Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

when the monster had shoved it closed. So strong he had been, so strong, and yet now he was standing there dripping with rain and pulling with all his nonexistent might, pitting his meager efforts against the giant’s almost casual display of power. Finally, after much struggle, he managed to pry it open, and Betty half staggered, half fell out of the car. She saw blood smear across him and panicked for a moment before she realized it was hers, blood from cuts caused by the shattered glass and the final desperate swipe of a dying beast’s claws.

They sank to the ground, which was becoming muddy from the now-cascading rain, clutching each other, mutually seeking anchors of reality in a world made deliriously unreal. She held him tight, cradled him in her arms, and then he looked at his hands like a newborn child seeing them for the first time. It was only at that point that it really, truly seemed to dawn on him that his towering green alter ego was gone, that he was himself again. How horrifying the realization must be for him, to know that he was rage incarnate, power out of control.

And then he laughed.

The response wasn’t at all what Betty expected. It not only caught her off guard, it made her feel—as strange as it sounded—even more uncomfortable than when she was being attacked by the gamma-irradiated dogs. He shook the fist that he’d been staring at, the thrust coming perilously close to Betty’s face, and the shocking thing was that he didn’t seem to notice. Rain poured down his face, into his eyes, slicked down his hair, and it didn’t seem to matter to him. He laughed again, this time sounding almost maniacal, like a . . . like a mad scientist.

Betty winced and reflexively drew back. He didn’t seem to care, caught up in his delirious chortling and self-satisfaction. He wasn’t shocked, he wasn’t terrified or appalled or frightened by what these events portended. He was happy. Happy! Happier than she had ever seen him. Worse . . . happier than she’d ever made him.

“Am I awake?” said Bruce. Betty nodded hesitantly. “Was it me? I killed them, right? I killed them!”

Bruce Krenzler, for all his emotional repression, had always been deeply considerate of Betty’s feelings. But the man known as Bruce Banner didn’t seem to care about them in the least, because he clamped his hand over her mouth without thinking in order to demonstrate what he was referring to. “Like that! I snapped their necks!”

Driven by nearly frantic energy, Betty shoved him away. He seemed startled.

“Bruce!”

He looked at her, blinking against the rain, then squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as if to force himself to fully concentrate on who and where he was.

Tentatively, fearfully, Betty leaned forward and whispered, “You can’t control it, can you?” She wasn’t just talking about the transformation, and she had a feeling he knew that. He couldn’t control the giddy euphoria that seized him and filled him with joy over the prospect of having crushed living creatures to death. Best, though, to focus on the change rather than his current emotional state. “Do you remember . . . how it comes?”

Finally a true look of fear appeared in his eyes. The full weight of what had occurred became clear to him, an eclipsing shadow of the moon moving away from the sun. He looked again at his hand, his fist, and this time there was no joy in contemplating the power of life and death that hand had held.

She took it gently in her own hands.

Slowly Bruce shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, with no trace of the mania that had gripped him so thoroughly. “It’s just the anger, the rage. I don’t know. I’m just . . . tired . . . afraid and so tired.”

She held him again in the rain. He closed his eyes and sagged against her. She helped him up and brought him into the cabin, and as she did so, the noises slowly returned to the forest.

As Bruce slept, Betty sat there and watched him. She thought of the creature. She thought of the power he had displayed, the way he’d reveled in it. And she thought that rage, in its most fundamental form, was uncontrollable. There was no way for sure to know what direction his anger would take, or against whom he might next turn.

She was shaken to the core by the way he’d clamped a hand over her mouth, and she thought of the way the hulking behemoth had crushed the skull of that glowing green mastiff. She stared at Bruce’s hands and could only see them large and green, and subjecting her to the same fate as the dogs. She looked at his bare chest, slowly rising and falling, and saw instead the massive chest of the awesome jade monster as she’d first spotted him in the woods.

The single most devastating, destructive, and unpredictable force to be created in the last half century was sleeping on her couch.

It was no wonder, really, that she panicked. No wonder that she picked up her cell phone, scrolled through the saved numbers, found the one for the Joint Tactical Force West. But now she found there was no signal on her cell. Hardly a shock. She tiptoed into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed as quietly as she could.

It took them no time at all to track down her father, and when she whispered, “Dad?” into the phone she did so with the tentativeness of someone entering a confessional and trying to determine if a priest was on the other side.

“Betty!” came her father’s voice, and she couldn’t recall the last time she had been so glad to hear it. Or glad at all, really. “Are you all right?”

His booming tone was a sharp contrast to Betty’s hushed whisper. “I’m scared, and I . . . we need