Hulk

  There was total silence, just as there had been earlier. It seemed as if the rest of the world had come to a complete halt, leaving just the two of them.

  Betty saw them before the creature did.

  All the blood drained from her face as they seemed to materialize like green specters at the edge of the forest. Three dogs, but they were only dogs in the broadest sense of the word. They were huge, hulking green creatures, heads lowered, jaws hanging down, eyes blazing hatred at a world that would allow such atrocities as they to exist. Saliva dripped down in a steady stream. From each of their throats came low growls that sounded like passing freight trains, but they were most certainly not passing. They were staying right there, and they were utterly terrifying.

  And then they attacked.

  Operating in concert with one another, the three animals took several quick bounds toward Betty and her unlikely protector, then vaulted through the air, covering the twenty feet between them in one impossible jump. Betty barely had time to register their advance, when her protector sprang backward, landing on the other side of the car. He did so with such facility that Betty realized he could probably escape from the charging monsters with very little difficulty, perhaps even enable both of them to get away.

  But the low growl of anger she heard rumbling within his breast said it all. She realized that running away was simply not in his nature. She also realized that she had suddenly stopped thinking of him as an “it.”

  The monstrous dogs overshot their target as if they were still unaccustomed to using their bodies and were unfamiliar with what they could do. The moment they passed, the giant shoved her against the car, and Betty automatically yanked the door open and thrust herself inside, offering herself a modicum of protection. He shoved the door closed, and the metal crumpled under the impact. Then he whirled to face the monsters, and issued a full-throated roar that seemed to dare them to take their best shot. The dogs thudded to the ground a few feet away, spun to face him, and snarled back, obviously accepting his defiant challenge. He crouched, looking as if he were going to jump at them, and suddenly he was airborne, heading straight up like a missile. Betty craned her neck, trying to peer through the windshield and keep track of him, but he was gone.

  The dogs tried their best to follow. They jumped straight up, but quickly fell back to earth. Instantly Betty understood why: Their bodies were designed to cover horizontal distances, not vertical. Human beings were upright creatures, and it was Betty’s strongest indication that—whatever her mysterious savior was—he was somehow far closer to human then she had initially thought.

  The three canines circled in confusion, unsure for a moment what to do. Then, as one, they swiveled their attention to the car, and her heart froze in her chest. Their thick lips pulled away from their rotting teeth, their eyes glowered, and they started to advance.

  And then, from overhead, the jade giant descended once more, and landed squarely on the back of one of the three dogs. He drove it straight down to the ground, crushing its body beneath his feet. There was a deafening snap and the creature let out such a cry of anguish that for an instant Betty actually felt sorry for it. But only for an instant. The other two dogs converged on the green monster, but he was already up and gone again.

  Betty watched with a combination of horror and fascination as the crushed dog’s flesh began to steam and melt away. It was as if nature was anxious to dispose of this abomination. The remaining two terrifying animals circled with even greater agitation, for they had absolutely no idea where to focus their attention: upon the prey in the car, upon their obviously deceased fellow, or upon their airborne green tormentor, who might return at any time.

  Suddenly one of the creatures darted quickly to the right, for no apparent reason that Betty could see, but then the reason became evident. The giant landed again with a resounding impact. This time, however, his target had sensed him at the last second and barely avoided meeting the same fate as the first.

  Now the battle was truly joined. One of the dogs clamped onto the giant’s ankle. He let out a thunderous bellow that seemed capable, on its own, of leveling trees, and indeed it seemed to Betty that the redwoods were trembling as a result. He tried to shake the dog loose, and its fellow lunged straight at his neck.

  Betty screamed. It was unthinkable how quickly everything had turned around. Less than a minute ago, she had regarded the bizarre green intruder as some sort of incredible threat ripped from the deepest recesses of her nightmares. Now she was seeing him as a defender, her only chance of getting out of this insane situation in one piece.

  But it was hopeless. He was outnumbered by his inhuman attackers, and one of them had a death grip on his throat.

  The giant staggered. With a snap of his leg he shook the one dog loose, then managed to pry apart the other dog’s jaws. Betty saw mangled flesh at the base of the giant’s neck, and green blood began oozing from it as the behemoth swung his arm around and sent the dog tumbling. He grabbed at his neck, probably feeling the pooling warmth, and looked in what was obvious surprise at the thick green liquid that collected in his palm.

  The dog who had been at his ankle turned its attention to Betty, and she screamed once more. The giant tried to respond, but the other dog was blocking his path. He staggered back, his rage momentarily taking a backseat to his primal urge to survive, then vaulted backward, ricocheting from the top of the cabin to the top of a nearby tree.

  The dogs quickly lost interest in their opponent, and circled the car. Betty shoved her hands into her pockets, looking for the keys . . . and spotted them outside, ten feet away, glistening mockingly on the ground where they’d fallen. “Oh, perfect,” she grated, realizing that her temporary haven was little more than a hunk of inanimate glass and metal that would fall very quickly to any concerted attack from these . . . these . . .

  Gamma irradiated . . . displaying tremendous strength and resilience . . . they were manufactured somehow, similar to the experimentation we’ve been pursuing. If it was only possible to perform studies . . .

  She was stunned at herself. Stunned, but also a little proud. Here she was, her life probably about to end, but she was going to go out thinking like a scientist. It was cold comfort, but it was better than nothing.

  And suddenly she jumped, jammed back against the seat, as a huge paw thudded against the windshield. Then her view was entirely blocked by snarling fangs and a long, dangling tongue. Another paw joined the first, slamming against the glass and leaving long scratches with ear-splitting shrieks. The windshield began to crack, spiderweb designs ribboning across it.

  Then there was a thump, and the dog’s face was mashed flat against the windshield, thick rivulets of blood dribbling everywhere. At first Betty couldn’t comprehend what had just happened, but then she saw it.

  The behemoth hadn’t been running from the dogs at all; he had simply been seeking out a weapon that would prove effective against them. What he had chosen proved devastating in its simplicity: an uprooted redwood tree. He had swung it with the precision of a baseball player at the plate and mashed the attacking canine flat.

  Straining to see through the streams of blood that were obscuring her view, Betty caught a quick glimpse of her protector looking around, clearly trying to see where the third dog had gotten off to. Then he found out as the mastiff leaped from behind, landing squarely on his back. The giant swung the tree around futilely, trying to reach the dog and having no luck. He tossed aside the lumber and instead tried grabbing at the dog. The beast eluded his questing hands, and so the giant simply threw himself backward, hoping to crush the dog by hitting the ground flat on his back.

  It was good in theory but failed in execution as the dog scrambled around to the front just as he struck the ground. It tried to drive its massive jaws toward the giant’s throat once again, but the behemoth caught it just in time, and they rolled across the forest floor, a combination of howls and snarls and green-muscled fury locked in a deadly embrace, biting, mauling, c
hoking.

  And suddenly the dog that had been smeared to within an inch of its life on the windshield managed to retreat from that final inch. The light dying in its eyes stoked back to full fire. It smashed through the glass in a final, desperate lunge, and just as it did, Betty’s hand yanked on the seat release. The upper section of the seat slammed back and Betty fell flat as the beast’s jaws crunched together just above her. She closed her eyes, partly to avoid getting broken glass in them, but also because she couldn’t stand to see that horrific face crunching into hers.

  She braced herself, hoping against hope that it would be quick.

  It wasn’t.

  She froze that way for a few seconds, then looked up. The dog’s head had gone limp; its jaws were hanging open. Its final attack had been, indeed, its final attack, as it succumbed to the damage the giant had inflicted upon it. Its body began to sizzle and melt as the other one’s had, and Betty scrambled backward, getting her legs clear. She wasn’t sure if the goo would have any toxic effect upon her, but she wasn’t inclined to take the chance.

  From across the clearing, she heard more snarling and howling, and it was impossible for her to discern what was coming from the animal and what from the giant. The dog was most certainly not human, but it was still hard for her to believe that the giant ever had been.

  The sounds escalated as the ferocity of the struggle increased, until there was a high-pitched whimper that could only have come from the throat of the dog. Betty tried to see past the shattered glass, but was reluctant to touch the dead dog in order to get it out of the way. Through the blood and gore she saw the outline of the giant, holding the third dog at arm’s length, and it seemed impossible but somehow the giant appeared larger than he had before. Yes . . . yes, it was true, for his fist was large enough to encircle the entirety of the beast’s throat, where it hadn’t been before. And suddenly the fist squeezed and the dog’s whimper became a high-pitched squeal of alarm, followed by a pulpy bursting of flesh and bone.

  Had Betty been processing information in anything resembling a normal fashion, she would have felt sick to her stomach. As it was, she was so much into the realm of mental overload that she was starting to think that nothing could ever shock her again.

  . . . Dead dead smashed no more dog done Betty safe Betty Betty . . .

  . . . Safe . . .

  . . . Done tired so tired but . . .

  . . . but . . . but . . . Betty . . . is . . .

  . . . is safe . . . Betty is . . . safe . . .

  “Betty . . . is safe. . . .”

  He spoke the words, and didn’t fully comprehend what they meant. The urgency, the need had been so deeply within him that it had lost all context or sense.

  His mind still in a fog, he was stumbling forward and fell to the riverbank, catching himself with his powerful arms before he could tumble headfirst toward the water. He stared blankly at his reflection, his thoughts fighting through the white noise of his consciousness, and there was an image in the water, and the water was wavering, except . . . it wasn’t. The water was still save for the rippling being caused by raindrops. It was his face that was wavering, except it wasn’t his face because it was large and green and distorted, except it was, because every man knows in his heart the face of darkness and rage that he carries within him; he simply chooses to ignore it.

  But there it was, staring back at him, except it was shrinking and shifting and undulating and turning into a face of weakness and bewilderment, and the sight of that face both angered him and filled him with a greater relief than he had ever known. The green tint to his skin mottled and then dissolved away into his normal flesh tone.

  And a voice sounded within his head, and it was his own voice and it was another, guttural voice. But, for one, brief moment, both voices had exactly the same concern:

  Betty . . .

  The rain splattered against what remained of the windshield, causing the blood to smear and run. Some of it was beginning to wash away, enabling Betty to see a little better. A little, but not much.

  She thought the giant was staggering toward the water, and she was worried that he had been mortally wounded. But he was no longer clutching at his throat where the skin had been torn away. That injury alone should have been enough to kill him, but instead, remarkably, it seemed as if the blood flow had been halted, as if the rip had just . . . just healed itself up somehow.

  . . . healed . . . gamma radiation . . .

  Oh, my God.

  Oh. My God.

  Even as she watched the giant sink to his knees, the truth of what she had just witnessed, the insane reality that her world had become, made itself known to her. Even as she watched the skin ripple and shift and retract in on itself, defying all the known laws of physics, as the behemoth’s mass just melted away like butter in a skillet, she denied it while accepting it.

  My God, what have we unleashed? she thought with a combination of revulsion and fascination.

  The world stopped as the man staggered to his feet, swaying in the rain, as if it had washed away the form of the monster to leave only the man. A baptism, reestablishing his humanity. And when he turned to face her, when Betty saw the face she knew she would see, the delicate line separating fantasy from reality blurred and twisted and then broke apart. Dancing through her head was the child’s song about rowing a boat, purely because of its refrain, “Life is but a dream.”

  He staggered toward her like a drunken man, and when he got to the side of the car, he pulled on the door that had been crushed in when the monster had shoved it closed. So strong he had been, so strong, and yet now he was standing there dripping with rain and pulling with all his nonexistent might, pitting his meager efforts against the giant’s almost casual display of power. Finally, after much struggle, he managed to pry it open, and Betty half staggered, half fell out of the car. She saw blood smear across him and panicked for a moment before she realized it was hers, blood from cuts caused by the shattered glass and the final desperate swipe of a dying beast’s claws.

  They sank to the ground, which was becoming muddy from the now-cascading rain, clutching each other, mutually seeking anchors of reality in a world made deliriously unreal. She held him tight, cradled him in her arms, and then he looked at his hands like a newborn child seeing them for the first time. It was only at that point that it really, truly seemed to dawn on him that his towering green alter ego was gone, that he was himself again. How horrifying the realization must be for him, to know that he was rage incarnate, power out of control.

  And then he laughed.

  The response wasn’t at all what Betty expected. It not only caught her off guard, it made her feel—as strange as it sounded—even more uncomfortable than when she was being attacked by the gamma-irradiated dogs. He shook the fist that he’d been staring at, the thrust coming perilously close to Betty’s face, and the shocking thing was that he didn’t seem to notice. Rain poured down his face, into his eyes, slicked down his hair, and it didn’t seem to matter to him. He laughed again, this time sounding almost maniacal, like a . . . like a mad scientist.

  Betty winced and reflexively drew back. He didn’t seem to care, caught up in his delirious chortling and self-satisfaction. He wasn’t shocked, he wasn’t terrified or appalled or frightened by what these events portended. He was happy. Happy! Happier than she had ever seen him. Worse . . . happier than she’d ever made him.

  “Am I awake?” said Bruce. Betty nodded hesitantly. “Was it me? I killed them, right? I killed them!”

  Bruce Krenzler, for all his emotional repression, had always been deeply considerate of Betty’s feelings. But the man known as Bruce Banner didn’t seem to care about them in the least, because he clamped his hand over her mouth without thinking in order to demonstrate what he was referring to. “Like that! I snapped their necks!”

  Driven by nearly frantic energy, Betty shoved him away. He seemed startled.

  “Bruce!”

  He looked at her, blinking agai
nst the rain, then squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as if to force himself to fully concentrate on who and where he was.

  Tentatively, fearfully, Betty leaned forward and whispered, “You can’t control it, can you?” She wasn’t just talking about the transformation, and she had a feeling he knew that. He couldn’t control the giddy euphoria that seized him and filled him with joy over the prospect of having crushed living creatures to death. Best, though, to focus on the change rather than his current emotional state. “Do you remember . . . how it comes?”

  Finally a true look of fear appeared in his eyes. The full weight of what had occurred became clear to him, an eclipsing shadow of the moon moving away from the sun. He looked again at his hand, his fist, and this time there was no joy in contemplating the power of life and death that hand had held.

  She took it gently in her own hands.

  Slowly Bruce shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, with no trace of the mania that had gripped him so thoroughly. “It’s just the anger, the rage. I don’t know. I’m just . . . tired . . . afraid and so tired.”

  She held him again in the rain. He closed his eyes and sagged against her. She helped him up and brought him into the cabin, and as she did so, the noises slowly returned to the forest.

  As Bruce slept, Betty sat there and watched him. She thought of the creature. She thought of the power he had displayed, the way he’d reveled in it. And she thought that rage, in its most fundamental form, was uncontrollable. There was no way for sure to know what direction his anger would take, or against whom he might next turn.

  She was shaken to the core by the way he’d clamped a hand over her mouth, and she thought of the way the hulking behemoth had crushed the skull of that glowing green mastiff. She stared at Bruce’s hands and could only see them large and green, and subjecting her to the same fate as the dogs. She looked at his bare chest, slowly rising and falling, and saw instead the massive chest of the awesome jade monster as she’d first spotted him in the woods.