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#5
AUG 10 |
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“Gray Moods”
“I will speak with Sersi NOW!”
Elvin Holliday ran a hand over his sweaty face and across his bald head as he grimaced at the loud voice of his traveling companion who was leaned half-over the counter of the Check-In Desk of the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The T-shirt Elvin had convinced him, barely, to wear was stretched taunt across his muscles and the brown beard of Hercules, Prince of Power, was in sharp contrast to the white of the shirt. If his piercing blue eyes could open any wider Elvin was certain they’d pop out of his sockets and attack the woman stammering on the other side of the counter.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t divulge guest information. I…”
“I know the harlot is within this faux-pyramid of debauchery, dear maiden,” Hercules said, his super-strong fingers beginning to mar the surface of the marble counter. “I can smell her lies and taste her deceit upon the very air. I have tasted the ambrosia of her womanly nature, which truly was wider than I had expected, and now she will never hide from mine godly senses.”
“Uh…oh boy, yeah,” Elvin said as he tried to interject into the altercation. “What my friend is saying is that we’re Avengers with S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance, and…uh, Sersi…is also an Avenger of a sort and we really need to find her for a very important matter.”
“Be that as it may,” the woman behind the counter, whose name tag read ‘Ashleigh’ in bubbly letters, shook her head, “I still cannot give away that information without…”
“Girl, you--”
“Step away from the counter and out the door and out of the city, Hercules,” a rough voice said from behind them and Elvin found that Ashleigh shivered just as much as he did in response to it. He turned and saw a man shorter than himself, but wider with skin as gray as slate beneath the blue pin-stripped suit he was wearing, which was stretched across his broad shoulders. Elvin recognized his face as that of the Hulk, but why the hell was he gray and small?
Hercules cast a look up at the mirrored photograph hanging above Ashleigh’s desk and snorted. “So, gone back to the gray period, eh Hulk? It wasn’t that impressive the first time and, oddly enough, less so again. Now, run along, I’ve business to attend to.”
“I don’t think so,” the Hulk said, taking his hat off and placing it on a side table. “I’m going to tell you one more time to get your barely-a-God ass outta this casino. Now.”
Hercules gritted his teeth and grimaced in extreme annoyance for a moment before he turned and leaned back against the counter, trying to remain calm. He and Elvin had been through a lot recently with the West Coast Avengers and the last thing he needed was this…at least not until after he had dealt with the treacherous Sersi*.
* See upcoming issues of WCA - MC
“Or?” he asked, crossing his arms.
“You can’t be this stupid,” the Gray Hulk said, his elongated brow shading his dark eyes as he clenched and unclenched his fists. “Even you can’t be that dumb.”
“I’ve fought monsters even you could not fathom, Tiny Hulk, not the least of which was your former ‘savage’ green side,” Hercules said, smiling. “He at least was of respectable height and had a unique air of menace. What are you going to do here, endanger all of these innocents as you try to punch me in the knee? Even you can’t be that…oh, you’re the Hulk, of COURSE you’re that dumb.”
“I want you to remember, when this is over, that you did this,” the Gray Hulk said as he took a step forward. “I asked nicely.”
Stepping between the two, Elvin raised his hands and plastered a wide smile on his face. “Hey, guys, lets think about this for just a…”
For the rest of his life Elvin would not be certain who had hit him, even though Hercules would protest vehemently every time that it had been the Hulk. All he knew was that one moment he was starting the speak and the next he was sitting up in the high-limit poker room of the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, which is located next door to the Luxor Casino, and had an incredible pain in his stomach. He also had a pile of poker chips and cards lying in his lap from the table that he’d crushed as he had been propelled through the wall of the casino and down onto the floor.
“Uh…can I get a marker chip?” he asked as he leapt up and ran toward the door.
Las Vegas Boulevard is normally one of the busiest roads in America, shuttling winners and losers, hookers and boozers, to and from one den of sin to another. There also was the occasional family doing the ‘West Coast’ vacation trip with the kids, hitting the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam on their way to California, usually with Mom indulging Dad’s desire to ‘see Las Vegas, that’s all, honest!’ for one night.
One such family was the Thompsons, who were currently sitting at a red light outside the Excalibur hotel heading North toward their room at the Treasure Island hotel. The kids were in the back ‘oohhing’ and ‘ahhhing’ at all the hotels, including the Luxor pyramid, the Excalibur’s fairy tale towers, and the roller coaster outside of the New York, New York. Beth looked at her husband and smiled, beginning to apologize for giving him a hard time about this idea…when a gray blob wearing a three-piece suit crashed through the back of the pick-up truck in front of them.
The only fortunate thing was that the Hulk’s impact didn’t cause an explosion, which was not so comforting to the driver of the truck, who got a face full of airbag and the back of his head smashed into the back of his seat hard enough to knock him unconscious. The cab of the truck, broken free as the Hulk’s torso severed the drive train of his truck, flipped backwards and the Thompson children’s jaws fell open in shock as their mother screamed as the cab flew directly toward their rented convertible…
However, only debris that caused only the barest of injuries impacted them because the man who was suddenly standing on the hood of the car had caught the cab of the truck, which pressed down on the car to such an extent that the front tires burst and the engine slammed into the asphalt. Hercules barely grunted at the impact as he carefully yet quickly sat the truck cab down and turned back to the Hulk…and right into a brutal uppercut that lifted the Olympian off of his feet and across the rest of the road to impact into the front driveway of the Tropicana hotel, digging a deep and jagged furrow into the concrete and tile drive.
Hercules slammed his hands into the ground to prevent impacting with a stretch limo parked at the door and flipped himself to his feet in just enough time to sidestep the descending Hulk, who sank up to his mid-thighs in the already partially dug hole Hercules made, temporarily pinning him. The double-handed pile-driving punch that impacted viciously with the top of his head was not unexpected, but the power behind the blow surprised the Gray Hulk as he sank to about mid-chest.
Hercules wasn’t pulling his punches this time.
“I have had ENOUGH, behemoth!” he screamed as he drew his foot up and stomped down on the Hulk’s face, snapping his nose and upper jaw as he pushed the Hulk completely through the pavement and into the limited sewer system of the desert town. “I will find Sersi and she will answer to me, and your interference will cease immediately!”
Hercules took a second to look back at the roadway and the humans who had been caught up in the initial blows, and regret crossed his mind as well as second thoughts. Had it really needed to come to this?
He didn’t have to consider the matter any longer as a tremendously strong hand clamped onto his ankle and jerked hard, pulling him into the sewer’s along with the Hulk, who was breathing hard through his shattered, yet healing, face, grayish-green blood splattering on Hercules’s face a split-second before the Hulk began hitting him.
The punches came hard and fast and Hercules was too disoriented to respond or protect himself. He felt his back driven into and through the underlying stone of Las Vegas as the Hulk jack-hammered him. Dirt and dust flew around them and with no leverage he could not do anything more than try to breathe. Had this continued, it was quite possible that the Hulk would have succeeded in beating him to death by asphyxiation.
But just as he was seeing darkness beginning to edge the stars out of his vision, they burst through the side wall of the lowest portion of the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino’s basement.
“Holy Mary Mother of God…”
The words slipped from Rage’s mouth as he exited the large hole in the side of the Luxor, pulling his mask over his face, and saw the trail of destruction before him. “Herc…no…”
He ran out into the standing-still traffic and saw the Thompson family standing around a truck cab leaning on its side due to the twisted metal where the back of the truck had once been. Rick Thompson was trying to get the door open to check on the driver of the truck, and Rage gently pushed him aside and pulled the door free easily, setting it aside as he carefully pulled the driver out and lay him on the street. Elvin didn’t know much about first aid, but even he could tell from the way the body lay, the unnatural twist of the neck, that it was too late.
The driver was dead.
“Look what you did!” someone in the crowd shouted. Rage looked up at a middle-aged woman who was pointing at him accusingly. “You killed him!”
“I—I just got here…” Rage said.
“Your kind!” someone else in the crowd yelled. Any other day Elvin, as a black man, may have taken that statement in a different light and had a different reaction. But as he looked at the crying Thompson children who were staring at the dead body, he knew they were right. Superhumans had done this, and Avengers at that, and for what? Retribution for what Sersi had done? A grudge match with a Hulk? This wasn’t what being an Avenger was supposed to be like…they were supposed to be the good guys, the ones who saved the lives, the ones who did what was right in the right way.
“I—I don’t know what’s going on,” he lied, the words like ashes in his mouth. “But I’ll stop it.” He stood and cringed inside when the crowd flinched back from him, clearing a path for him to sprint toward the Tropicana. He could see the damage to the ground and the hole, but it was the long swath of sinking ground extending northeast that made him clench his teeth in despair.
Where the Hulk had driven Hercules through the ground, it had caused a fissure that had destabilized everything above it, pulling cars, landscaping and even people into it unexpectedly, which left dozens in peril and caused numerous injuries. Rage leapt forward to help those he could even as he heard a terrible explosion.
He looked up from where he was lifting an SUV back up onto level ground when the back wall of the MGM casino crumbled to rubble.
Hercules twisted from beneath the Hulk as they landed, driving the Hulk face-first into the ground and rode him like a bodyboard for nearly a block before they began to slow. Jumping up, Hercules flipped in air and drove down with his elbow, driving it directly into the Hulk’s spine, causing him to cry out in anguish as his spine very nearly broke. While the Hulk was stunned, Hercules lifted him by his hair and drop-kicked him brutally, sending him skyrocketing towards a hotel construction site a block or so away, located behind the Paris hotel.
The Hulk grunted as he landed hard, sliding over the uneven ground before he stopped against a cement truck. He looked around briefly as he struggled to sit up and noticed the site was evacuated, the workers having the weekend off apparently, and the Hulk figured Hercules was learning from his mistakes and trying to save the soft humans. The Hulk wasn’t a murderer but found his compassion for the humans around him strangely lacking from even the last time he’d been in control.
He also found his abilities lacking. He remembered when he’d ruled this town with a gray-scaled fist, no one daring to say boo to him. Since his recent rebirth, he’d tried to remember that high, that power, but found it somehow lacking. He was still the meanest, toughest motherfucker around, but he felt incomplete and somehow…less? It couldn’t be because Banner was gone…could it?
Growling with rage and fury, he pushed that most unwanted thought from his mind and quickly rolled under the cement truck and briefly from Hercules’s view as the god came bounding up, rage clear on his face. The God knew he had to stop this madness now before any more innocents were hurt; he had tried his best as they plowed up and through the last casino to avoid the humans, even though it meant he took some terrible blows, but they’d destroyed floors and ceilings and walls and gambling machines…he had to fear that many had died.
“Come out, Hulk, and let us finish this madness before more are hurt!”
“I told you already, shithead, you did this!” the Hulk said as he came up from behind Hercules from behind a pile of steel beams, one of which he used as a baseball bat to drive Hercules into and through the cement truck’s cab. “Those deaths are on you!”
Hercules shrugged off the dizziness and sank his fingers into the barrel of the truck and slammed it down on the Hulk. “Nay! I was peaceful until you arrived, monstrosity. Had you left me alone I would have had my say with Sersi and none of this would have been necessary.” The barrel rose and descended twice more. “Your own guilt cannot be assuaged!” he screamed as he brought the crumpled cylinder down again.
A hand stopped it and knocked it aside as the Hulk came up with a handful of crushed concrete and hurled it into Hercules’s face, blinding and choking him. “Fine, I’m done with the who-did-what bullshit. Now it’s personal!”
Hercules didn’t see from where the blow came but as he flew into the partially built building, crushing several thick concrete pillars as he did, he tasted his own blood streaming from his nose and at least one eye socket, a rare and disconcerting feeling. Rarely had he ever been assaulted like this…in his mind he saw a half-dozen of the strongest mortals of Earth standing over him, the Masters of Evil having blindsided him in the bowels of Avengers Mansion during their dishonorable ‘siege’. They’d beaten him to the brink of death that day, a defeat and humbling that it had taken him years to recover from…though it still haunted his dreams.
It was with those unpleasant thoughts that the building collapsed upon Hercules.
The MGM was like a scene out of a terrorist’s wet dream.
The balconies surrounding the large main-level gambling floor were devastated, and the center of the floor was uprooted from where the two combatants had come bursting up from below. Rage saw scores of people lying on the floors with ghastly wounds, blood sprayed everywhere and many forms lay still, some with jackets or blankets covering them. Hotel security and medical staffs were tending to who they could, but the reality of the situation was devastating.
“HELP!” someone screamed suddenly, fracturing the growing despair in Elvin’s young heart. He sprinted around a destroyed statute and saw a floor waitress standing next to a collapsed bank of slot machines that had, until recently, been holding a brand new Camaro in the air as the spin-to-win prize. The collapsing stand had pushed the slot machines out like dominos and one had fallen across the legs of an older lady who lay next to an overturned wheelchair.
There was blood spreading out from beneath the machine.
Rage grasped the machine and began to toss it aside but the waitress suddenly was there, pushing down on the machine. “NO!”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What?”
“She’ll bleed out,” the waitress, a young Chinese girl, said, holding her hands out to him in a ‘don’t do anything’ motion.
“She’s bleeding now,” Elvin said, gesturing toward the blood.
“I know, but that’s ok,” the girl said, kneeling next to the woman, ripping at the bottom of her already-too-short dress. “Damage aside, the machine’s keeping her from spraying everywhere. We have to apply tunicates and wait for a paramedic to get here to cauterize the blood vessels when you lift that off of her.”
“I can’t stay,” Rage began to protest. “I have to stop them…”
“There’s a car on top of these machines, which I’m guessing from what you started to do that you can lift it, yes?” the girl said, freezing him with a look.
“Well, yeah…” he began.
“No one else can. If you leave, we’ll have to get a crane or something in here to move that, and that’ll take hours…hours she doesn’t have.” The girl smiled at the older woman, who was in and out of consciousness. “If you leave, she dies. If you stay, she might still die…but she’ll have a chance.”
Rage clenched his teeth in frustration and looked through the shattered wall and towards where the sounds of battle still could be heard. He then lowered his head and felt like bawling, because he knew he had no real choice. “Ok.”
“Thank you,” the girl said, smiling at him as she tied the knots. “My name’s Miri, by the way.”
“Rage,” he said, then shrugged when she looked at him. “It was a good idea at the time.”
“I doubt that,” Miri said.
Cracking his neck back into place and flexing his shoulders, the Gray Hulk approached the still settling building warily. He had no delusions about Hercules being dead or even seriously hindered by the building, and he wanted to make sure he was ready when he got up. “C’mon, already. I know you ain’t dead. Let me finish being the arrogance outta you and then you can get with leaving my city. I swear, you’re about the—”
Even expecting it, he didn’t see it coming. One second the scene was quiet, the next the rubble was exploding upward and quite possibly the maddest person this side of his green alter-ego was suddenly standing over the Hulk, the fury of an enraged God enough to even pause the Hulk. Something golden glinted in the light and then most of the bones in the left side of the Hulk’s face were pulverized and he was lifted off his feet and he was airborne. Like a human missile, the Hulk arced up and away from the construction site, peaked, and then crashed back down through the roof of the Las Vegas Convention Center, crashing completely through the building, which was strangely empty, and into the lowest level where the thick, reinforced concrete stopped his fall harshly.
He only had a few seconds to lay there, bleed and heal before Hercules landed next to him, his street clothes shredded and his warrior’s garb shining in the strangely bright light of the convention center. In all three of Hercules’s hands he held his golden Adamantine mace, which was suddenly a blur as he cracked down on the Hulk again, snapping his shoulder and flattening him into the floor. It was the most excruciating pain the Hulk had ever felt, at least in this form.
He waited for another strike but it didn’t come, nor did Hercules make any boasts. He pushed himself over, saying, “What, give up already? What is it with you ‘Gods’ anyway, always bringing a gun to a knife fight…why can’t anyone just settle things with fisticuffs anymore.”
“Hulk…still thy tongue.”
“Or what, you’ll hit me again?” The Hulk opened his eyes and saw Hercules had returned to just one body but was no longer looking at him. “What?” He rolled his head to the side and then whistled. “Oh.”
Standing around them were at least 100 agents of HYDRA, all pointing various energy weapons at them. A wider look at this apparently formerly secret bunker beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center showed it packed with pieces of technology, glass-enclosed laboratories, and corridors leading god-knows-where. All of this in his city, right under his nose…he could feel his rage beginning to bubble and suddenly his head was clear of the pain.
Except that meant his ears still worked. “As a protector for hire in this city, Tiny Hulk, you are in a class all to yourself.”
“It’s been a tough day,” Hulk said as the sound of 100 energy weapons cycling up began all around them. “But I’m starting to feel much better.”
Then the shooting started.
“I can’t stop the bleeding!” The paramedic’s hands were a blur as he attempted to work on the too-quickly bleeding stumps of the legs of the woman in front of him, but it wasn’t quickly enough. Having set the rubble aside, Rage stood with Miri and watched with a heavy heart. “I don’t know what—”
“Step aside,” a sultry voice said as a woman wearing a one-piece costume with long green boots and gloves slid up next to the paramedic and held her hands over the dying woman. Pale energy spread from Sersi’s hands to cover the woman’s legs, which ceased bleeding and, as they watched, began to heal in a pretty gory yet bloodless spectacle that, when finished, left the woman completely healed. When she woke up later, she’d find the bone disease that had put her in a wheelchair five years ago had also been healed.
“Sersi,” Rage said, stepping forward and grabbing her arm, jerking her around. “How dare you!”
The punch rocked him back on his heels and he let her go, struggling to recover himself. “Do not touch me, boy,” Sersi said, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She looked exhausted and drained and furious in her own right, but her Eternal-born strength was intact. “Haven’t you and Herakles done enough?”
“Us?!” Elvin said, feeling his namesake begin to take him over. “This is all your fault, lady! What about what you’ve done?”
“Let me show you what I’ve done, child!” Sersi said, flying forward and grasping him by the throat and flying across the casino to the hole in the wall Rage had entered through and forced him to look back the way they’d come.
His mouth fell open.
The damage wrought by the Hulk was repaired, at least superficially. The destroyed Luxor and Excalibur casinos were repaired, as was the road, the landscaping and even the cars from the road. It was almost as if nothing had happened at all.
Except that wasn’t true at all.
Standing on the side of the road and on the sidewalks were hundreds of traumatized people, including the family from the car who’d watched the man in the truck die, who was still lying dead on the side of the road. Elvin noticed scores of people sobbing, dozens still holding on to injured body parts, and more than one body that wasn’t moving at all. He realized that there had been other auto accidents behind the one he’d seen, and others had died. Several elderly people were among the dead, their hearts unable to cope with the sheer violence that had transpired.
“This helps and it doesn’t,” Sersi said, gesturing at her work. “I can fix the city and even heal many of the wounds, but I can’t alter all of their minds or make what happened here less real. I can’t stop the news footage or camera phones even now clogging the television, radio and Internet. And I can’t bring the dead back to life…not mortals, at any event. The terror and the fear and the memory of this will go on, child.”
“Why did you do it, Sersi? How could you betray us like that, let all that happen? You could have prevented all of this.” His anger spent, Rage slumped against the wall.
Sersi’s eyes flashed in anger, but it subsided as she picked Rage up and flew away, using her transmutational powers to repair the casino as they went. “I did what I had to do, Rage. I had to preserve the time stream. Whatever happened had to happen, there was no other alternative. Had I intervened earlier, our world would have been irrevocably changed. How many lives would that have cost? Even an Eternal could not figure that out.”
“You could have warned us…we could have worked out a better way. But to just cast his life away like that…to let that happen to him…it’s inhumanly cruel. And what about the lives that decision has cost, over the last few years and in the years to come?”
“The one constant in life is death, child. People will always die, most in horrific ways. I chose to preserve what we knew had happened instead of blindly acting and hoping things would work out better. It has been my centuries of experience that very rarely does the unknown turn our better.”
Rage was quiet for a long time, and finally dropped it. “We’ve got to stop them, Sersi. We have to end this. The rest can be sorted out then.”
“I will do what I can, but I cannot catch up to Hercules and fix his damage at the same time. The lives already injured are my immediate need; you must stop any more from happening.”
“How?” Elvin said even as he noticed Sersi’s hand begin to glow…
Hercules’s mace sang through the air and sank deeply into a mini-tank that had been rolled out to challenge him, the high-yield explosive shells having battered him painfully until he’d managed to set his feet and his teeth and grind through the blasts and get within striking distance. Removing his mace, Herc pulled the top off of the ruined tank and pulled the driver out, who was bleeding from a bad gash to his head but was in no immediate threat, and threw him into three of his comrades who were approaching, bowling them all over and into unconsciousness.
Four very large HYDRA agents dove onto Hercules and tried to bring him down, but with a powerful flex he threw them aside and then hurled his mace across the room and through a strange energy cannon that two of his foes had been powering up, aimed at the Hulk’s back. The men managed to get clear from the explosion, which devastated the upper section of the room and reflected the mace back into the middle of the room. A HYDRA agent dove for it, hoping to use it to turn the tide against these two monsters who were slaughtering them, but he dislocated his shoulder trying to jerk the mace from the ground, not anticipating the phenomenal weight.
It was almost a relief when the gray hand casually backhanded him across the room and grasped the mace. The Hulk lifted it, testing the weight and found it impressive, before casually tossing it back to Hercules. “I owed you one,” he said, flicking his head at the cannon. He looked around the room at the scattered bodies and grinned. “I think they give up.”
“You killed too many,” Hercules said, gritting his teeth. “They were of no consequence; they did not have to die.”
“They attacked me,” the Hulk said, grinning. “Kinda like you did.”
“You are an abomination,” Hercules said. “You should not even be alive. Perhaps I should end you here and now after all.”
“Bring it.”
“STOP!”
Both turned to see Rage finish appearing in the middle of the room, confused by his appearance at first. Rage was also surprised, stopping to take in the scene around him. “Holy shit! HYDRA?!”
Hercules took a quick sniff. “Sersi…”
That got Rage’s attention. “Yeah, Sersi! She’s trying to save lives right now, which is more than you two are doing. Your fight has killed people, Hercules! What do you think you’re doing?!”
“I…”
“I thought you were better than that, man. You were my idol… And you,” he said, looking at the Hulk, unable to keep looking at Hercules without breaking down. “You’re a worse menace than ever.”
The Hulk started to say something back when an image on a screen that was still working caught his attention. He walked over and activated the audio and they listened to a news report that described the scene of destruction in the city, even noting the repairs Sersi had performed. The images on the screen were riveting to them all: dozens of crying people, mostly children, covered in blood, and shots of the damage they’d wrought before Sersi had arrived.
Then they gave a death toll…47 people were dead.
“Zeus forgive me…” Hercules said, his shoulders slumping.
“You came here to take vengeance on Sersi for her actions, for the deaths she caused,” Rage said, pulling his mask off. “You’re no better than she is.” He looked at the Hulk. “None of us are. This is on us.”
“Elvin, please, you have to believe me…”
“I don’t,” he said, turning his back. “I don’t believe in you anymore, either.”
No one said anything for a while before the Hulk set his shoulders, apparently having made a decision. He moved away and began shifting through the rubble, pulling various electronic components and a funky-looking console with lots of gizmos attached to it. He worked at it furiously and then smiled at his work…before he smashed it with one downward punch.
Before the confused Avengers could ask him just what the hell he was doing, spotlights flooded the room and dozens of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents flooded the room, shouting for them to freeze and don’t move. There was a lot of commotion and angry shouts, and both Hercules and Rage kept their eyes on the Hulk, but he didn’t move a muscle.
Finally, Dum-Dum Dugan came in and walked directly up to Hercules and Rage. The anger on his face could have rivaled that of the Green Hulk at his most savage. Surprisingly, calmly, Dugan said, “Explain, if you can.”
Hercules seemed to come to a decision and set his shoulders. “It is all my…”
“Ah, no, actually, it’s not,” the Gray Hulk interjected. All eyes turned to him and he grinned. “HYDRA did it.”
Rage’s mouth fell open and Hercules’s eyes narrowed, but it was Dugan who spoke. “What?”
The Hulk gestured at the shattered machinery at his feet. “Mind control. HYDRA had apparently been working on a way to control gamma-spawned creatures and set up here to attack me when I returned. I’m afraid I attacked Hercules as a test on their behalf and caused all of this. Unfortunately for them, the signal from their machine lured me here, directing the fight this way, which as you can see didn’t work out so well for them. Given the rage the beating Hercules gave me raised, I was able to break free and assist in stopping HYDRA, destroying their machine.”
No one in the room spoke, but Elvin was shaking his head furiously. Dugan, again, was the first one to speak. “Bullshit.”
“Test the memory records of the machine,” the Hulk said. “Damaged as they are, I have no doubt you’ll find my DNA and brainwaves and even…” his teeth gritted, “…Banner’s. Tell me I’m wrong.” He grinned sinisterly.
Dugan stepped closer to the Hulk and stared at him without fear. Prior to a few weeks ago, he might have felt a twinge uncomfortable standing this close to the most violent of Banner’s visages…but after what had happened, he had no concern. “I will test it. If you’re lying, you’ll wish it was Thunderbolt still chasing you around. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” the Gray Hulk said, chuckling. “Good luck with that.”
Dugan turned and walked back to his men and Rage turned quickly on the Hulk. “You motherfucker! You can’t just walk away from this! You…”
“Yes, he can, Elvin,” Hercules said quietly. When Elvin turned back, Hercules said, “This would destroy the Avengers. Those deaths, that damage…even with Sersi trying to absolve her own vile soul…it would be considered an act of terrorism. Faith in the Avengers will disappear overnight.”
“You Olympians have a lot of trouble keeping believers, don’cha?” the Hulk said.
Hercules barely rose to the taunt; his soul was battered. “Leave, beast. You’ve spun your tale and though it costs me my honor I will go along with it. But be warned…if there ever comes another meeting between us, on that day you will die.”
“Looking forward to it,” the Gray Hulk said as he knelt then leapt out of the hole in the roof of the convention center.
“I don’t believe it,” Elvin said, his world shattered. “You’re covering it up. We don’t’ have a frig’n clue why HYDRA was here! You’re letting him win.”
“Nay, Elvin,” Hercules said. “No one has won anything. But the cost of the truth…”
“And you blamed Sersi,” Elvin said, stepping close, his dark face nearly purple with despair. “You’re a hundred times worse. Don’t ever speak to me again. Tell Jack I quit.”
“Rage, wait…” Hercules tried as Elvin turned and stalked toward the door.
“Go to Hades,” the boy said, never stopping.
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The End...
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