What It Feels Like
The shortest route to the south of the city would’ve been to cut across downtown, but the Void had left so little of it standing, smokestacks rising in the dawn gloom like the ghosts of dead skyscrapers. Mac Gargan went around, web-swinging between gutted low-rises and the scuffed gold domes of blast-crippled mosques. Dust and grit and whole bits of metal struck his suit, like jumping across the Hudson in mosquito season with your mouth open, but he barely felt it. The symbiote skin gave a peristaltic gurgle as it absorbed and digested the city’s debris.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” he muttered to himself as he swung low to pass under a particularly dense thicket of smoke.
A column of burnt-out tanks and armored vehicles gouted pollution from the right-hand lane. Heading the same way Mac was going. He didn’t know what the Kuwaiti flag was, but presumably it was the scorched tricolor painted on their turrets.
Men, women, and children streamed between the wrecks in the opposite direction. The wretched sounds of their panic threatened to trigger the nerveless rump of something he’d forgotten the name of in his thoughts.
He tried to focus on what the feeling was, but it was difficult for him to exercise those lobes of his brain. The symbiote had been eating away at his personality for too long. Thinking about anything other than sating its alien hunger, or killing the people that it loathed, left him confused, and even more suggestible to the monster’s will. But he was still a human being underneath the nightmare.
He was more than just Osborn’s scary cannibal.
He could be more.
Kill Norman Osborn, the symbiote mumbled in its batrachotoxin torpor.
Ignoring it, Mac glanced over his shoulder, his neck twisting further than any human neck ought to safely twist. Lindy stared a silent scream into his masked face. Her wide eyes alone were still visible above the web of symbiote matter smothering her mouth. He gave her a reassuring smile. For some reason that only made her squirm against the webbing bonding her to his back and try even harder to scream. He looked away, a fluttery sense of what could only have been pride puffing his misbegotten chest.
Time to be the hero.
At the top of his swing, he yanked on his web, slurping it back into his second skin as he free-fell a dozen or so feet and landed in a spreadeagled splat on the ceramic-white slope of a rooftop. The apartment building trembled, earthquake running into earthquake and gaining a decimal point on the Richter scale each time, the solid debris absorbed by Mac’s suit grinding against his bones as they vibrated. Clinging to the eaves and keeping to all-fours, he looked out over southern Kuwait City.
The apartment building was part of the last intact line of houses overlooking an urban warfare theme park of half-broken buildings, burning cars, and buried roads. He experienced that same sticky feeling in his prefrontal cortex that he’d felt watching the fleeing civilians, and remembered what it was.
New York.
He was looking at New York after the Skrull invasion: the last time he’d done something genuinely selfless and good.
The Void was up to his knees in the destruction, literally, but the scale of it was deceptive. Mac’s supposed friend had grown to mammoth proportions, transformed into a raging, ink-black Medusa of endlessly sprouting tentacles, emerging from a bottomless central body that was almost as large as the white-brick ruin it appeared to have broken through as it grew.
Badass, the symbiote murmured dreamily.
The fight, such as it was, wasn’t going too well.
The wreckage of Kuwaiti gunships and troop carriers filled the roadsides alongside those of buses and cars, and displayed every imaginable method of destruction, from flipped over, crushed, or hurled through buildings by tentacles, to being immolated by solar energy.
Moonstone and some guy with a golden sword fought side by side at the Void’s “feet”, fighting to protect an old man in bloody white robes who smelled pretty dead already.
Several pitch-black tentacles were wrapped around Moonstone’s limbs and body, but she had one arm free and was using it to send yellow beams slicing through the Void’s tentacles to the black shape at his core. The sword guy hacked at the tentacles that were encircling Moonstone, working himself into a lather of exhaustion just to keep his apparent ally’s one hand free of the Void’s clutches. Mac looked up. Way up. Above the tooth-decay horror show of Kuwait City’s redrawn skyline, a second battle was underway. Mac recognized the fighter from their own encounter in the New York Bulletin, and winced with sympathetic pain each time his Black Sword clove through one of the Void’s tentacles.
Mac wondered if it would have made any difference to the outcome if Norman, Vicky, Bullseye, Daken, Ares even, and all the might of H.A.M.M.E.R., were here where they ought to be rather than in a parking lot halfway across the city.
Probably not, he decided, watching with some satisfaction as the Black Raazer, enveloped by heaving tentacles, disappeared in a gasp of ether and a shriek that went through the psionic connections binding his mind to Venom’s and almost roused the beast from its torpor.
Mac fought it back down.
They were all depending on him now. Vicki was counting on him.
Lindy tried again to say something, wriggling in her web-sac as he launched himself from the rooftop fascia, webbed the lantern of a leaning lamppost, and swung towards the fight.
An urgent, alien sense of discomfort burrowed its way up from his gut. He experienced a short, vivid premonition of being burned alive, and immediately threw out another web, pulling himself sideways as a blast of dolorous light seared across him and demolished the apartment building he had been using as a perch. With another web-shoot, he corrected course, swinging low enough to the ground to whip up a train of dust.
The Void was fast. But how fast did you need to get to hit something that could react to your attack before you made it?
Swinging around, under, and through a succession of searing energy blasts and groping tentacles, he landed in a crouch on a patch of ground paved with rubble, a hundred feet from where Moonstone and Sword Guy struggled on. Neither of them noticed his arrival, or acknowledged it if they did, just another droplet of liquid black in a world corrupted by black.
The Void, though, extended a head that had become skeletal and crocodilian on a long, long neck, and gave a roar that shed the skyline of another handful of blast-wrecked buildings.
“YOU CANNOT FIGHT ME, BUG. ACTUAL GODS COULD NOT FIGHT ME.”
Mac staggered back from the sonic onslaught of the Void’s voice, less exquisitely tuned to the symbiote’s particular frequency of weakness than Dr Fiennes’ torture device but about a million times more powerful. He felt Lindy struggling to break free as the symbiote shriveled from the attack and the webbing sticking her in place weakened. He sacrificed several layers from his own symbiote suit, leaving ropy patches of bare skin on his forearms and thighs to keep her secure. He had to get her to the Void. No one had ever outright told him what the deal was between the Sentry and the Void. He was too dumb an animal to get it, or so they thought, but he’d been in the room when Osborn and Moonstone and Vicki had talked about it, and neither Mac Gargan nor Venom were as stupid as everyone seemed to think they were.
He knew, for instance, that his own life wasn’t going to be worth much if he couldn’t get the Sentry to re-emerge and banish the Void again.
With Lindy tightly held at the expense of his own protection, Mac lowered his head as if into a shrieking gale and pushed on.
A mass of tentacles burst through the air towards them.
Venom’s ESP saw them coming from a mile off. He saw that he didn’t have a prayer of avoiding half of them, but tried anyway, because that was what heroes did, still howling in protest as tendrils squirmed around his ankles, wrists, waist, throat, and hoisted him off the ground like a piece of leather on a tanning rack. His bones creaked, the symbiote suit rippling and flexing as it combatted the Void’s terrible, infinite strength with its own. Under the most awesome of pressures, the symbiote regurgitated Lindy.
She landed with a wet slap on the broken ground, and smeared black symbiote goo from her mouth on an almost equally soiled sleeve. She gasped for breath, and then yelled, “I said, let me talk to him!”
Mac groaned in pain as tension passed through the mass of tendrils holding him in place, a monstrous head appearing through the squalid mass like clouds parting to reveal not the sun, but the face of Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, with his mouth opening wide.
“L-LINDY?” it said.
“IT DOESN’T MATTER,” said the same head in a crueler voice. “DESTROY THEM ALL. DESTROY EVERYTHING.”
“LINDY.”
“OSBORN PROMISED TO HELP US.”
“LINDY!”
Mac felt the holds on him loosen, tendrils sliding around his arms and legs as several tentacles reached tentatively, almost shyly, towards Lindy. Venom could smell the terror on her, see the look of it stricken into her face as she forced herself to stand her ground and meet the gargantuan, inhuman gaze of her husband all the same.
“I CAME TO SAVE YOU!”
“I didn’t need saving. I came here to get away from you. From him.”
“KILL HER!” the second voice roared, but it sounded weaker now, on the losing side of the argument.
A tremor passed through the gelatinous heave of the transformed Void’s inky musculature. Fresh tentacles ceased to squirm free of the gelid black core with the same regularity, while those already at large whipped and flailed without direction, or even doubled back to throttle one another as whatever minds sought to guide them vied for control. From the corner of Mac’s eye, the sword guy found a second wind to winnow back the wavering tendrils, bringing a triumphant, vengeful shout from Moonstone as she found herself free.
“COME BACK TO NEW YORK WITH ME.”
Lindy leant back to avoid the brushing tentacles, but held her nerve. Mac found himself wishing he’d met a woman like that. “No,” she said.
The Sentry and the Void cried out together in their anguish. The remaining tentacles began to retreat, but rather than swell with the accretion of mass, the great monster shrank and shrank: he shrank like a collapsing star, the first rays of new, golden light pulsing through the Void until the symbiote was forced to film Mac’s eyes over to protect its host from blindness.
“Be nice to him!” Mac yelled.
“No,” Lindy shouted back, from somewhere in the blackness beyond Venom’s impenetrable eyelids. “I’m done being afraid. I want my husband back.” And then to the Void, “We’ll go back to New York, but not together. You’ll go back to the Watchtower and to being the hero you used to be. Or you’ll retire altogether. It’s up you. You’ll start talking to Reed and Sue again and stop listening to Norman. You’ll beat the Void forever. I’ll be going back to our old place in Queens until you do. If you ever want me to come back then that’s how it’s going to happen.”
Even through the black scabs over his eyes, Mac saw the human figure that walked out of the glare. He carried the glare out with him, the symbiote web still sticking to her evaporating like black ice before a flamethrower.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, coming for her with arms outstretched. “I’m so, so sorry.” Lindy pushed him off her, a mortal pitting her strength against the mightiest force in the known universe and leaving it sobbing uncontrollably at her feet.
Mac looked away, feeling unaccountably discomforted by the omnipotent hero’s humbling. The ruination of downtown Kuwait City was grossly accentuated by its return to stillness in the aftermath of the Sentry’s return to dominance over the Void, and by the godlike hero wailing his heartbreak into it on his hands and knees. Moonstone and Sword Guy were both looking at Mac, confused but too exhausted to ask what was going on, which came as a strange relief because Mac really didn’t have a clue.
I don’t understand, the symbiote mumbled. Why doesn’t he just eat her?
Mac shook his head numbly as Lindy left her husband in his crumpled-up heap and came to put her hand on his shoulder. He felt unexpectedly uplifted that she would touch him without worrying that he would bite her hand off. Even Vicki was scared of him. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be the good guy: to do good things and have people like you.
He could get used to it.
If the symbiote would let him.
If Norman would let him.
Kill Norman Osborn…
“Take me home,” said Lindy.