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  PROLOGUE

  He remembered the green light of the scanner playing across his face. He remembered the feeling of the gamma radiation, like a tingling heat on his skin. He remembered being scared when he felt his body start to change.

  After that, things were confused. There was a chair smashing through a window. Wrecked lab equipment scattered across the room. Betty slumped on the floor. Crushed lab furniture and computers jumbled on top of the two people beside her. General Ross, his uniform torn, scrambling.

  A hole broken through a wall. Cool air. Screaming and sirens.

  And anger, so much anger.

  Then nothing.

  The hospital room was blinding white. Betty was hooked up to tubes and life-support machines, unconscious. She looked so small.

  A strong hand landed on his shoulder. He looked up to see General Ross staring at him. You’ve got a lot of nerve coming in here after what you did, General Ross said.

  Bruce had never felt so tired in his life, so filled with misery. Worst of all was the rage that lingered in his blood. He could feel it, waiting for its chance to escape again. The monster wanted out, and he didn’t know how long he could hold it back.

  I just wanted to see her, he said. Make sure she’s all right.

  She’ll be all right as soon as you leave her alone, General Ross said. Permanently. Steer clear of her. You’re a project asset now. That’s all.

  He felt his pulse start to race, and knew the monster was waking up again. Terrified, he pushed past General Ross and ran—out of the hospital, out of the country, out of Betty’s life. He didn’t stop running.

  CHAPTER 1

  Bruce Banner sat straight up out of the nightmare, sweaty, his pulse racing. He reached over to the metronome he kept by his bed and put one hand on it, listening to its steady tick, tick, tick at sixty beats per minute. He tried to slow his pulse down to that rhythm. When he had gotten it under control, he stopped the device.

  He woke up like that nearly every day, keeping the metronome going all night to give his unconscious mind a rhythm. So far he’d been able to keep himself from getting out of control for five months. That’s how long it had been since the monster had gotten out.

  He’d been in Rocinha Favela, Brazil, for about that long, hiding out in the jumble of shacks and apartment buildings. It was where the poor people lived, and the people who wanted to disappear. Bruce was both.

  He made breakfast, then watched some TV with a Portuguese-English dictionary by his side. He was trying to learn the language and making decent progress. His dog, who he called Cachorro because it was the word for “dog,” sat at his side begging.

  Bruce looked up a word. He asked Cachorro if he was hungry in Portuguese. Cachorro’s ears pricked up. Bruce gave him his plate to lick.

  After washing up, he headed for his daily aikido practice. He’d never been a fighter, but aikido was good for teaching self-discipline, and since the… event… back at Culver University, Bruce knew he needed all the self-discipline he could get.

  In the aikido gym, his instructor ran him through exercises and drills, ending up with a series of falls that had Bruce breathing hard. He knew his pulse was up over one hundred beats per minute. That wasn’t dangerous territory, but it was a little too fast.

  His instructor waved at him to sit. Then he sat opposite Bruce, both of them cross-legged. “Let’s work on your breathing,” he said in Portuguese.

  Bruce nodded.

  “Here… emotions,” his instructor said, placing a palm flat on his chest. He touched his belly and huffed out short breaths. His belly pushed in with each one.

  Bruce started doing it, too. Together they practiced breathing from the belly, using the diaphragm. “When you control your emotions, you control your body,” his instructor said. “Now we’ll control your pulse.”

  He slapped Bruce in the face, hard. Bruce held himself back from responding, but he felt his pulse quicken. Slap! His face stung and he felt the rage building. Bruce glanced down at his watch. His pulse was 146.

  Too high.

  He breathed. He did exactly what his instructor had showed, letting the breath flow deep into his belly and come back out. Slowly his pulse came back down to a more normal rate.

  “You’re learning,” his instructor said.

  It was time to go to work at the bottling plant, making sure thousands of bottles of guarana soda got where they were supposed to go every day. The beans at the Brazilian guarana plant had three times as much caffeine as coffee. It definitely wasn’t something Bruce was going to drink. Not when it was so important to keep his pulse down. He didn’t even drink tea or eat chocolate anymore because they contained caffeine.

  He filed into the plant along with the other day laborers, finding a place in the dingy, poorly lit locker room between the main gate and the factory floor. As Bruce put his bag in his locker, someone banged into him hard from behind. He looked up and saw one of the factory’s tough guys cruising on down the hall. Most of his coworkers were just regular people, but there were a few bullies in every crowd.

  If only the bully knew what Bruce could do to him…

  No.

  He shrugged it off and went to work.

  His job was basically to do a bunch of different jobs. He distributed the mail, loaded pallets of soda for shipping, and kept track of where everything was going. Today they were putting together a shipment headed to the United States, specifically the Milwaukee and Chicago areas.

  First on the agenda today was distributing the mail. Bruce brought things to a couple dozen people throughout the bottling plant, including a young woman named Martina, who was friendly to him and occasionally helped him with the language. She also lived two floors below him at the favela.

  The snap of an electrical short came from the catwalk up above the conveyor belts that snaked all over the factory floor, carrying bottles to be filled and capped. The upper level was where the managers watched and kept track of everything. They also stopped and started the different lines to make sure everything stayed coordinated.

  “Breakdown! Breakdown!” the owner called from up on the catwalk. He beckoned for Bruce, who had fixed many of the factory’s outdated machines already during his time there. Bruce went up to the catwalk and saw that the control switch operating the main filling conveyor belt had shorted out. He put his glasses on to look at the wiring. After stripping the wires so they had better contact and winding them around the button anchors again, he tried it out.

  The conveyor belt kicked into motion. “Okay,” Bruce said. “I can make it work for a while, but you need new…” He trailed off, not knowing the Portuguese word for “resistors.”

  “I need a new factory,” the owner said. “Five months you’ve been helping me out like this. You’re too smart for day labor. Let me put you on the payroll.”

  Bruce smiled and shrugged as he put the cover back on the control switch. He glanced over at the manager again—and that’s when he cut his thumb on a sharp edge.
r />   It wasn’t a terrible cut, but it bled quickly. Droplets fell through the catwalk onto the moving conveyor belt below.

  “No, no, no, shut that off!” Bruce shouted. “Turn it off!” He was already running, trying to track the exact spot where the blood had fallen. “Watch out!” he said as he pushed past one of his surprised coworkers.

  The manager stopped the conveyor belt, and Bruce ran along the line until he found the spot where the blood drops had fallen. He carefully wiped them up with a rag from his pocket, scrubbing hard until all the blood was gone. Then he closed the cut with a little tube of Super Glue he kept in the same pocket with the rag. It was his emergency-cut kit and he was never without it because Bruce knew how dangerous his blood could be.

  “Okay,” he sighed. The line started up again.

  That had been close, Bruce thought. He hoped he’d gotten all the blood.

  He then wrapped up the pallet of just-filled bottles for shipping. He put the address label on the shrink-wrap and headed off for lunch.

  On his way, he saw the guy who had bumped into him in the locker room. Now he was giving Martina a hard time, cornering her and touching her face, telling her how pretty she was. His friends watched and made rude comments.

  Bruce hesitated. He didn’t want to cause trouble, but he couldn’t just stand there and let Martina get harassed. He took a few steps toward her.

  “Martina,” he called out in Portuguese. “Want to come have lunch with me?”

  “Get lost, gringo,” the leader snapped at Bruce.

  Bruce kept his eyes on Martina. “How about it?”

  The group leader stuck his arm out in front of Bruce. “I said beat it,” he growled. “You want a problem?”

  Bruce raised his hands. “No problem,” he said.

  “Too late,” the guy said. He shoved Bruce in the chest. His friends muscled in closer to Bruce on all sides.

  Bruce’s pulse began to race. He glanced down at the pulse monitor on his wrist—it was climbing fast, past 100 beats per minute, heading for 120. “Okay, listen,” he told them in his broken Portuguese. “Don’t make me hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m—” Bruce bit his lip, realizing he’d mixed up a word. “No, wait… that’s not right…”

  The leader looked puzzled for a moment. Then, thinking Bruce was mocking him, he shoved Bruce again, causing another spike in Bruce’s pulse. Things might have really gone wrong, but the manager saw the ruckus and shouted down from the catwalk.

  “Get moving! Get out of here!”

  The bully and his friends pushed past, laughing like it was no big deal, but from the looks on their faces, Bruce knew he’d be a fool to be caught alone with them.

  As soon as they were gone, Martina let out a big sigh and thanked Bruce. He smiled at her, carefully controlling his breathing, and then went on to eat his lunch.

  CHAPTER 2

  When the final whistle of the day sounded, Bruce headed outside and was excited to see the supply driver waiting for him. He was one of the guys who moonlighted doing unofficial delivery runs between the jungle and the city. A week or so before, Bruce had asked him to find a specific flower. He had it! Bruce ran over and paid him. Then he hurried home with the rare orchids, feeling a surge of optimism to balance out the stressful day.

  When Bruce got home, he showed the package to Cachorro. “See that?” he said excitedly. “That’s our ticket out of here.”

  Cachorro barked, picking up on Bruce’s excitement. Bruce put the flowers down and set up his laptop and portable satellite uplink. He kept them hidden in the apartment, together with a newspaper clipping.

  On the paper was a grainy, printed-out photograph of a beautiful woman with refined features and long dark hair. The caption read Dr. Elizabeth Ross. Bruce sighed. Betty Ross had been his girlfriend as well as his lab partner in the experiment that had gone so wrong. He missed her desperately, but he would never let himself be in a position to hurt her again. She didn’t know where he was now, and he was going to stay hidden until he solved his problem.

  It had been a long time since he’d seen Betty. She might not love him anymore after what had happened at Culver, but the thought of her was the only thing that kept Bruce going sometimes. He fired up the satellite feed and used an encrypted chat program to contact a person he knew only as Mr. Blue. Bruce had spent the past months trying to reach out to people who knew something about gamma radiation. Mr. Blue clearly did, and Bruce relied on his scientific advice. He was a skilled research scientist himself, but he had no lab and no way to keep up on the latest findings in his area—at least not if he wanted to stay hidden and stay safe.

  G: Blue, are you there?

  B: Mr. Green? Good hearing from you, my mysterious friend.

  G: I’ve found it.

  B: At long last! It’s a lovely little flower, isn’t it?

  Bruce looked at the flower. It was pretty, but that’s not why he cared about it. He returned to the monitor and his encrypted conversation. Mr. Blue had already logged off after leaving a final note:

  B: Be sure to try a high dose. Good luck! :)

  Bruce signed off and got to work. First he clipped the orchid’s petals into small pieces. He gathered them in a small bowl and poured a bit of rubbing alcohol in before crushing the flower into a paste. He added more fluid and put the mixture into a makeshift centrifuge he’d built using parts from a bicycle. It spun most of the fluid out into a small vial, where Bruce examined it. It was still too cloudy, meaning there were still too many bits of the crushed petals. He needed a better filter. He lit his stove and slowly heated the mixture in a distilling setup, watching the purer fluid fall drop by drop into a new vial. Now it was clear. Now he could use it.

  After pricking his finger, Bruce squeezed a drop of his blood onto a glass slide. He peered down at the slide through a microscope and adjusted the focus until he could see individual little disk-shaped red blood cells. Only his weren’t smooth and red; they were lumpy and a mixture of red and green, like they had been since his accident. This was the effect of the gamma radiation he’d been exposed to during the experiment. It was also what caused his transformation into… that thing.

  Bruce took out the slide. He filled an eyedropper with the clear fluid he’d distilled from the crushed orchid petals. Then he squeezed out three drops onto his blood on the slide and stuck the slide back under the microscope.

  Peering into the eyepiece, Bruce saw the formula seeping into his blood from the edges. The green lumps disappeared, and what were left were ordinary cells. Bruce’s heart jumped. Could he have found a cure? Could he finally come out of hiding and go home?

  Could he see Betty again?

  But as he kept watching, scribbling in a lab notebook to record the experiment… his cells deformed again, with the warty green bumps coming back and spreading to how they had been before.

  The experiment was a failure, and Bruce felt sick with the loss of hope. Eventually, Bruce got up from the lab table and went to his laptop to tell Mr. Blue the disappointing results.

  G: Another failure.

  B: How much did you use?

  G: All of it.

  B: Then it’s time to meet.

  G: Not safe.

  B: Living with gamma poisoning is not safe. Stop messing with flowers. Send me a sample.

  B: Can’t help if you won’t let me.

  Bruce looked at the picture of Betty and at the litter of flower stems on his table. Mr. Blue was right. He’d done everything he could do without actually giving someone else a look at a sample of his blood.

  When you only had one option, there was no point wasting time. Bruce drew a few milliliters of his blood with a syringe, capped the tube, and wrapped it carefully for shipping. He labeled it Mr. Green. The next day he mailed a package to Mr. Blue’s post office box in New York City.

  CHAPTER 3

  In his Pentagon office, General Thaddeus Ross—known to friends and enemies alike as Thunderbolt—snapped out of his reverie when
his assistant, Major Kathleen Sparr, put a stack of forms onto his desk. Ross signed the forms automatically. They were basic requisition orders, dull and routine.

  “Here’s something a bit more interesting,” Sparr said. She held out a fax. “Possible gamma sickness. Milwaukee. A man drank one of those guarana sodas. Guess it had a little more kick than he was looking for.”

  “Where was the soda bottled?” Ross asked.

  Major Sparr checked the fax. “Racinho Favela, Brazil.”

  A few weeks before, intelligence had flagged something else in Racinho Favela. A smuggler had been asking around about a particular rare orchid. It was known to S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists to have anti-radiation sickness possibilities. Ross and Sparr had tried to find out who had ordered the flower and where, but the Brazilian wilderness was a hard place to get good intelligence and the lead had petered out.

  Now, though, a bottle of soda from the same city had turned up tainted with gamma radiation. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

  “Get our agency people looking for an American at that bottling plant,” Ross ordered. “Tell them no contact. If he even sees them, he’s gone.”

  Then he got on the phone to call in some favors from an old friend.

  Two hours later, a transport van stopped near the runway of Fort Johnson, deep in the Florida Everglades. Ross watched with his fellow general, Joe Greller. “I got you what I could,” Greller said. “Short notice, but they’re all quality. And I pulled you an ace.”

  The chatter stopped as a helicopter banked in for a landing. Before the chopper was fully at rest, a short, muscular soldier with dirty blond hair leaped out. There was nothing remarkable about his features except his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who saw everything just a little bit better than most.

  “Emil Blonsky,” Greller said. “Born in Russia, raised in England. On loan to SOCOM from the Royal Marines.” SOCOM was the United States Special Operations Command.