Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

“I always do.” And he preceded her as she walked away from her view of the containment cell, the large door just slamming shut, locking away the most dangerous ninety-pound weakling in history.

Ross paced his office as Betty sat in a chair, perfectly still. It wouldn’t do to have both of them tromping around, she thought, so she stayed put while her father moved like a caged cat.

“What do you really know about this?” he asked her.

Betty, seated with her legs delicately crossed at the knee, gave the question a moment’s consideration. “In principle,” she said, “I can explain the nuclear chemistry of the transformation, and I have some ideas about how his cells can store so much energy.”

“Principles and ideas. I hear you,” said Ross, obviously trying not to sound dismissive, but making it clear that he wasn’t concerned about comprehending the mechanics. “But we don’t have all that much time here. And if he poses some kind of imminent danger . . .”

Betty supposed it was a valid enough concern, and her father’s priorities weren’t exactly out of whack. If someone had a gun pointed at them, they didn’t have to know how the firing mechanism worked. They just wanted someone to make the gun go away.

“Then help me get right to work,” Betty said briskly. She sat forward, interlaced her fingers and tucked them under her chin. “First, you have to understand, the triggers are somatic, but they’re also emotional. He needs to connect those emotions with the memories to which they are linked. And there are memories here, aren’t there? About his father?”

Slowly Ross nodded. “Yes, Betty,” he said, clearly not happy to acknowledge it, “there are. But frankly it’s not the memory of his father I’m worried about right now. It’s the fact that he’s still out there, and he may know as much about this, if not more, than we do.”

“Then he can’t continue to be out there.”

Again her father nodded in agreement. “All right,” he said briskly. “Here’s what we’re going to have to do. We’ll have to assign troops—at least a hundred—to comb the Berkeley area, turn the place upside down, see if we can shake him loose. Get the latest pictures we can of him, show them to every neighbor who might have seen him. Investigate the lab where he was posing as a janitor, and see if they have an address for him, or some sort of lead—what’s that?”

She was holding up a piece of paper. “It’s his address. You can just go to his house.”

Ross took it from her hands and stared at it.

“Yes, that might work, too,” he said, and then actually smiled at her. She returned the smile and was surprised to see just how easy it was to smile at him.

The FBI agents burst into the house of David Banner, guns drawn. Their eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, even as they waved flashlights around and shouted warnings that anyone in the house had best present themselves hands up, ready to surrender.

The warning made no difference to the small creature that streaked across the room, emitting high-pitched squeals that briefly froze the blood of the nearest man, Agent Lee. His mind told him that whatever was letting out those screeches couldn’t possibly be human, but for a heartbeat he thought he was being charged by a small child. His survival instincts overwhelmed him, however, and he fired off a fast shot at the fast-moving form even as he thought, Oh, my God, oh, my God, I shot a child.

It thudded to the floor and shuddered and twitched, and the agents moved forward hesitantly. The agent who had fired let out a sigh of relief, even as bewilderment swept through him. It definitely wasn’t a child; rather, it seemed to be some sort of rat. But it was indeed as big as a two year old. He’d never seen anything like it—and was even more stunned to see it dissolve into a hissing puddle of goo. “Man, Willard’s been smoking some serious steroids,” he muttered.

“Who the hell is ‘Willard’?” another agent, Special Agent Thomas, demanded.

“He was a rat in an old movie.”

“Oh. I remember that,” said Thomas, and frowned. “I thought Willard was the guy.”

“No, Willard was the rat.”

Thomas shook his head. “No. Willard was the guy who trained the rat. The rat was named ‘Ben.’ ”

Lee stared at him. “Thomas . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Search the damned house before I shoot you next.”

David Banner was smiling.

He loved being one step ahead of his pursuers. He was certain that, at that moment, someone—soldiers, Feds, whomever—were bursting into his house, hoping to arrest him. But all they were going to find were some wrecked remains of his work—wrecked because he himself had chosen to wreck it. The only thing of any interest in the house would be an oversize rat or two: early subjects for experimentation he had used.

The wheels of the janitor’s cart squeaked steadily down the hallway. The place was fairly deserted; small wonder. The rumors about what had happened had morphed and twisted, and now the popular belief was that terrorists calling themselves the Hulks had detonated a bomb at the lab to protest nuclear experimentation. As a result, 90 percent of the staff had called in sick for the rest of the week, and management wasn’t prepared to press the issue. So David Banner had the place more or less to himself, which was, of course, exactly what he wanted.

He parked his cart in front of his son’s lab and pulled out assorted tools from a case within. Stepping through, he found that the door to the gammasphere was open. The place was still pretty much a shambles, just as it had been when he’d been face-to-face with the green hulking creature that had been his son.

A sizable chunk of the sphere had been evicted through the roof, courtesy of the Hulk’s unearthly strength. But enough redundant systems were still in place that