JASON HENDERSON
Illustrations by James W. Fry
NEW YORK
BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Special thanks to Ginjer Buchanan, Steve Roman, stacy Gittelman, Mike Thomas, Steve Belding John Conroy, Brad Foltz, and Carol D. Page.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK: ABOMINATIONS
A Boulevard Book A Byron Preiss Multimedia Company, Inc. Book
PRINTING HISTORY Boulevard paperback edition July 1997
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Copyright Q 199? Marvel Characters, Inc.
Edited by Keith R.A. DeCandido.
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—For Earnest Bell, my Hero and my Grandpa.
For heip with Russian customs and holidays, my thanks go out to Marina Frants, who was dratted to the cause by virtue of her marriage to Keith R.A. DeCanaido, my editor, and who at least kept me from making a complete fool of myself. Whatever I still managed to get wrong is my own fault, of course. Thanks to Keith for his help and patience and more thanks for all the comics to get me up to speed.
Thanks to Pierre Askegren for co-creating Sean Morgan and letting me put him through hell.
Oh, and for inspiration, thanks to Toy Biz for the really cool Doctor Banner and Abomination figures. My wife is sick of me making fighting noises and throwing them around the home office, but I call it work.
There is grief.
Thank God there are heroes.
CHAfTilR 1
Sometimes I wake up and time is moving backward.
It is just after the gamma blast. I am on my back, writhing, pinned to a sheet of green glass the size of a skating rink that a few moments before was hot New Mexico sand. My hand is still in front of my face, and I can see the bones underneath my flesh glowing green and fiery. The gamma wave is flying fast and backward, though, backward with time. Now the sudden-born rage snuffs out again; time is flying past the moment’s birth.
Backward screams fly into my mouth and strips of clothing slap across my body as I fly off the green glass that turns brown and grainy. My feet go back into my shoes and hit the sand and my hand is still infront of my eyes as the wave rips past me and back to the opening flash.
Time careens backward and the flash is visible through my hand but now my hand is dropping. I see the beginning of the flash shrink down into the sand of the horizon, the gamma heat soaring back with the flash and leaving me standing in the New Mexico sand, beautifid, clouds moving backward.
Sometimes I wake up and it is before the gamma flash.
I am a man, my flesh is pink and always will be, my body is weak and always will be, my rage is human and_ controlled, like everyone else's. Eveiyone.
Sometimes I wake up and time moves backward and I am not tall, or angry, or strong, except in the ways I know and have seen a million times. My rage is safely hidden, it trudges through my mind unknown and unobtrusive. Sometimes I wake up and it is before the gamma flash and my life is small and I love it and hate it and am a normal man.
Sometimes I wake - up and lime moves backward and I am not green.
Damage foilowed the Hulk. The Hulk walked on the concrete road and killed it slowly, even as gingerly as he stepped. Despite his efforts, the concrete cracked, in tiny, inscrutable cracks taking years off the life of the thoroughfare. Step out at night, try to do some thinking, and what happens? Damage.
The Hulk walked the roads at m^ht wondering why he was being watched when he heard the sound. Just after he heard the sound of the crash, that godawful wailing metal sound, the Hulk reached the top of a hill and looked down bn a highway of licking f!ames™scattering and worming through bubbling jelly and cracked glass, cooling into a frozen purple lake of fire.
But that was after.
Fact #1. The freeways are built for trucks. There is no secret about this. Save for some heavily travelled parts of densely populated towns, the freeway system that laces through North America is chiefly a thoroughfare for the tractor-irailer. Certainly, cars are allowed. In the daytime, the trucks share the roads and let everybody else drive, too, but none of them are happy about it. At night, the trucks rule the roads.
Fact #2. Songs about car wrecks jangle arid careen across the airwaves like debris. There are a lot of them, and most o: them are awful n varieties of awful that changc with the decades, from the sublimely morbid “Warm Leatherette of the 1980s back to the mercilessly smarmy *sen AngeF of the 1950s. Car wrecks are the stuff of songs that people really like to sing and dance to. No one can say exactly why.
Fact #3. The car radio plays the same songs as the radio at home.
There is an interchange just north"6f W1 ire Plains, New York, where Route 4, moving westward, swoops up and around to meet Interstate 365, and the exit from 1-365 does the same in the opposite direction to get onto Route 4. Opposing vehicles pass one another on the curving ramp at the legal maximum speed of forty miles per hour. At forty, tons of metal careening into each other are already lethal, but forty is merely a bon geste on the part of the state of New York. Most cars make the interchange at fifty-five or sixty, sailing past their counterparts, usually separated by about ten feet of air and the perceived safety net of a sheet metal guardrail and, almost jokingly, a mesh of chain-link fcncing.
At eleven p.m. on February 20th, Alex Deere travelled north on 1-365 and prepared to exit onto Route 4. Deere drove an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer, the kind that, as noted, rule the road. To say that he was preparing to make the interchange is not entirely correct. He was falling asleep, and looldng for the interchange whenever he managed to wake up. Alex blinked and tried to focus on the oad, thudded awake by the turtlelike bumps built for exactly that purpose. His eyes travelled from his knuckles on the steering wheel to the trip report suction-cupped to the dashboard. He shook his head. He had been driving for eighteen hours.
Alex took a deep breath and rolled down the window, allowing the slicing cold air to fly in. He blinked. The hell with them. The hell with them and their Jumbo’s Jelly and their deadlines. The hell with their pressure and their “Welcome to the Jumbo’s Jelly family!” speechesZl don’t need this. (“Sorry, no, we need it by Thursday.”)
Deere grabbed Ms radio and keyed the mike. “Breaker one-nine,” he mumbled. “This is Jumbo Dog. Breaker one-nine for a radio checks He took off his cap and let tne air blow his hair around. Sleep rumbled like a distant wave in the background, an animal frightened away from camp for a moment, but still there, lurking. Deere watched the road fly underneath his hood and thanked God the roads were clear. Three days, ago this route was covered in snow. Now the ice and snow had been pushed onto the side of the road so the trucks could get through, so people everywhere could get their peanuts and popcorn and Jumbo’s Jelly.
The radio crackled. A voice popped out of the night and rasped through the wires.ft'Loud raid clear, Jumbo Dogjg c
ame the answer. “This is Backpack. What's your twenty?”
Deere looked out. God. Someone to talk to. Even for a second. The animal sleep growled and slunk back a, bit more. “Three-sixty-five North. Backpack. About three miles to Route 4.”
“Hell,” came the response. “We’re neighbors. I’m on 3^5 too, passed 4 a while back, mus. have passed you just a few minutes ago.”
Welcome, said Alex. The disembodied voice was moving in the opposite direction. For a moment Deere considered that he and the party on the other end had been about twenty feet from one another a few minutes ago, [ravelling in opposite directions. It didn’t mean much, but just struck him funny.
‘Right,” said the radio. “You sound beat, Jumbo. Whassamatter, you been- eatin’ too much o’ that jelly? Need a nap?”
Deere laughed. “Hell. Just a little tired. S Then he yawned, despite himself, as he keyed off the mike.
Backpack came back. “How long ya been out, Jumbo
Dog?” _
“Light—iii^hiaen hours.”
There was a pause, and Deere watched the road, which had gotten shiny. A few wet specks struck the windshield and he grimaced. It was starting to rain. After a few sec-
onds Backpack came on again and said, ‘That’s a iitde long, Jumbo. Not right you should be out that long.”
“I know.”
’ “There’s rules.”
“Yeah. But the company, you know.”
Pause. Somewhere out there, Deere knew, Backpack was shaking his head, blinking awake, looking at his own trip report, watching the road. “Yeah,” said Backpack. “I knowSejp
1_:-:“Yeah,” Deere repeated. The animal growled near the camp, hanging back. Deere turned on the wipers and watched the water roll across the windshield, and for a second it all went dark. Now and again the animal swallowed him, just jumped up and grabbed him, sucked him down, and then he’d blink out, and the animal sleep would wander away, watching.
1 ‘‘Take care, Jumbo. My daughter, man, she does love that jelly.”
“Heh. Mine too,” said Deere. He put the mike back and realized his face was getting wet. and rolled up the window. He turned on die radio.
(Teen Angel, can you hear me?)
“Hey, man, don’t fall asleep on me.” David Morgan turned up the radii) and shifted his foot. Ted Chamberlain moved a bit in his sleep and looked up at the driver of the small Ford Eseoit from underneath a mess of black hair that had fallen over his face. David was getting tired of depressing the gas pedal, but the Escort was not legendary for its accelerating prowess, and he had to stay pretty heavy on the gas to maintain a good speed. They were travelling east on Route 4.
Ted blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes. “It’s raining.”
“Yeah,” said David. “Cut me some slack and talk to me.”
Bj'What are we listening to?”
“Oldies,” David said with a grimace. He felt filthy. They had been driving for hours since the last stop. Not eng now. He ran his fingers through his red haii and felt like washing his hand afterwards. He was drenched in the kind of dry sweat that comes from sitting all day.
Ted reached down to the floorboard and rummaged through the mess of candy wrappers and crumpled fast food boxes to find the portable stereo. He lifted it to his knee arid popped the cassette drive open. “What do you want to hear?”
“Anything,’ David said, as he indignantly flipped the car stereo off.
'Eureka. ’ Ted said coolly. He held a tape under David’s nose. ‘Aerosmith.”
“Fair enough.” David watched the white lines disappearing under the hood as he listened to Ted popping the tape in and punching the play button. After a moment Steve Tyler’s wailing voice pierced the air with “Walk this Way”—briefly, because Tyler was immediately struck by an electronic seizure that warped his voice and dwindled it iowri to something that might have come from the mouth of Mr. Ed.
David shook his head “What did I say? Hm?”
“I don’t have the faintest—”
“What did I-say? Alkaline. Buy alkaline. House brand batteries, ‘no, those are just as good, David, they’ll last us ’til we get there.’ Hm? And I said—”
“They were cheaper.”
“Just so long,?’ said David, “as you know I was right”
‘ Right you were, oh wise one,” said Ted, putting the stereo out of its misery. The long-haired student looked out the window and back at his red-haired friend. “So. How long ’til we get there?”
“Oh,” said David, “about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half.”
“Think your Mom’ll be up?”
“She’ll get up. You know her. Soon as we hit the house, she’ll have a full-fledged barbecue ready ;n a quarter of an hour.”
“Think she’ll be ticked that we took a three-day weekend?”
“As long as I get the grades, I can do what I want You’ll see.”
“Cool.”
F^She is cool. Not the slightest bit like my dad.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What does he do?”
, ‘-‘You don’t want to know,” said David, which was what he usually said, and it tended to suffice as an answer. Fact was, he wasn’t completely sure what his dad did, and he didn’t much care. Dad was a distant person who tried really hard and sent money and just wasn’t around that much. And he could live with that.
They were driving to the Kamptons on a sort of musical whim. David had decided on Wednesday during Romantic & Victorian Poetry that Friday’s class wasn’t so important, after all. He had decided this because his mom had sent him a letter, the usual care-package-and-a-check, and she had included a clipping from the local paper advertising a two-day Horror Fest-o-Rama at the art theater down the street from a community college where Mom took art classes. Mario Bava, the Italian horror-meister of the 1960s, was to be showcased. “Fm not sure why,” the woman had scrawled, “but I thought you might be interested.”
“You bet I’m interested,” David had said, almost screaming it aloud while Professor Gregory chanted on about the neurotic Percy Shelley. “Hell, yeah,” he had answered to Ted’s incredulous questions. “Mario Bava! Babes in black and smoky crypts! Billowing smoke and vampires! And you should see the women at these things, man. Slender, dressed in slinky black, like refugees from Black Sunday. Suicidal-looking, but distinctly cool.
That was pood enough tor Ted. So here they were. They had gotten off late on Thursday and hadn't left Davis College until late afternoon, despite all intentions. But now they were nearly there.
“Not a problem*’5 David said again. ‘We crash, we eat well tomorrow, we hit the Fest-o-Rama tomorrow night, and we ogle the suicidal babes.” That was three minutes before they hit the jelly truck.
Three minutes is a long time. Alex Deere was still awake. Three minutes later on the curve, the animal sleep had pounced and devoured.
Alex Deere heard the hollow crunch of the guardrail ripping at the bumper and the snapping of the posts on which the railing stood. Above the grating of the chainlink fence grinding against the radiator grille he made out two sounds, like shotgun blasts: the tires blowing. He realized he had been sleeping and was already fighting the wheel.
In a highway accident, time becomes syrup. It is thin in parts and melted, and then the cooler parts grab you and stick to you. Deere saw his hiinds streaking like arcs of light on the wheei, saw a glint of metal from die front of a Ford Escort, saw two white hands down there, way down there in the Escort, a world away, fighting a steering wheel. He saw two eyes, the driver’s eyes, looking out from under shoulder-length red hair. Alex watched and for a thousandth of a second felt like he was in the Escort, the dorky little zero-to-sixty-in-three-minutes Escort and he was a long-haired kid trying to steer out of the way of a tractor-U-ailer coming Tike a locomotive over a flimsy sheet-metai guardrail, the fence twisting and rolling underneath.
(And yoonouuuu went running baaaack. . . )
Crunch and munch. Like candy, li
ke foil on the candy bar and Alex was eating it without taking the foil off, foil grinding into the chocolate and scraping Alex’s teeth and making his nerves sing with agony. Crunch and grind, and Alex tore the truck back in the direction of the highway toward his side of the guardrail even as the Escort was coming under the bumper. The flat wheels snagged the twisted guardrail. Time snapped thin and thick. The passenger side of the Escort slammed against the edge of the tractor, the shredded tractor wheels glancing off the ruined guardrail and getting wrapped up in the chain-link mesh.
Alex felt a great thrust from behind and realized the trailer had taken on a life of its own, bucking like a bronco, trying to throw him, trying to come through the back of the tractor and giving up and going around instead. The trailer twisted on its gigantic hitch and headed over the guardrail as Alex watched the windshield.
(Slip the juice to me, Bruce!)
The Escort wrapped around and wedged itself into the open seam between tractor and trailer and the two vehicles crunched on the slick concrete, tumbling in a long somersault off the ramp.
Freeze it. A moment in time like any other. Alex Deere is staring out the wet windshield looking up at the stars. The view out of the busted Escort windshield is of a narrow V between tractor and trailer. Two vehicles have become one, and they are frozen as they tumble through the air. Someone on a hill nearby is watching, and the concrete is exploding beneath his feet as he begins to run.
David Morgan thought: Streamers. He saw streamers in a dream once, after a pileup he narrowly escaped way off on Gulf Freeway coming out of Galveston, and he dreamt of it for months. In the dream, there were hundreds of cars crunching into one another like a soul train, and there were people hanging out of the cars, waving their arms, standing by the side of the freeway baking in the Texas sun, and off their arms and heads flew red streamers, long red ribbons whipping in the wind, trailing off the arms and heads and feet and out of mouths and off the jagged teeth of gaping windshields, streamers! And now he saw sireamers and heard distant popping and felt mass and bone and metal and plastic moving together.
(Warm... leatherette. Warm... leatherette.)
And again something else, not the exploding concrete under the feet of the giant man who hadn’t made it there yet, something else, a new sound, a screaming that meshed and chewed in with the screaming people, a sizzle of lire and gas lines bursting and pouring down.
Abominations Page 1