Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

about as close to sympathy as he was likely to get from Ross. He wasn’t sure if the general accepted his protestations of ignorance, but at the moment, at least, he appeared disinclined to continue harassing Bruce about what he was supposed to know but didn’t.

Ross harrumphed loudly and squared his shoulders. The brief instance of sympathy was gone.

“Until we get to the bottom of this, your lab has been declared a top military site, and you’re never going to get security clearance to get back into it—or any lab that’s doing anything more interesting than figuring out the next generation of herbal hair gel.” Then he came very close, practically thrusting his face into Bruce’s. When he spoke his breath stank of cigar. “And one more thing,” he snarled. “You ever come again within a thousand yards of my daughter, I’ll put you away for the rest of your natural life.”

Bruce said nothing. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of comebacks to that.

My life is spinning out of control.

It was a hard admission for Betty to make as she walked toward her front door, digging in her purse for her keys. Her entire job as a scientist was to find ways to master her environment, to reduce it to quantifiable units, to study it, measure it, and develop reproducible experiments that others could use as yardsticks for their own research. Just as Bruce valued his ability to control himself, Betty valued her ability to have a thorough grasp of her world and understand what made it tick. Not only did she no longer understand what made it tick, she didn’t even know what kind of timepiece it was.

Before she could insert the keys into the door, it swung open. She jumped back, startled and terrified. Then she gaped as a pair of military police marched out of her home as if they had every right to be there, taking out her computer and a box of papers for good measure. One of the MPs looked a bit embarrassed that they’d been caught. The other didn’t seem to give a damn, but just stared at Betty as if she were presenting an inconvenience to them.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Betty.

“Sorry, miss,” said the embarrassed-looking one. “Orders. Anything related to the lab, we’ve got to impound.” He actually sounded a bit apologetic.

She noticed another MP, sitting in a car across the street, eating a doughnut. “And him?” she asked.

The one who didn’t seem to give a damn spoke up. “For your own protection, miss,” he informed her in a monotone. Robo-Military Cop.

“I should have known,” said Betty sharply.

She wasn’t in the mood to be protected by her father. At that instant she wanted nothing more than for him to do her the courtesy of lying down in the street behind her car so she could back over him.

Betty turned on her heel, hopped back into her car, and drove off. She glanced in her rearview mirror and, sure enough, the MP in the car was following her. Apparently her father’s priorities superseded even the desire for a doughnut.

“Good,” she muttered. She was in a stupendously foul mood, and finally here was someone handy on whom she could take it out. The sun was setting, which was always the most hazardous time to drive. She welcomed it.

Betty cruised along, approaching an intersection, slowed down as the light turned yellow, then floored the accelerator just as it turned red. She hurtled through the intersection just as two cars began to enter it, and they both slammed on their brakes as she blew past them.

The sudden switch in acceleration caught the MP off guard and he automatically started to follow her. But the intersection was now blocked by the other two cars, and they were honking furiously at him. Betty watched in her rearview mirror, saw the car dwindling in the distance, and then increase in size again as it maneuvered around the two cars and came after her.

Good, she thought. I’d hate for it to end too soon.

Her car was a sporty model with manual transmission, and she’d been driving her sporty manual car in second gear, just to warm up. She switched it over into third, lead-footed the accelerator, and took off like a jackrabbit. It was the most fun she’d had in ages. In fact, it was the only fun she’d had in ages.

When she was fighting for her life several hours later, cursing herself for having ditched the MP in the kind of deliriously enjoyable auto chase that one usually only saw in films, the fun would seem very far away indeed.

unwise provocations

Glen Talbot was in an exceptionally good mood.

As the sun sank low on the horizon, Talbot drove up to the home of Bruce Banner, for such he knew him to be, and jovially greeted the MPs standing outside. “How’s our boy?” he asked.

One of the MPs nodded toward Banner’s window. And Talbot didn’t like what he was seeing, because he didn’t understand it. The blinds were opening, closing, opening, closing again, each time revealing and then shuttering light from within the living room. It was as if Bruce were trying to send a signal to somebody via some sort of code. But Talbot knew Morse code, not to mention semaphore, for what that was worth, and Bruce wasn’t blinking the blinds in any pattern he recognized.

Maybe it was another code altogether. That might be it. Bruce Banner might have invented a completely new version of an already existing transmission code, and was using it now to send a desperate message to a confederate.

Either that or it really was meaningless, and Banner was just doing it to mess with their heads. Talbot started to relax, but then realized that might be exactly what Banner wanted them to think, which would mean that . . . that . . .

Glen Talbot was no longer in a jovial