Hulk (15 page)

Bruce could see now the coat the old man was wearing, hanging partly open, and sure enough, he was wearing the clothes of someone on the custodial staff. But the man’s apparel was of secondary importance to Bruce. What caught his attention was the way the old man had said “Miss Ross.” The barely contained anger, even resentment. A warning rang in his head, but it was hard for him to focus on that when there was so much else vying for his attention.

Bruce started to sit up, but got tangled in the wires from the various monitoring devices, not to mention the IV drip they’d introduced just to make sure he didn’t become dehydrated.

“No, please,” said the man. “You’re not well.” He went to Bruce, unsorted the jumble of twisted wires as he spoke. “You’ve had an accident,” he said in a soothing singsong, as if cooing to an infant in a cradle. “You’re wondering why you’re still alive, aren’t you? You’re thinking: there’s something inside, something different, inexplicable.”

The old man might have been crazy, but the movements of his fingers amidst the array of wires had been swift and sure. They now hung freely from one another. He stepped back and said, “I can help you understand, if you’ll let me . . . if you’ll forgive me.”

I’m dealing with a lunatic. He thinks I’m somebody else.

“Look, mister, I’m sure I have nothing to forgive you for,” Bruce said, keeping his voice calm and level. It wasn’t all that difficult, really, having had years of practice at it. “So, maybe you’d better just go. Please, I’ll be fine.”

The old man shoved his face toward Bruce’s, and an image leaped unbidden to Bruce’s mind. It was the old man’s face, but younger, much younger,
almost like his own, and bigger, so very much bigger, and he was shoving some sort of stuffed toys at Bruce, and the toys looked familiar, all of it looked familiar, and he was shoving a couple of toys into Bruce’s face. . . .

“You must know,” the old man said insistently, his gravelly voice snapping Bruce back to the present day. “You don’t want to believe it, but I can see it in your eyes”—and he was scrutinizing Bruce’s face—“eyes so much like your mother’s. Of course, you’re my flesh and blood, but then . . .” His voice dropped down even further, and his breath was a foul thing filling Bruce’s nose, so much so that Bruce had to fight the urge to vomit. “. . . you’re something else, too, aren’t you? My physical son, but the child of my mind, too.”

The old man was between Bruce’s hand and the call button that would summon the nurse from the front desk. “You’re lying,” said Bruce, which probably weren’t the best words he might have chosen, considering he was trying to talk sense to a nutcase. But he was understandably disconcerted by the circumstances. “My parents died when I was a small boy.”

“That’s what they wanted you to believe,” the old man said intensely. He rose from the bed and started to pace, and Bruce could have gone for the call button at that point. But the old man’s movements, the fervor with which he spoke, were almost hypnotic. In all his years, Bruce had never encountered a personality quite like this one: a true psychotic.

Despite the immediate danger, the scientist within him came to the fore, and he found himself in observational mode, intrigued to see what the old man would say or do next. Meantime, the old man continued to rant, clearly in his own world.

“The experiments, the accident, they were top secret. They put me away, thirty years—away from you, away from our work—but they couldn’t keep me forever. After all, I’m sane. They had to admit it.”

The dogs were starting to get fidgety. The pit bull looked in Bruce’s direction and started to growl, and this was more than enough to get Bruce’s hand to stray toward the call button. But then the old man raised his arm and the dogs came to attention. Bruce let the call button be, and continued to watch the old man, who had refocused his energies back on Bruce. The intruder was speaking louder, his voice growing in both volume and intensity. He sounded like the classic mad scientist from some old black-and-white horror film, exhorting whatever unseen gods were looking down on him and encouraging him in his demented endeavors. Bruce started to wonder whether this wasn’t a dream after all, for the only thing the moment lacked was lightning bolts and rolling thunder as the old man declared, “You see, everything your extraordinary mind has been seeking all these years—it’s been inside of you—
and now we will understand it, harness it
—”

The phone rang, a mundane sound that seemed out of place in a moment of such Grand Guignol. Bruce looked over at it, but the old man stepped quickly toward him, his voice growing softer but still at full force in its demented drive. “Miss Ross again. Don’t answer! There’s something you need to know about her, Bruce. Something troublesome, but I can protect you from her.”

And that was, abruptly, all Bruce could take.

Starting to tremble, he fairly shouted,
“You’re crazy! Get out!”

A look of menacing hatred passed over his father’s face. As if responding to the mood of their master, the dogs crouched for an attack.

But Bruce, furious over the old man’s aspersions of Betty, didn’t back down. At that moment he didn’t care if the damned animals leapt at him and tried to tear him apart. His only concern was telling this lunatic to vacate the room instantly.

“Get. Out.”

And, astoundingly, a look of satisfaction passed over the old man’s face. One might have thought that he was genuinely glad to see a flash of temper. “Heel,” the father ordered the dogs, and the daunting canines promptly backed off.

There was a long moment wherein the old man appeared to be sizing Bruce up, and then he said in a mildly mocking voice, “We’re going to have to watch that temper of yours.” From the way he said it, it was impossible to tell whether he meant it as an advisory against the dangers of giving in to anger . . . or whether he intended to keep Bruce’s anger under careful observation. Nor did Bruce have the opportunity to get him to clarify, for the old man promptly departed, the dogs obediently following him with their long toenails click-clacking on the polished floor.

The phone kept ringing, but Bruce didn’t notice it. He wasn’t even staring in the direction that the man had gone; instead, he was fixed upon the point in the room that the man had occupied moments before. It was as if he were concerned that the man might somehow reappear from thin air, like a phantasm or recurring hallucination.

Then the phone stopped ringing, and the abrupt cessation snapped Bruce back to reality. He snatched the IV out of his arm, pulled the leads from his various monitors, and rolled off the bed. He sagged for a moment, his legs not completely ready to accept his weight, but he braced himself and forced himself forward. He stumbled once, but then righted himself and made it out into the hall. His sudden arrival in front of the nurse’s station startled the nurse awake. She looked astounded to see him standing there.

“Where did he go?” demanded Bruce.

The nurse stared at him a little fearfully. “Who?” she asked uncertainly.

Bruce looked up and down the corridor.

Empty.

“Maybe it was a dream at that,” he said softly. Without another word to the nurse, or even an attempt at an explanation, he shuffled back into his room. The nurse followed him and didn’t say a word as she hooked him back up to the various monitoring devices. He simply lay there, staring at the ceiling, his mind far, far away. When sleep finally came for him—a total, deep sleep—he welcomed it with a sense of swelling relief.

And as he slept . . .
there was pain and hurt and a bubbling, brooding anger long repressed against anyone and everyone who had ever done harm to him or laughed at him or tried to hurt him, and a sea of faces swam before him, sneering, chuckling, and the world around him was tinted green and in the darkness of his innermost fears
. . . he awoke to discover that his bed was bent right along the frame, and the IV tube and monitoring devices had been ripped free in his thrashing.

He staggered to his feet, stumbling about in the darkness. He tried to call out to the nurse, but his throat was constricted. The idiot woman must have been away from her station, or perhaps had fallen asleep again. . . .
Useless, just useless woman. He should smash her, should
. . .

He forced the thoughts away as he lurched toward the bathroom. He knocked over a lamp in the darkness and barely registered the sound of its crashing to the floor. He made it to the bathroom with a supreme effort and clicked on the light, squinting against the sudden brightness. He stared at his face, looking for . . . well, he wasn’t certain. For something. But there was nothing there.

Nothing.

He looked down at his clothes. The stitching on his T-shirt and pajama legs had ripped at the seams.

That wasn’t nothing.

That was something . . . something confusing, something horrifying, something that he couldn’t begin to cope with.

His gaze swiveled back to the mirror, and suddenly there was a gray haze enveloping him. He wanted to push it away, but he lacked the will, and as he tottered toward the mirror, he thought he saw a faint hint of green reflected in his eyes. Then the gray haze overwhelmed him and sent him spiraling away into blackness.

connections

Betty Ross, moonlight filtering through the shades of her bedroom, put down the phone and stared at it long after she had hung up.

To a certain degree, she was relieved that Bruce hadn’t picked it up. After all, what would she have said to him? “Hi, Bruce. Betty. Look, I had a dream that you might be in some sort of great danger, so I thought I’d call and say, ‘Hi.’ How’s the food?” Oh, yes, that would have worked. It would have gone a far piece toward hastening him to a full recovery.

Nor could she put a face to the danger. She just had images of Bruce, and he was crying out and cringing, and, oddly enough, sometimes he looked like a little boy in her dreams. Still, Betty was a rationalist, and didn’t for a moment think she was having dreams that somehow foretold the future. The explanations for the symbolism were all too readily apparent. The danger element came from the accident that Bruce had been in. The visions of him as a child stemmed from an almost maternal concern about his welfare. After all, didn’t every woman sometimes mother the man she loved?

She leaned forward, her chin almost touching her knees. The man she loved. She still thought of him that way, even though he had made it clear that his own emotional stuntedness made it impossible for him to reciprocate in the way she wanted and needed. But almost losing Bruce had brought some new elements into play for her. Look what he had done: He had risked his life for others. Not just risked his life; he had actually thrown himself into what he must have believed was certain death. The fact that he had survived was pure happenstance, a freak chance, a one-in-a-million shot. The incident said something huge about the man with whom she had broken off a romantic relationship because . . . why? He wasn’t good enough for her? He didn’t smile enough or laugh enough or share his feelings?

She had felt isolated and distant from him, but how much of that was her, as opposed to him? If Bruce were restricted to a wheelchair, would she be angry with him because he was unable to walk? Of course not. So if he was simply psychologically unable to relate to her in the emotional manner she thought she needed, was she being equally unreasonable expecting him to do so?

Betty ran her fingers through her hair in exasperation. She couldn’t get out of her head the image of Bruce splayed across the gamma cannon. Was she some sort of ingrate for even thinking that perhaps he—

The phone rang.

The ring broke the stillness and she gasped, startled. She reached over for it too hastily and grabbed the receiver up. “Bruce?” she said.

There was a pause. “Noooo. It’s not Bruce. Is that acceptable?”

She sat there, confused, wondering who in the world it was. The voice was deep and resonant, and for a moment she thought it might be an obscene phone caller.

And then, abruptly, she realized who it was, and her face flushed as the notion that her father had been making lewd phone calls became not only ludicrous but downright embarrassing.

“Dad?” she said tentatively.

“Yes.”

“Oh. Hi. I, uh . . . well. Heh.” She felt flummoxed. “This is unexpected. I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“I didn’t have your number.”

“Oh. Right.”

“And it’s unlisted.”

“That’s . . . that’s also right. How did you get it?”

“I ordered my aide to get it.”

“I see. And . . . how did
he
get it?”

Thunderbolt Ross paused on the other end. “The how doesn’t matter. I told him to get it; he got it. Beyond that, it’s unimportant.”

She laughed humorlessly. “Nice to see you haven’t changed, Dad.” Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, because this wasn’t the time to start mouthing off to her father. She hadn’t forgotten her promise to Bruce, that she would get in touch with Ross and try to do something about reining in Talbot. So now, by happenstance, her father had called. This wasn’t the time to be giving him lip.

“It’s . . . good to hear from you, Dad. It’s been . . . too long, really.”

“Yes. Yes, it has.” His voice sounded surprisingly soft, even concerned. “Betty, I was thinking perhaps we might want to get together. Have dinner. Are you available?”

She was caught off guard.
What’s wrong? Is he dying? Am
I
dying?
She made sure to keep a smile on her face, though—not that he could see it, of course, but at least that way her voice would continue to sound upbeat.

“Sure, Dad! Always. When did you have in mind? Should I come there?”

“No. No, I’ll come to you. I’ll have my aide finalize the details and you’ll hear back shortly.”

She glanced at the clock. It was close to midnight. Did the man ever sleep? Probably not. And his aide, whoever that poor nameless devil was, probably didn’t either, although that was likely not by choice. “Okay, that’d be fine.”

“Good.” Another pause. “You . . . sound healthy, Betty.”