Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
Sheryl drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows down.
The marsh smell came through strong at this hour, salt and rot and standing water. She kept the speed at forty, watching the road. The gravel pullout where she’d parked was four miles behind her. Her hands were steady. Her shoulders weren’t.
She’d taken a hit to the left side that had put her through a cypress trunk. The tree had lost that exchange. She hadn’t walked away clean.
In human form, the damage settled differently. A deep bruise across her left lat that would show purple by morning. Her right knee was tracking slightly wrong when she walked back to the car, correcting itself one step at a time as the strain worked through the joint. She’d cataloged it the way she cataloged post-op complications. Systematically. Without sentiment.
The knee was fine now.
She turned onto the main road and picked up speed.
The green creature’s biology ran through her mind the way a differential diagnosis runs. She started with what she knew. Mass somewhere above a thousand pounds in that form. Possibly significantly above. She’d hit it with everything she had in the first charge, and it hadn’t given ground the way anything else she’d encountered had given ground. It absorbed impact. Not through technique or bracing. Structurally. Like hitting a building that happened to hit back.
The healing was the part she kept returning to.
She’d opened the forearm. Four clean lines, deep enough to matter. She’d watched them seal. Not slowly. Not over minutes. The tissue had pulled back together in seconds, the way a wound looks in fast-forward. She knew accelerated cellular repair. She lived inside accelerated cellular repair. What she’d seen on that forearm was operating at a rate that made her own biology look considered by comparison.
She didn’t know what that meant yet. She intended to find out.
The city lights came up on the horizon. She took the interchange and merged onto the elevated stretch that ran above the eastern wetlands, the marsh spreading dark and flat on both sides below.
She thought about the Helios facility.
Someone had the Death Claw strain in a lab. That wasn’t speculation. She’d felt the pulse carry the biological signature of the strain itself, processed and refined, bouncing off her own biology like a frequency finding its receptor. Whoever was running that facility had sourced samples from the infected population. Had isolated the protein sequences. Had been working with her biology in a controlled environment for long enough to produce a compound unstable enough to detonate.
That was the part that required a response.
She got off the elevated road and took surface streets south toward her building. The city was quiet at this hour. A convenience store lit up on a corner. A car idles outside an apartment complex. Normal sounds. Normal light.
She pulled into her parking spot, cut the engine, and sat for a moment.
Derek had been in that clearing. She’d clocked him and the detective at the tree line before the second pulse hit and the green creature came back at her. Derek had seen her. That wasn’t new; he’d seen her in that form before, but he’d also seen the green creature, and Derek was exactly the kind of person who would start pulling that thread the moment he got home.
She’d need to get ahead of that conversation.
She got out of the car, took the stairs to the fourth floor, and let herself into the apartment. The lights were off. She didn’t turn them on. She moved to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and drank half of it standing at the sink.
The green creature was not her primary problem.
Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, it had moved east after the fight. Away from the city. That suggested it wasn’t targeting Bayou Mounds specifically. It had responded to something, the same way she had responded to something, and now it was somewhere in the wetlands processing what had happened. She understood that instinct completely.
The Helios facility was her primary problem.
She set the glass down.
They had her biology. They had refined it, combined it with something else, and run a trial that had sent a pulse across four miles of marsh and triggered two separate apex-level biological responses in the same night. That was not a contained research operation. That was a weapons program. She’d worked in enough hospital environments adjacent to government contracts to know the difference between science and procurement.
They were building something. They were using her to build it.
She walked to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and thought about Derek again. He was good. Better than most people she’d worked alongside in any capacity. But this wasn’t his operation to run.
She was going to find the Helios facility.
She was going to go in alone, at night, and she was going to take apart everything they had built with her biology before they could deploy it. The samples, the compound, the research infrastructure. Whatever they had sourced and whatever they had produced from it. All of it.
She’d do it in three days. Enough time to locate the facility perimeter through the marsh approach, map the exhaust system they’d used for dispersal, and identify the external sensor grid.
She lay back on the bed without undressing.
Three days.
She closed her eyes.
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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