Hulk (24 page)

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 against 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.

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 send 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.