Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
The Hulk found her again twenty minutes later.
She’d moved northeast through the marsh, putting distance between them while she assessed, tracking the chemical signal from the Helios facility and running her options. The shoulder had already started knitting itself back together, the strain doing its work, the ache dropping from sharp to manageable. She’d used the time to think.
It didn’t help.
She heard him before she smelled him, the cypress stands shaking in a line that cut through the marsh from the southwest, the sound of his movement like something being dragged through the world by force. He wasn’t tracking her the way a predator tracked. He was moving through the terrain the way the weather moved, without adjustment, without strategy, pushing through whatever was in front of him.
Sheryl stopped moving and turned to face the sound.
He came through a stand of mature cypress like they were tall grass, two trees going down in front of him, root masses tearing free and spraying black water in every direction. He saw her, and the roar that came out of him rolled across the marsh and hit the tree line on the far side and came back.
She dropped to all fours and charged.
The speed she generated on four limbs was different from bipedal, lower and faster, the power coming from her hindquarters and driving her forward in long bounds that covered ground faster than anything her size should move. She covered the forty feet between them before he’d fully reset from the roar and hit him low, driving her shoulder into his thigh, claws finding grip on the back of his knee.
The Hulk went down on one knee.
One knee. For two seconds.
Then he reached back, found her by the scruff, and stood up. He swung her forward over his head in a full arc and released her at the apex. She was airborne for a long moment, the marsh spreading out below her in the moonlight, the destroyed clearing from their first exchange visible to the southwest, already half-flooded with dark water filling the craters.
She hit the surface of a wide channel and went under hard.
The bottom was six feet down, and she found it and pushed off, breaking the surface and orienting fast. The Hulk was at the channel’s edge, thirty feet away. He grabbed a cypress tree at the waterline, a mature one, three feet across at the base, and pulled. The root system held for two seconds before the waterlogged earth gave up, and the whole tree came free. He turned and threw it.
Sheryl dove left,t and the tree hit the water where she’d been, the impact sending a wave across the channel that washed over both banks. She came back up and was moving before the wave settled, cutting across the channel at an angle, and hit the opposite bank at a run. She crossed it and went into the tree line on the far side, using the cypress stands for cover, circling back toward him through the shadows.
The Hulk stood at the channel’s edge and looked for her.
She came out of the tree line from his left, low and fast, and raked her claws across his ribs before he could turn fully. The claws caught and dragged, leaving four parallel marks across the green skin. Shallow. Closing already. But she felt the resistance in it, the density of whatever his biology was made of, and understood again that she was working against something that operated outside her frame of reference.
He backhanded her with his left hand.
The blow caught her across the chest, and she left the ground again, this time traveling farther, clearing the tree line entirely and landing in the next channel over with enough force to send water eight feet into the air. She went deep this time, hit the bottom, felt the mud close around her hands and knees, and pushed back up.
When she broke the surface, he was already there.
He’d crossed the tree line and both channels in the time it took her to recover, and he came down out of the cypress stand onto the bank above her and jumped. The impact when he landed shook the ground hard enough that the channel walls collapsed inward on both sides, a ten-foot section of bank sliding into the water, and the shockwave traveled outward through the marsh in a ring that flattened the grass and sent ripples across every body of water within two hundred yards.
Sheryl felt it through the water before she saw it.
She was back on the bank when the secondary wave hit, the ground under her feet rolling as something vast had shifted beneath it. To the south, through the cypress stands, she heard a sound she identified after a moment as a boat hull hitting something solid. Then another sound. Wood cracking. A motor is cutting out.
The Hulk straightened from the landing crouch, and the ground cracked beneath him in a starburst pattern, the fissures running outward through the soft earth and opening into the water table below.
Sheryl stood on the collapsing bank and looked at the damage between them.
Three channels are disrupted. A section of marsh that had existed in some form since before the city was built now looked like something had detonated beneath it. Cypress trees lay down in every direction, their root masses pulled free and lying on their sides in the water. The ground cratered and fissured, dark water welling up through the cracks and spreading across what had been a solid bank.
She looked at the Hulk across the new geography of destroyed marsh.
He looked back at her.
Derek heard it from the car.
He and Olivia were on the parish road running along the marsh’s eastern edge, following up on a report that had come through dispatch twenty minutes ago. A caller on a houseboat half a mile into the wetlands had reported what they described as an earthquake. Then a second caller, a crawfish trapper working the early morning channels, reported something moving through the marsh that had capsized his flatboat without touching it.
Olivia had her lights on but no siren, pushing the sedan down the parish road at seventy. Derek had the window down, listening.
The sound coming from the marsh was wrong in a specific way. He’d been in combat. He knew what ordnance sounded like, what a controlled demolition sounded like, what a building collapse sounded like. This was none of those things. It was rhythmic in a broken way, impacts separated by seconds, each one carrying a weight that suggested mass rather than explosive force.
Something very large was hitting things.
“Pull over,” Derek said.
Olivia pulled onto the shoulder and killed the lights. They got out. The marsh stretched away to their left, the cypress canopy a black mass against the slightly lighter sky. Through it, maybe a quarter mile in, something was moving. The canopy shook in sections, not from wind, the disturbance traveling in a line and then reversing, back and forth.
Then the ground moved under Derek’s feet.
A rolling shudder, brief and deep, the kind that came up through the soles of his shoes and registered in his knees. Olivia grabbed the car door. The sedan rocked on its suspension.
“That was not an earthquake,” Olivia said.
Derek was already moving toward the tree line.
“Derek.” Olivia’s voice carried the specific edge it got when she thought he was about to do something with no backup plan. “We don’t know what’s in there.”
“I know what’s in there,” Derek said, not slowing down.
He pushed into the cypress stands and moved toward the sound, covering ground fast, his enhanced senses processing the marsh ahead. The smells hit him in layers as he moved deeper. Churned earth. Broken wood. Water is displaced from its natural channels. And underneath all of it, two biological signatures that his senses cross-referenced and came back with separate responses to.
One was familiar. He’d known it his whole life, the specific compound of it changed by the strain, but still carrying something he’d been reading since childhood.
His mother.
The other was something his senses had no category for. Dense and strange and radiating energy at a frequency that pushed against his own biology like a hand pressed flat against a door.
He came through the last stand of cypress and stopped at the edge of what had been a channel bank.
The scene in front of him took a moment to process.
The marsh had been rearranged. There was no other word for it. Channels that should have run straight were disrupted, their banks collapsed, and the water spread across ground that should have been solid. Cypress trees were down in every direction, some of them snapped at the base, some pulled up entirely, their root masses exposed and dark. The ground between the water features was cratered, the fissures running outward from impact points that Derek estimated at somewhere between three and five distinct locations.
In the middle of it, across a collapsed channel, two figures faced each other.
His mother, in her full Death Claw form, black fur dark with marsh water, was standing on a section of bank that was actively crumbling at the edges. The yellow eyes were steady, fixed on what stood across from her.
Derek looked at what stood across from her.
The size of it stopped his thinking for a full second. He’d seen large Lycans. He’d faced things that his pre-infection self would have categorized as impossible. The green creature across the channel operated on a scale that made those reference points useless. It was enormous in the way that certain geological features were enormous, the kind of mass that changed the space around it just by being there.
It turned its head and looked at Derek.
Derek looked back at it.
Olivia pushed through the tree line behind him, breathing hard from the run, and stopped at his shoulder. He heard her take in the scene. Heard her breathing change.
“Derek,” she said quietly.
“I see it.”
“What is that?”
Derek watched the green creature turn its attention back to his mother. Watched her hold her ground on the collapsing bank, claws out, yellow eyes burning.
“I don’t know,” Derek said.
The Hulk’s attention had moved off Derek and back to Death Claw, the brief distraction of new arrivals already processed and discarded. He took one step forward, and the bank under his foot collapsed into the channel, dark water swallowing the ground he’d been standing on. He stepped over the gap without adjusting his stride.
Death Claw moved to meet him.
Derek stepped forward toward the water.
Olivia caught his arm. “You can’t get in the middle of that.”
“She’s my mother.”
“She’s also eight feet tall and holding her own.” Olivia’s grip tightened. “If you go in there in your current form, you’re an obstacle, not a factor. Think.”
Derek stopped. Watched the two figures close the distance between them again, the ground shaking with each of the green creature’s steps.
Olivia was right. He knew she was right. Every second of Army training, he had said the same thing. Assess before you commit. Know your effect on the battlefield before you step onto it.
He watched his mother hit the green creature with both hands, the impact audible even over the ambient noise of the destroyed marsh. Watched the creature absorb it and keep moving.
His jaw tightened.
“We need to know what that thing is,” Derek said. “And we need to know right now.”
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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