion died away after a few seconds, and for the second time that day, it rained on Spider-Man. Not clean water, though, but mud and muck and leaves and more moss and slime and bugs and freshwater leeches, and finally some very surprised frogs.

  After a few moments which he spent trying to sort out the ringing in his ears from the ringing silence that followed the explosion, Spider-Man staggered to his feet again and started back toward where the building had been. There was precious little of it left, or, for that matter, of the rest of the hammock in which it had been secreted. Where it had stood was mostly a large hole, rapidly filling with water.

  He cursed silently. The odds of a normal person surviving that—

  Except that none of us are all that normal.

  “Spider-Man,” said a voice behind him.

  He turned.

  “Curt?”

  The Lizard dropped his lower jaw in the closest approximation of a grin. “Not—for long,” he said painfully. “This—won’t last. A temporary effect. The last dose of serum—it was—” The Lizard fought with his breath for a moment, or perhaps with something else.

  “Never mind,” he said. “The hydrogel—helped a little to slow the release, but—still dosage problems—” He gasped. “Slipping now. Spider-Man—Martha, William.”

  “I’ll take them a message,” Spidey said.

  “Tell them I—love them, but I—can’t come home now. So close, I’m so close—just this lucid moment between states is—such a stride.” He struggled for a few breaths during which nothing came out of his throat but growls, and Spider-Man wondered whether the Lizard would go for his throat again. But the Lizard shook his head, gathered his strength again. “But it won’t last. There are—probably side effects from the—neural control chip they had implanted in me, when they—sent me out to make—distractions for thefts.” He lifted the torn arm. “Atypical hyperstimulation and—paleotrophic myelin regeneration, I’d guess. A—good turn—they didn’t mean to do. But it’s a once-off effect. Will—have to reconstruct, now, do it all over. Tell them I can’t come back. Not until I’m well—”

  “Curt,” Spider-Man said, “believe me. They wouldn’t care whether you were well or not. Just go home. Let me help you—please.”

  The Lizard shook his head sadly, wearing an expression like a dinosaur contemplating extinction. “Home. Oh, I want to go home, and just be me, with them—”

  His face twisted suddenly out of shape. The eyes went utterly saurian—but flickered back into human expression again. “Not much—time now,” the Lizard said, infinitely sad. “I love them—oh, I love them. The most important thing. Never said it enough—now it seems like all I say, all I think, when I can speak—” The sheer pain in the voice choked it, turned it into a moan, then the moan turned into a roar—

  Spider-Man ducked as the claw swiped out at him. When he straightened, all there was to be seen was a scaled, shining form, loping away into the paling night, under the declining moon. As it went, it roared, like a wounded thing, and there were tears in the roar.

  Spidey stood still and watched him until he was out of sight, his eyes burning.

  After a while he moved around the explosion site again and spent half an hour or so looking for any sign of Venom. There was none. The symbiote is probably recovering from that sonic whammy, Spider-Man thought. Venom was probably thrown in the other direction and decided to get out and recoup his strength somewhere quiet. Until he can get at me later, Spidey thought, or the Lizard, or both of us.

  But he couldn’t quite forget that strange look that Venom and the Lizard had exchanged: the “animal” and the “monster” sharing their humanity for a moment in the face of the inhuman human threatening them both.

  Not a bad way to start the day, Spider-Man thought, and sighed. He made his way out past the shattered stumps of the cypresses, into the open Everglades, and looked east, where the false dawn was slowly becoming true. Then, under the mask, he acquired a slow smile, reached into the pouch under his costume, and pulled out his phone t
o make a call.

  TWELVE

  HE knocked on the door of the hotel room.

  It opened. Vreni looked at him, and her eyes widened. She said, “Where have you been?! I’ve been calling your mobile, but you had it turned off—”

  Peter handed her a yellow manila envelope and held up a finger. “Don’t say anything,” he said, “until you look at them.”

  Vreni shut her mouth, though plainly it was an effort. She sat down at the table by the window, opened the envelope, and her mouth opened again, and stayed that way, as she started going through the prints.

  “My God,” she said. “My God.” And she turned over a couple more of them, and then stopped at the one which Peter considered the prize of the collection, the bomb going off in the Sound Suppression tank, water leaping in the air all over, while in the background Spider-Man looked down from high above, on the gantry. Vreni looked up at him and said, “How did you do this? Do you channel for Eastman’s ghost or something? We’ve got to get these on the wire. Do you know how much the Associated Press is going to pay you for these? How did you get these?”

  “That Questar,” Peter said, in sincere misdirection, “is a terrific piece of equipment.”

  Vreni looked at him with an expression of profound skepticism. “All right,” she said. “I won’t ask you how you get these, if you won’t ask me about the half-track in Bosnia.”

  “I thought it was an armored personnel carrier,” Peter said.

  Vreni snorted. “Never believe the first version of a story.”

  “So,” Peter said, “where are you with yours? Did Kate like it?”

  “Oh yes,” Vreni said, and to Peter’s astonishment, she looked sour. “She says she wants to send me to England, to look into the collapse of another merchant bank. Damn overseas assignments! I don’t want foreign muck. I want to stay here and rake good old-fashioned star-spangled muck!”

  “Yell at her,” Peter said mildly. “She likes that.”

  “I know. Bad habit. She got it from Jameson.” Vreni sighed then, and sat down a moment, starting to go through her purse, hunting something. “But we made good connections on this one. The German government has apparently started an inquiry of Gottschalk’s bank. I finally caught up with him,” she said. “Did I mention that?”

  “Not since we talked last.”

  “Yes. Took me hours and hours to find him, but when we finally met, he seemed most eager to talk. Something to do with someone he’d seen before me. He wouldn’t say who.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows. He had his own ideas about who that might be.

  “Meanwhile, the feds are starting a RICO investigation of CCRC’s doings down here,” Vreni said.

  “You don’t look pleased.”

  “They should have done this on their own, six weeks ago,” Vreni said, sounding disgusted, “after the New York craziness started to surface. What were they waiting for, an engraved invitation?” She came up with a soft-tip pen from her purse and started indicating crop marks at the edges of the photographs. “They’ll go into more depth this time, or they’ll look really stupid.

  “But, my gosh,” Vreni said, sounding more satisfied, “what a haul of stuff, down on the south coast. That ink! Do you know how much that stuff is worth? The story’s a bombshell. Ripples are spreading all over, in Europe. Corruption in Brussels! Government collaboration with racketeering in Germany! It’s a long way yet to the bottom of this can of worms.” Her eyes shone.

  “Wait a minute. Don’t Brussels and Germany count as ‘foreign muck’?”

  “Well, yeah, but—” Vreni put aside a print and eyed the next one. “Anyway, the followups on this story alone are going to keep me busy for weeks. The boondoggling in NASA alone is worth a Sunday supplement.” She glanced at him, amused. “Still no telling,” she added, “what was going on with that reactor.”

  “Oh?”

  Vreni shook her head. “Can’t get a straight answer out of them at the moment. They’re claiming that the rumors of difficulties with the security, and the supposed change of reactors, was all part of some kind of cover operation, meant to draw these terrorists who hit the place the other night out into the open. Naturally everybody’s so horrified by what almost happened on the pad that no one’s asking the hard questions. Give it a couple of weeks, though, and once everyone gets over being relieved for the astronauts’ sake, the gloves will come off.”

  Peter nodded, wondering who had manufactured this particular story. He rather suspected that the change in names from CHERM to MPAPPS had had more to do with good old-fashioned misdirection, and a piece of vital “test material” going missing. He had not pressed Garrett very far on the subject, and he had an idea she wouldn’t have told him if he had. “What about the Lizard angle?”

  Vreni sighed. “We wasted so much time on that,” she said. “I wish we hadn’t bothered. What he was doing, involved in small-time thefts, I can’t imagine. He seems to have vanished again, though. A blind alley. In retrospect, I wish we could have spent that time at Canaveral.”

  Good, Peter thought. I’d rather leave Curt out of all of this and spare him—and Martha and William—the grief.

  She finished with the photos. “Well,” Vreni said, “these are really nice. Should make you a tidy little fee from AP after the Bugle gets its cut. Nobody else has anything so immediate or detailed.” She glanced sidewise at him. “Come on, let’s get down to the bureau. Then—” She looked closely at him. “Look at those circles under your eyes! Haven’t you been sleeping?”

  “Well,” he said, “last night was a little long.”

  “I know the feeling. Come on, let’s go start getting you rich and me famous.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “If promises are all that life offers you, kid,” Vreni said as they headed out, “grab ’em and shake ’em till they squeak. They’re better than nothing.”

  * * *

  FAIRLY late that afternoon, as sunset was lengthening the shadows in the Connorses’ back yard, a tall shape in red and blue swung down on a web from the nearest telephone pole and landed softly in the well-trampled grass. Quietly he slipped up to the patio doors and knocked.

  A head poked around into the living room from the kitchen. “Spider-Man!”

  “Hey, William! Is your mom around?”

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  A few minutes later, Spidey was ensconced in the living room again. “No tea, Martha,” he said, “thanks. It’s a flying visit only.”

  “You mean swinging,” William said, grinning.

  Martha was wearing a smile for her guest, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You’ve seen Curt,” she said.

  “I’ve seen the Lizard,” Spidey said, “and talked with him, yes.”

  “Talked with him?”

  He told them the story, with some discreet editing. “He was very definite,” Spider-Man said, “that his condition as the Lizard right now wasn’t going to last; it was an accidental conjunction of temporary effects. When the Lizard appears again, it will just be the mindless beast again. But at the same time—he felt he was getting very close to the cure, closer than he’d ever been. He said he just couldn’t come home until he was well. I don’t think he believes it would be fair to you.”

  Martha looked at Spider-Man silently. “We don’t care about fair,” she said. “Either of us.”

  “I think he knows that. I know he knows you just want him home. In fact, I told him that. He said to tell you he loves you, he wants to be home with you, just as himself, but right now, he simply can’t. He says he has to go back to the work.”

  Martha sighed and glanced at William, who was intently examining the carpet. “Where will he go now?” she said. “Did he say?” Spidey shook his head. “I have no idea. Martha, I have nothing concrete to base it on, but I get the feeling that Curt’s involved in something much larger than the business of his own cure. I wouldn’t know where to start looking, at the moment, but after I have a while to con
sider, I may be able to think of something. I’ll let you know if I find out anything at all.”

  “You’ve already done a great deal for us,” Martha said. “Don’t let it interfere with your proper work.”

  “This is my proper work,” Spidey said.

  William glanced up at him then. His face was quite calm and composed, but his eyes were too bright and he sounded stuffed up when he spoke. “When he was human,” William said, “how did he sound?”

  Spider-Man thought of the voice that had so briefly forced its way through the Lizard’s throat—dignified, powerful even in such tragic circumstances, and able to see something worthwhile even in Venom—and bent the truth ever so slightly. “He sounded just fine,” he said. “Curt Connors is alive and well, never doubt it. And he’ll be back.”

  He looked up to find Martha’s eyes on him. They said, Really?

  All he could do was nod and believe, with Martha and William, that it would be true.

  * * *

  THAT evening, Peter sat with MJ over the dinner table in his hotel, and listened to her bubble over. It was the best possible salve for his aches and pains, both mental and physical.

  “So he offered me a hundred percent raise,” MJ said.

  “After you spent an hour and a half telling him off,” Peter said, hunting around in his salad for the tomatoes. He always ate them first. “He must have been frightened for his life.”

  MJ chuckled. “Tiger, I think he was. From me, I mean, as opposed to those other people. I haven’t blown up at anybody like that since—Wow, I don’t know if I’ve ever blown up at anybody like that.”

  “All those years’ worth of frustration at once. I’d pay money to see it.”

  “Be careful,” MJ said, smiling sweetly, “or someday you may get a demonstration, free. I found it very liberating.”

  “I bet. So what about him, then?”

  “Well, the cops and the Coast Guard picked up the people who’d made him set up the drop.”

  “So Murray told me,” Peter said, “when I brought him his widget back.”