by Diane Duane
Venom came at him, all claws and pseudopodia, tongue and teeth and dribble, and that enormous mocking, hungry grin.
“Okay, that does it. I’m losing my temper now!” Spider-Man snarled. He leapt clear, no web of his own to hold him up, only a superheated jet of his own anger at this repetitive, constant, stupid, inconclusive feuding. It wasn’t just painful, it wasn’t just an interruption to a crime-fighting career that was dangerous enough already, but it was also getting seriously tiresome.
Spidey slammed into Venom, wrapping himself around the barrel-chested upper body while the pseudopods wrapped themselves around him, and concentrated entirely on pummeling Venom’s head.
“I didn’t start this!” he yelled furiously into Venom’s ear. “I didn’t start this, and right now I don’t need it!”
“What you need,” said the dark voice, “and what we need, are two entirely different things.” Pseudopodia wrapped around Spidey’s throat, and choking, he tore at them. “And this is a need that has remained unsatisfied for far too long!”
They slammed into the side of a building and glass shattered. Even through his daze, Spider-Man found time to wonder how the people inside were going to explain that particular claim to their insurance company. Fortunately the impact wasn’t as destructive as he had feared—the wrapping that the symbiote was trying to fling around him had acted as a blunt-trauma pad all down his spine.
But the high-frequency crash as the massive sheet of plate glass gave way was enough to make it shiver away from him a little. Spidey took the opportunity, thrusting out with all his limbs in an attempt to shake it loose. It let go of his legs and arms, but still clutched him by the throat, and Venom’s leering face wasn’t far away either.
They dropped a dozen feet as Venom’s own organic webbing stretched under the double burden, and Spider-Man used the distracting jolt as they stopped to add a little more distraction, by doubling up, arching around, and doing his level best to kick Venom in the back of the head with both feet.
One heel skidded off the rounded skull, but the other hit home square and solid. This time it was Venom’s turn to reel and, as they swung out and down in another descending arc, they finished against yet another window and another explosive crack of breaking glass.
“The insurance companies in this town are just going to love us,” Spidey said. As the huge slabs of shattered glass shifted and screeched, the sound loosened the symbiote’s grip still further. He managed to shake himself free of its grasp and jump sideways onto the vertical surface of the building. “Would you mind telling me what brought this on?” he demanded.
“You brought this on,” rumbled Venom. “All of it.” Strands of darkness wreathed about him as the sound-shocked symbiote recovered what passed for its equilibrium.
“You’ll be claiming I bombed Pearl Harbor next,” sneered Spidey, scuttling around the corner of the building. Like a huge, black steam train, Venom came around after him. It was what Spidey had been expecting, and he was ready.
A great wad of webbing from both web-shooters hit Venom full in the face, head, and upper body, and together he and the symbiote went down, spinning more webbing behind them to break their fall.
Spidey followed, bounding down the glass wall. It didn’t last; these things never seemed to last. Venom shot out another stream of webbing that anchored on the corner of the building; he recovered, turned the speed of his fall into a swinging arc, and came back up and around fist foremost.
It caught Spider-Man right in the pit of the stomach. No matter how good-looking, how well-defined, or how just plain hard the human abdominal muscles might be, they remain only muscles. Flesh, not armor plate. Spidey folded over like a half-closed penknife, coughing and winded, and the next blow took him in the side of the head.
Only reflex took him out of harm’s way, because he had no idea how he had wound up clinging to another building twenty feet away. Apparently his autopilot must have cut in at the right time.
Venom came at him again. Spidey leapt to meet him, wrapped his arms and legs around him, and sent them both tumbling out and down toward the street. They turned as they fell, web shooting out from Venom to anchor on a building cornice as they plummeted past it. The strand didn’t just stop their fall, but snapped them back up several stories as if they had been bungeejumping. They hung at the end of the line, not even doing anything so structured as trading punches but just flailing at each other.
Then another fist caught Spidey on the forehead. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he shouted, shaking another incursion of stars away from his vision. “I don’t want to fight with you.” He hammered each word home with a quick left-right-left sequence into Venom’s lantern jaw.
“You do a good imitation,” Venom snarled, punching back. They were swinging to and fro by now, a great, thrashing, furious pendulum of kicks and punches, the soggy sound of impact and the grunt of breath. One massive punch hit Spidey in the side, and there was a single new noise, a sharp, whiplash crack as one rib gave way.
That’s the third time this year, said a surprisingly calm voice in the back of his head. The doctors at the University clinic are never gonna believe this one. What are you gonna say? “I walked into a door.” They’re already sure that MJ beats me up!
Then spider-sense went sizzling along his already-outraged nerve endings and made him flinch sideways—just before something that had nothing to do with Venom or the symbiote whizzed past his ear. Spidey knew exactly what it was, because he had heard the same sound too many times before: the tiny sonic boom of a high-velocity bullet, then a perceptible instant later, the slam of the shot.
Already shooting webbing for his getaway, he glanced down and saw the man with the gun. Even at this distance its long, curved magazine was unmistakable. Another AK-74 Kalashnikov. Another puff of flame bloomed from its muzzle. This time, a spout of dust and fragments exploded from a little crater higher up the building, the snap of the bullet’s passage drowned out by a more Hollywood-authentic whining ricochet.
Then even that was lost in the flat, all-too-real hammer of automatic fire as the gunman lost whatever passed for patience. He flipped the Kalashnikov’s selector to full rock-and-roll and tried to use quantity where quality had failed. The bucking, juddering gun proved at once that it wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies.
“Now what?” Spidey panted bitterly as he swung high and wide for a safe, solid corner. A cluster of full-metal-jacket slugs chewed masonry in his wake and left a series of appropriately spiderwebbed holes through yet another long-suffering window.
“It would seem we have company,” said Venom. He was laboring a bit himself, and his chest was heaving. Spider-Man’s last kick had caught him squarely over the breastbone, and the symbiote’s arms were boiling around in a seethe of undirected fury.
“Anyone I know?”
“Russians,” snapped Venom, trying to get his breath back. “CCRC.”
“Oh really?” The gunfire stopped briefly as a magazine was replaced, then started up again. It was back to single shots again, each one probing and picking like a needle at possible hiding places. “Truce?” suggested Spidey. “For now, anyway?”
“Not much choice,” Venom gasped, plainly reluctant as always to take the course of good sense. “We’ll continue this discussion later.” He looked down and pointed at a man in a peculiar floppy dark hat with grommets in it. “There. We need him. His name is Niner.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Spidey. The rib felt bad. “You take the batch on the left, I’ll take the batch on the right? Okay, then go!”
They leapt together and bullet strikes spattered around them; but always above. It’s harder to shoot at a falling object than one might think: it’s a near ninety-degree deflection, and the lead required keeps changing with the acceleration of the fall. And that’s only with a steady thirty-meter-per-second-squared descent. These two targets kept splaying their limbs as air brakes or balling up tight to drop faster.
&
nbsp; Where other jumpers from tall buildings only strike the pavement and splat, these two struck the pavement and bounced. Feet and fists lashed out, and the men on the ground, who might have thought that safety lay in distance and ballistics and weight of firepower, were rapidly taught that their only true safety lay in distance alone.
The gunmen had all of their Kalashnikovs on full automatic now, spraying bullets everywhere with a complete disregard even for their own safety, never mind the locals who were scattering in all directions. The lack of blood in the street was only due to the fact that most of the firing had been directed upward.
“These people are going to get hurt!” Spidey shouted at Venom. “The innocents, remember? Save them!”
But the innocents were already doing a good job of saving themselves. They were New Yorkers, after all, and not entirely unfamiliar with the sound of gunfire, though not with gunfire that was rapidly approaching the noise level of a small war, nor of battles involving super-powered beings on the street. They knew to get under cover when they heard it.
“Him!” Venom shouted, pointing at the man in the strange dark hat, and took off after him. Niner dashed into a building and was gone, with Venom in pursuit. And that left Spider-Man all alone, facing four or five gunmen, all of them firing rather chaotically at him. Or at least in his general direction. Being given a big, shiny assault rifle was one thing, but possession didn’t automatically grant mastery, and wherever these guys had been recruited, it wasn’t a marksmanship school.
Spidey gave thanks for that—and also for the fact that the sight of Venom’s fanged maw and his cloud of whipping black pseudopods would have been enough to unsettle even the coolest, steadiest shot. These characters were like reeds in the wind.
He bounded toward the gunmen, never moving in the same direction for more than a split second at a time, leaping up the sides of neighboring buildings for the added advantage that came when he jumped back down again. Once again it proved true that shooting at a rapidly moving, rapidly foreshortening target could quickly ruin anyone’s aim—though never so much or so fast as when that same moving target finished its last leap with both feet full in your chest. Or your stomach.
Or the one man Spidey took out simply by landing on his head.
He hit the ground rolling, swung out one leg at ankle level, and neatly chopped both of another Russian’s own legs right out from under him. The man’s AK-74 went one way, his legs went another, and the mafioski’s head hit the pavement with a satisfying, if rather hollow, clonk.
Two others were running toward him, firing from the hip in the best traditions of all those old newsreels from World War II. That was fine if the purpose of firing was to keep a lot of enemy heads down; it was rather less effective when trying to hit a bouncing, elusive, rubber ball of a super hero. And whether running, jumping, or standing still, using any gun on its full-auto setting guzzles ammunition and empties one of those long banana magazines in just three seconds.
That was something else films tended not to bother with, except for dramatic effect. Spider-Man had frequently been grateful for the ignorance of crooks whose knowledge of firearms came mostly from bad action movies.
As Spidey ducked behind a row of parked cars, most of them already the likely subject of yet more insurance claims, he could hear first one and then the other gun stop firing. Yet the footsteps kept on coming. Either this pair were very brave, or very stupid. And he’d seen no sign of bravery so far today.
Or maybe they were being very crafty instead. There was always the chance that they had managed to pry their fingers from the triggers before all their bullets ran out. Or maybe they had reloads, though he hadn’t seen any extra magazines so far. But like traffic, it’s the one you didn’t see that gets you, and he wasn’t about to take any chances.
Yet when the muzzle of one Kalashnikov came poking gingerly around the end of the nearest car, it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Spidey raised his arm and webbed the weapon all over its barrel, then gave the length of webbing a good, hard yank. The gun jerked from its owner’s hands and went spinning high into the air. Spidey heard it come down with a skidding clatter thirty or so yards away, and he also heard the footsteps of the now ex-gunman running away even faster than he had approached.
That left one.
Spidey was glad he hadn’t risked standing up too soon, because there was a hollow metallic slap that he’d heard before: the sound of a fresh magazine being smacked home. An instant later there were three quick, spaced shots, and three heavy bangs that rocked the car on its springs. Spider-Man hadn’t thought the Kalashnikov could put a bullet clear from one side of the vehicle to the other, except through the windows, but the ragged, bright-edged holes that were appearing on his side changed his mind.
He moved along the row of cars in a spider-scuttle far faster than the gunman could have been expecting, letting the guy keep thinking he was still four cars from his present position. That suited Spidey. He squeezed between a Lexus and the 700-series BMW beside it, thinking, Who teaches these people to park so close? and peered out from the shadow of a convenient wheel-arch. Spidey then waited for this last one to follow his friend’s lead and come too close.
He didn’t. Instead he hunched down into a position that, though it looked awkward, allowed him to see right underneath each car. If he looked underneath and saw no one hiding beyond, then he slammed four bullets through the bodywork. Two went through the front door at seat and foot-well height, then two more through the back. Then he duckwalked along to the next and did it all over again.
Spider-Man didn’t like the look of this one bit. All the others had been rock-and-roll players, subject to what some reporters on the Bugle called “Beirut Syndrome”: if it puts out enough noise and enough bullets, then it must be doing some good.
But this guy was good, and the parking row wasn’t very long. It wouldn’t be more than a minute before Spidey ran out of cars that weren’t in the line of fire. But then, inside his mask, Spider-Man smiled. The solution, as usual, was an obvious one.
Totally focused on someone who had to be hiding almost at ground level behind the cars, the gunman’s attention couldn’t shift quite fast enough to realize that a sudden flicker of movement up and over their roofline might be more than just a pigeon. Pigeons didn’t jump like that, pigeons didn’t bounce like that, and most of all, pigeons didn’t have fists like that.
Thud!
Spidey massaged his knuckles gently, spared just one glance for the unconscious body that had skidded several feet away, then looked about for Venom and the elusive Niner. No chance; they were gone.
He winced, and pressed one careful hand to his side over the damaged rib. Did he just crack it, maybe? he wondered. Yes, no, or maybe, it didn’t really matter. There was no time for a checkup or an X-ray, or indeed anything much except to go back to the apartment and strap himself up—a first-aid skill at which he had way too much practice—then get back out and get busy.
Spider-Man headed for home.
* * *
THAT night, about eight, MJ headed off to Sundog to do her first night’s voice work. It was a little strange, now, to feel the nervousness that she hadn’t felt during the audition. I’ve never really done this before, she thought as she got out of the cab. What if I screw up in some weird way? I’d really like to do this work—oh, please don’t let me screw up.
She pushed the doorbell, and a friendly voice said, “Hi, MJ! Come on in!” The door buzzed open.
“Hidden camera?” she said to the voice from the little grille.
“Yup,” said the voice. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I get to watch standing there in the daytime, picking their noses.”
She chuckled and went up the stairs, a little more slowly than last time so that she wouldn’t arrive out of breath. At the top of the stairs, the owner of the friendly voice, Harriet the receptionist, was waiting for her with the second door held open. “You’re working on The Giga
-Group taping, huh?”
“That’s the one.”
“Okay. They’re all down in Six: that’s the biggest room. Two levels down from this one. You want some coffee or something?”
“I wouldn’t mind a Coke.”
“Caffeine by any other name,” Harriet said, with a lopsided grin, and went off to get it.
MJ went carefully down the spiral staircase, amazed at the complete difference of tone between this job and her last one. Maybe making cartoons sweetens your disposition or something, she thought. Certainly Jymn was nothing like most of the directors she’d seen lately.
Two levels down, as Harriet had said, she found Recording Room Six, which took up the whole floor. The design was interesting: the inner recording room, where the cast sat and worked, was a large U shape with a very thick bottom. On the nonmicrophoned side, in the middle of a huge semicircular mixing board, were several seats for the mixer, voice director, and so forth. When MJ came in, there was already somebody working at the board, a chunky man with a graying ponytail and a beard; next to him Jymn Magon sat, going over some pages and using a scalding-pink highlighter on them. At the sound of the door opening, he turned. “Oh, hi, MJ! Any first-night flutters?”
She laughed just a little. “Now that you mention it—”
“Don’t worry about it—none of us bite. This is Paul, our soundman.”
“Hi,” Paul said and turned his attention back to his board.
“He’s always very focused during a session,” Jymn said. “Don’t mind him. He loosens up afterward. Come on and meet your fellow voice talent.”
He pushed the studio door open for her. “Guys? Here’s your new coworker.”
Three men and a woman looked back at her from the director’s chairs where they perched. “Halsey Robins—he’s several of our good guys.” A middle-aged man with a shock of startling white hair nodded to her, smiled. “Marion Archangel.” She was a petite middle-aged woman, pert and blond; MJ recognized her name as that of someone who had done a lot of commercial work in the last few years, so that there were some products, specifically a brand of margarine, that MJ associated with her. She smiled at MJ, gave her a little wave. “Doug Booth.” A slim handsome young blond man dressed all in black, he waggled his eyebrows at her. “And Rory Armistead.” The oldest of them, a portly man possibly in his late sixties, he nodded gravely to MJ and said, “Welcome.”
