=Venom=

Venom 7

  Dan was on his way home for lunch to feed their cat when he saw two black SUV’s parked on the street in front of him and Ana’s building. He drove by slowly and saw them loading Brie into the car.
  “Hello?” Answered Ana.
  “They found Brie.”
  “What? Who? Archer?”
  “Yea, I was just on my way home to feed Mr. Belvedere and saw them putting her into a blacked-out SUV. I’m going to circle the block and come back around.”
  “Ok, I’ll see if I can cut out of here early and call Mack.” Ana hung up the phone and sat back in her chair. “Damn it.”

  “I want you to come with me.” Said Archer, opening the door to Eddie’s holding cell. Eddie was sitting with his back against the wall looking at his bandaged arm.
  “Are you planning on cooking the rest of me?”
  Archer stood in the doorway waiting in silence. Eddie got to his feet and followed him to another lab. They walked through two sets of double doors into a dark room. Archer flipped on the light and escorted him into another holding cell.
   “You walked me 100 feet just to put me in another shitty room.” Archer locked him in and then punched a keypad that pulled up a screen dividing his cell from the one beside him. “BRIE!”

  She was laying on the floor in the next chamber, still unconscious from the drugs. Archer walked over to her cell and pressed a button. Another loud sonic pulse echoed through the room, Brie’s body thrashed frantically as Venom struggled to maintain his grasp on his host.
  “There it is.” Grinned Archer.
  “Stop it! Or I swear to God I’ll rip your fuckin’ head off!” Eddie beat the glass.
Archer stopped the pulse and Brie rolled onto her side gasping for air, she caught a glimpse of Eddie and crawled over to the glass.
  “Eddie…”
  “Brie, honey, I’m so, so, sorry.”
  “The Symbiote seems to be having a harder time reaching equilibrium with you. We ran a few tests on you while you were out. It’s still impressive you’ve been able to maintain control this long.”
  Archer projects video footage on a nearby wall from Carlton Drake’s archives of the original specimens killing their hosts.
  “I would not do that to you, although he is right. We are not a compatible match. If I stay with you much longer you will become very ill.” Whispered Venom.
  “That would have been nice to know earlier.” She muttered.
  “This was only supposed to be temporary…”
  “We can extract the Symbiote one of two ways. Obviously, one will be easier than the other.”
  “Why don’t you open the door and I’ll hand him over?”
  “Very funny.” Archer opened a hatch and slid in a container.
  “He can’t live without a host, you’ll kill him.” Brie looked at the container. How ironic that it looked like the shoebox you’d burry your dead pet cat in.
  “He's the last of his kind on Earth. I wouldn’t dare.”
  Brie suddenly felt weak, like the weight of the world suddenly decided to pull her under. She braced herself against the wall as black slime oozed down onto her shoes and Venom found his way into the container which sealed automatically. Archer pulled the container back through the hatch and locked it once more. Brie looked pale and feverish as she slid down onto the floor.
  “I’ll have some supplements brought to you. You should recover in a few hours from the separation.” He said as he exited the lab with Venom.
  Eddie kneeled beside her on the other side of the glass. He knew exactly how she felt. Before he and Venom fully bonded there were a lot of kinks they had to work out, mainly involving Venom’s diet. She looked over at him and pulled off half a smile. She was happy he was okay, although it was clear he had been worked over.
  “You look like shit.” She joked and Eddie laughed.
  “Yea? Well for someone who looks like they’re going to drop dead any minute, you’re still a looker.”
  Brie shook her head and laughed lightly. “I don’t know how you do it. I was with him for two days…”
  “It was rough on me too.”
  “I’m talking about the talking. He almost never shuts up.”

   Archer gave Venom a variety of host to bond with, starting off with smaller organisms ranging from mice and rats, to rabbits and monkeys, and eventually two human host. Archer had enough money and pull in government that he could easily of had a dozen prisoners taken from the local jailhouse to be used for experimentation. Instead he opted for two who had no ties to family or society that were in pristine shape. They were written off like livestock from the record books and sent to his facility.
   Venom didn’t bother trying to pair with them. He maintained enough of a bond that he could entertain Archer and buy Ana some time.
  “Your species is quite extraordinary. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourselves?
  “We are destruction.”
  “That’s not true. Sure, there were a few bad apples in the batch that came here, but you were okay.”
  “I am a mutation of my species. I do not seek a host for the slaughter.”
  “You want to keep your host?”
  “Yes. My species insists on feeding off a host until it becomes weak and inadequate for our nutritional needs and then we eat them.”
  “How many of you are there?”
   “Thousands. We could decimate your planet in weeks.”
  “How do you breed?”
  “Bend over and I will show you.”
   Archer chuckled. “You sound like your host.”
  “We are the perfect match.”
  “Indeed.”

   Brie was feeling better after a medic came in and got her some fluids. “So, what’s this all about?”
  “Archer wants Venom to show him where his planet is. He wants to bring back more of his kind to study.”
  “Because that worked out so well for Drake.” She muttered sarcastically. “If we’re lucky Ana will have help by tomorrow.”
  “I want you to know, if I would have known this was going to happen, I never would have asked you out and got you caught up in all of this.”

  Just to be safe, Dan met Ana at a hotel a couple of blocks away from their place. Ana called Mack to let him know there was going to be a change of plans and that she needed those clearance cards immediately and that Brie was now out of the picture. Later that evening, there was a knock on the door of their hotel room.
  “Hi, would you like to buy some girl scout cookies?” Said a little girl with a green sash and hat.
  “No thanks sweetie.” Ana smiled and began closing the door, but the little girl shoved her foot between the gap.
  “I insist. My brother LOVES the peanut butter ones.” The girl had a very intimidating look, so Ana took her advice and gave the girl $6 for a box of cookies. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
  “What kind of girl scout sells cookies in April?” Asks Dan.
Ana opened the box and found it devoid of cookies and containing their clearance badges.

“Charming little sister of yours.” Says Ana while on the phone with Mack. He got tied up at work and had his little sister pick up the badges and bring them to her.
  “Yea, she can be pretty persuasive if she needs to be. I did what I could with the second photo, but it’s not perfect.
  Mack had taken close up photos of Ana and Brie after their meeting to put on the badges, but now it was up to Ana and Dan, so she gave him a cropped photo of them on their honeymoon with a floral beach shirt. It was the only one she could find where there wasn’t anything obscuring his face. 
  The plan was for Ana and Dan to present themselves as VIP donors visiting Archer and checking out his labs. Mack was going to follow them through the facility using security cameras and in the event of their plan backfiring, creating a diversion to help them escape.
  “Relax.” Ana could tell Dan was nervous as they pulled up to the facility and handed their badges to the gate guard for verification.
“I am as relaxed as I can be going into a facility where a man has kidnapped two of our peers, including one DIRECTLY from our house.”
  “Just follow my lead.” She said as she parked.

  “IDs please?” Asked the security guard at the lobby entrance. “What’s your business here?”
  “Dr. Dumont and I are here tour the facility’s labs.”
  “Which lab?” Questions the guard.
  “All of them.”
  The guard took a double take of their badges. “Casual Friday?”
  “It was an office party, Luau.” Dan tried to explain the tropical attire in the photo.
  “Look, Mr. Dumont here has invested a lot of money in Mr. Archer’s exploration program. It’s been a long day and I’m sure he would like to speak with Mr. Archer promptly before deciding on whether or not to keep funding the program.”
  The guard looked the two of them over and let them through.

  Archer returns with Venom and a couple of guards, including Rice, who opens Brie’s cell and yanks her to her feet. She pulls away and he grabs a handful of her hair while unholstering his gun and pointing it to the bottom of her chin.
  “Let her go!” Eddie slammed his hands against the glass at the sight of Rice’s smirk.
  Archer slid the container housing Venom into Eddie’s containment.
  “You sure you want to do that?” Eddie looked at Archer intensely.
  “If you so much as give Rice the impression that you’ll try something stupid he has permission to shoot her in the head.”
  “I have a twitchy trigger finger.” He warned.
  Eddie pressed a button on the side of the box releasing Venom who didn’t hesitate to bond to his favorite host.
  “I’m going to bite his head off and savor it’s flavor.” Hissed Venom.
  “Which of these planets belongs to your kind?” Asked Archer, revealing a map of the planetary system where he was from.
  “What makes you think I will give you the right planet?”
  Rice released a round in the chamber with Brie and then placed the hot barrel against her neck again. She tried not to scream as it seared the skin. Venom roared.

  Ana and Dan stopped in their tracks, the sound of the gunshot echoed into the main lab. Two guards appeared and they ducked behind  a set of servers while they passed by, followed by Archer, Rice and Brie.
  “Send the coordinates to the Apparition shuttle craft immediately. They can make it there in three days time.” Ordered Archer to one guard. “Take her down to Level 3. If it turns out he’s lying we’ll kill her.”
   The last guard followed Rice with Brie down to level 3 while Archer punched in a security code, locking down the wing of the lab. When the coast was clear Ana and Dan made their way through in search of Eddie. There was a loud thumping noise coming from deeper inside the lab where they found Venom clawing and beating on the glass.
  “Eddie.” Called out Dan.
  Venom turn excited to see him and Ana coming to his aid. “Dan! Ana! Let me out of here. I need to find Brie and bite off the head of Archer and Rice!”
  “They’ve taken her down to level 3. But he locked down the unit, once you leave the lab alarms are going to sound.”
  “Let me try and get in touch with Mack, maybe he can do something about that.” Ana texts Mack who had been hiding in her car.
  “Need help, locked down in lab. Can you silence alarms?”
  “I can try.”
  While Mack was inside Archer’s systems, he decided to do some searching around in his servers, downloading as much incriminating information as possible. He was able to bypass the main alarm to the labs, but overlooked the secondary silent alarm that signaled the security desk. Dan released Venom from his chamber and he immediately took off.
  “You two need to leave now. It’s is going to be a real shit show.”
  “We’ll meet you and Brie down at the Sip N’ Go.” Informed Ana.
  They fled the lab, and although the alarm didn’t sound off the emergency lights began to flash.
  “Fuck.” Mack immediately called Ana. “Hey, I think there was a secondary system set up.”
  “You think?” She said as security guards came walking down the hall.
  “I’ll fix it.”
  “No time.” She said as her and Dan took off running down the hall into a stairwell.
  Mack bypassed a few more systems triggering the fire system and setting off the alarm and sprinklers. Ana and Dan made it down to the lobby that was full of guards.
  “I got an idea.” Said Dan, pulling his shirt up over his nose. Ana followed his lead.
  Dan began coughing as soon as they enter the lobby. “There was a gas leak in the lab. You need to get everyone out of here now.”
  “Just a minute…” The guard who questioned their credentials when they first walked in wasn’t so sure about their story, but he didn’t have time to interrogate them after an explosion sounded in the building.