The single most devastating, destructive, and unpredictable force to be created in the last half century was sleeping on her couch.
It was no wonder, really, that she panicked. No wonder that she picked up her cell phone, scrolled through the saved numbers, found the one for the Joint Tactical Force West. But now she found there was no signal on her cell. Hardly a shock. She tiptoed into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed as quietly as she could.
It took them no time at all to track down her father, and when she whispered, “Dad?” into the phone she did so with the tentativeness of someone entering a confessional and trying to determine if a priest was on the other side.
“Betty!” came her father’s voice, and she couldn’t recall the last time she had been so glad to hear it. Or glad at all, really. “Are you all right?”
His booming tone was a sharp contrast to Betty’s hushed whisper. “I’m scared, and I . . . we need your help. I need to . . .” She paused. It was the most difficult thing she’d ever said, and she was saying it as much to herself as to him. “I need to trust you.”
“Where are you?” said Ross.
She pressed the phone more tightly against her ear. “It’s not Bruce’s fault. You have to believe me. His father, he tried to kill me and Bruce. . . .”
Bruce stirred slightly and Betty paused, watching him.
“Yes? Betty? Betty?” said Ross.
“We’re at the cabin,” she said abruptly. “We’re not going anywhere. Take your time. Make preparations. And Dad, whatever you do . . .”
“Yes?”
“Don’t piss him off.”
betrayal or salvation?
The rain from the night before had had a cleansing effect on the forest. Come the morning sun, it would have been hard to believe that there had been any sort of altercation at all. The downpour had washed away the blood and gore that had been splattered about, including the dissolved corpses of the killer dogs. The fallen tree was there, but trees fall all the time. As for the bashed-in car, well, there wasn’t much to be done about that, really.
Bruce was sitting up on the couch, a blanket wrapped around him since he had no clothes there to change into. He was still having trouble processing all that had happened. So much of it was like a dream, and not just the over-the-top changing into a monster aspects of it. He remembered the entire event in the same manner that one does a dream, with quick impressions here or sense memories there. The only difference was that in a dream, you’re entirely within your own head and limited to whatever visual elements you can recollect. But here, Betty had witnessed it, and she had even spoken with Bruce’s lunatic father, who purported to be behind at least some aspect of what had occurred. So she was able to help him piece it all together.
She sat in a chair opposite him, hands resting in her lap. She was taking all of this far better than he would have been able to, if the circumstances had, somehow, been reversed. She smiled at him, spoke to him gently, did nothing to get him the least bit worked up. A certain amount of that came from pure self-preservation, sure enough. It definitely wasn’t in her best interests to get him worked up. The fortunate thing, though, was that Betty was concerned about Bruce, about what had happened to him, and what most likely would happen to him if the situation were allowed to continue unchecked.
Betty was in his court, though. She was one hundred percent on his side, and as long as that was the case, Bruce couldn’t envision any scenario they couldn’t overcome, any conundrum so difficult that they wouldn’t be able to solve it.
The morning sun created a small corona around her hair. She appeared almost angelic as, with a beatific face, she went over everything that had happened, trying to connect the dots of the puzzle in order to bring it into clearer focus.
“Your anger,” she was saying, “it must trigger some kind of signal, and if the DNA strands break open that quickly there must be a tremendous release of energy.”
“Which I somehow absorb,” said Bruce thoughtfully.
“And transform. Like you did with the gamma rays. It’s just . . . inside of you.” Then she paused, trying to figure out the answer to her next question even before she voiced it. “But then . . . what stops it?” she asked.
“Yeah, what stops it from going on and on, into some kind of chain reaction?” he wondered aloud. “Maybe the next time, it’ll just keep going.”
The notion caused Betty to shudder. Bruce couldn’t blame her, really. The prospect of becoming . . . what? King Hulk, stomping through town, knocking over buildings and threatening airplanes while clutching a screaming beauty in his oversize hand. What a wonderful mental image to carry. Better that he should explode, like Freddie.
He paused. There was something else he wanted to say, but it was a difficult thing for him to admit. He had no idea how she would react, and his instinct was to keep it to himself. But he was trying to be honest with Betty, to let her know everything that was going through his mind. If he stinted on that now, she would know. He didn’t know how she’d know, but she would.
And the bottom line was she wanted to help him. She cared about him, loved him. How could she possibly aid him if he kept things from her?
He leaned forward, gesturing for her to do likewise. She hesitated a moment, and then did so. He spoke in a low voice, like a wizard about to utter a chant. “You know what scares me the most? When it happens, when it comes over me, when I totally lose control—” They locked gazes, and he reached deep into the truth of his soul and admitted it to her, and to himself. “—I like it.”
There was a moment of silence. Clearly Betty had no idea how to react, and that was understandable. Bruce was exploring new territory himself. There was no reason that Betty shouldn’t be daunted by the prospect. Indeed, the fact that she’d taken as much as she had in stride was nothing short of . . .
At that moment, Bruce heard a noise outside. It sounded like a garbage can being knocked over. Perhaps a raccoon was foraging around.
He gestured for Betty to remain exactly where she was. She watched him with limpid eyes as he went to the window to ascertain just what it was that was rooting around outside. He wasn’t expecting to do anything more than shout loudly in order to frighten off some creature foraging, looking for a snack.
So it was that when he leaned out the window, he was caught unawares by a soft pop of air and a sudden sharp pain squarely in his gut. He stared down uncomprehendingly to see a tranquilizer dart still quivering in his stomach.
He knew it immediately for what it was, and sought to yank it out of his belly. However, when he informed his right arm of what he wanted to do, his right arm simply hung there like a lifeless slab of meat. His left arm was, rudely, no more cooperative than his right, and then he sank to his knees and managed to get out the word, “What?” Which was about all he could think of to say.
The world started to haze out around him, and then Betty was there, her face filling the entirety of his field of vision. Betty went to him, helped him to the ground. He stared up at her uncomprehendingly as she murmured, “It’s going to be all right. It’s just going to make you sleep.” He tried shaking his head, but he couldn’t even force his neck muscles to respond, and she continued, “You’ll forgive me, Bruce. I know you will. I didn’t know what else to do.”
That was when he realized what she had done. He hadn’t associated the dart with Betty, because the magnitude of such a betrayal was too great for him to comprehend. But now that he did realize, he felt the beginnings of a green haze settling upon him. He could see it, floating there, bringing with it fury and release and the ability to avenge this wrong, to strike back at his attackers, at his betrayers.
Forgive her? Forgive her? He would . . . would . . .
“To help you, okay?” she continued, although he could barely make it out, for the haze was enveloping him, but it was also beginning to dissipate. He realized it was a race, the narcotics coursing through his body even as his mind tried to fight them off, to sen
d him to a place where the anger would carry him through. Nourish him.
“We’re going someplace safe, where nothing can go after you. You understand, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just let you go.”
But he was going to go . . . go . . . He would show her, show them, whoever they were . . . and . . . whoever he was . . . hard to . . . focus . . . just . . . have to . . . remember . . . remember . . . something . . . what was . . . ?
The door burst open and a uniformed tactical team entered, weapons drawn. Although he could no longer move his head, his eyes shifted toward them and the world became a great blur to him, a great, large green blur. That seemed somehow amusingly appropriate to him.
He looked up at Betty once more, and she was taken aback, because she saw it then in his eyes, the hint of glittering anger, pure as a newborn, and if he had been able to remain conscious for even another three seconds, he might have been able to fight it off, fight through it, and become that which he knew would be able to solve this problem, something that would mow through the mass of green bodies in front of him like a thresher and he would . . .
. . . smash . . . smash them . . . smash . . . sleep . . . sleep . . .
And a blackness tinged with green claimed him.
Betty Ross had never felt so utterly torn in her life.
She told herself that what she had done was good and right and proper, that she’d had no choice, really, none whatsoever. And she kept saying that, right up until the soldiers grabbed the unconscious Bruce as if he were a sack of meat and bones.
“Hold it!” she shouted.
“One side, we’ll take it from here,” one of the soldiers said brusquely, and another strong-armed her out of the way.
They were throwing him around, slamming cuffs and locks and restraints on him, bruising him. Bruce moaned in his drug-induced sleep, and she saw the beginnings of a large bruise on his bare shoulder from where one of them had thoughtlessly banged him into the edge of the sofa.
“I said hold it!”
“Ma’am,” one of the soldiers said with that sort of feigned politeness that was really nothing of the kind, “step aside or we’ll be forced to—”
“Shut up, soldier, and stand down right now! All of you! Now! Unless you’re that anxious to screw with the daughter of Thunderbolt Ross!”
She derived some faint intellectual amusement from the fact that she had something sounding very much like her father’s voice coming out of her mouth. Certainly the soldiers looked stunned, and the entire operation crashed to a halt as they froze where they were.
Betty didn’t hesitate, because to do so would have indicated weakness, and she could afford to display none. “Now listen up! I’m Dr. Elizabeth Ross! Ranking officer, identify yourself.”
One of the soldiers stepped forward, looking at her suspiciously. “Lieutenant Simmons.”
“Simmons, this man here is my find and my responsibility, and I will see him handled with kid gloves or I will see the next man who so much as uses harsh language on him hauled up on charges. He’s got more power in one arm than you have in your entire armory, and if you cause that power to be unleashed, then God help you, because no one else will, including your mama. Do we understand each other?”
Speaking very stiffly, but with proper restraint, Simmons said, “Yes, doctor.”
“Now,” she said with brisk efficiency, “show me what you’ve got.”
He frowned. “Ma’am?”
Rolling her eyes, she clarified, “For transportation and containment. And let’s remember, soldier, this man was eight feet tall and green not all that long ago, and all you troops still couldn’t find him, which makes me think you couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a flashlight. You’re here because I called my father and told you where to come and what to do, which means we play this my way. Got it?”
“Yes, doctor,” he said again.
Inwardly, Betty felt like a complete sham. These weren’t her own words flying out of her mouth, her own personality in force. She was deliberately channeling her father. On the other hand, as the soldiers proceeded to treat her with complete deference and she watched them handle Bruce’s insensate body as if he were a carton of eggs, she couldn’t help but feel like the most glorious sham in the world.
And for just a moment, she had the faintest idea of what it had been like for Bruce to be almost giddy with empowerment. She liked it.
unbalance of power
The quiet of the sky over Desert Base was shattered by the powerful engines of the Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk helicopter, escorted by a pair of smaller Apache choppers that flew high above. On the ground at the base, there was a mad scramble that might have looked to the untrained eye like total confusion, but was in fact highly organized. A transport truck drove up just as the Black Hawk descended to several hundred feet, and the ’copter’s loading bay opened up to disgorge its cargo on a crane—the cargo consisting of a large container that looked like an oversize tube, or, perhaps, a high-tech coffin.
The transport truck joined other vehicles to form a convoy, then headed away from the main section of the base, the place with the obvious hangars and barracks and all sorts of places that congressmen or assorted inspectors might poke through at any given moment in order to impress constituents. But this particular transport’s destination was someplace a bit more . . . secluded.
Back in the early days of Desert Base, there had been some additional property adjacent to it that was privately owned and featured a drive-in movie theater. The theater had served as a popular gathering place for army personnel, who’d park with their honeys and kick back to watch the latest grade B horror flick. Curiously, when the base blew up years earlier, the theater was one of the few things left standing. It wasn’t, however, in good condition.
Over a period of time, the deteriorating remains of the theater became a front for all the research that was considered a bit too delicate for normal venues.
The convoy rolled up to the dilapidated screen and then stopped. Nothing happened at first, and then slowly, with an audible grinding of gears, the ground itself began to move. The first panicked thought of an observer would have been that it was an earthquake, and that a crevice was opening up directly in front of one. But seconds later, a huge door lifted clear, revealing a deep, sloping tunnel, and there was the glint of a track in the early morning sun.
In no time at all the soldiers off-loaded the metal tube from the truck and onto the rails. Interlocks engaged, and the tube slowly but steadily descended into the hidden recesses of the underground facility. A small mountain range sat in the near distance, and it would have been impossible for anyone to guess that entire sections of the range had been hollowed out to serve as hidden means of access for aircraft. And, once the entry ramp sank back down into the desert soil, no one would have known that there was anything underground at all.
A short time later the tube was unloaded in the vast underground arrival hall, filled with military personnel, scientists, and technicians moving in and out of various tunnels that radiated outward from the main hub. A command and control center was perched high above the hall, with windows overlooking the hive of industry that began surrounding the tube, like worker and drone bees bustling around the arrival of the queen.
And from high above, looking out one of the windows, Betty Ross watched as the tube slid along its track toward a spherical containment cell into which the unconscious Bruce would be loaded. She bit her lip, fighting to keep down the grief and uncertainty that raged through her with as much emotional force as the Hulk had displayed in disposing of the dog attackers.
The Hulk.
That was the name she’d heard bandied about, the name people had started using. She was unable to figure out who had first called him that, but the name seemed to have stuck, and now she was using it too.
Well, that made a certain amount of sense. That was the scientific tendency, wasn’t it, to find names for things, all the time? No new discovery wa
s really legitimate until it had a name slapped on it. So why not the Hulk? The creature certainly bore more of a resemblance to a hulking beast than he did to Bruce Banner . . .
. . . and yet . . .
. . . and yet when she had looked into his eyes, she had found more emotional purity and honesty there than she had ever seen in any other man. Thinking men kept their thoughts hidden behind layer upon layer of civilization and subtext and second thoughts. But the Hulk, he looked at the world with pure emotion, and no sense of anything beyond his immediate wants and desires. In many ways, it was a more honest way to exist. She almost envied him having so immaculate a worldview.
She heard a throat being cleared behind her, and knew who it was before she even turned.
General Ross was standing there, looking as if he hadn’t slept for a very long time. Then again, Betty didn’t think she looked much better. They saw the fatigue in each other, then both managed a brief but pained smile to acknowledge it.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now,” said her father, “we talk. Not about the things we should have all this time,” he admitted. “But we talk. Not here, though.”
“Lead the way,” she invited.
“I always do.” And he preceded her as she walked away from her view of the containment cell, the large door just slamming shut, locking away the most dangerous ninety-pound weakling in history.
Ross paced his office as Betty sat in a chair, perfectly still. It wouldn’t do to have both of them tromping around, she thought, so she stayed put while her father moved like a caged cat.
“What do you really know about this?” he asked her.
Betty, seated with her legs delicately crossed at the knee, gave the question a moment’s consideration. “In principle,” she said, “I can explain the nuclear chemistry of the transformation, and I have some ideas about how his cells can store so much energy.”