Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
The security team came through the stairwell door fast and tight, two men leading with batons, two behind with tasers raised. The lead man got one step into the sub-level before Derek hit him.
Savage cleared six feet in a single stride. The impact drove the man into the door frame hard enough to crack the housing. The second man swung his baton across Savage’s back. It snapped clean on contact. Savage turned, grabbed him by the vest, and threw him into the stairwell wall. He went down and stayed down.
The taser prongs hit Savage in the left shoulder. The current ran through him. He pulled the wires out with one hand and looked at the man holding the device. The man dropped it and ran up the stairs. Savage let him go.
Marsh pressed himself against the wall beside the stairwell door, hand flat against the concrete. He waited until the last man’s footsteps were gone, then pushed off the wall and moved to the containment unit keypads.
“Three and four,” Derek said. His voice had changed. Deeper. The words barely fit his mouth.
Marsh was already working unit three. His fingers moved through the override sequence from memory. The keypad beeped twice, then clicked. The door seal released.
Banner was on his knees on the floor, wrists still cabled to the anchor point. His skin had gone full green. The monitoring equipment beside him was screaming a single sustained alarm. The muscles along his neck and shoulders were moving under his skin like something trying to get out.
Marsh crossed the room and pulled the cable housing from the wall anchor. The cable went slack. Banner’s hands dropped.
He looked up at Marsh. The eyes were wrong. Not Banner’s eyes anymore.
“Get clear,” Derek said from the doorway.
Marsh got clear.
In containment unit four, Sheryl heard the wall anchor pull free next door.
The suppression compound had been running into her face for four hours. Her lungs felt like wet concrete. The Death Claw strain was moving at the cellular level, fighting the compound molecule by molecule, losing. She had cataloged the losing as a fact and kept moving anyway.
She heard the stairwell collision. She heard the baton snap. She smelled Derek the moment he hit the bottom of the stairs.
The keypad on her door beeped twice.
The door opened.
Derek stood in the frame. Eight feet of him. The lion’s mane dense and black, yellow eyes burning in the red emergency light. He looked at the suppression unit running compound into her face, reached over, and pulled it out of the wall.
She pulled in a full breath. The compound was still in her system but the source was gone. She could feel the strain starting to reassert.
“Wrists,” she said.
Derek pulled the wrist restraints apart at the joint. The metal didn’t bend. It separated.
She pulled her feet free of the ankle clamps. Stood. Her legs held.
Through the reinforced window she could see unit three. The door was open. The monitoring equipment was on the floor. The green light was wrong — too bright, filling the room wall to wall.
The Hulk came through the interior wall.
Not the door. The wall. The reinforced steel buckled inward and then outward, and he stepped through the gap like it was a curtain. He was three feet taller and two feet wider than anything the sub-level was designed to contain. The ceiling cracked along his spine as he cleared the doorway.
He looked at Sheryl. She looked at him.
Last time they’d stood across dark water from each other, they’d fought. She’d run threat assessment in real time and come away uncertain for the first time since the infection. The biology still registered the same — mass above a thousand pounds, cellular repair exceeding her own.
He wasn’t looking at her like a threat.
He turned toward the stairwell.
She followed.
Striker was on the main floor when the sub-level alarms shifted frequency.
He pulled his radio and called the security room. No answer. He called the eastern perimeter team. One response, two men down. He understood the situation in the time it took him to cross the corridor to Bright’s office.
Bright was at his workstation, pulling files to an external drive. He looked up when Striker came through the door.
“We need to move,” Striker said.
“Give me two minutes.”
“We don’t have two minutes.”
The floor shook. A deep, structural impact that rattled the ceiling fixtures and sent a crack running along the north wall from floor to ceiling. Bright’s monitor tipped off the desk. Striker caught it without thinking.
The second impact hit before he could set it down. The north wall of the main lab blew inward.
The Hulk stepped through. Concrete dust and insulation followed him into the room like weather. He looked at the workstations, the equipment racks, the servers running LC-7 analysis along the east wall, and he started working.
Not random. Methodical. Each workstation hit once, exactly hard enough to destroy the hardware. The server rack came off the wall whole and went through the floor.
Striker drew his sidearm and put four rounds into the Hulk’s back. The Hulk turned around.
Striker had run threat assessment for twelve years. He processed what he was seeing in the half-second before the Hulk’s hand closed around his chest. He understood the assessment was academic.
The hand tightened once. Striker stopped.
Bright ran for the exterior door at the south end of the corridor. He made it six steps past the threshold before Death Claw came around the corner of the building.
She was in full form. The fur was black in the moonlight. The yellow eyes found him immediately.
He had her biology in his lab for fourteen months. He had her cells in suspension tanks, her protein sequences in a hundred different experimental compounds. He had thought of her as a resource.
She covered the distance in two strides.
Bright went down hard on the gravel walkway. His hands came up by instinct. She looked at him for one second, then did what she had driven to the facility three days ago to do.
Derek stood at the south exterior wall and watched the marsh.
The facility was burning behind him. The main structure had gone up fast — the Hulk had taken the generator housing out last, and the LC-7 reserves caught within forty seconds. The auxiliary buildings followed.
Marsh came up beside him, hands braced on his knees, breathing hard. His override unit was gone, lost somewhere in the sub-level when the wall came down.
“Your mother?” Marsh asked.
Derek looked at the tree line. The darkness was still.
“She’s out,” he said.
The green glow was visible fifty yards into the marsh, moving east through the cypress stands. The light faded as it went deeper. Then it was gone.
The facility burned. Neither of them moved until the first siren reached them from the parish road.
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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