Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
The first thing Bruce Banner knew was mud.
It was in his mouth, packed under his fingernails, cold against the side of his face where he’d gone down. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and stayed there for a moment, letting the world settle into something he could work with. Cypress roots pressed into his palms. Water moved somewhere close.
He stood.
The clearing around him was wreckage. Three channels had collapsed into each other, their banks folded inward like wet paper. Cypress trees lay across the ground in multiple directions, root systems torn up and exposed to the gray morning light. The earth itself had fractured in places, long cracks radiating outward from impact zones, the way glass breaks from a thrown stone. Whoever had been here had hit the ground hard enough to split it.
He already knew who had been here.
Banner turned a slow circle, cataloging. His shirt was gone. His pants were shredded at both knees and the waistband. His boots had survived, which was more than usual. He checked his wrists, his ribs, the back of his skull. No damage beyond what the ground had done when he came down. That was also more than usual.
He’d fought something that could take a hit.
The fragments came to him in pieces, the way they always did. Green. Rage. Something moving through the dark that was fast enough to matter. He never got a clean memory from the other side. He got impressions, physical data, the ghost of something that had occupied the same body he was standing in now. He filed it away and moved.
His pack was forty feet east, wedged against the root system of a standing cypress at the edge of the destruction zone. The Hulk never touched his gear. Whatever instinct ran the other side of him treated the pack like it wasn’t there, and Banner had stopped questioning it years ago. He pulled the pack free, checked the main compartment, and found his equipment case intact.
He unzipped it and went to work.
The spectral analyzer was the size of a paperback novel, built from salvaged medical imaging components and three years of modifications he’d made in motel rooms and borrowed lab spaces. It wasn’t elegant. It worked. He powered it up, waited for the calibration cycle, and began moving through the clearing in a systematic grid.
The gamma signature was everywhere. That was expected. The Hulk left a residue the analyzer could read from thirty feet, a biological and energetic footprint that Banner had spent years learning to map and measure. It told him nothing new.
He was looking for the other signature.
He found it at the edge of a collapsed channel bank, where something had gone into the mud and come back out. The impression was deep, the dimensions wrong for anything on the standard predator list for Louisiana wetlands. He crouched and examined it. Four-toed, elongated, the claw marks at the front of each toe pressed an inch into the soil. Something between eight hundred and twelve hundred pounds, based on depth and spread. Something bipedal.
The analyzer read the soil chemistry around the impression and flagged two anomalies immediately. A protein compound it didn’t recognize, and a secondary marker it flagged as biological fluid, mammalian, unclassified.
Banner followed the channel bank south until he found what he was looking for.
The fur was caught on a broken cypress branch at chest height, a cluster of fibers pulled free during whatever had moved through here at speed. Jet black. Coarse at the base, finer at the tip. He bagged it. Fifteen feet further, he found a smear of fluid on a partially submerged root, dark and already thickening at the edges. He swabbed it twice, sealed both samples, and brought them back to the analyzer.
The processing cycle took four minutes.
He stood in the ruined clearing while it ran, listening to the marsh come back to itself around him. Birds had started up somewhere to the north. The water in the collapsed channels moved in new patterns, finding routes through the disrupted earth. The smell of the place was deep and organic, cut through with something chemical that didn’t belong in a wetland.
The analyzer chimed.
Banner looked at the screen for a long time without moving.
The protein structure in the fur sample was mammalian, but the sequencing was wrong. Not mutated in any framework he recognized. Not gamma-influenced. Not a product of radiation exposure or chemical contamination in any form, his equipment could be placed. The structure had been rewritten at a level that shouldn’t have been survivable, and the organism carrying it was not only surviving, but the tissue samples showed accelerated cellular repair at a rate that rivaled his own biology. The fluid sample confirmed it. Whatever had been in this marsh with him operated on a biological logic he didn’t have a category for.
He ran the comparison sequence against every database he’d built over twelve years of field work. Gamma mutations across the full spectrum. Experimental biology from three continents’ worth of incident reports. The analyzer came back with a partial match on the protein compound only, flagged as a derivative of something sourced from this region, cross-referenced against a Helios Genomics procurement log he’d pulled three weeks ago when the facility first showed up on his monitoring sweep.
He stared at that for a moment.
Helios had this biology in a lab. Or something close enough to it that their procurement logs left a fingerprint his equipment could read. That meant the pulse that had triggered his monitoring system, triggered his transformation, was carrying the signature of this same organism. Someone had taken this thing apart in a facility twelve acres deep in a private wetland and run a trial that blew out into the marsh.
Banner packed his equipment. He pulled a spare shirt from the bottom of the pack, shook the mud out of it, and put it on.
He didn’t know what the creature was. He knew it wasn’t gamma science. He knew it predated anything in his databases by the look of the protein architecture, something that had developed outside the frameworks he’d spent his adult life mapping. He knew it was fast, strong, and capable of absorbing punishment in ways that had apparently made the fight worth having from both sides.
He knew someone had it in a lab and was doing things with it.
That last part was the part that sat wrong.
Banner looked back at the clearing once before he turned north toward Bayou Mounds. The destruction was extensive even by his standards. Channels gone, earth cracked, trees down in every direction. He’d done most of it, he assumed. He always assumed that. But some of it belonged to something else, and that something else had walked out of here on its own, which meant it was still out in those wetlands.
He picked up the ridge line and started moving.
The marsh held its sounds around him as he walked. Somewhere behind him, the clearing settled into its new shape, water filling the cracks, mud sliding slowly back toward level. By the time he reached the parish road, his boots were soaked through, and the analyzer was running a secondary process on the protein sample, cross-referencing against every outlier file he’d never found a home for.
He didn’t expect to find one.
He pulled his phone from the pack’s outer pocket and checked the map. Bayou Mounds was four miles northeast. He had a car parked on a gravel pullout south of the city, assuming it was still there.
He started walking.
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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