Hulk (20 page)

Bruce felt a great swell of anger as he saw the contemptuous and doubting looks on the faces of Ross and the other officers. It was only his long practice at keeping his feelings firmly in control that enabled him to prevent that anger from being anything other than momentary.

The situation was so clichéd that Bruce would have laughed had he not been the subject of the interrogation. They’d even brought in a lamp with a high-powered bulb that they were shining on him, so that he would . . . what? Tan?

Ross sighed extremely loudly, in that way that one does to announce that one is reaching the end of one’s patience. “You guys buying this repressed-memory syndrome thing?” he asked the other officers.

“I
don’t
remember,” said Bruce, maintaining his equanimity. He didn’t in the least indicate that he was annoyed by their obvious skepticism. They were effectively calling him a liar. That didn’t bother Bruce. He’d been called far worse, under more trying circumstances than this. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’d like to help you, but I don’t know.” He almost sounded apologetic.

Ross leaned in toward him. “You know who I am, right, Banner?”

“Don’t
you
?”

“Banner . . .” Ross said warningly.

But Bruce simply smiled inwardly. “Perhaps you’re suffering from repressed-memory syndrome. Nasty, isn’t it? But you’ll learn to live with it. I have.”

“Banner!”

Bruce wasn’t exactly accustomed to answering to that name, but he knew that he’d pushed things as far as he could. “You’re Betty’s father,” said Bruce. “A high-ranking general.”

“Let’s cut the crap,” Ross snapped, circling Bruce, coming closer and closer in on his personal space. If he was trying to intimidate Bruce, it wasn’t working. Last Bruce had checked, there was no law against not knowing something, and at that moment, that was all Bruce was sure he was guilty of. Ross, however, didn’t seem deterred by Bruce’s lack of offenses. “I’m the guy who had your father tossed away, and a lot more like him. And I’ll do the same to you if I feel so disposed. You understand?” asked Ross.

Bruce had to admit to himself that that interested him. “My father. You say his name is Banner?” he asked, all too aware that it was the name the janitor, or dog man, or whatever one wanted to think of him as, had claimed was Bruce’s own. This simply couldn’t be coincidence.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Ross, mistaking Bruce’s desire to clarify his own thoughts as an anxiousness to cooperate. “But then you say you’ve never known your parents.”

“I never did,” Bruce insisted.

“Don’t play me! You were four years old when you saw it—”

And those words caused something to freeze within Bruce. Abruptly he felt as if he were standing on the other side of a door, which, if swung open, would lead him toward things that would clarify so much, things that would fill the great gaping hole he’d always carried within him. The problem was he wasn’t sure he wanted to step through that door, for he knew instinctively that there would be no going back. And the old saying about ignorance being bliss had some merit to it at that.

He wrestled with the prospect of asking, but finally couldn’t help himself. “Saw what?”

Ross stared at him incredulously. “You were
right there
! How could anyone
forget
a thing like that?”

“Like what?!”

The general missed the rising ire in his subject, and instead simply said with unbridled contempt, “Oh, some more repressed memories?”

And Bruce saw himself jumping from his chair . . .
leaping upon Ross, bearing him to the ground, pounding on his face, and his fists becoming larger, more powerful with every blow and Ross’s face was a horrible mess but Bruce didn’t care for he was howling with fury and laughing and smashing, just smashing . . .

Bruce sank further into his chair. He closed his eyes, desperate to shut out the vision that his own imagination had given him. He started to tremble, the repression of his anger becoming literally a physical thing. “Just . . . tell me,” was all he managed to say, his voice strangled.

There was something in his voice, something in his manner, that actually seemed to get through to Ross, at least a little bit. The slightest hint of empathy crossed his face. “I’m sorry, son,” he said with a heavy sigh, casting a frustrated glance at the other officers. “You’re an even more screwed-up mess than I thought you’d be.”

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—chose 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.”