Hulk (29 page)

And then, as she entered her house, she froze. Something felt wrong, although she wasn’t sure what. She flicked on a light and gasped.

David Banner was seated in a chair square in the middle of the living room. He looked rather comfortable, as if he’d sent Betty out to pick up some cigarettes and was wondering what had taken her so long.

“My dear Miss Ross,” he said, “welcome back.”

Betty started to back toward the door. She didn’t even bother to ask how he had gotten in. A man who was capable of turning three canines into slavering engines of destruction shouldn’t have had any difficulty with a door lock.

“Look,” she warned him, “there are two MPs parked right outside. I scream, and—”

He waved off whatever concerns she had, or that he thought she might have. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not angry with you, not anymore.”

These were hardly the most comforting words she could have heard from someone who was, essentially, a lunatic. She didn’t continue her retreat, though, freezing in place just within the door frame. She could still bolt if need be. Both of his hands were plainly visible, so it wasn’t as if he could produce a gun and shoot her down.

David Banner continued. “Please, just hear me out,” he said soothingly. “I can guess why you’re here. Your father betrayed you, didn’t he? You should have expected it. They did the same to me.”

She wasn’t listening to the things he was saying, although she hated to admit that they did interest her slightly. Instead, she demanded, “What do you want?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t really know anymore,” he said with a shrug. He leaned forward in the chair and Betty reflexively flinched back. But his hands remained unthreateningly in front of him. The odd thing was that he didn’t even seem to be addressing his remarks to her, even though they concerned her. He seemed to be talking more to himself. “I know what you want. The same thing you always have: You want to understand him, don’t you? But you’ll never understand him,” he told her sadly. “There is no scientific language yet that could ever account for him.”

She licked her lips, which had become remarkably dry. He wasn’t sounding like a crazy man at this point. Instead, he was surprisingly lucid. Perhaps she might even be able to communicate with him in a common language, about a common concern. That wasn’t too much to hope for, was it? Even madmen had their saner moments. If this was one of his . . .

“But there is a cause, isn’t there?” asked Betty. She cleared her throat, speaking with the delicacy of a police officer trying to talk a jumper in off a ledge. “At the very least a chain of events I can reconstruct. I have some idea of your research, of the experiments you performed on yourself. I think that Bruce—”

He interrupted her brusquely, but it seemed motivated by anger aimed more at himself than her. His voice laced with sorrow, he said, “Of course Bruce is the outcome, the mistake . . . my mistake. And you think I haven’t lived a day since without regretting it?” He sagged back in the chair, as if making the admission had drained him of whatever energy he had.

“No, I don’t think that,” said Betty. “But now you can do something about it.”

“But what could I do?” said the father, not paying attention to Betty. “She so wanted a baby. And I was so in love with her . . .”

the devil you know

His memories floated in an abyss, scattered about, and he saw them dancing past him, taunting him, ready to be reclaimed. . . .

Connections—wires to his brain, his brain to his past, his father, his mother—the connection was there, long forgotten, long unemployed, but it was there, sucking him in. His past was one large vacuum, and nature abhorred a vacuum, which meant nature abhorred him, and it had turned its sights upon him now and drawn him down, down through a vast neural network of reticulated nets which formed floating, liquid screens of unconscious images, memories, an uncharted chorus of voices and sounds inside him, and he almost felt as if he could hear his father’s voice, that’s how connected they had become . . .

“I could feel it, from the moment she conceived,” said David Banner, as Betty listened with rapt attention. “It wasn’t a son I had given her but a monster. I thought”— his voice rose with desperate urgency—“maybe if I could make this one mistake go away, I’d give everything up, even my work, take it back, just take it back to when it was just she and me.”

And his mother was smiling at him, except it wasn’t Monica Krenzler, it was his mother, his real mother, and she was glorious and beautiful and she bore a passing resemblance to Betty, which made perfect sense somehow, perfect sense, and the floating image of his mother collided and mixed with the image of two dolls, overlapped with the vision of his mother, and she was smiling and reassuring, and a door opened, flooding her image with light. . . .

“I remember that day so well,” said David Banner. “Every sensation, as I walked into the house. Felt the handle of the knife. It must have been destined, just like Abraham and Isaac, the son, sacrificed by the father.”

Betty didn’t comprehend what he was saying at first, for the mention of the knife came from nowhere, and then she did, and she cringed back in horror.

His mother cringed back in horror at first, and then she saw that her husband was eyeing their son, and the horror was replaced by the fierce determination of a mother fighting for her child’s life, and she backpedaled, occupying the door frame between them, and young Bruce clutched the stuffed toys to his chest as he tried to see around his mother, thinking that it was all a game and she was hiding some sort of surprise, that was it, she was suddenly going to turn around and she and his father would yell, “Surprise!” except she wasn’t turning, she was still facing his father, and there was yelling, but it wasn’t “Surprise,” it was a bunch of bad words that he wasn’t supposed to say, and anger, and suddenly there was a shriek and somebody must have been holding a bottle of ketchup between them because red liquid was spilling down the side of her dress. . . .

“But she surprised me. It was as if,” and he spoke in a singsong voice, “as if she and the knife merged into one thing. You can’t imagine—” Betty was wide-eyed as he stared at his empty hand. “—the unbearable finality of it, her life, and mine, suspended at the end of my hand. . . .”

. . . and he flew at his father, who was staring stupefied at the blade, which was still dripping with the blood of his wife, Bruce’s mother, and he remembered at the last moment to bring the knife up, but the boy was upon him then, leaping, knocking the knife clear, and although the monster wasn’t yet unleashed, wasn’t yet anything approaching his full strength, the glimmer of its potential was there, and the father looked into the eyes of the son and knew fear as the boy tore at him like a wildcat, and the boy lost track of his mother, saw her stumble in shock and confusion out the front door, and then his father tried to throw him down so he could get at the knife . . . and . . .

“And in that one moment, I took everything that was dear to me . . .”

. . . he sank his teeth—like an animal, like a berserk, rabid dog—into his father’s neck, and tasted his father’s blood between his teeth, and the father howled and shrieked and the screams of the father blended and overlapped with the howling of sirens . . .

“. . . and transformed it into nothing more than a memory. . . .”

. . . as the MPs swarmed the house, and his father was dragged away and shoved into a car with whirling lights atop it, and Bruce was screaming and pointing in the direction he’d seen his mother stagger off, but no one could understand him because he wasn’t speaking, he was grunting and growling inarticulately, like an ape crying out in distress, and someone was trying to hold him steady and he struggled and yanked and shrieked and the rage seized him and his body started to bubble for a moment and someone yelled “He’s got a swelling here, it’s huge; get some ice packs, stat!” and “We need to sedate him; he’s having a seizure!”

“But you can’t step back from what you create, can you?” said David Banner, apparently oblivious to the look of fear and revulsion on Betty’s face. “No matter how horrifying. My son—he was fated to become . . . what he has now become. No, it’s over for him, and for me too.”

And he shoved them away with a strength that none would have thought he could possess, and he sprinted into the house, grabbing the dolls as he went, and up, up into his room, and feet were pounding up the stairs after him, and he was about to hide under his bed when there was some sort of explosion, some noise, and the sky lit up, and he ran to the window and looked out, saw something that he couldn’t begin to comprehend, something that made it seem as if the world was all new because what was there before had just been wiped clean, clean away, and there was a man in the street in a uniform, and a little girl looking up at him, and he caught a glimpse of his father’s face as everyone froze in a tableau that seared itself into his mind and then buried itself deep, but it was back, back to torment him, and the images were swirling every which way, and suddenly his father was old, the connection reestablished, his hair graying, and the girl was grown and it was Betty, and her father was next to her, and they were all looking up at him, and he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand knowing what was coming, couldn’t stand the pain, the agony, it was unfair, it was so unfair, why had it happened, why couldn’t he have had a normal life, why WHY WHY because it made him want to—makes us want to—makes me want to just . . . just . . .

“That’s why I’ve come to you, to ask you for a last, simple favor,” he said, his voice quavering. “Miss Ross, do you think you could persuade your father—as a man, as a father himself—to let me see my son, for one last time, if I turn myself in peacefully? And then he can put me away forever. Could you do that for me?” asked David Banner, and then he started to weep. . . .

. . . just . . . smash him . . . smash his crying face; I can see him; he’s right there, in my head . . . my soul. I just . . . hate . . . hate . . . smash . . . destroy him . . . crush . . . squeeze, blood oozing between fingers, crush, mash, destroy, smash everything, smash it all . . .

Betty regarded him uneasily. “Let me make a call,” she said. She left the room. He looked after her, a grim smile replacing his tears.

. . . SMASH IT ALLLLL . . .

Overlooking the immersion cell from the glassed-in lab, one of the technicians, whose name was Wein, called out in genuine excitement as he studied the flashing monitors. “We’re getting a lot of neural activity! Incredible. He’s generating enormous amounts of . . .”

And Glen Talbot pushed Wein aside and said, “Let me see!” He leaned in, studied the readouts in approval. “Bingo! That must be some jumbo nightmare he’s having.”

That was when they heard the roar from within the tank, muted but audible, the liquid resonating with the cries from within. The tank, impossibly, bucked in its moorings, and pulsed, and rippled, and at that instant Talbot realized his catastrophic mistake. A fundamental error, something that a third-grade science student would have known about. But he’d missed it, the technicians had missed it, everyone in the damned multibillion facility had missed it.

“Liquid displacement,”
he whispered. When Banner’s body morphed and shifted and grew into the muscled and monstrous form known as the incredible Hulk, it took up space that had previously been occupied by the fluid within the tank. But the liquid was still there, and the violent growth of Banner’s body demanded an equally violent displacement of the fluid to somewhere else, like water blasting out of a pool when someone cannonballs into it. However, the tank was filled almost to capacity as it was; with the sudden arrival of the Hulk, there was nowhere for the liquid to go except out . . .

. . . which it did.

Seams buckled and broke and fluid blew out in all directions, and then there was another roar, and a huge green hand worked its way between the seams. Rivets popped, metal twisted and broke, and suddenly the tank cracked open like a piñata. The metal shrieked, the sound blending with the screams of the onlookers, and bent backward, and as the liquid cascaded every which way, the Hulk rose in the middle, wet and dripping and bellowing a roar that could have been made by an angry T rex sinking into a tar pit. The only difference was that the Hulk’s life wasn’t in danger.

That couldn’t, however, be said of the lives of anyone who was watching.

. . . wet . . . dripping . . . where . . . where . . . no matter where . . . smash . . . kill . . .

Wein, who was standing next to Talbot, didn’t panic, because he was far too much of a professional for that. It was, however, requiring every ounce of self-control he possessed not to. And if he’d had the slightest inkling of what he was facing, he likely would have soiled himself.

As it was, his voice was rock steady as he asked, “Should I incinerate?”

Talbot had recovered himself after his initial reaction and said with such disdain that one would have thought the incineration query to be the single dumbest question ever voiced, “No! I can’t do anything with ashes.” He hit the intercom. “All right, put him to sleep.”

The Hulk roared and pounded against the walls of the immersion cell as gas flowed from the walls, enveloping him.

The mind of Bruce Banner was buried deep, as deep as the memories of his childhood had been. The rampaging, bestial mind of the Hulk was in full control, but even so there was just enough of Banner’s awareness to allow an actual coherent thought to play across the Hulk’s mind

. . . gas . . . hold breath . . .

and without understanding why, but not caring particularly, the Hulk took a quick and deep breath, filling up his lungs an instant before the gas rose to the level of his nostrils.