Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

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,