Author’s Note: When I created the Bayou Blood universe, I built it around a simple idea. Monsters can be the good guys. Or at least, they can be the necessary ones.
Sheryl and Derek Brown didn’t ask for what happened to them. Neither did their city. But when Bayou Mounds needed something capable of standing between it and the darkness crawling out of those wetlands, they were the ones who showed up.
This crossover started with a question. What happens when the most powerful monster on Earth walks into a world that already has its own?
I wanted to find out.
The Hulk is one of the most iconic figures in comics history, a brilliant man trapped in a war with his own biology. That conflict felt right for this world. Bayou Blood has always been about people carrying something inside them they didn’t choose and deciding what to do with it anyway.
I hope this story brings new readers into Bayou Mounds for the first time. And for those of you who have been here from the beginning, welcome back to the bayou.
— Dee Watts
The motel room in Baton Rouge smelled like cigarette smoke and old carpet cleaner, the kind of place that charged by the week and didn’t ask questions. Bruce Banner sat at the small desk near the window with his laptop open, three empty coffee cups pushed to one side, and a yellow legal pad covered in handwritten calculations on the other.
Outside, the interstate hummed with late traffic. A truck downshifted on the overpass. Banner didn’t hear any of it.
His eyes were fixed on the spectral analysis running across his screen.
The readings had started four days ago, faint enough that he’d almost dismissed them as equipment interference. A biochemical signal originating somewhere in the wetlands southeast of Baton Rouge, drifting toward the river parishes. He’d picked it up through a monitoring program he ran on a private server, something he’d built years ago to track gamma-adjacent anomalies before they became someone else’s problem. The program flagged radiation signatures, mutagenic compounds, and anything that carried the specific frequency of gamma exposure.
This signal wasn’t gamma. Not exactly.
Banner pulled up the comparison graph he’d built overnight. On the left, a clean gamma signature from a documented exposure site in New Mexico. On the right are the Louisiana readings. The shapes were similar enough to trigger his alert system, but the behavior was wrong. Gamma radiation decayed in predictable patterns. It followed physics. It didn’t fluctuate.
This signal pulsed.
Banner leaned closer to the screen. He’d run the data through two separate analysis programs and gotten the same result both times. The energy pattern wasn’t degrading. It was cycling, expanding and contracting at irregular intervals, like something breathing.
He picked up his pen and wrote a single word at the bottom of the legal pad.
Biological.
He stared at it for a moment, then set the pen down.
The smart move was to call someone. Send the data to a research contact, flag it through one of the anonymous channels he used when something needed attention but couldn’t be traced back to him. Let someone else investigate. That was almost always the smart move.
Banner closed the comparison graph and opened a mapping program. He typed in the coordinates where the signal was strongest and watched the satellite image load. Wetlands. Dense marsh broken by channels of dark water, cypress trees standing in the shallows like sentinels, the whole landscape so thick with vegetation it swallowed light. A small urban cluster about twelve miles northeast of the signal’s center. He zoomed in on the label.
Bayou Mounds, Louisiana.
He’d never heard of it.
Banner zoomed out and checked the distance from his current location. Seventy-one miles. An hour and change on the interstate.
He looked at the pulsing signal on his screen. Then he looked at his phone sitting on the nightstand, contacts full of people he could call.
He picked up his car keys instead.
The smell reached Derek Brown before the lights did.
He was riding in the passenger seat of Olivia Hale’s unmarked sedan, the windows cracked against the humid night air, when it came through the gap. Thick and copper-heavy, the kind of smell that coated the back of your throat. He’d learned not to react visibly when it hit him. Olivia didn’t need to know how clearly he could detect things she couldn’t.
“You smell that?” Olivia asked, slowing the car.
So she could smell it too. That meant it was bad.
“Yeah,” Derek said.
Olivia pulled onto the gravel shoulder and killed the headlights. Ahead of them, a farm road cut between two fenced pastures, the wood rails barely visible in the dark. She’d gotten the call forty minutes ago. Livestock massacre on a property off Highway 628, outside the Bayou Mounds city limits. The responding deputy had used the word massacre specifically, and deputies in this parish had seen enough animal attacks to know the difference between a predator kill and something else.
They got out. Derek pulled a flashlight from his jacket and swept it across the nearest pasture.
The fence rail was broken. Not cut, not pulled loose from rot. Broken, the wood splintered outward like something had walked through it without slowing down.
Olivia moved her own light along the ground. The grass was torn up, deep gouges running parallel through the soil. She crouched, examined the nearest track, and said nothing for a moment.
“That’s not a boot print,” she said.
“No.” Derek kept his light moving. “It’s not.”
The tracks led toward the center of the pasture. They followed them. The ground grew wetter as they moved away from the fence line, the grass giving way to soft earth that held the impressions clearly. Three toes. Long, deep, the spacing between each strike was wider than anything Derek could attribute to local wildlife.
They found the cattle thirty yards in.
Olivia stopped walking. Derek stopped beside her.
Six animals. All of them down, scattered across a thirty-foot radius like they’d been thrown. The injuries were severe, the kind of damage that came from something with size and force behind it. Derek moved his flashlight slowly across the scene, reading it the way his Army training had taught him to read a cleared building. Entry point, movement pattern, exit route.
Whatever, this hadn’t been hungry.
A predator that killed to feed left a different kind of scene. This was territorial. Or it was a warning.
“Deputy said there was another one two miles south last week,” Olivia said. Her voice stayed even, the tone she used when she was storing information rather than reacting to it. “Thought it was a pack of feral dogs.”
“It wasn’t dogs,” Derek said.
“No.” She swept her light toward the tree line at the far end of the pasture. The beam didn’t reach far enough. “Whatever it was came out of the marsh.”
Derek studied the tree line. The darkness out there was absolute, the cypress canopy blocking even the moonlight. His enhanced senses pushed outward, reading the air. The blood smell was heavy and close, but underneath it, coming from the direction of the wetlands, was something else. Faint. Chemical. Wrong in a way he couldn’t immediately identify, like something that didn’t belong in the biological inventory of a Louisiana marsh.
He’d smelled industrial compounds before. Solvent runoff from the refineries, chemical discharge from the processing plants along the river. This wasn’t that.
“Olivia.” Derek kept his eyes on the tree line. “You know anything about any new operations setting up out in the wetlands? Private sector, research, anything like that?”
Olivia turned to look at him. “Why?”
“Something’s out there,” Derek said. “Something that wasn’t there before.”
Olivia looked toward the marsh. The darkness held its position, giving nothing back.
“I’ll make some calls in the morning,” she said.
Derek kept his light on the tree line a moment longer, then lowered it.
Something had moved through this pasture with enough force to break fence rails and scatter six cattle like they were nothing. And it had come from the direction of the wetlands, the same direction that the faint chemical smell was drifting from.
He filed that away and followed Olivia back toward the car.
Banner crossed into St. John the Baptist Parish just after midnight. The interstate thinned out, the lights of Baton Rouge fading in his rearview mirror. The highway ran flat and straight through the dark, the landscape on either side dropping away into low marsh. He could see the water sometimes, catching the moonlight between the trees.
He had his laptop open on the passenger seat, running on battery, the signal tracker refreshing every four minutes. The readings were stronger out here. The pulse was more defined, the intervals tighter. Whatever was generating the signal, he was moving toward it.
Banner kept both hands on the wheel and watched the road.
He’d been wrong before about signals like this. Twice, he’d tracked anomalies that turned out to be equipment malfunctions at research facilities. Both times, he’d felt the specific embarrassment of a man who’d driven hundreds of miles for a false alarm.
He hoped this was the third time.
The signal pulsed on his screen.
Banner watched the interval. Four seconds. Three. Two.
The reading spiked, sharp and sudden, then settled back to its baseline.
His hands tightened on the wheel.
That wasn’t equipment malfunction behavior. Equipment malfunctions degraded or held steady. They didn’t spike and recover. They didn’t behave like a response.
Banner reached over and turned up the sensitivity on the tracker. The signal came back stronger, its origin point now registering with enough precision to narrow it to a specific area of wetlands approximately nine miles southwest of Bayou Mounds.
He set his jaw and kept driving.
The highway sign ahead read: Bayou Mounds — 11 Miles.
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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