Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

mood. He was suddenly very, very irritated with Bruce Banner—and was certain that he was going to take that irritation out on Banner himself.

Bruce wondered what they were hoping to accomplish by leaving him alone in his home. Probably they wanted him to sweat, to wonder what horrible thing was going to happen next.

They didn’t understand, had no comprehension. Sitting around in his house couldn’t begin to worry him. What they were going to do to him was of no consequence. The notion that they were going to yank his security clearance, ban him from plying his trade, was meaningless; all their threats were meaningless.

His worries were far away from their priorities. His worries centered around the voice in his head, and a pounding rage that seemed to be taking on a life of its own. Their threats to the life he knew were inconsequential, because Bruce already sensed that the life he knew was over. The only matter remaining to be decided was precisely how over it was.

At that moment, he heard the faint ringing of a telephone.

It confused him because it didn’t sound like the ring of his own phone. He wondered if Ross or one of the MPs had left behind a cell phone, but he didn’t see any. Just to make sure, he picked up the receiver of his telephone, but the ringing continued unabated. It would actually have been rather surprising had it been his phone, considering he could see now that the cord had been cut. Very thorough people, Ross and his boys.

That didn’t alter the fact that the ringing was going on, and Bruce was starting to get more and more annoyed. He looked for its source and found it under the cushion on his chair. He pulled out a tiny cell phone, looked at it, pressed a button, and held it to his ear. “Hello?” said Bruce tentatively, certain that the phone must belong to Ross or an MP, and that was who the caller would be asking for.

He was stunned when he heard the voice of the man who had purported to be his father saying in a softly dangerous tone, “Bruce?”

When Bruce didn’t answer, the old man just continued talking, as if Bruce’s participation in the conversation not only wasn’t mandatory but might even slow things down. “So they think they can just throw you away as they did me?”

Banner walked to the window and checked. The guards were milling about, unaware of his conversation. “What’s wrong with me?” Bruce was almost whispering. “What . . . did you do to me?”

David Banner—if that was truly who he was—chose not to answer. Instead he said blandly, as if delivering a weather report from Guam, “I got a visit today. A very unwelcome visit. I’m afraid my hand is being forced.”

Bruce wasn’t going to let himself be distracted. “What did you do to me?” he persisted in asking.

An unpleasant laugh came from the other end. “You so much want to know, don’t you? But I think no explanation will ever serve you half as well as experience. And, in any case, I still don’t quite understand it myself,” he admitted. “If they had only let me work in peace—but, of course, my ‘betters’ would have none of it.”

“So you experimented on yourself, didn’t you?” Bruce guessed between gritted teeth. Except it wasn’t much of a guess; he’d had plenty of time to figure out exactly what had happened, presuming the old man’s claims of patrimony were true. And as of now, he had zero reason to think otherwise. He paused, afraid to ask the next question and afraid not to. “And passed on to me . . . what?”

There was a silence on the other end that seemed to stretch to infinity. Bruce began to think that the connection had been lost, and then the old man spoke, making Bruce realize that his “father” had just been enjoying stringing him along.

“A deformity. You could call it that. But an amazing strength, too,” he added, and Bruce could practically hear him smiling over the phone. “And now unleashed, I can finally harvest it.”

There were few things David Banner could have said that would have been more alarming than that. “You’ll do no such thing,” Bruce said sharply. “I will isolate it and treat it myself. Remove it, kill it—before it does any real harm.”

This time there was no deliberate pause or smugness. David replied immediately and angrily, his voice dripping with bile and bitter sarcasm. “Oh, I bet you and your Betty would love to destroy it. But would you really, even if it meant killing yourself? I don’t think so.”

Bruce wasn’t so sure about that. He was slowly becoming aware of just what it was that was moving through his bloodstream, brought to full life by the combination of the nanomeds and gamma radiation. Had Bruce been left to his own devices, it was possible that—with his tendency to repress his emotions and fears—he might well have led a normal life—a life full of loneliness and emotional deprivation, but normal nonetheless. Well, relatively normal.

But it was becoming clear that the nanos and rads had had some sort of catalytic effect on him, triggering biological shifts and changes of which he could only guess. But if they had caused some sort of revision of his biological makeup, then perhaps it was possible to find a way to reverse the effect. Anything that was done could be undone. It didn’t seem much more complicated than that.

And then David Banner said something that complicated things very, very much.

“And as for Betty,” he told Bruce with a chortle, “I’m sending her a little surprise visit from some four-legged friends of mine.”

The room, the world, seemed to go dark around Bruce Banner, seemed to skew at an angle. Suddenly there was a thudding pulse in his temples, and he had to fight to hear the words from the other end of the phone. “You see,