Previously on Hulk vs. Death Claw
Striker’s teams moved out at 0300.
Two separate convoys. No headlights past the facility perimeter. The northern team took the marsh access road in two flatboats, running quiet electric motors, equipment cases strapped low in the hulls. Six men. Chemical suppressant array broken into four deployment units, each one sealed in waterproof housing. The northern approach to the city was four miles of open channel before the wetland brush thickened toward the residential edge.
The eastern team went on foot. Four men, heavier gear. The gamma dampening emitters were the size of car batteries, two per man, carried in padded harnesses across the chest and back. They moved single file along the ridge line, following the GPS markers Striker had pulled from the LC-7 tracking data. The gamma signature was stationary, two miles east of the destruction zone, in a shallow depression between two cypress stands.
Striker stood at the facility’s east window and watched both teams disappear into the dark.
He picked up his radio. “Northern team, check in at the first channel marker.”
“Copy,” came the response. Flat and professional.
He set the radio down and looked at the site map on his tablet. Both markers pulsed steadily. Neither had moved in six hours. He’d been watching them since midnight. The Lycan signature was in the city, stationary at a fixed address he’d had since the previous morning. The gamma signature had settled in the eastern marsh sometime before dawn and hadn’t shifted since.
Seventy-two hours had been the plan. Bright had wanted the perimeter clean.
They were moving in forty-eight.
Bright had seen the photograph of Derek Brown a second time and changed his mind about the timeline.
Sheryl came out of the marsh on the second night.
She’d spent six hours moving the southern perimeter, staying in human form, using the enhanced senses to map the facility’s exhaust network and external sensor placement. She had what she needed. Access point on the southwestern fence line where the sensor grid had a twelve-foot gap, the exhaust system running underground from the main lab building to a dispersal vent one hundred yards into the wetland brush.
She drove home, showered, and slept for four hours.
The third day, she worked her regular shift at BMR. Rounds at seven, two consultations, a stress test review that ran long. She ate lunch at her desk. Called Derek twice, got his voicemail both times. Left no message.
She drove home at six, changed out of her work clothes, and stood in the kitchen for a moment thinking about the southwestern fence line and the sensor gap.
She’d go tonight.
She was reaching for her keys when the smell hit her.
Chemical. Synthetic. Coming through the apartment ventilation system in a thin, steady stream that hadn’t been there this morning. She recognized the base compound immediately. Lycan protein sequences, processed and refined. Her own biology, weaponized and piped into her home through the HVAC.
She held her breath and moved for the door.
Her hand closed on the handle, and her legs went out.
She caught the door frame on the way down, held herself upright for two seconds, then her grip failed. She hit the floor on her side. Her vision stayed clear, but her body had stopped responding the way it should. She tried to push herself up. Her arms moved wrong, slow and disconnected, like signals running through water.
The Death Claw strain pushed back against the suppressant. She felt it working through her system, the biology fighting the compound the way her immune system fights infection. Fast and aggressive. It wasn’t fast enough.
The apartment door opened from the outside.
Two men in respirators and tactical gear moved through the doorway. One went to the window and sealed the ventilation gap with a foam block. The other crouched beside her and checked her pulse with two fingers against her neck.
“Suppressant holding,” he said into his radio.
She looked up at him. Her jaw worked, but nothing came out.
“Northern team confirms acquisition,” Striker’s voice came back through the radio. “Package secure. Move to extraction.”
They rolled her onto a transport board. She felt the straps go across her chest and legs. The strain was still fighting. Her fingers moved against the board, slow and deliberate, finding no purchase. The man with the radio lifted his end of the board, and they carried her through the door.
The last thing she saw before they took her out of the home was her keys still hanging on the hook by the door.
Banner was two miles into the eastern marsh when the first emitter fired.
He felt it before he understood it. A pressure in his chest that had nothing to do with exertion, a frequency hitting his biology at a level below sound. He stopped walking and stood still, head down, one hand against a cypress trunk.
His monitoring equipment had flagged an energy signature forty minutes ago, directional, coming from the ridge line to the north. He’d moved east to put distance between himself and whatever was generating it. The signature had moved with him.
The second emitter fired.
The pressure doubled. Banner’s knees hit the ground. He put both hands in the mud and stayed there, breathing through it. He knew what was happening. He’d felt dampening technology before, crude versions of it, built by people who understood gamma science well enough to be dangerous. This was more refined. This was built by someone who had studied his biology specifically.
The third emitter fired.
Something shifted. The other side came up fast, faster than it usually came up, the biology surging against the dampening field the way it surges against everything that tries to contain it. Banner felt himself losing the boundary between one state and the other. He gripped the cypress root and held on.
“Don’t,” he said, to no one.
The fourth emitter fired.
The green came up through his hands first. The cypress root splintered. He was on his feet without deciding to stand, eight feet of rage and gamma biology staring into the dark marsh, chest heaving, the dampening field pressing in from four directions simultaneously.
The Hulk swung toward the nearest emitter signature and took three steps before his legs locked.
The field tightened. He dropped to one knee, head down, both fists in the mud. The marsh shook with the impact. He pushed against the field with everything the biology had, and the field held. He pushed harder. The ground cratered under his fists. Water flooded the depression around him.
He stayed there. Locked. Burning.
A containment team emerged from the tree line. Eight men in heavy gear, moving in a wide arc, keeping their distance. One of them raised a secondary emitter unit and fired it directly at the base of his skull.
The Hulk’s head dropped.
He fought it for eleven seconds. Banner counted them from somewhere far back, fragments coming through the way they always came through. Green. Pressure. Dark water rising around his knees.
Then nothing.
The marsh went quiet.
One of the containment team members stepped forward and checked the readings on his emitter unit. He keyed his radio.
“Eastern team confirms acquisition,” he said. “Package secure.”
Somewhere in the cypress stands a night bird called once and went silent.
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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