Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

he spoke, were almost hypnotic. In all his years, Bruce had never encountered a personality quite like this one: a true psychotic.

Despite the immediate danger, the scientist within him came to the fore, and he found himself in observational mode, intrigued to see what the old man would say or do next. Meantime, the old man continued to rant, clearly in his own world.

“The experiments, the accident, they were top secret. They put me away, thirty years—away from you, away from our work—but they couldn’t keep me forever. After all, I’m sane. They had to admit it.”

The dogs were starting to get fidgety. The pit bull looked in Bruce’s direction and started to growl, and this was more than enough to get Bruce’s hand to stray toward the call button. But then the old man raised his arm and the dogs came to attention. Bruce let the call button be, and continued to watch the old man, who had refocused his energies back on Bruce. The intruder was speaking louder, his voice growing in both volume and intensity. He sounded like the classic mad scientist from some old black-and-white horror film, exhorting whatever unseen gods were looking down on him and encouraging him in his demented endeavors. Bruce started to wonder whether this wasn’t a dream after all, for the only thing the moment lacked was lightning bolts and rolling thunder as the old man declared, “You see, everything your extraordinary mind has been seeking all these years—it’s been inside of you—and now we will understand it, harness it—”

The phone rang, a mundane sound that seemed out of place in a moment of such Grand Guignol. Bruce looked over at it, but the old man stepped quickly toward him, his voice growing softer but still at full force in its demented drive. “Miss Ross again. Don’t answer! There’s something you need to know about her, Bruce. Something troublesome, but I can protect you from her.”

And that was, abruptly, all Bruce could take.

Starting to tremble, he fairly shouted, “You’re crazy! Get out!”

A look of menacing hatred passed over his father’s face. As if responding to the mood of their master, the dogs crouched for an attack.

But Bruce, furious over the old man’s aspersions of Betty, didn’t back down. At that moment he didn’t care if the damned animals leapt at him and tried to tear him apart. His only concern was telling this lunatic to vacate the room instantly.

“Get. Out.”

And, astoundingly, a look of satisfaction passed over the old man’s face. One might have thought that he was genuinely glad to see a flash of temper. “Heel,” the father ordered the dogs, and the daunting canines promptly backed off.

There was a long moment wherein the old man appeared to be sizing Bruce up, and then he said in a mildly mocking voice, “We’re going to have to watch that temper of yours.” From the way he said it, it was impossible to tell whether he meant it as an advisory against the dangers of giving in to anger . . . or whether he intended to keep Bruce’s anger under careful observation. Nor did Bruce have the opportunity to get him to clarify, for the old man promptly departed, the dogs obediently following him with their long toenails click-clacking on the polished floor.

The phone kept ringing, but Bruce didn’t notice it. He wasn’t even staring in the direction that the man had gone; instead, he was fixed upon the point in the room that the man had occupied moments before. It was as if he were concerned that the man might somehow reappear from thin air, like a phantasm or recurring hallucination.

Then the phone stopped ringing, and the abrupt cessation snapped Bruce back to reality. He snatched the IV out of his arm, pulled the leads from his various monitors, and rolled off the bed. He sagged for a moment, his legs not completely ready to accept his weight, but he braced himself and forced himself forward. He stumbled once, but then righted himself and made it out into the hall. His sudden arrival in front of the nurse’s station startled the nurse awake. She looked astounded to see him standing there.

“Where did he go?” demanded Bruce.

The nurse stared at him a little fearfully. “Who?” she asked uncertainly.

Bruce looked up and down the corridor.

Empty.

“Maybe it was a dream at that,” he said softly. Without another word to the nurse, or even an attempt at an explanation, he shuffled back into his room. The nurse followed him and didn’t say a word as she hooked him back up to the various monitoring devices. He simply lay there, staring at the ceiling, his mind far, far away. When sleep finally came for him—a total, deep sleep—he welcomed it with a sense of swelling relief.

And as he slept . . . there was pain and hurt and a bubbling, brooding anger long repressed against anyone and everyone who had ever done harm to him or laughed at him or tried to hurt him, and a sea of faces swam before him, sneering, chuckling, and the world around him was tinted green and in the darkness of his innermost fears . . . he awoke to discover that his bed was bent right along the frame, and the IV tube and monitoring devices had been ripped free in his thrashing.

He staggered to his feet, stumbling about in the darkness. He tried to call out to the nurse, but his throat was constricted. The idiot woman must have been away from her station, or perhaps had fallen asleep again. . . . Useless, just useless woman. He should smash her, should . . .

He forced the thoughts away as he lurched toward the bathroom. He knocked over a lamp in the darkness and barely registered the sound of its crashing to the floor. He made it to the bathroom with a supreme effort and clicked on the light, squinting against the sudden brightness. He stared at