Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
Sheryl felt it in her sleep.
Not a sound. Not a smell. Something deeper than either of those, a vibration that moved through the biology of her the way a subsonic frequency moved through concrete. It didn’t wake her gently. It pulled her up out of unconsciousness like a hand closing around her collar, and she was sitting upright in bed before she’d fully processed being awake.
Her bedroom was dark. 2:51 AM on the clock. The apartment was quiet around her, the building settled, the street outside carrying nothing but the occasional passing car. Normal. Everything is registering as normal.
But her pulse was already elevated, her senses pushing outward through the walls before she’d made a conscious decision to let them. The Death Claw strain didn’t ask permission. It simply responded, and her body followed.
She sat still and listened to what it was telling her.
Something had discharged in the wetlands. That was the only framework she had for the sensation. This energy didn’t belong in the biological inventory of the marsh, radiating outward from a point southeast of the city. She could feel the direction of it, the way you felt a draft from a window you couldn’t see. It wasn’t a smell. It didn’t sound. It was a pressure against something inside her that had no clinical name.
She’d been a physician for twenty-two years. She had no language for what she was feeling that fit inside a medical chart.
Sheryl got out of bed and walked to the window. The city stretched out below her, streetlights and dark rooftops, the tree line of the park two blocks east a solid black mass against the slightly lighter sky. Somewhere beyond the city’s southern edge, the marsh began. Miles of dark water and cypress stands, the kind of landscape that swallowed sound and held secrets without effort.
The pressure was coming from that direction.
She stood at the window for a long moment, her hands loose at her sides, and ran a clinical assessment the way she would with a patient presenting unusual symptoms. The sensation had woken her from deep sleep. It was directional. It was sustained, not fading. And the strain was responding to it with something that wasn’t quite aggression and wasn’t quite alarm.
It was recognition.
Like calling to like.
That detail unsettled her more than the rest of it.
She drove south out of the city before dawn, taking the highway until it thinned into a two-lane parish road, then leaving the car on a gravel pullout where the road curved closest to the marsh. She’d done this before, the quiet departure, the change of clothes left folded on the back seat. She kept the utility van for joint operations with Derek. For this, she used her own vehicle, a dark gray Accord that drew no attention.
She walked into the tree line on foot and kept walking until the city was gone behind her and there was nothing around her but the marsh.
Then she transformed.
The shift took eleven seconds. She’d timed it once, back when the novelty of being able to control it still carried a clinical fascination. The biology moved fast when she directed it, the muscle mass expanding, the skeletal structure reconfiguring with a sound like thick rope pulled taut. It wasn’t painless. It had never been painless. But she’d stopped cataloging the discomfort the same way a surgeon stopped noticing the smell of cauterized tissue. It was the cost of the function.
Death Claw stood in the cypress shallows and let the marsh settle around her.
The wetlands smelled different at this scale. Every layer of it separated and sharpened, the decomposing vegetation at the waterline, the musk of alligators somewhere to the east, the salt drift coming up from the gulf sixty miles south. She processed it automatically, the sensory input sorting itself into relevant and irrelevant without conscious effort.
The chemical signature hit immediately.
Stronger here than it had been from the apartment window. Sharp and synthetic, riding underneath the organic smell of the marsh like something that had been introduced rather than grown. She turned her head southeast and held still, letting the air move across her senses.
Biological compounds. Processed, not natural. And underneath those, something that carried the faint resonance of the strain itself, the Death Claw biology worked into whatever had discharged from that direction. Her instincts sharpened into a point.
Someone had her biology in a lab.
She moved through the marsh without deciding to. The water was shallow here, knee-deep in the low spots, and she covered ground fast, pushing through the cypress stands in long strides, her weight distributed across the soft bottom without sinking. She knew this terrain. She’d moved through it enough times that the root systems and the depth variations were mapped somewhere in her memory.
The chemical smell grew stronger as she moved southeast. She tracked it the way she tracked any quarry, reading the changes in concentration, adjusting her angle when the scent thinned. The marsh opened into wider channels, and she moved along the bank, staying in the tree shadow.
She was three miles from the city when she heard the vehicle.
A single engine, moving slowly, coming from the north on the parish road that ran along the marsh’s eastern edge. She stopped and turned toward the sound, water dripping from her fur in the sudden stillness. Headlights moved through the trees, visible in fragments between the cypress trunks.
The vehicle slowed. Stopped.
She heard a door open. One person. Footsteps on gravel, then grass, moving toward the tree line with a flashlight beam sweeping ahead. The footsteps were careful, the weight distribution suggesting someone paying attention to the ground.
The chemical smell was still pulling her southeast, toward its source.
She looked in that direction, then back toward the flashlight moving through the trees at the marsh’s edge.
The flashlight stopped. The beam held steady on the water for a moment. She watched the person behind it stand very still.
Then the smell changed.
It came off the figure at the tree line, subtle and strange, a biological signature she’d never encountered before. Not Lycan. Not a human standard. Something that sat in the space between those categories without belonging to either. She processed it, cross-referencing against everything she’d built up in two years of moving through this world with heightened senses.
Nothing matched.
The figure at the tree line swept the flashlight beam slowly across the marsh, and for a moment, the light caught the surface of the water thirty feet from where she stood in the shadows. She held completely still, her yellow eyes fixed on the figure, reading the body language. Cautious. Alert. Alone.
Not a threat in the conventional sense.
But carrying something in his biology that had no business being in a Louisiana marsh.
She held her position and watched him work his way along the tree line, flashlight moving, stopping occasionally to examine something she couldn’t identify from this distance. He pulled something from his jacket pocket, a device of some kind, held it up, checked it, and put it back.
Then the pulse came.
It rolled through the marsh like a pressure wave, different from the first discharge that had woken her, stronger and more focused, as if whatever was running at the Helios facility had cycled back to full output. The Death Claw strain spiked hard in response, her muscles contracting involuntarily, every instinct she had snapping toward the source at once.
She heard the figure at the tree line make a sound.
A sharp, involuntary sound. Pain adjacent. Then silence.
She turned toward him.
He’d dropped the flashlight. It lay in the grass at the marsh’s edge, beam pointing sideways across the ground, illuminating nothing useful. The figure was on one knee, one hand pressed to the earth, the other holding the side of his head. His breathing had changed, gone ragged and fast, and the biological signature coming off him was shifting, the strange compound of his scent rewriting itself in real time.
Sheryl had been a physician long enough to recognize a physiological crisis when she saw one.
She watched the figure’s silhouette change.
It started at the shoulders. The outline expanded, slow at first and then fast, the proportions moving outside anything human biology produced. The sound that came with it was deep and structural, the kind of sound that registered in the chest more than the ears. The grass around him flattened outward in a ring. The cypress trees at the marsh’s edge shuddered.
Then he stood up.
The thing that stood out was not the man who had dropped the flashlight.
It was enormous. Green and dense with muscle, the head low between massive shoulders, the hands hanging at its sides with fingers thick as a man’s wrist. It straightened to its full height, and the cypress canopy above it shook with the displacement of air.
Sheryl stood in the shadows of the marsh and looked at the creature across thirty feet of dark water.
She had walked through this territory for two years. She had faced things that had no name in any biology textbook. She had stood in front of infected Lycans twice her size and not moved.
She didn’t move now.
But the calculation running behind her yellow eyes was entirely new.
The green creature turned its head slowly, scanning the marsh. The flashlight on the ground behind it threw just enough light to catch the water’s surface between them. Its eyes found the shadows where she stood.
They looked at each other across the dark water.
Death Claw held her position and assessed what she was looking at. The mass was extraordinary, beyond anything the Death Claw strain produced in its most advanced hosts. The biological signature was foreign and dense, nothing like the Lycan markers she could read in her own kind. And the energy coming off it was the same frequency as the pulse that had woken her.
Not the facility. Not Helios.
Him.
The creature across the water exhaled, a low sound that moved through the cypress trunks like a pressure change before a storm. It took one step toward the water’s edge.
Sheryl stepped out of the shadows.
Disclaimer Statement: The Incredible Hulk and all related characters are the property of Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. This story is an independently produced fan fiction created by Dee Watts. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Marvel Entertainment or any of its subsidiaries in any capacity. All Bayou Blood characters, locations, and story elements are original intellectual property owned exclusively by Dee Watts. This work was created for entertainment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended.
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