Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

at the curb. She turned and stood in the doorway, staring at it in grim annoyance. They were probably busy setting up a listening center of some kind, to make sure Betty didn’t start calling newspaper or TV reporters to try to tell them what was going on. Not that anyone would believe her, of course. An underground army research base? Studying her boyfriend who was capable of turning into a half-ton of rampaging fury, if someone pushed him far enough? Oh yeah. That would fly.

And then, as she entered her house, she froze. Something felt wrong, although she wasn’t sure what. She flicked on a light and gasped.

David Banner was seated in a chair square in the middle of the living room. He looked rather comfortable, as if he’d sent Betty out to pick up some cigarettes and was wondering what had taken her so long.

“My dear Miss Ross,” he said, “welcome back.”

Betty started to back toward the door. She didn’t even bother to ask how he had gotten in. A man who was capable of turning three canines into slavering engines of destruction shouldn’t have had any difficulty with a door lock.

“Look,” she warned him, “there are two MPs parked right outside. I scream, and—”

He waved off whatever concerns she had, or that he thought she might have. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not angry with you, not anymore.”

These were hardly the most comforting words she could have heard from someone who was, essentially, a lunatic. She didn’t continue her retreat, though, freezing in place just within the door frame. She could still bolt if need be. Both of his hands were plainly visible, so it wasn’t as if he could produce a gun and shoot her down.

David Banner continued. “Please, just hear me out,” he said soothingly. “I can guess why you’re here. Your father betrayed you, didn’t he? You should have expected it. They did the same to me.”

She wasn’t listening to the things he was saying, although she hated to admit that they did interest her slightly. Instead, she demanded, “What do you want?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t really know anymore,” he said with a shrug. He leaned forward in the chair and Betty reflexively flinched back. But his hands remained unthreateningly in front of him. The odd thing was that he didn’t even seem to be addressing his remarks to her, even though they concerned her. He seemed to be talking more to himself. “I know what you want. The same thing you always have: You want to understand him, don’t you? But you’ll never understand him,” he told her sadly. “There is no scientific language yet that could ever account for him.”

She licked her lips, which had become remarkably dry. He wasn’t sounding like a crazy man at this point. Instead, he was surprisingly lucid. Perhaps she might even be able to communicate with him in a common language, about a common concern. That wasn’t too much to hope for, was it? Even madmen had their saner moments. If this was one of his . . .

“But there is a cause, isn’t there?” asked Betty. She cleared her throat, speaking with the delicacy of a police officer trying to talk a jumper in off a ledge. “At the very least a chain of events I can reconstruct. I have some idea of your research, of the experiments you performed on yourself. I think that Bruce—”

He interrupted her brusquely, but it seemed motivated by anger aimed more at himself than her. His voice laced with sorrow, he said, “Of course Bruce is the outcome, the mistake . . . my mistake. And you think I haven’t lived a day since without regretting it?” He sagged back in the chair, as if making the admission had drained him of whatever energy he had.

“No, I don’t think that,” said Betty. “But now you can do something about it.”

“But what could I do?” said the father, not paying attention to Betty. “She so wanted a baby. And I was so in love with her . . .”

the devil you know

His memories floated in an abyss, scattered about, and he saw them dancing past him, taunting him, ready to be reclaimed. . . .

Connections—wires to his brain, his brain to his past, his father, his mother—the connection was there, long forgotten, long unemployed, but it was there, sucking him in. His past was one large vacuum, and nature abhorred a vacuum, which meant nature abhorred him, and it had turned its sights upon him now and drawn him down, down through a vast neural network of reticulated nets which formed floating, liquid screens of unconscious images, memories, an uncharted chorus of voices and sounds inside him, and he almost felt as if he could hear his father’s voice, that’s how connected they had become . . .

“I could feel it, from the moment she conceived,” said David Banner, as Betty listened with rapt attention. “It wasn’t a son I had given her but a monster. I thought”— his voice rose with desperate urgency—“maybe if I could make this one mistake go away, I’d give everything up, even my work, take it back, just take it back to when it was just she and me.”

And his mother was smiling at him, except it wasn’t Monica Krenzler, it was his mother, his real mother, and she was glorious and beautiful and she bore a passing resemblance to Betty, which made perfect sense somehow, perfect sense, and the floating image of his mother collided and mixed with the image of two dolls, overlapped with the vision of his mother, and she was smiling and reassuring, and a door opened, flooding her image with light. . . .

“I remember that day so well,” said David Banner. “Every sensation, as I walked into the house. Felt the handle of the knife. It must have been destined, just like Abraham and Isaac,