Hulk (6 page)

“Not a problem. We’ll improvise,” said the old man, and he snapped his fingers. The dogs were upon Benny in a heartbeat, one of them—a pit bull—clamping his teeth around Benny’s throat before he could get so much as a scream out. The old man stepped through the door as the animals bore Benny to the floor, and as the janitor writhed in his death throes, the old man said, “By the way . . .
love
your orchestra,” as he closed the door behind him.

Not for the first time, Bruce Krenzler had the oddest feeling that he was staring into the mirror at someone else’s face. Or perhaps it was something other than that. Yes. Yes, it felt as if he were studying his own face, but eyes other than his were gazing back at him with intensity and curiosity and . . . hatred.

Why hatred?

Why not?

The query and the reply ran through his head, one stumbling over the other, and the impact of their collision nearly jolted him from his reverie. His mind split ever so slightly, and he saw himself from beyond the restrictions of his mortal shell, as if he were having an out-of-body experience. How ludicrous it would have seemed to someone on the outside looking in. Here he was, standing bare chested, a towel wrapped around his middle, staring into a mirror as if his own reflection were simply the most irresistible thing he’d ever laid eyes on. He would have come across to an observer as a world-class egomaniac. Or a narcissist.
Or an actor
, he added mentally, and tried to laugh at his little unvoiced jest. Oddly, he found he couldn’t.

His straight black hair was still slicked down from his having showered minutes before, but his skin had dried. He studied his face more closely. His ears stuck out a bit on either side. He thought he looked like a reasonably intelligent individual, and then wondered whether that again wasn’t the consideration of someone who was too self-obsessed for his own good.

Bruce looked a bit older than he felt. He was reasonably muscled. He didn’t get the chance to exercise all that often, because he was so busy in the lab. He used to have much more of a tan, but lately he’d been eating, sleeping, and breathing in the laboratory, and some days it seemed the only reason he came home was because Betty practically forced him to.

Something flickered in his eyes when he thought of Betty. Again, he wasn’t sure what it was, and that bothered him a lot. He thought of the time when they’d been on their way up to the cabin, and Betty had gazed at him lovingly and spoke of how the eyes were the window to the soul. Bruce had laughed and said in an offhand manner, “Yes, but whose soul?” When Betty had asked him what that was supposed to mean, he didn’t have an explanation. He still didn’t.

“My God, Bruce,” he said out loud. Although the shade was drawn in his bathroom, the light of dawn was visible through it. “Could you possibly waste time any more comprehensively than you already have?”

He then wondered for some odd reason if he was going to respond to himself.
They always say talking to yourself is no big deal; it’s when you start replying that you’ve got a problem
.

He didn’t reply, which provided at least some temporary degree of relief.

Deciding that he’d been screwing around for far too long already, Bruce quickly lathered up his face and began to draw his razor across it. He did so with the same careful, methodical strokes he always used when attending to—well, just about anything, really. Betty had once said that with the slightest push, he could easily trip over into the realm of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I could never have OCD,” Bruce had assured her. “I’m too anal retentive.” That made Betty laugh, and the matter had been dropped. Not forgotten by Bruce, or Betty, truth to tell, but dropped nevertheless.

The razor moved across his face. He watched it carefully. Gradually Bruce realized that there was something wrong with his reflection, but he couldn’t fathom what it might be. Finally he noticed it: He’d stopped blinking. He was so fixed on what he was doing that his eyes were just staring, like the orbs of a serpent. Or a madman.

He blinked. It took an effort, but he did it. One blink, slow, methodical, and then open, and there were those eyes again, set in his relatively nondescript face, and
damn
, but it felt as if someone else was staring back.

You’re losing it, Bruce.

Yes. You are.

He almost jumped as he once again responded to himself, in a voice that sounded like hell’s cement mixer, and he nicked himself shaving.

And there was blood, blood everywhere, gushing, and it was horrible, just terrifying, and deep within something rooting around recoiled in terror and anger, all mixed together, looking at his eyes,
through
his eyes, with burning hatred . . .

It was a tiny cut. No gushing. No trauma. Just a dot. He held a piece of tissue paper to it for a moment and the bleeding stopped almost immediately.

He actually chuckled when he saw how minimal the damage was. “The dangers of letting yourself get worked up,” he said aloud, although no one was there to hear.

And then, almost against his will, he saw
those eyes
, and suddenly felt as if someone was indeed there to hear. Someone other than himself.

He finished shaving far quicker than he ever had before, threw a wet towel over his face, and wiped away the shaving cream. When he lowered the damp cloth, his eyes were his and his alone, leaving him to ponder the fact that he was suffering from too much imagination and too little morning coffee.

The laboratory within the Lawrence Berkeley facility in which Bruce spent most of his time was an amusing place. Well, amusing to someone like Bruce. Whenever he saw labs in movies, the scientists’ domains were always clean and polished and wonderfully organized. As a student, all the labs he’d ever been in during his school days were maelstroms of barely controlled chaos. In a way, he’d always looked forward to becoming an adult so that he could inhabit one of those movie labs and never have to be stepping in between or under or around various projects to get where he had to go.

Well, here he was, a project administrator, the lead scientist in one of the facility’s most promising projects, and not only had his organizational skills not improved, but apparently they had degenerated.

His assistant, Jake Harper, was theoretically supposed to help Bruce keep on track. The operative word, unfortunately, was “theoretically,” and as it happened, it turned out not to be one of Bruce’s better theories. Harper was almost as hopeless as Bruce himself.

Betty could have gotten everything organized, of course. She had that sort of mind. But she had once told Bruce point-blank that if he was waiting for her to get their act together for them, then he was going to be waiting a long, bloody time, because she’d be damned if she voluntarily took on the role of token female cleaning up after the guys.

This left Bruce and Harper to make occasional, perfunctory attempts at getting the place in order, and Betty to stand in the midst of the discord, shake her head, and make disapproving clucking noises every so often. So the lab never got cleaned up, but at least everyone knew their place in the order of things. Bruce took some comfort from that, cold as that comfort might be.

Harper—with his disheveled hair, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, and perpetually wan complexion—was several years younger than Bruce and several light-years more nervous. Certainly that nervousness came from lack of confidence in himself, which Bruce couldn’t begin to comprehend. Harper’s competency tested off the charts, and he’d graduated eighth in his class at MIT. His doctorate on cellular regeneration had been so groundbreaking that no less an authority than Dr. Henry Pym had shaken his hand and congratulated him on a job well done.

Yet during procedures, Harper had a tendency to move around with energized nervousness, as if concerned about his own adequacy, or perhaps about the possibility that something might blow up in his face and take his face along with it. Still, he got the job done better than any dozen men with whom Bruce had been associated, and so Bruce was willing to tolerate Harper’s little quirks. Fortunately enough, Bruce wasn’t of the temperament to let a great deal bother him.

Except your own reflection
, he thought.

Annoyed with himself for mentally retreating to his mirror encounter—which had been elevated in his mind, much to his irritation, from a simple shave to some vast analysis of his psyche—Bruce pushed away all such irrelevant considerations and concentrated instead upon the gammasphere.

The round chamber sat glistening before him, the product of two years of meticulous planning and labor. Shielded with glass a foot thick, the lower section was lined with glittering panels, reflectors designed to process and focus the radiation that would be carefully manipulated by the scientists outside. In the center of the gammasphere, staring out passively from within a small dome atop a pedestal, was a frog. The dome was perforated with microscopic airholes that would both enable the frog to continue breathing and for gases and the like to pass through and reach the test subject. A focusing mirror was situated directly above the pedestal.

Bruce referred to the frog as “Number Eleven.” This didn’t sit well with Harper, who insisted on naming every damned one of the test subjects over Bruce’s objections. This one he had dubbed “Freddie.” Bruce considered it unprofessional. One simply didn’t humanize test subjects. He’d commented rather loudly during one lunch meeting that it was pointless to expend emotional energy becoming attached to experimental creatures. Whereupon Betty, without looking up from her tuna sandwich, had commented rather pointedly that if one wasn’t going to become too attached to experimental creatures or to other human beings, what
was
one going to become attached to? Harper had looked puzzled, and Betty had just smiled sweetly, but Bruce had been all too aware that the oblique observation was directed at him.

What did she want from him? Why couldn’t she simply accept that he wasn’t like her? What was it about women that made them feel compelled to try to change the men they loved?

Well, that was how much Betty truly knew him, he decided. Because if she knew him at all, she’d be aware that if there was one thing Bruce Krenzler didn’t do well with, it was change. He was too set in his ways, too locked into the man he was, to see beyond to other possibilities. Personal transformation wasn’t his forte. Ask anyone.

Bruce made a last minute check of the levels, and glanced across the room to make eye contact with Harper. Harper had just finished his own cross-checks, and nodded once to indicate that he was good to go.

“Harper,” said Bruce, “release the nanomeds.”

Harper nodded once, his hair flopping around like so much seaweed as he pressed a release valve. There was a hissing sound as the chamber filled with gas.

Freddie the frog glanced around in passive bewilderment. He didn’t see the nanomeds, of course. He would have required eyes formed on Krypton to be able to discern them. He did, however, hear the soft hiss of the gas. He flicked his tongue out experimentally, in the off chance that there was something in the gas that would provide nourishment.

“Okay,” said Bruce, taking a deep breath and then letting it out slowly. “Let’s hit Freddie with the gamma radiation.”

Harper punched instructions into a keyboard, muttering softly to himself something that Bruce at first didn’t hear. But then he did, the words repeated softly, like a mantra: “Let it work, let it work, let it work . . .” At that, Bruce had to smile, albeit very slightly. He wondered whether Harper was so desperate for it to work because he wanted the project to succeed . . . or because he was concerned about the fate of the frog should the experiment fail.

A pinpoint stream of gamma radiation hit the focal lens above the pedestal. In a flash, it zapped the frog across the chest. The poor creature flipped over onto its back for a moment, its little arms and legs flailing before it was able to take the time to recover and right itself. Had there been any exposure to open air from the chamber, there would doubtless have been the faint smell of burning meat. Certainly the sound would have been unpleasant. But instead Bruce and Harper were conveniently isolated, and the only thing they were able to observe was the ugly gash the frog had acquired on its chest.

Freddie was still stumbling about, looking disoriented. The frog blinked furiously, probably wondering if this was the first step toward prepping it to become an entrée; perhaps it was about to lose its legs to some gourmand.

For a moment there was nothing. Bruce watched. And then slowly, miraculously, the wound began to close up. As it closed, it left a zone of throbbing, almost fluorescent green in its wake, the freshly produced tissue saturated with color.

Bruce couldn’t believe it. Next to him, Harper was chortling with pleasure and triumph, and then he heard a female voice, so close to him that she was practically breathing in his ear, whisper,
“Yes!”

He turned to see, to his surprise, that Betty Ross was standing there. He had no clue how long she’d been there, but obviously it had been long enough to observe the results of the experiment. He hadn’t even been aware that she was in the lab, or else he would have held the tests up. He had thought she was out at a conference, and yet here she was in the flesh. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised at that. Betty routinely blew off national gatherings, claiming the work she and Bruce were doing was so evolved past anyone else’s that hanging around with other scientists, looking for tips and clues and guidance, was a waste of time.

She was so close that he could smell her perfume. He never quite understood why women tried to make themselves smell like flowers or palm trees or an evening rain rather than just smelling like women.

Still, it wasn’t a bad scent. . . .

He caught her glance, smiled involuntarily, then went back to the issue at hand and studied the readings from the scanners mounted directly under the frog. The frog was trembling slightly, but that could be due to a dozen things, most likely sympathetic vibrations to—