Too Many Bad Things
At the end of a thirty-yard scramble across the front of the Bulletin building, Mac Gargan webbed the steel cladding either side of the window frame, threw himself back out over the street for maximum force before launching himself at the glass. He smashed through and hit another wall.
This one was of gunfire.
Five soldiers in padded black armor and bug-lensed helmets sheltered behind desks in a staggered firing line facing his entry point, shredding office furniture and interior walls with high-caliber bullets as though they were papier mache. Their aim was good, unpanicked, the baleful green beams of tracking lasers spraying the walls moments before hails of automatic fire ripped them apart.
They’d been waiting for him.
Gargan’s inward dive slammed to a halt against fifty rounds per second. He hit the ground in a storm of powdered MDF and plasterboard, green targeting lasers bouncing wildly off each other and strobing through the dust. He writhed on the floor like a man drowning in oil while the alien symbiote thickened into a bullet-resistant carapace and spat out the bullets that had already punched through.
Hell, that hurt.
No, it doesn’t, said the Venom symbiote, the echo of a psionic growl in his head.
Yeah, he thought, his own inner voice. It actually didn’t.
Get up and start killing, loser. I’m hungry.
Gargan sprang onto all fours and pushed off the ground.
His body twisted around its central humanoid mass, adopting new shapes and changing them again a dozen times before reaching the near wall and sticking to it. He didn’t stay there long, using it instead as a springboard to launch himself clear across the soldiers’ heads and onto the ceiling. Bullets gave chase, a spray separating and spreading as they hared after a fast-moving target. The soldiers were good though, falling back and spreading out, keeping their distance and renewing their encirclement.
Gargan threw a web and swung around a thick structural column that a few seconds of gunfire had stripped to bare concrete, buying the symbiote a second or two to regenerate their injuries. Plastic foam fell from the pulverized ceiling tiles like snow as he emerged from around the column and dropped behind a filing cabinet. Bullets banged into the side of it with a sound like a manic compulsive trying to grate an iron bar.
He licked his lips and growled, the vibrations running through the metal cabinet and into his spine in uncanny sympathy with the symbiote’s psychic urging to stop cowering and feed. He hardly needed convincing.
It was why Venom had chosen him.
It got a host with fewer qualms about indulging its various unsavory appetites, and he got a bewildering array of alien powers and the strength to do whatever he wanted with them, to whomever he wanted to do it to.
Until Osborn, and his doctors, and his drugs.
Kill them all. Then kill Osborn.
Gargan gritted his teeth and shook his head. Before the pills, he’d rarely had the willpower to deny the symbiote. He didn’t like denying it now. Letting it do what it wanted was easier.
Kill Osborn.
“This isn’t the time for–”
He checked that thought.
A premonition of pain and fire, a spider-sense of sorts, squirmed through the psychic ganglia that tethered his brain to Venom’s weirder extrasensory perceptions. He whirled away from the filing cabinet and leapt, just as a rocket-propelled grenade tore it to shreds. An expanding fireball lifted Gargan up and flung him into the wall, knocking yet another hole through the front of the Bulletin building and kicking him out over East 53rd Street.
The siren wail of alarms drifted up from street level, the rattle of gunfire and the screams of onlookers. Daken and Ares were having their own fun.
So long as they leave the bodies for us.
Trailing vaporous clouds of symbiote matter, Gargan launched sticky bundles of webbing that splattered securely to the outside wall. He threw them sparingly. Venom’s webs were extensions of the symbiote’s body. They weren’t infinite, and the RPG blast had already left his inky black skin looking scrappy, his own flesh showing through in patches and coming out in goose bumps in the March cold.
He was practically indestructible. But the symbiote could be hurt by fire.
Someone had come prepared.
The webs yanked taut. He pulled back with a roar, muscles straining and swelling, launching himself back towards the building and in no mood to fuss too hard over windows. He crashed through steel and concrete like a missile and into the unused offices of the Symkarian exile on the tenth floor.
He rolled through rubble, traveling several yards over factory-fresh carpet covered with a clear plastic sheet before coming to a halt beside an empty cubicle. He panted while the symbiote regenerated.
After this we’re going to kill Osborn.
“I’m not going back to Thunderbolt Mountain,” he said aloud. “Or the Raft.”
Thunderbolt Mountain wasn’t so bad. At least you got to be you. Or me… Whatever.
Gargan shook his head to clear it of the extra voices.
He couldn’t remember what it was like to be lonely in his own head. He reminded himself that he’d chosen this. He’d chosen it all.
“Shut up, I–”
He looked up, various senses squirming for his attention.
The ceiling exploded.
A torrent of bullets tore through it and Gargan roared in pain as they hammered into the wounded symbiote. Their targeting devices were definitely allowing them to track his movements through the walls. That was some rare and expensive hardware they were packing.
Gargan made a mental note to strip them before he ate them.
It wasn’t as if Osborn paid him.
He launched himself at the ceiling, erupting through the weakened floor of the eleventh like a kraken attacking from beneath the ice.
The angles of fire coming in through what had been the ceiling gave him a general idea of where his attackers were and, faster than a human could react to him, he carpet-sprayed the area with webs.
One hit a soldier fully on the armored vest. The man flew back through desks and ruined furniture before being webbed messily to a partition wall. Another web caught a soldier’s gun, yanking it out of his hands and leaving it dangling just out of reach. A third caught a glancing strike as he ducked, and then struggled, caught fast, his shoulder indelibly stuck to the underside of the desk he had been sheltering behind.
Gargan landed. The floor creaked under his monstrous weight, and he leapt again just as it fell from under him, coming down this time on top of a large office printer that another soldier had been using as cover. It died like a car in a crusher. The soldier swung his gun around. Gargan smacked it aside on the back of his hand. A third arm burst wetly from his chest, took the armored man by the neck and lifted him bodily off the ground. Without intending to do it, or even being conscious of having done it, he had grown to twice human size. His distended maw gaped, wider than a man was broad, black saliva dripping from his teeth.
He tried to remember that thing he had mentally resolved to do.
Oh yeah.
Strip them before eating them.
Hell with that!
His neck snapped forward, jaws crashing shut–
–over nothing.
Gargan drew back, flexing his inexplicably empty fist.
He snarled, re-absorbing the third arm into his body, and looked up.
A shadow bloomed out of the bullet-riddled gloom by the elevator doors, deposited the wounded soldier, and in a rippling of the ambient darkness, turned back. The shadow met his eyes. Two slashes of red in a mummy-like wrap of absolute black. Gargan felt a chill go through him like a knife. Through Venom’s memories, Gargan knew the sensation of absolute cold against his skin. This was that, but taken further. It went through meat and through bone and into a soul that Gargan had done too many bad things to want revealed to the world. Venom bared his teeth with frustrated hunger, rejecting the fear and, as a psionic side-effect of so doing, denying it to Gargan as well, projecting the full gamut of alien hatreds, avarice, and aggression onto his host’s brain in its place.
With a roar, he launched himself across the room.
The shadow rose up to meet him, neither floating nor flying, but drawn, as though the space between him and Venom, his destination point, had been commanded to close and it had obeyed. A curved black sword appeared in skeletally thin gray hands, dark robes rippling out like a cape that then frayed into shadow. Laughter rattled out of him. Like breath forced out of a dead man’s chest.
Gargan swung a giant-sized fist, bellowing in surprise as it met no resistance whatsoever before sprawling across the floor and gouging out concrete and carpet with his knuckles.
The shadow cackled all around him. Its voice was a corpse’s whisper, accented by dead languages. “Try again, Spider-Man.”
The goading pushed Venom into a frenzy.
He grew upwards from the ankles, sucking his prone body up after himself and dumping the recycled mass into the creation of two wrecking ball fists. He launched himself with a berserk howl, tendrils bursting from his upper body, growing barbs and teeth and whipping towards his enemy. The shadow swordsman flowed effortlessly out of reach, freely altering his size, shape, and position in space as though all of these could be commanded with an expression of will. In a swirl of tenebrous dark, the shadow retaliated. Venom turned his furious onslaught into an equally frenzied defense, weaving acrobatically, and elastically, around the free-flowing black sword, pitting alien ESP itself against the shadow-man’s eerie powers, and busting a gut for the right to a tie.
The black sword cleaved through a clutch of tendrils, and Gargan shrieked.
Pain – sudden, debilitating, total – went through him like a blunt saw. Venom and Gargan screamed together as one, the psionic connections between their two minds catching fire and blazing with the other’s agony. In that moment the symbiote came close to rejecting him outright, and he it. The only reason they did not was that their loathing for the one who had done this to them was greater.
“The kiss of the Black Blade is an exquisite torture, is it not?” The shadow had no scent. No warmth emanated from his body. No breath drifted from the slit in his headdress. There was no emotion, neither kindness nor malice, in his words. “Even after I surrendered the last vestiges of my own soul and left behind my flesh, I could not relinquish this weapon. No. But I have taught it to crave that which I can no longer give it.” With a flourish, he inverted the sword and lifted it high. An execution stroke. “The evils of a human soul.”
Venom’s remaining tendrils were shriveling back, recoiling from the Black Blade’s cut like worms from bright sunlight, melting back into a central body that was no longer growing but shrinking, man-sized and wailing like a child at the cloaked shadow’s sandaled feet.
He could do nothing to defend himself.
“Go to whatever hell deserves you knowing that it was the Black Raazer who sends you there.”
A scream rang out from the direction of the elevator.
Raazer turned with an enraged hiss.
Gargan exerted enough command over his own body to look up.
The mercenary that Raazer had earlier rescued from Venom’s jaws stood before the now-open doors. His face was pale. He had surprisingly little to say. Daken’s claws emerged from the ceramic panels of his protective vest.
“Damn,” said Daken, his yellow uniform soiled with the bloody scent of at least fifteen different people. “That elevator is slow.”
The shadow drifted back, lowering his sword into a guard to caution against both the newly arrived Daken and the injured Venom. “Your claws cannot touch me, Wolverine, and I can cut in ways that even you will not quickly heal from.”
He carved the air with a hand gesture, and the soldier in Daken’s arms vanished. Daken stumbled, betraying just how much he had been leaning on the dying man as a crutch. Another set of brisk gestures followed. The rest of the mercenaries, freed from Venom’s webs when Raazer’s Black Blade had struck the parent organism, and in the process of picking up themselves and their weapons, turned to smoke and disappeared. “But the fate of minions does not concern me. This battlefield has already been won. The world cries out against tyranny and my brotherhood has answered: the end of the Iron Patriot’s dark reign is nigh.” His cloak fluttered, fading into the ambient gloom, then his gray hands, his glowing red eyes. Last to vanish was his voice, a scratch like twigs on a window pane as he left them with his parting words.
And then he was gone.
Gargan looked mutely at Daken. Daken looked at Gargan.
For a minute they knelt on ruined carpet or slouched against the bloody side of an elevator door in a silence that even a mutual hatred for one another could not fill with words.
“Good work, team,” said Bullseye, appearing from a bullet-mauled corridor with a computer under one arm and, for some reason, Sarah Greene’s framed degree certificate under the other. “Seriously. Good hustle tonight. Six out of ten. Way to show nobody the Avengers are no pushovers.”
Gargan glared at him for almost as long as he and Daken had been glaring at each other.
With a sigh, Daken shook his head and drew a small cellphone from his pocket.
“Nice girl’s phone,” said Bullseye. “Couldn’t you get it in pink?”
Ignoring him, Daken waited for the number he had just pushed to dial. Snubbing the speakerphone, he held the handset to his ear. “Hello, Ms Hand. We have it.” He glanced at Bullseye as the person at the other end of the call spoke. “About ten minutes. Tell Karla I’ll be stopping at an ATM on the way back. She’ll understand.” Another pause. “Well, whenever she’s free, then.” He ended the call and returned the device to his pocket. “The deputy director seemed very anxious to debrief us. I can’t for the life of me imagine why. And she would very much appreciate it if we could find our way back to Avengers Tower without destroying too much more of New York.” He flashed a smile as fake as his uniform. “Who wants to tell Ares?”
“Where is he?” said Gargan.
“Oh, about halfway towards Queensboro Bridge, I expect. Just follow the line of burning cars.”
Now can we kill Osborn? Venom growled in his thoughts.
“Yeah…” Gargan sighed, to no one in particular. Perhaps to everyone. He wasn’t sure. “I guess it’ll have to be me, won’t it?”