Hulk (25 page)

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 was 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.”

“Principles and ideas. I hear you,” said Ross, obviously trying not to sound dismissive, but making it clear that he wasn’t concerned about comprehending the mechanics. “But we don’t have all that much time here. And if he poses some kind of imminent danger . . .”

Betty supposed it was a valid enough concern, and her father’s priorities weren’t exactly out of whack. If someone had a gun pointed at them, they didn’t have to know how the firing mechanism worked. They just wanted someone to make the gun go away.

“Then help me get right to work,” Betty said briskly. She sat forward, interlaced her fingers and tucked them under her chin. “First, you have to understand, the triggers are somatic, but they’re also emotional. He needs to connect those emotions with the memories to which they are linked. And there
are
memories here, aren’t there? About his father?”

Slowly Ross nodded. “Yes, Betty,” he said, clearly not happy to acknowledge it, “there are. But frankly it’s not the
memory
of his father I’m worried about right now. It’s the fact that he’s still out there, and he may know as much about this, if not more, than we do.”

“Then he can’t continue to be out there.”

Again her father nodded in agreement. “All right,” he said briskly. “Here’s what we’re going to have to do. We’ll have to assign troops—at least a hundred—to comb the Berkeley area, turn the place upside down, see if we can shake him loose. Get the latest pictures we can of him, show them to every neighbor who might have seen him. Investigate the lab where he was posing as a janitor, and see if they have an address for him, or some sort of lead—what’s that?”

She was holding up a piece of paper. “It’s his address. You can just go to his house.”

Ross took it from her hands and stared at it.

“Yes, that might work, too,” he said, and then actually smiled at her. She returned the smile and was surprised to see just how easy it was to smile at him.

The FBI agents burst into the house of David Banner, guns drawn. Their eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, even as they waved flashlights around and shouted warnings that anyone in the house had best present themselves hands up, ready to surrender.

The warning made no difference to the small creature that streaked across the room, emitting high-pitched squeals that briefly froze the blood of the nearest man, Agent Lee. His mind told him that whatever was letting out those screeches couldn’t possibly be human, but for a heartbeat he thought he was being charged by a small child. His survival instincts overwhelmed him, however, and he fired off a fast shot at the fast-moving form even as he thought,
Oh, my God, oh, my God, I shot a child
.

It thudded to the floor and shuddered and twitched, and the agents moved forward hesitantly. The agent who had fired let out a sigh of relief, even as bewilderment swept through him. It definitely wasn’t a child; rather, it seemed to be some sort of rat. But it was indeed as big as a two year old. He’d never seen anything like it—and was even more stunned to see it dissolve into a hissing puddle of goo. “Man, Willard’s been smoking some serious steroids,” he muttered.

“Who the hell is ‘Willard’?” another agent, Special Agent Thomas, demanded.

“He was a rat in an old movie.”

“Oh. I remember that,” said Thomas, and frowned. “I thought Willard was the guy.”

“No, Willard was the rat.”

Thomas shook his head. “No. Willard was the guy who trained the rat. The rat was named ‘Ben.’ ”

Lee stared at him. “Thomas . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Search the damned house before I shoot you next.”

David Banner was smiling.

He loved being one step ahead of his pursuers. He was certain that, at that moment, someone—soldiers, Feds, whomever—were bursting into his house, hoping to arrest him. But all they were going to find were some wrecked remains of his work—wrecked because he himself had chosen to wreck it. The only thing of any interest in the house would be an oversize rat or two: early subjects for experimentation he had used.

The wheels of the janitor’s cart squeaked steadily down the hallway. The place was fairly deserted; small wonder. The rumors about what had happened had morphed and twisted, and now the popular belief was that terrorists calling themselves the Hulks had detonated a bomb at the lab to protest nuclear experimentation. As a result, 90 percent of the staff had called in sick for the rest of the week, and management wasn’t prepared to press the issue. So David Banner had the place more or less to himself, which was, of course, exactly what he wanted.

He parked his cart in front of his son’s lab and pulled out assorted tools from a case within. Stepping through, he found that the door to the gammasphere was open. The place was still pretty much a shambles, just as it had been when he’d been face-to-face with the green hulking creature that had been his son.

A sizable chunk of the sphere had been evicted through the roof, courtesy of the Hulk’s unearthly strength. But enough redundant systems were still in place that the equipment was still functional. There’d likely be radiation leaks throughout the lab, but David Banner didn’t give a damn about that.

Banner wasted no time, since he had no idea how much time he had. His babies, his glorious hounds of hell, had not returned to him. That led him to suspect that their assault on Betty Ross had not gone successfully. It had, however, succeeded as far as David Banner was concerned, because their failure meant that his son had managed to take on all three of the creatures single-handedly. His son, having assumed the great and glorious shape that was his birthright, had more than lived up to his father’s expectations. No father could have asked for more.

And as the son had beaten the path, so now would the father follow it.

Swiftly, with the focused drive of someone who has been waiting for this moment his entire life, he rigged up a series of makeshift reflectors around the edge of the vacuum tubes protruding into the room. Fine beads of sweat built up on his forehead, and his breathing came faster and faster. He caressed the mirrors as he set them into place, ran his hands lovingly over the instrumentation as he brought the power on line and set the dials.

As he walked into the midst of the chamber with the mechanisms on a time release, he felt as if time had slowed down, as if the world had turned to liquid and he was moving through it in a dreamlike state. Everything, everything had built to this moment, and he stood there, mentally counting down the moments, waiting, waiting, and finally there was a loud
click
that told him everything had come together, fallen into place just as he had planned it—hell, better than he’d planned it. He spread wide his arms and bathed in the light and radiation that filled the wrecked gammasphere, the open canister emitting gas filled with nanomeds, while the gamma radiation bathed him in its glorious light.