Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

Night had fallen. A nurse was asleep at her desk.

Bruce sat up in his bed, hooked to various monitors that showed nothing abnormal. He was going mad with boredom. It was bad enough when he was at home, unable to sleep and compelled by insomnia to pick up pencil and paper and start working. But here he was in the infirmary, and they were keeping a wary eye on him. It seemed as if, every fifteen minutes or so, someone else came in urging him to go to sleep. He was starting to feel as if he were a child, or at the very least was being treated like one.

He leaned back, his mind wandering over the things that had happened over the past few days. The events, the memories. He tried to force himself back into the moment when he’d been struck by the gamma radiation, and what had been going through his mind at the time. It hadn’t been words so much as crazed thoughts and images tumbling pell-mell one over the other, and some seemed familiar, but others didn’t. Instead they were like the recollections of events that had happened to someone else . . .

Someone else . . .

For a very long time, it had disturbed Bruce that his early years were a blur to him. Everyone had fragments of memories, moments that were mental snapshots, and these snapshots could always be put into some sort of framework or context. That had never been the case with him. On rare occasions he would speak of them to his mother, but she never seemed to be of much help. She would just smile and shrug and offer him some freshly baked cookies. Before long he stopped mentioning those memory shards because he was beginning to worry that he’d get fat from the cookies. It seemed easier not to worry about it, and he hadn’t thought of it in quite some time.

But in those final moments before he’d interposed himself between the gamma cannon and the others, his life had flashed before his eyes. Not unusual. Imminent death triggers that rush of memories, the computer of one’s brain dumping all the memories like one great final purging of the hard drive. As it so happened he hadn’t died, but the memories had been shaken up for the first time in ages. They floated in the river of his memory like disturbed silt . . . and also for the first time, there was a hint of . . . of familiarity. Familiarity from a most unexpected source.

Bruce’s gaze wandered over to the phone on the nightstand next to him. He wondered if the thing was hooked up. Experimentally he picked up the receiver and was rewarded with a dial tone. His first attempt at dialing, however, was met with a rapid busy signal. Then he remembered he had to dial 9 to get out. Would that getting out of any situation was as easy as dialing 9, he thought as he dialed the phone number of the one person he felt he could talk to.

He hoped she was in. Not just that, but he hoped she wasn’t out . . . and, more to the point, he hoped she wasn’t out with him.

The phone rang two, three times, and there was a click. Then came Betty’s voice, “Hello,” and Bruce paused a moment, waiting to see if it would be followed by an answering machine message. No. Just silence. A slightly puzzled Betty repeated, “Hello?” and Bruce realized that he had never been so glad to hear another person’s voice in his entire life. He felt pure, raw emotion choking up in his breast, and just as quickly quieted it.

“Hey,” said Bruce.

“Hey!” Betty replied, sounding cheered, even a bit relieved. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

She paused, as if worried that he wasn’t telling her something. “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He heard a small exhale of breath. She was sighing in relief. How nice. He could see her clearly in his mind’s eye: her smile, the luster of her hair, that way she had of making him feel alive just by looking at him. Just hearing her voice gave him—what was the phrase?—a rush.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I was just sitting here,” Bruce said, “thinking about you, about your dream.”

“What dream?” asked Betty.

“The one of the desert.”

There was another pause, this time a bit more uncomfortable. Finally she said guardedly, “And what were you thinking about?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He didn’t want to say, “I thought I was about to die and while that was happening—” because she already seemed skittish and tentative enough with the entire situation. Why risk getting her worked up? So, choosing his words carefully, he said, “Sometimes, when I’m not really thinking about much of anything, I remember images from it. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“It’s as if—” He didn’t know how else to say it. “—I dreamed it myself.”

There was a soft laugh on the other end. He could tell she thought he was just being sweet, that he was trying to show just how much he shared her feelings and concerns.

Women, he sighed mentally.

“What’s the number there?” she asked. “In case I’m seized with a sudden urge to hear your voice.” He told her, reading it off the dial where it was printed. She repeated it, and then said softly, “You should get some sleep. Have some sweet dreams of your own.”

“Yeah,” said Bruce, “you, too.”

He kept the phone to his ear long after Betty had hung up, hoping that he could somehow cause her to materialize in front of him through sheer force of will. After a while, though, when the dial tone changed to an irritating buzz, he hung up and settled back on the bed. The buzz remained in his head, however, fatiguing his mind. He didn’t resist it. Hell, he welcomed it. It was pretty depressing to think that the only way he was able to get some sleep