EPISODE

By Derrick Ferguson

Bruce Banner’s first thought upon waking up was the same thought he had many a day in the past years: Where AM I? But this was a different waking from his previous ones. Ever since he had made a definite effort to work together with that part of his psyche that was known as The Incredible Hulk he had found he had more access to the brute’s memories. So whereas he previously would wake up in remote regions of The Earth with no clue at all as to how he got there he now woke up with at least more than a hazy memory of the previous events so that he could piece together what had happened. Or if he simply sat down, relaxed and allowed The Hulk’s memory to slowly filter down into his own consciousness, he came up with his answers. But this was different.

He knew exactly what he had been doing. He had been driving a jeep through the Pacific Northwest region. A jeep provided to him by Woodgod. Then there had been the crimson mist that engulfed him. Then he had started to change to The Hulk. And then…nothing. Until now.

He took stock of his surroundings. He was still in a forest but this was a vastly different forest than the one he had been driving through. That forest had been home to titanic trees that had stood for thousands of years, lush foliage and the sounds of life. This forest…this one was ancient, almost prehistoric in aspect. The trees were not green but dark grey with knotted, twisted roots that reminded Bruce of the contorted limbs of extreme arthritis sufferers. The wood of the trees themselves seemed as if it were somehow infected. Thick, unhealthy looking sap oozed from splits in the wood. The foliage reminded him of wild orchids with their startlingly lush and bright blood red and deep purple leaves. Even though he could see the blazing yellow sun high above the day still seemed somehow dark.

Bruce got to his feet slowly, checking himself for any wounds. He was dressed in a green T-shirt two sizes too big, jeans and waterproof hiking boots. These weren’t the clothes he had been wearing when the crimson cloud had engulfed him. The air was warm and smelled vaguely of sweet rot. There was something definitely not real about all of this but according to Bruce’s senses, this was reality. He was fairly certain there was no forest like this anywhere on Earth…except maybe The Savage Land. Could he have been transported there somehow? But by who? And for what reason? If there was any one good thing about being Bruce Banner and The Hulk it was that most of the planet’s superhuman community tended to stay as far away from him as possible, believing that the best way to not have to deal with The Hulk was not to provoke Bruce Banner in any way or God Forbid, make Bruce Banner mad.

He could hear soft music playing somewhere to his left. Music? In a forest that looked like something out of Jurassic Park? Nice, slow, easy listening music at that. Bruce carefully headed into the direction of the music, raising his legs high to step over the gnarled and bizarrely tangled roots. Bruce had been in more than his share of bizarre situations but few matched the sight that came into his view as he came to a huge clearing that contained a sight that was without a doubt the last thing in the world he expected to see.

It was a basketball court. The wood gleamed with a high polish that almost seemed to glow. In the exact middle of the court a man sat in a high-backed leather chair, calmly reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. A genuine vintage 1930’s windup phonograph stood on a table next to the chair. It was from this that the music was emanating. There were wooden bleachers on either side of the basketball court and a number of men and women in white suits occupied them. They all were bent over their laptop computers and did not look up from their furious typing as Bruce came closer and stepped onto the court. The man in the high-backed leather chair did not look up as Bruce approached.

The man was reading a Washington Post that Bruce was amazed to see was dated February 8, 1998. Despite the date it looked as crisp and as fresh if it had been printed that same day. Bruce noticed that when the man flicked the ash from his cigarette, the ash simply disappeared before it hit the highly polished wood of the basketball court. Bruce finally recognized the record that was playing on the windup phonograph: Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo. Bruce looked at the men and women sitting in the bleachers. They were all still looking down at their laptops and the sounds of their tapping on the keys was like thousands of tiny tap-dancers all in synch. The music played and the pages of the newspaper rustled as the man continued to read.

Bruce examined him. He was dressed in a simple black business suit and highly polished black shoes. His red tie and white shirt were so clean looking it almost hurt Bruce’s eyes to look at them. His slim hands looked almost feminine, fragile. His thick black hair was slicked back and shone almost as brightly as the basketball court. Bruce cleared his throat: “Excuse me, but could you-” The man looked up and Bruce stepped back in shocked surprise.

The man’s eyes were completely red. No pupils, no irises, no sclera. Just bright crimson orbs.

The man folded his newspaper briskly. “It’s not time for us to talk yet. Soon. But first you and yours must have your own dialog.”

“Where am I?” Bruce demanded. “Why have you brought me here? What do you want from me?”

“I didn’t bring you here, Bruce. This is something that isn’t under my control-” the man suddenly smiled with very white teeth as if he had made a joke but Bruce couldn’t find a damn thing funny about this situation. “-but I hope to correct the error soon enough. But you must dialog with you and yours.” The man pointed. “That way. Keep going and he’ll find you, trust me.”

Bruce looked in the direction the man was pointing in. All Bruce could see was more tangled foliage that he wasn’t too keen on stumbling around in. But the red-eyed man had returned to his newspaper and his cigarette and the record was playing again from the beginning. He had been dismissed. Something told Bruce that he would get no more answers from this gentleman. Or whatever he was.

As Bruce walked in the direction indicated he wondered if he had been abducted by aliens. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But he really hadn’t had much interaction with any alien race in recent years so for what purpose could they have taken him? And why such a bizarre scenario? It didn’t make sense no matter from which direction Bruce examined it. He pushed through the foliage, slightly disgusted by the slick feel of the wide leaves. He had quite enough of forests and trees the past couple of days to last him for the next decade and all he wanted was for this to be over so that-

The growl off to his left was one that immediately locked his legs and made his bowels quiver.

Bruce turned his head very slowly in the direction that the growl had come from. He couldn’t even imagine what it was that had made that kind of growl. It was like nothing he could ever remember having heard before in his life. He tried to make his legs obey him, to turn his body around and take him back to the basketball court but is was as if his legs had grown roots of their own into the gray earth because they budged not a millimeter.

The second growl was lower in volume and had the unmistakable edge of bloodlust. And now Bruce’s legs were moving. Unfortunately they were moving not one in front of the other as he wished but from side to side. How about that? the rational and scientific part of his mind that remained coolly analytical no matter what said. My knees actually ARE knocking together!

The thing that was growling burst from its cover into full view and Bruce’s blood turned ice cold as he stared at the death charging right at him.

It was a bear but not like any bear Bruce had ever seen in person, on television or in photos. This bear had to easily be 3000 pounds, covered in silver-black spiky fur. The long three inch claws on each paw tore up great clods of earth as the creature galumphed towards him. The bear roared again, great ropy drools of greenish saliva spewing from a maw that looked like a red, raw bottomless pit. And the eyes…huge compound eyes like that of a dragonfly that seemed to glow brighter and brighter the closer the bear got.

Bruce covered up his face with his arms and said a quick last prayer.

But then something grabbed him up and yanked him into the air so fast that he felt as if the wind pressure would flatten the top of his head. Bruce uncovered his arms and looked down. He should have guessed.

The Incredible Hulk held Bruce Banner over his head as the bear skidded to a halt. The bear roared again, louder and more defiant. The Hulk roared right back, ruffling the spiky fur of the bear. The Hulk placed Bruce on a low branch of a nearby tree. He turned his squarish head and gave Bruce a look of complete and utter disgust. “Don’t youever get tired a’ being a pussy?” the man-monster growled. He turned back to the bear and Bruce could see that The Hulk had apparently been here longer and evidently had been busy. He wore a loincloth, boots and leggings made from bear skins. Other bear skins were wrapped around his incredibly thick forearms. The Hulk had had to kill an awful lot of bears to collect that many skins.

The bear stood up on its hind legs and roared a challenge again. The Hulk didn’t bother roaring back this time but attacked with bloodthirsty glee that was matched by the bear that lumbered forward. The two titanic forms collided with an impact that made the forest shake. Bruce wrapped his arms and legs around the branch as best he could and held on.

The bear’s claws were tearing The Hulk’s back to shreds. Not that The Hulk was standing there taking the punishment. His strong teeth sank deep into the bear’s neck and savagely chewed away, bright red blood geysering into the air in a thick mist. The Hulk shoved the bear over and it tumbled onto its back. Grinning through the coating of blood on his face, The Hulk dropped a huge fist down on the bear’s chest. The snapping of bones and the scream of the bear filled the forest with awful volume. The bear struggled to get back on its feet but The Hulk wasn’t giving the animal time to recover. The Hulk knew better than most than any animal is at its most dangerous when wounded. He reached out with those great green hands and seized the bear’s upper and lower jaws and twisted sharply. The bear’s head literally was torn in opposite directions and with a final apocalyptic heave, the bear died.

The Hulk let go of the bear and stepped back, barely winded. The deep gashes in his broad back were healing up with their usual rapidity. The Hulk turned back to the tree he had placed Bruce in. The Hulk took only one step before another bear, this one fully as big as the one he had just killed charged out of the jungle with a frightening silence. Apparently this bear was a little smarter than his dead brother. He didn’t give The Hulk any warning and pounced on the back of the man-monster, digging with claws and those horribly long, curving fangs that were like miniature sabers that slashed through the dense flesh of The Hulk as though it was pistachio ice cream. The Hulk went over on his stomach with a surprised bellow; face first right into the dirt, the entire crushing weight of the bear on his back. The bear was grunting as if it were satisfying itself sexually by devouring The Hulk’s flesh. It was tearing great gobbets of emerald meat from The Hulk’s back and swallowing as fast at it could.

A rock sped across the clearing and hit the bear square in its right’s compound eye that burst open like a water balloon dropped from a ten story building. The bear screamed in pained rage and lurched up and off its afternoon snack. It swiveled its head to see where the rock had come from, a torrent of blood pouring down the right side of its body. Its remaining eyes fixed on a shaking Bruce Banner who had climbed down from the tree and had another rock in his hand. The throw had been one of the sheerest luck imaginable since Bruce was trembling so bad that by all rights he shouldn’t have been able to hit the bear even if had been standing one foot away from him, much less fifteen.

The bear decided that The Hulk could wait and galloped at Bruce, who dropped his rock and tried to scramble back to the relative safety of his branch, which now looked as if it were an impossible distance away. The bear roared and Bruce could swear that he felt the hot bloody breath of the thing on his back.

The bear’s charge was suddenly halted as The Hulk grabbed it by one of its hind legs. The Hulk’s eyes were blazing with overwhelming rage as he lifted the bear completely over his head and brought it slamming down on the ground. The bear split in a dozen places, organs bursting through the rents in the flesh. Bones were pulverized. In less than twenty seconds 3000 pounds of pure organic killing fury had been turned into a bag of pulped meat.

The Hulk let go of the leg, walked over to the bear’s head and hitched up his loincloth. A thick stream of steaming lime green urine splattered on the bear’s remaining eye.

The Hulk turned his head to regard Bruce. “Guess you ain’t so useless after all, are ya? I suppose that you ‘spect me to kiss yer ass now and thank you.”

Bruce wiped cold sweat from his face and got his trembling limbs under control as his replied; “I don’t expect anything from you resembling gratitude, Hulk. I helped you because I need you to survive. You know that. I’ve never pretended anything different. If there was a way I could figure out what’s happened to us and undo by myself I’d have let that bear eat you alive and not lost a night’s sleep over it.”

The Hulk finished his business, shook himself off and replaced his loincloth. “Fair enough, Banner. Speaking a’which, do you know where we are an’ what’s happened ta us?”

“No, but you know that we’ve been separated into two before.”

“Been a while, though. You seen that bastard wit th’ red eyes?”

“Yes. Did you talk to him?”

Bruce Banner was astonished to see an expression on The Hulk’s face that he had never thought to see: fear.

“I think we need to find a quite place and talk, Hulk.”

The emerald giant turned and stomped away; “C’mon, then. We can do all th’ jawjackin’ ya want back at my camp.”

The Hulk wasn’t exactly an expert at camping outdoors. Bruce looked around the spacious clearing. A rough pit had been dug and a roaring fire, far bigger than it needed to be was crackling cheerfully. The Hulk threw a log wider than Bruce’s torso into the pit. Sparks spiraled upwards. Off to one side were three bear corpses, devoid of skin. The Hulk stomped over to the carcasses and with his bare hands ripped a slab of meat from one of them. He stomped back to the fire and spitted the meat on a long sharp pole and hunkered down, holding the slab of meat over the fire.

Bruce sat down about ten feet from The Hulk, off to his right side where he could keep a good eye on him. “Somehow I thought you would have no problem eating raw meat.”

“I don’t. This is fer you. How you want it? Well done?”

Bruce almost broke out into a laugh but something stopped him. He was afraid that if he started laughing he might not be able to stop. This situation was rapidly getting more frightening and more surreal by the minute. He had to feel his way carefully here, gather all the information he could and assess what had happened to them and how he could fix it. If he could. “Hulk, what happened to us? What happened to you?”

The Hulk didn’t speak for several minutes. He sat there like a great green idol, perhaps the horrible totem of a savage, untamed tribe that overran nations with fire and blood. The crackling fire threw strange shadows over the face of the man-monster. Under the ledges of bony gristle that were his eyebrows his eyes were unseen. But Bruce could still feel the hate that radiated from them.

“I dunno. We had just finished wit that Woodguy. You were drivin’. That’s all I remember. Then I was here. I was attacked by them bears. You see how they ended up. I stayed and waited fer you.”

“You knew I was coming?”

The Hulk grunted an assent. He removed the meat from the fire and tore off a piece, flung it to where Bruce sat. “Sorry I ain’t got no salt or pepper,” he snarled with grim humor. Bruce looked at the ragged piece of steaming meat. He’d let it cool off a bit. The Hulk was eating the rest of the meat, ripping into it with as much gusto as he had ripped into those bears a few minutes ago.

“Hulk, how long have you been here?”

“I dunno.” Blood and juice from the half-cooked meat dripped from The Hulk’s chin. “Long enuff to have killed a dozen bears. I walked around this forest for th’ longest, lookin’ for a cave. I don’t like bein’ out in th’ open. Not in this forest, anyways.” The Hulk’s chewing slowed as he looked around almost furtively.

“Why didn’t you just leap out of this forest?”

The Hulk snarled a response and chewed more meat. Bruce reached for his own meat which had cooled enough for him to rip off a long piece with his bare hands. It was tough meat but it was food. Not that Bruce thought eating regular was going to be a problem here. Wherever here was. Bruce put forth his question again: “Hulk? Why didn’t you just leap out of this forest?”

“Because I can’t.” The Hulk’s voice was low, moody rumble. He sounded like a sulky teenager being questioned by his father as to why he hadn’t mowed the lawn.

“You can’t? Why?”

“Because I just CAN’T! Now shut UP!” The Hulk roared. And now Bruce could see his eyes; two fiery orbs of sheer hateful power that made Bruce visibly shudder. My God…THIS is what other people see…no wonder everybody hates me…I mean HIM…

“Hulk, this could be important! The reason why you can’t jump out of here must mean that there’s a force field or an energy dampening field or-”

“Fer somebody supposed to be so smart you can be really fuckin’ stoopid sometimes. Didn’t you see me tear them bears apart? I ain’t lost my strength, ya dumb sack a’shit. And that means I still got the power to jump outta here.”

Bruce had to admit that The Hulk had caught him out there on that one. It was obvious that The Hulk had lost none of his strength judging from his fight with the bears and his healing factor was also unimpaired. So then it should have been simplicity itself for The Hulk to have leapt out this forest. Then something hit Bruce so hard that he felt like standing up and asking The Hulk to kick him as hard as he could. Which The Hulk would have no doubt done with the greatest of enthusiasm.

“Hulk, did you talk to the man with red eyes? The man sitting on the basketball court?”

The Hulk was up on his feet and towering over Bruce in seemingly a heartbeat. How does he move so goddamn FAST?

“You know who he is, dontcha? Don’t lie to me, Banner.” The Hulk’s nostrils flared rhythmically. “I can smell a lie on ya. I’ll pop ya like a pimple if ya lie to me.”

“I just spoke to him myself! He said that you and I had to talk but I didn’t understand what he meant until just now!” Bruce had scuttled backwards a few feet but the face of The Hulk was still filling his whole field of vision. The hot breath of the man-monster smelled of blood and his eyes were madness itself. The Hulk’s eyes bored Bruce’s for a full minute before the behemoth grunted with satisfaction and sat back on his haunches, his long arms resting on his knees.

“He was here when I got here. I heard music playin’ and folla’ed it until I saw him. I yelled and charged ‘im. I was gonna mash him like a bug. But then he looked at me and just told me to be quiet and go wait in the forest. Said I had to wait until it was time for me to leave.”

“Did he say anything else, Hulk? Think! It’s very important that you remember if he said anything else!”

“No need for that, Dr. Banner.” The man with the red eyes was walking into their camp; his newspaper neatly folded and tucked under one arm. He looked as calm and relaxed as if he were strolling down New York City’s Fifth Avenue instead of through a primeval jungle. He might have been greeting a pair of old friends instead of a scared scientist and the most dangerous man-monster on the planet. “Now that you and yours have had time together to digest this situation and see that you’re not in control, it’s time that we all talked together.”

“Who are you and how have you split us apart? What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything from either you or The Hulk, Banner. At least not yet. But there’s been some serious tampering with your DNA recently and that activated a failsafe build into your subconscious. I am that failsafe.”

“I don’t unnerstand a damn thing yer sayin’. But if you don’t stop fuckin’ with us I’m gonna pull you apart like a chicken wing and eat your legs right in front’a yer dyin’ eyes.”

Amazing, the man with the red eyes chuckled as if The Hulk had told one hell of a funny joke. “Cute, isn’t it?” He tossed his newspaper into the fire. “I wish I had more time with it. It’s at its most amusing when it’s trying to be tough.”

“That sounds an awful lot like you’re going to send us back to where we belong.”

“No. You’re going to be sent to where you were going when we reached out with our advanced matter transporters and got you.”

“But how did you know where I was?” Bruce was on his feet now and The Hulk was at his back. He could feel The Hulk’s urge to rush the man with red eyes and tear him into bloody bits. But Bruce was feeling something else from the brute. Something that was preventing The Hulk from doing what he wished. And that was fear. And just the fact that he was experiencing fear was making The Hulk even angrier and even more dangerous than usual. “Who ARE you?”

The man with the red eyes shrugged and reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a platinum cigarette case, opened it and withdrew a cigarette. He closed the case and tapped the cigarette on the lid a few times to tamp down the tobacco. He placed the cigarette in his mouth and with a sudden crimson poof! the cigarette lit itself.

“Dr. Banner. Hulk. You both must understand something: there’s far more going on than you could ever hope to understand. The conspiracy that you are trying to expose and destroy is the merest tip of the largest iceberg imaginable. There are conspiracies within conspiracies. They operate on levels of vastness that you could scarcely hope to comprehend. But many of them hinge upon the two of you. It’s not permissible that you be tampered with. That’s why the failsafe was activated.”

“You must mean Woodgod. He was only trying to help. I had fought Jim Hammond, The Human Torch-”

“You didn’t fight nobody, Banner! I was th’ one that bastard Hammond hurt! An’ I’M the one that’s gonna make ‘im pay!”

Both Bruce and the man with the red eyes ignored the bellowing of The Hulk. The green goliath was straining as if he were on some sort of invisible leash that was holding him back from attacking the quietly smoking man whose crimson eyes faintly glowed.

“If you had only exercised patience, Dr. Banner your skin would have returned to its normal pigmentation eventually. There was no need for you to have involved others.”

“And how would you know that? Maybe I should step aside and let Hulk take you apart. You’re doing a lot of talking but you’re saying absolutely nothing. You’re wasting my time. I don’t like my time being wasted.”

The man with the red eyes chuckled. “Much as you claim to hate your alter ego you find it very easy to use him to threaten, don’t you, Banner? And you certainly have no issue with him demolishing everything in your way if it will serve your ends. But that’s okay. It’s not as if we didn’t want it that way. In fact, you’ve done better than our initial projections ever suggested.”

The Hulk roared impotently. He still did not budge from his spot. The man with the red eyes was as nonchalant as if he were waiting for a bus. He continued to smoke. “It’s best if you think of this as just another unexplained episode in your lives, the both of you. I regret that we had to meet in such a fashion but it was necessary that you be removed for a time so that we could be sure your DNA hadn’t been compromised. Turns out that Woodgod is a superior geneticist. We may have to send a team after him. It would appear he’s a resource far too valuable to be allowed to continue to roam at will.”

Bruce’s voice was a ragged whisper; “Who ARE you?”

The Hulk suddenly seemed as if he broke the invisible leash that was holding him and with a hideous bellow leaped right over Bruce’s head at the man with the red eyes.

“Hulk! NO!”

The Hulk landed right on top of the man with the red eyes.

And that’s when the forest went away.

Bruce Banner awoke, naked and shivering in a damp, dark ally. It was nighttime. He slowly got to his feet, shaking and shivering all over. How had he got here? And whereWAS here? So much of his recent memories were fragmented, dim and distant as if half-remembered dreams were fighting each other, trying to gain supremacy. He remembered…bears? Why would he remember bears? He hadn’t seen a bear in years. Or had he just seen one? And why were The Hulk’s howls of anguish so loud in his head? What had happened to him?

Bruce wrapped his thin arms around him as best he could and stumbled from the alley, his bare feet splashing into puddles of water. It had rained recently. The pavement and street were still wet and the air felt heavy with moisture. There was nobody on the street and the only thing that seemed as if was open was a 24 hour Dunkin’ Donuts.

Bruce stumbled down the street towards it.

NEXT: Hardbottle and his Hulkbusters return as they make final preparations to hunt down The Hulk!