Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

because I called my father and told you where to come and what to do, which means we play this my way. Got it?”

“Yes, doctor,” he said again.

Inwardly, Betty felt like a complete sham. These weren’t her own words flying out of her mouth, her own personality in force. She was deliberately channeling her father. On the other hand, as the soldiers proceeded to treat her with complete deference and she watched them handle Bruce’s insensate body as if he were a carton of eggs, she couldn’t help but feel like the most glorious sham in the world.

And for just a moment, she had the faintest idea of what it had been like for Bruce to be almost giddy with empowerment. She liked it.

unbalance of power

The quiet of the sky over Desert Base was shattered by the powerful engines of the Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk helicopter, escorted by a pair of smaller Apache choppers that flew high above. On the ground at the base, there was a mad scramble that might have looked to the untrained eye like total confusion, but was in fact highly organized. A transport truck drove up just as the Black Hawk descended to several hundred feet, and the ’copter’s loading bay opened up to disgorge its cargo on a crane—the cargo consisting of a large container that looked like an oversize tube, or, perhaps, a high-tech coffin.

The transport truck joined other vehicles to form a convoy, then headed away from the main section of the base, the place with the obvious hangars and barracks and all sorts of places that congressmen or assorted inspectors might poke through at any given moment in order to impress constituents. But this particular transport’s destination was someplace a bit more . . . secluded.

Back in the early days of Desert Base, there had been some additional property adjacent to it that was privately owned and featured a drive-in movie theater. The theater had served as a popular gathering place for army personnel, who’d park with their honeys and kick back to watch the latest grade B horror flick. Curiously, when the base blew up years earlier, the theater was one of the few things left standing. It wasn’t, however, in good condition.

Over a period of time, the deteriorating remains of the theater became a front for all the research that was considered a bit too delicate for normal venues.

The convoy rolled up to the dilapidated screen and then stopped. Nothing happened at first, and then slowly, with an audible grinding of gears, the ground itself began to move. The first panicked thought of an observer would have been that it was an earthquake, and that a crevice was opening up directly in front of one. But seconds later, a huge door lifted clear, revealing a deep, sloping tunnel, and there was the glint of a track in the early morning sun.

In no time at all the soldiers off-loaded the metal tube from the truck and onto the rails. Interlocks engaged, and the tube slowly but steadily descended into the hidden recesses of the underground facility. A small mountain range sat in the near distance, and it would have been impossible for anyone to guess that entire sections of the range had been hollowed out to serve as hidden means of access for aircraft. And, once the entry ramp sank back down into the desert soil, no one would have known that there was anything underground at all.

A short time later the tube was unloaded in the vast underground arrival hall, filled with military personnel, scientists, and technicians moving in and out of various tunnels that radiated outward from the main hub. A command and control center was perched high above the hall, with windows overlooking the hive of industry that began surrounding the tube, like worker and drone bees bustling around the arrival of the queen.

And from high above, looking out one of the windows, Betty Ross watched as the tube slid along its track toward a spherical containment cell into which the unconscious Bruce would be loaded. She bit her lip, fighting to keep down the grief and uncertainty that raged through her with as much emotional force as the Hulk had displayed in disposing of the dog attackers.

The Hulk.

That was the name she’d heard bandied about, the name people had started using. She was unable to figure out who had first called him that, but the name seemed to have stuck, and now she was using it too.

Well, that made a certain amount of sense. That was the scientific tendency, wasn’t it, to find names for things, all the time? No new discovery was really legitimate until it had a name slapped on it. So why not the Hulk? The creature certainly bore more of a resemblance to a hulking beast than he did to Bruce Banner . . .

. . . and yet . . .

. . . and yet when she had looked into his eyes, she had found more emotional purity and honesty there than she had ever seen in any other man. Thinking men kept their thoughts hidden behind layer upon layer of civilization and subtext and second thoughts. But the Hulk, he looked at the world with pure emotion, and no sense of anything beyond his immediate wants and desires. In many ways, it was a more honest way to exist. She almost envied him having so immaculate a worldview.

She heard a throat being cleared behind her, and knew who it was before she even turned.

General Ross was standing there, looking as if he hadn’t slept for a very long time. Then again, Betty didn’t think she looked much better. They saw the fatigue in each other, then both managed a brief but pained smile to acknowledge it.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now,” said her father, “we talk. Not about the things we should have all this time,” he admitted. “But we talk. Not here, though.”

“Lead the way,” she