Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
The Hulk saw her and stopped.
Not from fear. The Hulk didn’t process fear the way Banner did, didn’t run the careful risk assessments or the measured hesitations. What stopped him was the sheer specificity of what stood across the water. He’d torn through enough of the world to know what most things were on sight. This wasn’t any of them.
The creature was massive, black-furred, and upright, standing at the marsh’s edge with the stillness of something that had decided to stop moving rather than something that didn’t know what to do. Eight feet of dense muscle, the shoulders wide, the arms long, the clawed hands hanging loose at its sides. The eyes were yellow, burning steady in the dark like something lit from inside.
They weren’t the eyes of an animal running on instinct.
That detail registered even through the rage fog that Banner’s transformation left behind. The Hulk processed the world in broad strokes, threat and not-threat, obstacle and not-obstacle. The creature across the water didn’t fit cleanly into either category. It was watching him the way a predator watched something it was still measuring.
The Hulk straightened to his full height,t and the cypress canopy shuddered above him.
Across the water, the black creature didn’t move.
The Hulk took one step into the shallows. The water exploded outward from his foot, spray catching the faint light, the bottom mud collapsing under his weight. The marsh swallowed his ankle, and he pulled free with a sound like something being torn loose, and took another step.
The black creature stepped forward to meet him.
Sheryl crossed the channel in four strides, the water shallow enough that she was through it and climbing the opposite bank before the surface had finished churning behind her. She came up fast, covering the distance between them at a run, and the Hulk swung before she’d fully closed the gap.
The fist caught her across the left shoulder.
The impact sent her sideways through the air, twelve feet of trajectory before she hit a cypress trunk hard enough to crack it through the middle. The tree groaned and tilted, roots pulling from the soft earth. She landed in the shallows on her hands and knees, and the water erupted around her.
She was back on her feet in two seconds.
The Hulk was already moving, crossing the bank in two strides, and she ducked under his second swing and drove her shoulder into his midsection. The force she generated was enough to move a loaded freight truck. It moved the Hulk three steps backward. Not off his feet. Three steps.
She registered that information and filed it.
He grabbed her by the arm before she could pull back, the grip crushing, and swung her in a full arc that cleared a twenty-foot radius of cypress saplings before he released her. She hit the marsh at an angle and went under, the black water closing over her for a half second before she found the bottom and pushed back up.
The Hulk was at the water’s edge when she surfaced.
Sheryl shook the water from her eyes and looked at him. The rage on his face was uncomplicated, no strategy behind it, no calculation. Pure force looking for something to apply itself to. She understood that kind of biology. She’d faced Lycans in the grip of a full feral state, the ones where the human was gone completely and only the hunger was left.
This was different. The rage was structured somehow, contained inside the enormous frame like pressure inside a vessel. It wasn’t feral. It was focused.
She came out of the water at an angle, not straight at him, cutting left across the bank and forcing him to turn. He tracked her and swung, and she let the blow graze her instead of taking it full, riding the force rather than absorbing it, using the momentum to spin and rake her claws across his forearm.
The claws left marks.
Shallow ones. But marks.
The Hulk looked at his forearm. Then he looked at her.
She bared her teeth.
He roared. The sound rolled across the marsh and kept going, deep enough to vibrate in her sternum, loud enough that somewhere in the distance a flock of birds erupted from the tree line all at once. The ground under his feet compressed as he launched forward, both fists coming down together where she’d been standing.
She wasn’t there.
She’d gone left, moving at full speed along the bank, and when the double impact hit the earth behind her, the shockwave knocked her forward anyway, her feet leaving the ground for a moment before she recovered. The crater behind her was four feet deep and filling with dark water.
She turned and looked at it.
Then she looked at him.
He was already closing the distance, and she braced and took the hit this time, her claws finding purchase on his shoulders as he drove her backward through a stand of cypress trees. Trunks snapped on both sides of them. Her back hit a root mass, and she felt it give, the whole structure pulling free from the waterlogged earth. She locked her grip on his shoulders and used the root mass as leverage, pulling him sideways and driving her knee into his midsection.
He absorbed it and kept pushing.
The sheer mass of him was a problem her biology hadn’t prepared her for. Every Lycan she’d faced, even the largest ones, had an upper limit she could work against. She could find the leverage point, apply her strength in the right direction, and move them. The Hulk’s mass kept redistributing, kept finding new ground, kept pushing through the force she generated without stopping.
She released his shoulders and dropped low, going under his center of gravity, and drove upward with both hands against his chest. The impact lifted him six inches off the ground.
Six inches.
He came back down, and the marsh floor cracked.
She was breathing hard now, not from exertion in the human sense but from the sustained output, the Death Claw strain running at full capacity and starting to feel the demand. The Hulk showed none of it. His breathing was unchanged, his posture the same as when they’d started, the only difference being the shallow claw marks on his forearm that had already begun to close.
She watched the marks seal themselves and felt something she didn’t experience often.
Uncertainty.
The Hulk rolled his shoulders and looked at her across the torn-up ground between them. Twenty feet of destroyed marsh, uprooted cypress trees lying in the water, the earth cratered and churned. The fog had thinned during the fight, the moon coming through in pale sections that lit the destruction between them.
He took a step toward her.
She held her ground and read him. The rage was still there, filling up the space behind his eyes, but it wasn’t accelerating. It had reached a level and held. She’d hit him with everything she had, and he was standing the same as before.
The rational part of her brain, the part that had survived medical school and a combat-level biological transformation and two years of fighting things that should have killed her, ran the numbers.
A prolonged engagement was a loss condition.
She didn’t retreat. Retreating wasn’t in her vocabulary. But she moved, sideways along the bank, keeping her eyes on him, creating distance without turning her back. He tracked her movement but didn’t immediately follow, his head turning as she moved, those green eyes following her along the bank.
She reached the tree line and stepped into the shadows.
The Hulk stood in the destroyed clearing and watched the darkness where she’d gone. He took one step toward the tree line and stopped. The yellow eyes were gone. The black fur had absorbed the shadow and taken her with it.
He stood in the ruined marsh and looked at the darkness.
Then something pulled his attention east. A sound, or a smell, or whatever version of Banner’s instincts survived the transformation and kept him from walking into traffic. His head turned. His eyes moved toward the tree line on the opposite side of the clearing.
He took one step east. Then another.
Then he was moving, pushing through the cypress stands away from the clearing, the trees shaking with his passage, the sound of his movement carrying across the marsh for a long time after he disappeared.
Sheryl stood in the shadows, twenty yards into the tree line, and listened to him go.
She stayed still until the sound faded completely, until the marsh settled back into its night register, the frogs resuming, the water finding its new level in the craters he’d left behind. Then she stood there a little longer.
Her left shoulder ached where the first blow had landed. She rotated it carefully, feeling the joint move through its range. Bruised, possibly a minor structural issue that the strain would resolve within the hour. Nothing that would last.
She looked out at the clearing. Two cypress trees down. Ground cratered in three places. The channel behind her was still moving from where they’d churned through it.
She looked at the claw marks she’d put in his forearm. Watched them seal. Gone in seconds.
Sheryl turned and moved deeper into the marsh, heading northwest toward where she’d left her car. She moved quietly now, no longer tracking the chemical signal from the Helios facility. That problem hadn’t gone anywhere. It will be there tomorrow.
Right now, she needed to think about what she’d just fought.
It had walked into her territory carrying energy in its biology that matched the pulse from the facility. It had taken everything she generated and asked for more. It healed faster than she did. It was stronger than she was.
That last thought sat in her chest like a stone.
She pushed through the last stand of cypress and found the parish road, her car sitting on the gravel pullout where she’d left it. She transformed in the tree line, the shift running in reverse, eleven seconds back to the woman who drove a gray Accord and held hospital privileges at Bayou Mounds Regional Hospital.
Sheryl stood in the dark in her human clothes and looked south toward the marsh.
Somewhere out there, something green and enormous was moving through her territory.
And she had no idea what it was.
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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