Hulk, Peter David [best ereader for academics .TXT] 📗

Bruce Banner looked at Betty with an exhausted half smile. “You found me,” he said.

Betty took a quick glance around. “You weren’t that hard to find,” she said, seeing morbid amusement in the moment.

“Yes,” said Bruce, “I was.” And Betty knew that he was referring to something else completely, and she began to cry.

“Hey,” Bruce continued softly, and now he was the one who was comforting her. “I’m just grateful we got the chance . . . to say good-bye.”

And they clung to each other then, two people surrounded by the physical wreckage left in the wake of the Hulk, a symbol of the emotional wreckage of the couple themselves.

Several hundred miles away, Monica Krenzler watched CNN’s footage of an as-yet-unidentified, dark-haired man clinging to a young woman, sobbing piteously in the midst of the real-life horror show his life had become. Monica’s tears as she watched were more copious than his.

In his cell at the Joint Tactical Force West brig, David Banner sat upright on his cot and smiled.

“Soon,” he whispered. “Very, very soon.”

Soon he knew they would come for him. Soon he knew that he would be brought to see his son. Soon he would be invincible.

“Can I get a pizza in here?” he called to the guard. No answer was forthcoming. He reminded himself to kill the guard as soon as he was the greatest power on earth.

sins of the father

In a grudging, almost perverse way, Bruce Banner had to admire the ingenuity of the scientists at the base. They’d come up with a rather clever way of keeping him immobilized, having rigged up the entire thing in an otherwise empty airplane hangar.

Essentially, he was positioned on a large platform between two huge electromagnetic arrays. The entire area was illuminated by immense klieg lights, making it that much easier to see Bruce—not that he was doing much of anything interesting. He just sat on a cot, staring at one of the arrays with vague curiosity.

He had every reason to be interested. The arrays were large enough and powerful enough that, although they likely wouldn’t have much effect on the Hulk other than to annoy him further, they would be able to incinerate Bruce Banner in a matter of seconds. He would be the most powerful pile of ashes in California.

It didn’t matter to Bruce. None of it did. He had examined the situation, turned it over and over in his mind. With all that, he hadn’t come to a conclusion that was substantially any different from what he’d already intuited back in San Francisco. He’d clambered back to reality and found Betty, like a drowning man surfacing and gasping in lungsful of air. But even in that moment of joy and salvation, he had known instantly that it was going to be temporary.

He was, quite simply, too dangerous to live.

Betty Ross had come to much the same conclusion as Bruce. The only difference was she was far more unwilling to accept it.

She was at the far end of the hangar, watching him on monitors that had been rigged up near a communications truck. Thunderbolt Ross was addressing her and several other scientists and high-ranking officers who she didn’t recognize.

“Here’s the deal,” said Ross. “He stays on the base here until we get final word from C Three on how to dispose of him. The slightest hint he’s putting on weight, or he starts curling his lip a little too meanly, or he starts looking like an avocado, we turn up the juice and he’s incinerated immediately.” He hadn’t been looking right at Betty as he spoke, but now he did. His expression softened slightly, but only slightly. This wasn’t a situation where he was going to try to sugarcoat it for her. “Betty, you’d better prepare yourself for the orders we’re going to get.”

“We’ve established a two-hundred-yard perimeter, sir,” said a colonel whose nametag identified him as Thomas. “If we deploy the electromagnetic array, there should be no collateral damage.”

“It’ll be a hell of a show, though,” said Ross. Betty shuddered when he said that, and he looked as if he immediately regretted having made the comment. But he’d said it, and, frankly, he was probably right. The electromagnets would unleash a light display that would look like the Big Bang, except the intention would be to destroy, rather than create.

Betty looked around at the soldiers who were stationed at the controls. They looked to be on hair triggers, tense and waiting for the slightest sign that the lethal device should be activated. Hell, they were so keyed up that if Bruce chose that moment to sneeze, they’d probably fry him, and get a medal and commendation into the bargain.

God, what had she done? Because of her, Bruce was now helpless. But what other options had been open to her? Do nothing and let him destroy San Francisco? Well, if he’d leveled it, no more worrying about climbing those damned hills. She wanted to laugh and cry at the thought, and managed to keep herself from doing either through an impressive display of self-control.

Then she heard a personnel transport truck pull up, and she knew, even before the doors were opened, just who it was that was in there. Guards jumped down and opened the back, and David Banner—in chains—was led out of the vehicle, escorted by the troops. He passed Betty and Ross, making eye contact but saying nothing. His escorts pointed him toward the open end of the hangar. Betty watched him approach the hangar, and she didn’t know whether she wanted to kill him or . . .

No. On second thought, she did know.

Bruce Banner, half-blinded by the lights, sat up, and saw the figure of a man approaching him in a slow, shambling manner. Nevertheless, he recognized his father almost instantly. Slowly David Banner traversed the length of the hangar, stepping right up and in between the electromagnets. It was