Hulk

by Peter David

  Bruce looked up at him, realizing that this was about as close to sympathy as he was likely to get from Ross. He wasn’t sure if the general accepted his protestations of ignorance, but at the moment, at least, he appeared disinclined to continue harassing Bruce about what he was supposed to know but didn’t.

  Ross harrumphed loudly and squared his shoulders. The brief instance of sympathy was gone.

  “Until we get to the bottom of this, your lab has been declared a top military site, and you’re never going to get security clearance to get back into it—or any lab that’s doing anything more interesting than figuring out the next generation of herbal hair gel.” Then he came very close, practically thrusting his face into Bruce’s. When he spoke his breath stank of cigar. “And one more thing,” he snarled. “You ever come again within a thousand yards of my daughter, I’ll put you away for the rest of your natural life.”

  Bruce said nothing. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of comebacks to that.

  My life is spinning out of control.

  It was a hard admission for Betty to make as she walked toward her front door, digging in her purse for her keys. Her entire job as a scientist was to find ways to master her environment, to reduce it to quantifiable units, to study it, measure it, and develop reproducible experiments that others could use as yardsticks for their own research. Just as Bruce valued his ability to control himself, Betty valued her ability to have a thorough grasp of her world and understand what made it tick. Not only did she no longer understand what made it tick, she didn’t even know what kind of timepiece it was.

  Before she could insert the keys into the door, it swung open. She jumped back, startled and terrified. Then she gaped as a pair of military police marched out of her home as if they had every right to be there, taking out her computer and a box of papers for good measure. One of the MPs looked a bit embarrassed that they’d been caught. The other didn’t seem to give a damn, but just stared at Betty as if she were presenting an inconvenience to them.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Betty.

  “Sorry, miss,” said the embarrassed-looking one. “Orders. Anything related to the lab, we’ve got to impound.” He actually sounded a bit apologetic.

  She noticed another MP, sitting in a car across the street, eating a doughnut. “And him?” she asked.

  The one who didn’t seem to give a damn spoke up. “For your own protection, miss,” he informed her in a monotone. Robo-Military Cop.

  “I should have known,” said Betty sharply.

  She wasn’t in the mood to be protected by her father. At that instant she wanted nothing more than for him to do her the courtesy of lying down in the street behind her car so she could back over him.

  Betty turned on her heel, hopped back into her car, and drove off. She glanced in her rearview mirror and, sure enough, the MP in the car was following her. Apparently her father’s priorities superseded even the desire for a doughnut.

  “Good,” she muttered. She was in a stupendously foul mood, and finally here was someone handy on whom she could take it out. The sun was setting, which was always the most hazardous time to drive. She welcomed it.

  Betty cruised along, approaching an intersection, slowed down as the light turned yellow, then floored the accelerator just as it turned red. She hurtled through the intersection just as two cars began to enter it, and they both slammed on their brakes as she blew past them.

  The sudden switch in acceleration caught the MP off guard and he automatically started to follow her. But the intersection was now blocked by the other two cars, and they were honking furiously at him. Betty watched in her rearview mirror, saw the car dwindling in the distance, and then increase in size again as it maneuvered around the two cars and came after her.

  Good, she thought. I’d hate for it to end too soon.

  Her car was a sporty model with manual transmission, and she’d been driving her sporty manual car in second gear, just to warm up. She switched it over into third, lead-footed the accelerator, and took off like a jackrabbit. It was the most fun she’d had in ages. In fact, it was the only fun she’d had in ages.

  When she was fighting for her life several hours later, cursing herself for having ditched the MP in the kind of deliriously enjoyable auto chase that one usually only saw in films, the fun would seem very far away indeed.

  unwise provocations

  Glen Talbot was in an exceptionally good mood.

  As the sun sank low on the horizon, Talbot drove up to the home of Bruce Banner, for such he knew him to be, and jovially greeted the MPs standing outside. “How’s our boy?” he asked.

  One of the MPs nodded toward Banner’s window. And Talbot didn’t like what he was seeing, because he didn’t understand it. The blinds were opening, closing, opening, closing again, each time revealing and then shuttering light from within the living room. It was as if Bruce were trying to send a signal to somebody via some sort of code. But Talbot knew Morse code, not to mention semaphore, for what that was worth, and Bruce wasn’t blinking the blinds in any pattern he recognized.

  Maybe it was another code altogether. That might be it. Bruce Banner might have invented a completely new version of an already existing transmission code, and was using it now to send a desperate message to a confederate.

  Either that or it really was meaningless, and Banner was just doing it to mess with their heads. Talbot started to relax, but then realized that might be exactly what Banner wanted them to think, which would mean that . . . that . . .

  Glen Talbot was no longer in a jovial mood. He was suddenly very, very irritated with Bruce Banner—and was certain that he was going to take that irritation out on Banner himself.

  Bruce wondered what they were hoping to accomplish by leaving him alone in his home. Probably they wanted him to sweat, to wonder what horrible thing was going to happen next.

  They didn’t understand, had no comprehension. Sitting around in his house couldn’t begin to worry him. What they were going to do to him was of no consequence. The notion that they were going to yank his security clearance, ban him from plying his trade, was meaningless; all their threats were meaningless.

  His worries were far away from their priorities. His worries centered around the voice in his head, and a pounding rage that seemed to be taking on a life of its own. Their threats to the life he knew were inconsequential, because Bruce already sensed that the life he knew was over. The only matter remaining to be decided was precisely how over it was.

  At that moment, he heard the faint ringing of a telephone.

  It confused him because it didn’t sound like the ring of his own phone. He wondered if Ross or one of the MPs had left behind a cell phone, but he didn’t see any. Just to make sure, he picked up the receiver of his telephone, but the ringing continued unabated. It would actually have been rather surprising had it been his phone, considering he could see now that the cord had been cut. Very thorough people, Ross and his boys.

  That didn’t alter the fact that the ringing was going on, and Bruce was starting to get more and more annoyed. He looked for its source and found it under the cushion on his chair. He pulled out a tiny cell phone, looked at it, pressed a button, and held it to his ear. “Hello?” said Bruce tentatively, certain that the phone must belong to Ross or an MP, and that was who the caller would be asking for.

  He was stunned when he heard the voice of the man who had purported to be his father saying in a softly dangerous tone, “Bruce?”

  When Bruce didn’t answer, the old man just continued talking, as if Bruce’s participation in the conversation not only wasn’t mandatory but might even slow things down. “So they think they can just throw you away as they did me?”

  Banner walked to the window and checked. The guards were milling about, unaware of his conversation. “What’s wrong with me?” Bruce was almost whispering. “What . . . did you do to me?”

  David Banner—if that was truly who he was—cho
se not to answer. Instead he said blandly, as if delivering a weather report from Guam, “I got a visit today. A very unwelcome visit. I’m afraid my hand is being forced.”

  Bruce wasn’t going to let himself be distracted. “What did you do to me?” he persisted in asking.

  An unpleasant laugh came from the other end. “You so much want to know, don’t you? But I think no explanation will ever serve you half as well as experience. And, in any case, I still don’t quite understand it myself,” he admitted. “If they had only let me work in peace—but, of course, my ‘betters’ would have none of it.”

  “So you experimented on yourself, didn’t you?” Bruce guessed between gritted teeth. Except it wasn’t much of a guess; he’d had plenty of time to figure out exactly what had happened, presuming the old man’s claims of patrimony were true. And as of now, he had zero reason to think otherwise. He paused, afraid to ask the next question and afraid not to. “And passed on to me . . . what?”

  There was a silence on the other end that seemed to stretch to infinity. Bruce began to think that the connection had been lost, and then the old man spoke, making Bruce realize that his “father” had just been enjoying stringing him along.

  “A deformity. You could call it that. But an amazing strength, too,” he added, and Bruce could practically hear him smiling over the phone. “And now unleashed, I can finally harvest it.”

  There were few things David Banner could have said that would have been more alarming than that. “You’ll do no such thing,” Bruce said sharply. “I will isolate it and treat it myself. Remove it, kill it—before it does any real harm.”

  This time there was no deliberate pause or smugness. David replied immediately and angrily, his voice dripping with bile and bitter sarcasm. “Oh, I bet you and your Betty would love to destroy it. But would you really, even if it meant killing yourself? I don’t think so.”

  Bruce wasn’t so sure about that. He was slowly becoming aware of just what it was that was moving through his bloodstream, brought to full life by the combination of the nanomeds and gamma radiation. Had Bruce been left to his own devices, it was possible that—with his tendency to repress his emotions and fears—he might well have led a normal life—a life full of loneliness and emotional deprivation, but normal nonetheless. Well, relatively normal.

  But it was becoming clear that the nanos and rads had had some sort of catalytic effect on him, triggering biological shifts and changes of which he could only guess. But if they had caused some sort of revision of his biological makeup, then perhaps it was possible to find a way to reverse the effect. Anything that was done could be undone. It didn’t seem much more complicated than that.

  And then David Banner said something that complicated things very, very much.

  “And as for Betty,” he told Bruce with a chortle, “I’m sending her a little surprise visit from some four-legged friends of mine.”

  The room, the world, seemed to go dark around Bruce Banner, seemed to skew at an angle. Suddenly there was a thudding pulse in his temples, and he had to fight to hear the words from the other end of the phone. “You see, I’ve managed to culture some of your very own DNA, Bruce, and the results, while unstable, are powerful,” said David Banner.

  “What about my DNA?” demanded Bruce.

  His father ignored the question. “Let’s just wait and see what Betty makes of the results!”

  “No!” shouted Bruce. “You’re crazy! I won’t let you! You—!” But then he looked at the small readout on the phone and saw that there was no longer a connection. His father had hung up.

  Utterly frantic, Bruce ran to the front door, pulled it open, and found Glen Talbot standing there, a smile on his face.

  “Inside, asshole. I want to talk to you,” said Talbot.

  David Banner whistled a late 1950s pop tune called “Betty My Angel” as he removed the headset and went into the yard. Everything was moving so perfectly, falling into place so ideally, that it was one of those moments where he couldn’t help but think that there was some higher purpose to all that had happened to him, some higher power that was moving in most mysterious ways. It was odd; he’d never thought of himself as a particularly devout man, or even a believer. But with all that was occurring and falling his way, perhaps—perhaps there was something to this God thing after all.

  Well, why not? Man was, after all, supposed to have been created in God’s image. That being the case, man should be as deft and adept at creating as that which had brought him into existence. And certainly David Banner had been holding up his end in that regard.

  As he walked out into the yard, he was greeted with growling so vicious that it bordered on the obscene. Three feral voices snarled low and deep, sounding more like huge semis with busted mufflers than anything alive. He continued to whistle “Betty My Angel” even as he contemplated Betty becoming a genuine angel. It gave him a satisfied feeling. Let her be God’s problem instead of his.

  He held up Betty’s scarf. Since she’d left it, he’d been careful to keep it isolated in a plastic bag so it wouldn’t get any other scents mixed in with it. Now he waved the scarf, teased the dogs with it, kept it just out of their reach even as the waving caused them to go into berserk fits of barking.

  When he’d gotten them sufficiently worked up, he let fly the scarf. Huge teeth powered by great, green muzzles tore into it as flecks of jade spittle flew from their maws.

  “Now, fetch!” said David Banner, and they understood what he wanted, for they had been well trained to start with, and the processes he’d inflicted on them had only made them more intelligent—not to mention more ferocious. “Fetch and let nothing stand in your way!”

  The sun had not yet quite set, but the full moon was already visible high above the horizon. The dogs, like gigantic gamma-irradiated wolves, leaned back on their haunches and bayed at it.

  If Glen Talbot had heard the chorus of canine ululation, he might well have joined in.

  Everything that he’d done—the planning, the maneuvering, the precise and far-reaching Godlike manipulation—everything from striving to put Bruce and Betty together, to arranging for Bruce’s nutball father to be kicked loose from the hospital so that the screws could be jammed in ever more tightly, everything was coming together precisely, like cogs in a great machine. In his mind’s eye, Talbot could see Bruce Banner being mashed between those cogs, and in so suffering, unleashing tremendous untapped energy.

  Talbot couldn’t, of course, have anticipated the accident that sent the nanomeds and gamma radiation coursing through Banner’s bloodstream. But that was the true beauty of a really great plan: When something unexpected occurred, it played perfectly into the overall scheme without causing the plan to miss a beat.

  So now, when faced with the frantic scientist, it was all Talbot could do not to laugh in Banner’s face and tell this brilliant researcher—who unquestionably thought that he was so much brighter, so much more intelligent than Talbot—that he, Banner, was just a pawn in a vast chess game. With Talbot moving all the pieces.

  “Talbot, listen! It’s my father. We don’t have much time. I think he’s going after Betty,” Bruce said, the words spilling over one another.

  Talbot stepped inside, kicked the door closed behind him, and approached Banner. He made sure to display a proper amount of ire, throwing a total non sequitur at Bruce to keep him off balance. “So, you think you can go behind my back, get Ross to cut me out?”

  Banner blinked, an owl caught in the wash of a spotlight. “What are you talking about?” said Banner. “I’m trying to tell you, we need to get help—”

  With a swift maneuver. Talbot kicked Banner’s legs out from under him. Banner dropped on his back to the floor and Talbot pressed a shoe into his face. “You pathetic freak,” he said tightly, his jaw twitching with an anger that came all too naturally. “Tomorrow, after I convince Ross, you’ll be carted off to spend the rest of your life in some tiny, solitary hellhole. And I’ll take over your work. But
in the meantime,” and his voice became more and more intense, “you’re going to tell me what the hell happened to your lab. You didn’t happen to steal anything important from it last night, did you?”

  Talbot’s heel was crushing Bruce’s mouth. Even Talbot had to admit to himself that he was impressed by Bruce’s tenacity, because all he could talk about was the woman. “I swear to you, believe me, Betty is going to be killed.”

  Unsure of whether he believed Banner or not, but certain that he didn’t especially give a damn, Talbot pushed down harder. “If I can state the obvious, it’s your health I’d be worried about right now.”

  Bruce desperately grabbed Talbot’s leg with both hands, grunted, struggled, but couldn’t overcome Talbot’s strength and skill as Talbot ground his shoe into Bruce’s face. He did so with a cold calculation that even an experienced scientist might have envied, provided that experienced scientist wasn’t busy getting his face kicked in.

  Talbot had studied the records concerning Bruce Krenzler, aka Banner, far too thoroughly to be engaging in such brutality simply for its own sake. Granted, he was enjoying it, but that was merely a bonus. The bizarre incidents involving young Banner’s form had involved, according to all evidence, stress situations—so much so that Banner himself, in his psychological development, had locked away anything in his makeup that might trigger a response to stress. Now, though, the course of events had taken on a life of their own. Talbot had helped set the roller-coaster in motion; all he had to do was hold on for the ride.

  He began to worry, though, that Banner might lapse into unconsciousness rather than provide him with what he wanted. So, satisfying himself with a final kick, he removed his foot from Banner’s face. Bruce rolled over in pain, and propped himself up.