Spider-Man: The Venom Factor

"Is there anything else you can remember from the newscast that might be a help?"

  She recited to him, word for word, as best she could, the text of the news report. Spidey shook his head. "I'm not sure there was anything even in the big safe that would have done Hobby any good. And he wouldn't have known that until he got it home, wherever home is, and opened it. Then he probably figured that he might as well make some use of it, and gave a batch of that stuff to the authorities as a sample."

  "So he got the material for his bomb somewhere else entirely."

  "That's right."

  "He has to have been storing it somewhere, then."

  Spider-Man nodded. "The 'where' is the problem."

  "Well, I've got a suggestion. Marilyn, the homeless lady I met in the shelter the other night, told me that the place where people have been getting sick lately is over by Penn Station."

  "Penn Station," Spidey said. "You know, when the critter came out into the rail yards and knocked the train over, it ran back into the tracks that would have come out of Penn."

  "Interesting," MJ said.

  "Well, I'll find out. I managed to put a tracer on both of the safes that Hobby took—"

  "Your spider-sense is back, then!" MJ said, relieved.

  "That's right."

  "Well, that's good. Though, I don't know ... it was kinda fun to see you tripping over things like a real human being. Oh well. I knew it couldn't last."

  "You like seeing me fall on my nose! When I get back after all this, I'm going to tickle you until you can't breathe."

  "You'll have to catch me first," MJ said mildly, but there was loving challenge in her voice. "I just want you to know that I love you," MJ said, "and I was worried for you. I want you to be real careful, and don't give me any more cause to worry, okay?"

  "Okay." He pulled up his mask just enough, and gave her a long and enthusiastic kiss.

  She refused to let him go for another moment. "Hon," she said, "if I don't see you by five thirty this morning—"

  "You will," said Spider-Man. "Never fear."

  Swinging from weblines, Spider-Man headed downtown. The buzz from his spider-tracer grew stronger all the time—its signal undiminished from being underground, if indeed it was underground as he suspected.

  The alien was still on his mind. How did they manage to capture it for as long as they did? he wondered. What were they keeping it in? Lead, almost certainly, if the ambient radiation around the creature had to be minimized. Probably reinforced with other substances—though maybe not reinforced enough.

  All the same, he wondered at the wisdom of sending a nuclear sub to carry such a creature. It would have been like shipping a tiger in a truck full of meat. He sighed, then. Friends who had gone into the armed forces had joked with him, telling him that the words "military" and "intelligence" appearing in the same phrase were an oxymoron, with the emphasis on the moronic side of things. It may be that the Navy scientists really thought whatever confinement vessel they were using was sufficient. Well . . . they'll have to think again.

  Spider-Man was still bemused enough by the thing's likeness to Venom. But it was certainly nothing more than a coincidence. Though he hadn't had the symbiote-costume for very long, he'd never noticed it to have any affinity for radiation, so their resemblance wasn't a family one. He did wonder very much what kind of evolution would produce such a creature, especially one with bipedal and bilateral symmetry which also involved the ability to use those tentacular pseudopods. He would have to leave a message on Reed Richards's voice mail about it at some point, but there was no time for that right now. Maybe in the morning—assuming there was still a city with a phone system.

  And the poor alien creature—he doubted that even it could survive dawn at ground zero. If it did, it would certainly get such a blast of radiation from the bomb that even it would get a bellyache.

  Spider-Man swung up onto the top of the hotel across from Madison Square Garden and stood looking down at the entrance to Penn Station. Was he imagining it, or was the traffic a little less busy than usual this time of day? He wouldn't be surprised if people who had heard about Hobgoblin's threat might very well have decided to hurry home to their families and stay there, if this was going to be the city's last night. He wished he could do something of that sort himself, but when he could possibly do something to stop Hobgoblin, he couldn't afford such a luxury.

  He swung down to ground level, and got onto one of the escalators which headed down into Penn. People stared at him with some surprise. Some waved and called his name, others just looked at him as if they saw him every day and he was just one more commuter.

  He came out on the lower concourse level. His spider-sense guided him to the right . . . back and down. He went along past the Long Island Rail Road ticket windows into the main concourse, paused a moment to get his direction from the tracer. Looking up, he saw the guy who made track announcements gazing at him thoughtfully from his little glass box high up on the west wall. Spider-Man gave the guy a wave, then headed toward one of the track doors on the west wall. Its indicator light was lit, to show that the train was boarding.

  Spider-Man joined the commuters crowding in through the door and headed down the stairs. Again, some looked at him curiously while others barely spared him a glance. But all of them were moving with a speed which suggested they thought a bomb might go off under their feet right now instead of later.

  He left them getting into the big silver LIRR train and continued down the platform, following the buzz of his spider-sense. It was getting stronger. Somewhere off this track and farther down. He walked to the end of the platform, found the steps that let onto the tracks, and began to stroll down them, keeping an eye out behind him to make sure Venom wasn't sneaking up behind him.

  He came to a railed stairway leading downwards between two of the tracks. Downwards, his spider-sense said to him, so down he went. At the bottom, he discovered another long, barren access tunnel. He followed it to another set up steps. Down he went again.

  Following his spider-sense, he came to a place where half a dozen tunnels met. The spider-sense indicated that the source of the tracer was quite close. Just off to the right—downward again.

  He followed the rightward tunnel. This one almost immediately deadended into a stairwell, which he took very slowly and softly in the increasing dark, for he heard voices. At the bottom he paused, looking ahead. Light poured through air vents set into the walls of the tunnel in which he now stood. The voices were louder here. He listened but couldn't quite make out the words. Then came a very familiar laugh.

  Hobgoblin.

  Eddie Brock's was not what one would normally consider a meticulous personality. He had been told by friends that this lack might get him into trouble one day. Sure enough, one time during his days as a journalist, he ran with a story as it seemed to be going, confident it would turn out as he'd expected. And, as his friends predicted, he got into trouble.

  That, however, had been Spider-Man's fault. His career, his relationships, everything lay in ruins now because of Spider-Man. His life since then, it seemed, had been one long stroll through dark places—the sewers of San Francisco, and the basements of his soul.

  At least today he had some slight hope for a modicum of satisfaction. He would catch the Hobgoblin. He would extract the last possible measure of terror and repentance from him. And, when that was done, he would disassemble him into his component parts. Nothing about Hobgoblin's life would suit him so much as ending it.

  Eddie was not going about his plan in a slipshod manner. He had taken some care, while researching CCRC's connections, also to look into the Map Room at the New York Public Library's 42nd Street research library. There he had pulled the Con Edison maps for the access tunnels in the Midtown and West Side areas.

  It was fortunate that his memory had always been sharp, for the whole place was a tangled warren of crawl-ways, passages, flights of stairs, and access holes of such complexity that anyone trying to navigate
it without aid would be hopelessly lost. There were too many traps and pitfalls for the unwary—dead ends; pathways that seemed to go nowhere but led for miles, twisting, turning on themselves; old accesses added to new ones; old ones blocked up without being noted in the maps except as footnotes. It was all very complicated.

  Eddie knew well enough, though, the kinds of places he was interested in. He had started, logically enough, at the CCRC headquarters.

  He came after closing hours, having just had his little contretemps with Hobgoblin and Spider-Man. Spider-Man . . . All over Eddie's skin, the symbiote ruffled, a quick movement like the skin of a horse trembling when a fly bites it, a gesture of mingled disgust and desire. The symbiote's moods were clear enough to him from inside. But that gesture was diagnostic of one of the most common of its emotions. The symbiote's hatred for Spider-Man was a refreshing thing next to his: simple, straightforward, but at the same time, always tinged with longing.

  His pain was always a trouble to it, and its pain to him, especially when he pitied it for what it couldn't be, for the one thing that was lacking. It had sentience—it existed, and it knew it did. But personality, it had none. A sort of a yearning toward his personality, and a sort of sad longing for something of the same kind, like the Tin Man wishing for a heart. But that was all. And when you came right down to it, sentience without personality was not enough to be company.

  Even so, from Eddie's point of view, their relationship was better than being alone. Now, as he stood in the silence of the deserted downstairs of the CCRC building, next to the old warehouse, he got from the symbiote a sense of excitement—of interest and desire—and, very restrained at the back of that interest, the hope of something to tear, devour, consume.

  That was the one danger of dealing with the symbiote, Eddie thought, as he stood gazing down into that hole. If you were careless, you could easily fall into its mindset—to slash and feed when it desired to, rather than when prudence or necessity dictated. Its frustration that it could not subsume the one being it desperately desired sometimes drove it, hungrily, to try to consume others, like people desperate for protein who stuff themselves full of empty calories because there's nothing else. Sometimes these gorges left Eddie exhausted; other times they left him simply annoyed and enervated. But they were something he had learned to put up with in good grace. There had to be some give-and-take, after all, and his partner had plenty of positive aspects.

  Now he stood looking down into that hole and said, "He's down there somewhere." The symbiote stirred and rustled all around him, starting already to send out questing tendrils that waved in the air as if testing it for scent. The symbiote had been attuned to his rage all day, reacting with eagerness and pleasure, knowing it was going to feed if they caught the one its partner was after. The symbiote wasn't picky. It had grown to like the taste of blood. Eddie's problem—their joint problem as Venom—was to make sure it got only blood that needed to be shed.

  He judged the hole. No more than about fifteen feet down. Tendrils swarmed out, anchoring themselves to the edges of the hole. Eddie jumped and was let down easily.

  He glanced up the length of the tunnel in which he found himself. Its bare concrete had been stained by years' passage of water, rust, and other, less healthy, things. Rats' squeaking could be heard further down. There was no light here, but far down he saw an inequality in the darkness which meant there was light elsewhere. He headed for it slowly and silently, knowing that what he pursued could go silently, too, when it pleased.

  Hobgoblin ... he thought. Now there will be a dainty morsel for a leisurely postmortem. Eddie confined himself to criminals, to those who preyed on the innocent. Occasionally you might find a criminal who, given the right time, the right money, and sufficient resources, could eventually have been rehabilitated. Trouble was, there wasn't enough time, and resources generally could better be used on other things. They were wasted on criminals. So often all the good intentions failed. That was the problem with life in general, from his point of view.

  If there was anything Venom knew at this point, it was that justice started and ended in one's own hands, and at the business end of whatever tools you could bring to bear to enforce your power. He was justice, now. Rough justice it might be, but it worked a lot better than the milk-and-water, etiolated kind of justice that various costumed crimefighters, bumbling police, and the corrupt judiciary were trying to impose.

  He paused as the light grew from a hint to a halo before him. It came from a single bare bulb set in a concrete wall where this tunnel met another. To his left, the new tunnel dead-ended. To his right, it stretched away for at least a hundred yards before either ending or turning; he couldn't see which.

  That would be north, he thought. Uptown. "Let's go," he said.

  He made his way up the tunnel, listening carefully. It was not as quiet down here as might have been expected. Even now, the incessant noise of the city managed to force its way through the layers of concrete and brick and earth: bumps and clanks from far above, as traffic hit some occasional manhole cover, the toothaching sound of someone working with a jackhammer blocks away. The low-frequency city roar didn't carry here as it did above ground, but knockings and bumpings, the hiss of steam in conduit pipes, the occasional hum of an exposed transformer box—

  —and the murmur of voices.

  He stopped, listened. Nothing. Then a sound, indistinct, but in the pattern was that of someone speaking. And then, unquestionably, a cough.

  Quietly, now, he thought to the symbiote. They made their way to where the tunnel did not end, but turned right again, east. Eddie was taking care to keep his directions straight; he might need to find this place again.

  He headed eastward for perhaps half a long block, and then once again the tunnel turned. Now he saw the muted glow of light coming from the north ward leg. This time the voices rose much more clearly.

  He padded forward as quickly as he could, but took more care about being silent. Every now and then a rat bolted out from under his feet, and the symbiote stretched out a hungry tendril for it, but always Eddie would pull those reaching tentacles back. "You'll spoil your supper," he muttered. The symbiote's desires and hungers were something he had learned to exploit, and he wanted its hunger at its sharpest when they met Hobgoblin. Spider-Man had been right about one thing—he wasn't too sure where a spleen was. But he had done a little research after looking at the utility tunnel maps, and he thought Venom now had a good chance of finding it and seeing whether that particular morsel was all it was cracked up to be.

  He came to the second turning of the tunnel, paused, and looked around the corner cautiously. Voices again rang out. The light ahead had a different quality than the dim, dusty-bulbed utility lights strung sparingly through the tunnel itself. It was a cleaner white, and he caught a faint whiff of kerosene.

  Around him, the symbiote stirred and shifted excitedly. Eddie said softly, "Not this time. Just wait. And considering who we're going to be dealing with . . . street clothes, please."

  Obediently it shifted. The spider logo across his chest faded as the black flushed into a beige shirt, jeans, boots. He looked himself over and said, "A little more used-looking."

  Quickly the symbiote reshaped itself to his thought: frays and holes appeared in the jeans, a convincing patina of dirt, the collar and rolled-up cuffs of the shirt went threadbare. There was no point in frightening these people. He knew their kind: suspicious of strangers, always afraid of being driven out of their hard-won hiding places, or worse, made to live there on a new boss's sufferance. Venom had seen enough of that in the city under Golden Gate Park where he now served as protector—a portion of San Francisco buried in the 1906 earthquake and subsequently forgotten. The underground city had become a haven for society's outcasts.

  He looked himself over one more time, ruffled his hair a bit, felt his chin. Well, the stubble was there, no need to do anything about that.

  Slowly he walked down the tunnel, letting his foot
steps echo. Ahead of him, people fell silent, listening. He was listening, too, for the sound of a weapon being gotten ready. Not that it was likely that people in these circumstances could do much to him, especially with the symbiote at hand. But all the same, he liked to be careful. "Hello?" Eddie said, trying to sound nonthreatening.

  "Hello? Who's that?" came a voice from down the tunnel, fairly nearby now.

  "Nobody," Eddie said. "Nobody much. I won't hurt anybody here."

  "Well, Mister Nobody," said the voice, and it was female, "you just come down here nice and slow, and you keep your hands where we can see them."

  Eddie did that, having no reason to disobey and hearing no overt threat in the voice, just the kind of toughness one needed to survive in these tunnels. Slowly he walked forward.

  There were small "bays" in the sides of the tunnel, faired-in places six or eight feet deep. In one of these, the voices he heard were concentrated. He came abreast of the place and found himself looking at a tidy, neat little campsite, such as you might expect to find in the backwoods somewhere. Except that here they all were, any number of feet underground.

  Eddie came up to the group—there were three of them—and stood there, letting them see him, keeping his hands in the open. Two women—an older one, red hair going pink as the white came in; a middle-aged one, blond, still pretty in anybody's book; and an old man, weary-looking, his face flushed with red, peppered with big broken blood vessels, some of them ulcerated. Looks like alcohol or chemical abuse, Venom thought, sterno, possibly. . . . There was no telling. It was something he had seen enough of both in San Fran and here.

  "That's an old trick," the little old red-haired lady said to him, looking up at him genially.

  "Which one, ma'am?"

  " 'Nobody.' " She smiled, and there was some humor in the expression. "I remember another time a youngster came calling on people who weren't expecting him. They asked him his name too, and he said 'Nobody.' Then when the youngster's host started abusing his guests, and the young fella arranged to have a sharp stick poked into his host's big eye, all the poor monster could yell was, 'Oh my gosh, Nobody's hurting me!' And all his friends yelled back, 'Better pray for relief, then.' "