Hulk-demic

Chapter 5 "no man, no gun, no army"

Bruce sat alone in the lab. There was no night or day anymore. Weeks of living in this bunker guaranteed that. But he was alone, and tired, and the lights were off. The others had gone off for their own rests. Betty too had retired to her small room in the General's suite. 295 steps away, he thought.  Bruce was alone and he felt alone. Yet, he was not alone.

The lurking leviathan remained in its solitary and freezing cell. Bruce sat on a chair, sagging and half conscious, facing the monitor-- and that gray face was as expressiveless as it was motionless. Thinking of the prisoner as an ill human rather than a rampaging monster pried on Bruce's mind. A human mind was trapped inside that creature—a human was prisoner to the hulk, who was Banner's prisoner, a kind of Russian nesting doll. Bruce wondered what kind of thoughts lurked in there.

Betty had told him that in medical school she had learned that most specialists believed that coma patients might still be aware of their surroundings, hearing, thinking, alive. Like a character from a Poe story, trapped inside one's own body. How about this hulk? Did its human mind still function on some level, aware of the rampaging terror it had become but unable to stall its violence in any meaningful way.

Perhaps the human mind inside that beast already impeded the violence? Maybe this was the watered-down version of what it was truly capable of. Maybe there was an internal struggle between beast and man, violence and civilization. Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. And maybe that was the path to the cure he sought! If he could just find a way to reach that higher mind, that shred of humanity.

Bruce just stared and stared, hypnotized by the black and white feed and the siren's cry of the hulk's lost mind.

Over the days the creature did occasionally move around. Its prison was not large, a single step in any direction and it reached a wall. The ceiling was only a foot or two over its head. Reaching up it could touch it with ease. The hulk would sometimes run its massive hand along the walls and ceilings, feeling the surfaces, almost gentle. But since its capture there had been no more violent outbursts, which everyone assumed was due to the freezing cold temperature in there.

Ross wanted Bruce to help him build a new bomb. The team had developed a pretty clear picture of how the gamma radiation had affected the monster's cells. It was itself full of the gamma rays. Ross contemplated some kind of super-Gamma Radiation Bomb, one that would totally destroy the beasts. Bruce's argued for a counter-bomb of sorts, something that would balance the first bomb's effects. Would it reverse the effect? Was it a cure or a death sentence? Might it even somehow make matters worse? That was Bruce's biggest fear now. Like a doctor, he preached "do no harm." General Ross did not agree. Harming the enemy is what armies were for, after all.

Rick was stuck kin the middle.  He helped Ross work out some of the physics for his super bomb, but ultimately Rick was on his mentor's side. He saw how damaged Bruce had become since this "pandemic" began and Bruce 100% blamed himself. Bruce had judged himself and Rick felt that Bruce was now punishing himself.

"Rick," Ross implored, "you have to help me convince Bruce. Only he really knows all the specs of the first Gamma Radiation Bomb, we can't build this one without him."

"Gosh I just don't know..."

Ross's plan had another hitch: to detonate the first GRB Bruce had used a very small atomic device to trigger the reaction. One more of the devices did exist, but it was stored in a secure location on the main base, near Kirbyville. If they couldn't get their hands on that one then none of this would work anyway.

Bruce's breath became increasingly shallow. His chest tightened. He might well be having a heart attack, he wasn't self-aware enough to know what he was feeling at that moment. Staring at his patient/nemesis, he muttered, "We're just a bunch of puny humans to you, aren't we." Bruce's glasses slipped from his face, he didn't notice. In these lonely sessions where Bruce just watched the creature, he noticed that it didn't blink, the hulk never blinked! Was this part of its over-all metabolism being slowed by the cold? Or, was this due to its instantaneous regeneration, which might be protecting its eyeballs without blinking? Bruce also began to worry that keeping the thing half-frozen and docile might in fact be impairing their research. Maybe they would never find the answer without examining it in its own natural state...

General Ross was in a small command center off of the bunker. He had maps of the region out and of the base. He had developed the plan to recover the fissionable material that would be needed. Tomorrow he would send out his last jeep and a 5-man squad on what might be the biggest suicide mission since D-Day itself (a battle he himself had been in). Betty came in to check on her father. "That damn Bruce!" Ross roared immediately, "Can't you convince him to build this bomb?"

"Dad, it's not that he won't, I don't think he can, not while he blames himself..."

"He just sits in his lab, staring at that monstrosity!"

"It's not a monster to him. It's a human, dad, like you or me."

He replied like any veteran of World War Two would, "The Nazis were humans too, but they were beasts, and we didn't try to cure them, blast it! We tried to defeat them!" Betty had never understood her father more then at that very moment, and never felt more distant. "This is war!"

"Let me go talk to him," she kissed her father on the check, and quietly slipped out.

Bruce leaned in slowly, he didn't even realize how close he was to the monitor. That terrifying form, those deadly eyes. Victor Frankenstein began his story as a man of medicine trying to heal, but by the end of the novel he had wrought on the world a homicidal maniac who killed everyone he loved. And so had Bruce. Bruce thought of his parents, back in Dayton.

He and General Ross had worked out some models trying to figure out how far the gamma radiation might have spread, and thus estimate how far-reaching this problem might be. Dayton was over a thousand miles from here, and was unlikely to have felt the initial terror of the mass transformations of innocents into rage-filled smashing machines. But even if they hadn't been exposed initially, his educated guess was given the weeks since the initial blast there was a 30% chance that Dayton was now under siege by numerous, maybe hundreds of hulks.

Ross kept pushing this scenario on him, hoping that the idea that his parents might be in danger would spur Bruce to some action. It had the opposite effect. Bruce's over-riding fear was, What if my parents had been turned into these green killing machines? He would look for a cure, never a weapon.

What are you thinking, hulk? Bruce tried to enter its mind. He felt as if a part of his mind was touching its brain. First he felt the rage. Yes, all that anger coupled with all that inhuman strength. It would be the greatest feeling on earth. I am invincible! I will smash all those who imprison me! I will be a revenge machine. I will murder because I can murder and no man, no gun, no army, can stop me. Smash, smash, puny humans!

The hulk's face turned towards where the camera in its cell was hidden in the concrete slabs. It looked at the camera. It looked directly at the camera, at Bruce. Its massive jaw moved slightly, shifting, it spoke. The hulk said, "Banner." Bruce literally fell of his chair. He actually hit his head on the desk. He felt dizzy, he felt blood. He tasted blood! He struggled to get to his feet, suddenly hands were there helping him. He realized Betty was there, saying his name, over and over again.

"Bruce, can you hear me, are you alright?"

Bruce was a not a particularly large nor heavy man. He slumped, exhausted, into Betty's arms. "No, I'm not alright, not at all." Dizzy, he passed out.