by Alex Irvine
He broke the kiss as his heart rate started to speed up. “Whoa,” he said. “I can’t get too excited.”
“Not even a little excited?” she asked with a playful pout. He sighed and rested his head against her chest. She stroked his hair. “It’s okay,” she said.
They sat together and started to talk about what they were going to do next.
CHAPTER 17
Ross paced across his office as he watched the news reports on TV. He grimaced as they showed footage of the final explosion.
The coverage switched to a reporter in a newsroom. “Rumors continue to swirl about a clash between the US military and an unknown adversary at Culver University earlier today,” the reporter announced.
The TV now showed a blond reporter standing with two students on campus. “Very few outside the military got a firsthand look at who—or what—the soldiers were fighting,” she said. “Sophomores Jack McGhee and Jim Wilson were coming home from a hike and witnessed some of the battle. McGhee captured this on his cell phone.” The screen flashed an extremely grainy image of the creature.
The reporter held up her microphone to the nearest student, Jack McGhee. “Can you describe what you saw?” she asked.
“Dude, it was huge and green!” McGhee exclaimed.
“Dude, it was so big,” Wilson agreed. “It was like this huge… hulk.”
The reporter faced the camera again. “Further search for the mysterious ‘hulk’ was delayed by powerful thunderstorms in Smoky Mountains National Park.”
Ross wheeled around when Sparr entered his office.
“Sir. It’s Blonsky,” said Sparr.
Ross and Sparr hustled toward the hospital ward. As they pushed through the ICU doors, Ross asked, “Has anybody found out if he had next of kin or family?”
Sparr held open the door for him. “You can ask him yourself,” she replied.
A group of doctors and nurses backed away from Blonsky’s bed as Ross entered, and Ross could see Blonsky sitting up, laughing. One of the nurses was taking off a metal splint from his hand. He was completely healed. Ross reconsidered what he’d thought earlier about the Super-Soldier serum. Apparently it had made Blonsky tougher than Ross had thought.
Blonsky grinned when he saw Ross. “Sir,” he said.
Ross approached Blonsky and looked him over, astounded by the recovery. There wasn’t a mark on him, and considering what Blonsky had looked like when they’d medevacked him back here, that was nothing short of incredible. “Good to see you back on your feet, soldier.”
“Thank you, sir,” Blonsky said.
Ross kept looking at him, gauging his health from how Blonsky sat, how his eyes tracked everything in the room… and how the smile on his face didn’t really hide the expression of a man who wanted revenge. “How do you feel?” Ross asked.
Blonsky’s grin widened. “Ready for round three,” he replied.
Betty emptied the contents of her purse onto the motel bedspread. She had a phone, a credit and debit card, her driver’s license, forty dollars in cash, some makeup, her university ID, and a digital camera.
Betty shrugged. “I thought if you asked me to go, I ought to be ready.”
Bruce smiled, touched that she was prepared to join him. He collected everything from the bedspread except the money and the camera, and put them back into her purse. “Basically we can’t use any of this because they can track all of it,” he said.
“How about my lip gloss?” Betty joked. “Can they track that?”
With a laugh, Bruce said, “No, you can keep that.”
“And I need my glasses,” she added.
“You can—” Bruce stopped as he realized she was having fun with him. “We can use most of it,” he corrected himself. “We just can’t use the credit cards, the ID, or the phone. Don’t even turn the phone on.”
Betty looked down at the money in his hand. “How will we get where we need to go on forty dollars and no credit cards?”
Bruce looked down at the floor. He didn’t have an answer for her.
“We can sell this,” Betty said. She removed a chain from her neck, pulling up a lovely gold pendant. Bruce knew she had gotten it as an inheritance from her mother.
“No,” Bruce said firmly. “It’s the only thing you have left from her. No.”
“Well, we’ll have to try to get it back,” Betty said.
In that moment, Bruce realized how lucky he was to have her on his side.
Ross stood in the Pentagon planning room, looking over the team he had assembled as Sparr wrapped up the briefing on the Banner situation. They all stared up at Bruce’s and Betty’s photos on the projection screen.
“Federal is already monitoring phone, plastic, and Dr. Ross’s Web accounts, and local police have been on alert,” Sparr continued. “They’ll pop up somewhere, and when they do, it comes straight to us.”
Ross cleared his throat. “They’re not gonna just pop up,” he interjected. “Banner made it five years and got across borders without making a mistake. He won’t use a credit card now. If he was trying to escape, he’d be long gone. He’s not trying to disappear this time—he’s looking for help.” The general raised a hand and closed it into a fist. “That’s how we’re going to get him. We know what they’re after, and we know he’s been talking to somebody. You all have copies of the correspondence. The aliases Mr. Green and Mr. Blue have been added to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Operations Database. If he comes up for air, we’ll be waiting. If he makes a peep, we’ll hear him. And when he slips up, we’ll be ready.”
Betty counted out cash to the young guy working at the counter at a gas station. While the clerk was distracted, Bruce stepped into the attached garage and spotted a greasy-looking computer terminal on a desk. He plugged the USB drive into the computer.
He didn’t have time to download the chat software, and also he couldn’t attach files that way. Mr. Blue needed data, and Mr. Green wanted him to have it. So Bruce typed a quick e-mail to an address at Grayburn College, where he knew Mr. Blue worked. He used a subject line guaranteed to get Mr. Blue’s attention: File from Mr. Green.
The message was simple. Mr. Blue. Here’s the data. It’s time to meet.—Mr. Green. Then he uploaded the data from the drive and sent it off.
Betty came out of the store as he exited the garage. She held up a set of keys and smiled, pointing at a battered pickup truck. As Bruce removed the FOR SALE sign from the window and tossed it in the back of the truck, Betty said, “Hey…”
Bruce faced her, then grimaced when he saw her holding up the camera.
“It’s been worse than this before, right?” Betty asked.
“Yes,” Bruce replied. “Much worse.”
“And you’re not just running now,” Betty continued. “We’re on the way to something better. So smile.”
Bruce tried, but he was afraid he didn’t give her much of a smile to work with. But she snapped the picture anyway.
They were still on the highway as night fell. Betty drove, and Bruce leaned his head against the passenger-side window.
Betty took a deep breath. “What is it like?” she asked. “When it happens, what do you experience?”
“Remember those experiments we volunteered for at Harvard? Those induced hallucinations? It’s a lot like that. Just a thousand times amplified. It’s like someone’s poured a liter of acid into my brain.”
It was a scary thing to hear, but Betty went on. She loved Bruce and wanted him to know that she was with him for whatever he needed her to hear, and whatever he needed her to do. “Do you remember anything?” she asked.
“Just fragments. Images. There’s too much noise. I can never derive much out of it.”
“But then it’s still you… inside him,” Betty said.
“No. No, it’s not,” Bruce responded curtly.
Betty let that sit before replying. “I don’t know,” she began. “In the cave, I really felt like it knew me. Maybe your mind is in there, it’s just overcharged and c
an’t process what’s happening.”
“I don’t want to control it. I want to get rid of it,” Bruce said sullenly.
Betty wanted to say more, but she could tell Bruce was shutting down. He couldn’t come to grips with the creature inside him, and Betty knew if she was in his shoes she would probably have had the same trouble. Bruce turned away from her, staring out the window into the darkness.
All he could see was his own reflection.
CHAPTER 18
In a secret medical lab, Blonsky sat back on a hospital bed. Two nearby technicians prepared syringes of Super-Soldier serum, while another one hooked Blonsky up to monitors.
Ross stepped up to the edge of the bed. “You ready?” he asked.
Blonsky smiled. “Let’s even the playing field a little,” he replied.
In her office in a building across the base from the medical facility, Major Sparr looked up. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s search computer had turned up a hit on the term “Mr. Blue.”
She clicked on the result and ran down all possible avenues. Got him, she thought. This had to be the guy Bruce was going to see.
Bruce woke up in the truck sometime in the afternoon. They were inching down the highway in heavy traffic, and he couldn’t tell how long he’d been asleep. On the radio, an announcer softly recited the news. “Bruce, wake up,” Betty said. “There’s something going on.”
Bruce peered out the front windshield at the traffic jam. The reporter on the radio mentioned traffic delays due to a heightened security alert, and Bruce opened his door and looked out. Far ahead, he could see the gates of a toll booth at the entrance of the Holland Tunnel. Uniformed officers stood by the gates, staring at faces in the cars slowly passing by the checkpoint.
“We’ve got to go,” Bruce decided.
Betty glanced at him in alarm.
“Walk toward the back,” Bruce said. “Just don’t move too fast.”
Both of them exited the truck, abandoning it on the road. Picking their way through the slow lines of honking cars, they headed for the shoulder and hiked down a gravelly slope.
They made their way through an industrial area of Jersey City to the edge of the Hudson River. There Bruce spotted a dock in the distance. They approached one of the fishermen, a tall guy with a mop of gray hair who was leaning against a railing with a fishing pole. Betty chatted with him, offering him some money. The fisherman nodded.
A few minutes later, they took a seat in a small outboard motorboat. The fisherman throttled the engine, and Bruce and Betty faced forward as they puttered out onto the river. The Statue of Liberty and New York City shimmered in the sunlight across the water.
They docked near Battery Park, thanked the fisherman, and walked up onto the streets of the city. Ten or fifteen minutes later, they’d gotten as far as Chambers Street. Betty and Bruce stopped by a map kiosk to figure out the best route to their destination.
“It’s a long way uptown,” Betty pointed out. “I think the subway’s probably quickest.”
Bruce chuckled. “Me in a crowded metal tube underground with hundreds of other people in the most aggressive city in the world?”
“Right,” said Betty. “Let’s get a cab.”
The cab driver who picked them up was easily the most reckless driver in a city full of reckless drivers.
Betty gasped as the taxi slashed wildly across two lanes on Sixth Avenue. The driver slammed on the breaks randomly, honked his horn every few seconds, nearly killed a bike messenger, and sped through yellow lights instead of slowing down for them. The radio blared music while the driver jabbered on his cell phone. Bruce and Betty slammed around in the backseat.
Bruce’s new pulse monitor beeped as his heart rate climbed past ninety-seven beats per minute… up to ninety-eight… then ninety-nine…
He put his head back and closed his eyes, breathing deeply.
The cab screeched to a halt near Columbus Circle, in midtown Manhattan, bumping into the curb by an entrance to Central Park. They weren’t close to their destination, but they couldn’t stand that insane ride any longer!
Betty chucked a few bills through the passenger-side window. “Are you out of your mind! That was the worst cab ride I’ve ever had!” she yelled.
The driver just made a kissing noise and screeched away.
Betty kicked the rear bumper as it passed her. “Jerk!” she yelled, letting out all her pent-up frustration.
“You know,” Bruce suggested softly, “I know a few techniques that could help you manage that anger very effectively.”
“You zip it,” Betty snapped. “We’re walking.”
“Okay,” Bruce said.
CHAPTER 19
Outside Grayburn College’s science building, Professor Sterns walked down the front steps, shuffling a stack of papers in his hands.
Betty hurried over to him. “Excuse me, Dr. Sterns?” she said. “Sorry to bother you, I’m Elizabeth Ross.”
Dr. Sterns stared at her in surprise. “Oh! Dr. Ross!” he replied with a gasp. “I devoured your paper on synthesizing myostatin! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Betty waved to Bruce, who strode up the stairs to join them. “I have someone who would like to meet you,” Betty said.
“Okay,” Sterns said as Bruce approached.
Bruce stuck out his hand for the professor to shake. “It’s Mr. Blue, isn’t it?”
Dr. Stern’s mouth dropped open. “Mr. Green!”
Up in Dr. Sterns’s office, Bruce and Betty stepped through a mad scientist’s clutter of books, papers, chemical models, and scientific equipment. There was nowhere for guests to sit, so they stood in front of the professor’s messy desk.
Dr. Sterns plopped down in his desk chair, chattering away happily. “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been wondering if you were even real,” he said. “And if you were, what would it look like? A person with that much power lurking in him. Nothing could have surprised me more than this unassuming man shaking my hand. But look, we’re not strolling into the park for a picnic here. Even if everything goes perfectly, if we induce an episode, if we get the dosage exactly right… is that going to be a lasting cure, or just some antidote to suppress that specific flare-up?” He mimed flipping a coin. “I don’t know.”
Sterns’s expression grew serious. “What I’m saying is if we overshoot by even a small integer… These concentrations carry extraordinary levels of toxicity.”
“You mean it could kill him,” Betty translated.
“Kill him? Yeah,” Sterns agreed. “I should say so.”
Betty and Bruce glanced at each other. It sounded like a big decision to make, but Bruce would try anything if it meant never losing control to the Hulk again.
“You should know that there’s a flip side to this, too,” Bruce said. “If we miss on the low side—if we induce me and the antidote fails—it will be very dangerous for you,” he warned them.
Dr. Sterns chuckled and shrugged off the warning. “Look. I’ve always been far more curious than cautious,” he said. “And that’s served me pretty well.” He clapped his hands together abruptly. “So. Are we going to do this?”
Betty and Bruce both nodded.
“Into the glorious unknown!” Dr. Sterns cheered.
At the Everglades base, helicopters were staging for the operation to take down Bruce. Flight crews did their final checks and ground support techs checked boxes on their mission-prep lists.
Inside the barracks, Blonsky stood alone in a locker room, staring at himself in the mirror. He still looked as he always had—a smallish man, compact in build, not too muscular. He was the kind of men others always underestimated, until they came up against him in a fight.
But now, as he watched, his body began to change. The new dose of the Super-Soldier serum was taking hold. Blonsky watched, and he liked what he saw. It hurt, but nothing worth having was ever painless. And this? Oh yes. It was worth having.
Blonsky grinned crazily at himself in the mirror.
A few
hours later, he boarded a high-tech helicopter with a troop of other special forces soldiers. Besides him, there were three two-man shooting teams. Thermal scopes and rifles were racked against the wall.
Blonsky sat across from a soldier who had been in the Culver University battle.
“How you feeling, man?” the soldier asked him.
“Like a monster,” Blonsky replied with a grin.
CHAPTER 20
Dr. Sterns and Betty prepared Bruce’s experimental procedure. Betty thought that the lab table looked disturbingly like a prison bed for administering lethal injections. The whole laboratory had a Dr. Frankenstein vibe that made her feel unnerved.
Bruce stripped to his stretchy Lycra shorts and handed his clothes to Betty. “Think of all the money I’ll save on wardrobe if this works,” he joked. When she didn’t laugh, his expression grew solemn. “If this starts to go bad,” he said, “promise me you won’t try to help.”
“Bruce—” Betty began.
“It’s the worst when it starts,” he interrupted. “You have to promise me you’ll run or I can’t do this.”
Betty nodded.
“Okay. On the table,” Dr. Sterns said. He pointed to the medical restraints on the lab table. “If you have a strong reaction, these will keep you from hurting yourself.”
Bruce chuckled. He climbed up onto the table and lay down. “You can tell me later if you thought it was strong.”
Dr. Sterns tilted the table back and attached the straps to Bruce’s wrists and ankles. Betty helped him insert an IV linked to the cell saturation machine into each of Bruce’s arms and legs. Dr. Sterns opened a canister containing the antidote and connected it to a plunger attached to the IV tubes. He pounded on one of the machines, saying something about his graduate students messing it up. Finally, Dr. Sterns stuck contact pads connected to electrical wires onto Bruce’s temples.