Abominations
Page 23
Green, suddenly. Emerald and brilliant, flashing hard green and blinding bright, both walls lit up.
The desert, a field of green glass. Then the pictures again, young Emil. Young Brace.
“I ask you,” the figure in the dark rasped, “are we the same? I tell you' what I think. I think we are changed, and we change ourselves. But we cannot help what we become. We cannot help being what we have become. Do you understand? I make a choice, it affects me, and I become a new thing. But I must react in the nature of what I am.”
“That’s an excuse,” Bruce said.
“You’re not listening,” Emil said. “Look at these images, two men, Brace Banner and Emil Blonsky. And the gamma wave flies over us and we are gone, erased. All our hopes gone, all our dreams burnt to irradiated cinders. We have been made new beings. I am an Abomination. And you are a Hulk. We are not fit for humanity. You know it. Deep inside, you know it, as much as you do not wish to listen to me. We do not belong because of
what we are. And we cannot help being what we have become.”
The videos blinked off and Bruce looked back at the crouched figure. The only light in the tunnel came from those two, glimmering red eyes, and the flickering torch, die flames flickering madly off the dead monitor screens. “Can’t we?” Bruce asked, moving between the dark screens.
The crouching figure did not move. It did not breathe. And as Bruce stepped forward, reaching out, he already knew what was going to happen.
He touched the head, tipping it, and the electric eyes nickered as the stone gargoyle tipped sideways with the Hulk’s hand. It fell over, without drama, leaving a trail as it went down, the fins on the side of the head scraping their way down the muck-covered bricks.
‘Can’t we?” Bruce asked again, quietly, to no one in particular.
And the Hulk put his giant, green, unwieldy, dense hands in his pockets, in the dark, under the ground, far from the eyes of men. And he listened in his mind to the words of the Abomination and he considered the source, and he questioned their wisdom, and he doubted their truth. And in fear of those words he crouched by the gargoyle and closed his eyes, because he could look at the electric eyes no longer.
And aboard the SAFE Helicarrier, on the GammaTrac. there was not an Abomination in sight.
Jasc Henderson was bom in north Texas and attended the University of Dallas, where he wrote his first book. Th Iron Thane, in his junior year. After finishing his JD at the Carho- c University of America, Columbus School Law, in Washington, D.C., Henderson came back to Texas and now lives in Austin with his wife, Julia, an educational policy wonk. His other novels include The Spawn of Loki and the Highlander novel The Element of Fire. He is coauthor, with Tom DeFalco, of the first book of the X-Men & Spider-Man: Time’s Arrow trilogy, to be published in the summer of 1998. Visit Henderson’s home page at http://www.flash.netTjhenders/JHENDERS.HTM.
Rocketed to Earth as an infant, James W. Fry escaped the destruction of his homeplanet and grew to adulthood ii Brooklyn, New York. In 1984, seduced by the irresistible combination of insane deadlines and crippling poverty, he embarked on a career as a freelance illustrator, lames s credits nclude The New ShadowHawk for Image, Star Trek and The Blasters for DC Comics, Spider-Man Team-Up and Midnight Sons Unlimited for Marvel, and ..opps Comics s SilverStar. He has provided illustrations for several Star Trek: The Next Generation YA novels, the Spider-Man novels Warrior’s Revenge, Carnage in Nev York, and Goblin’s Revenge, and the anthologies The Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimate X-Men, and Untold Tales of Spider-Man. Himself a leading cause of stress-related illness in comic book editors, James’s greatest unfulfilled ambition is to get one full night of guilt-free sleep.