Bruce Banner sat straight up out of the nightmare, sweaty, his pulse racing. He reached over to the metronome he kept by his bed and put one hand on it, listening to its steady tick, tick, tick at sixty beats per minute. He tried to slow his pulse down to that rhythm. When he had gotten it under control, he stopped the metronome.

He woke up like that nearly every day even though he kept the metronome going all night to give his sleeping mind a rhythm. So far he’d been able to keep himself from getting out of control for five months. That’s how long it had been since the monster had gotten out.

He’d also been in Porto Verde, Brazil, for about that long, hiding out in the jumble of shacks and apartment buildings known as a favela. It was where the poor people lived, and the people who wanted to disappear. Bruce was both.

He got up and made breakfast, then watched some TV with a Portuguese-English dictionary by his side. He was trying to learn the language and making decent progress. His dog, who he called Cachorro because it was the Brazilian Portuguese word for “dog,” sat at his side begging.

Bruce looked up a word. He asked Cachorro if he was hungry in Portuguese. Cachorro’s ears pricked up. Bruce gave him his breakfast plate to lick.

Then he washed up and headed for his daily aikido practice. He’d never been a fighter, but aikido was good for teaching self-discipline, and since the...event...back at Culver University, Bruce knew he needed all the self-discipline he could get.

In the aikido gym, his instructor ran him through exercises and drills, ending up with a series of falls that had Bruce breathing hard. He knew his pulse was up over one hundred beats per minute. That wasn’t dangerous territory, but it was a little too fast.

His instructor waved at him to sit. Then he sat opposite Bruce, both of them cross-legged. “Let’s work on your breathing,” he said in Portuguese.

Bruce nodded.

“Here...emotions,” his instructor said, placing a palm flat on his chest. “Fear no good. So emotion...” He touched his belly and huffed out short breaths. His belly pushed in with each one.

Bruce started doing it, too. Together they practiced breathing from the belly, using the diaphragm. “When you control your emotions, you control your body,” his instructor said. “Now we’ll control your pulse.”

He slapped Bruce in the face, hard. Bruce held himself back from responding, but he felt his pulse quicken. Slap. His face stung and he felt the rage building. Bruce glanced down at his watch. His pulse was 146.

Too high.

He breathed. He did exactly what his instructor had showed, letting the breath flow deep into his belly and come back out. Slowly his pulse came back down to a more normal rate.

“You’re learning,” his instructor said.

Then it was time to go to work at the bottling plant, making sure thousands of bottles of guarana soda got where they were supposed to go every day. The beans at the Brazilian guarana plant had three times as much caffeine as coffee. It definitely wasn’t something Bruce was going to drink. Not when it was so important to keep his pulse down. He didn’t even drink tea or eat chocolate anymore because they contained caffeine.

He filed into the plant along with the other day laborers, finding a locker in the dingy, poorly lit locker room between the main gate and the factory floor. As Bruce put his bag in his locker, someone banged into him hard from behind. He looked up and saw one of the factory’s tough guys cruising on down the hall. Most of his coworkers were just regular people, but there were a few bullies in every crowd. Bruce stood out because he wasn’t Brazilian, so that made him a target.

If only the bully knew what Bruce could do to him...

No.

He shrugged it off and went to work.

His job was basically to do a bunch of different jobs. He distributed the mail, loaded pallets of soda for shipping, and kept track of where everything was going. Today they were putting together a shipment headed to the United States, specifically the Milwaukee and Chicago areas.

First on the agenda today was dis-tributing the mail. Bruce brought things to a couple dozen people throughout the bottling plant, including a young woman named Martina, who was friendly to him and occasionally helped him with the language. She also lived two floors below him at the favela.

The snap of an electrical short came from the catwalk up above the conveyor belts that snaked all over the factory floor, carrying bottles to be filled and capped. The upper level was where the managers watched and kept track of everything. They also stopped and started the different lines to make sure everything stayed coordinated.

“Breakdown, breakdown,” the owner called from up on the catwalk. He beckoned for Bruce, who had fixed many of the factory’s outdated machines already during his time there. Bruce went up to the catwalk and saw that the control switch operating the main filling conveyor belt had shorted out. He put his glasses on to look at the wiring. After stripping the wires so they had better contact and winding them around the button anchors again, he tried it out.

The conveyor belt kicked into motion again. “Okay,” Bruce said. “I can make it work for a while, but you need new...” He trailed off, not knowing the Portuguese word for “resistors.”

“I need a new factory,” the owner said. “Five months you’ve been helping me out like this. You’re too smart for day labor. Let me put you on the payroll.”

Bruce smiled and shrugged as he put the cover back on the control switch. He glanced over at the manager again—and that’s when he cut his thumb on a sharp edge of the switch cover.

It wasn’t a terrible cut, but it bled quickly. Droplets fell through the catwalk onto the moving conveyor belt below.

“No, no, no, shut that off!” Bruce shouted. “Turn it off!” He was already running, trying to track the exact spot where the blood had fallen. “Watch out!” he said as he pushed past one of his surprised coworkers.

The manager stopped the conveyor belt, and Bruce ran along the line until he found the spot where the blood drops had fallen. Carefully he wiped them up with a rag from his pocket, scrubbing hard until all the blood was gone. Then he closed the cut with a little tube of Super Glue he kept in the same pocket with the rag. It was his emergency-cut kit and he was never without it because Bruce knew how dangerous his blood could be.

“Okay,” he sighed. The line started up again.

That had been close, Bruce thought. He hoped he’d gotten all the blood.

His next job was to wrap up the pallet of just-filled bottles for shipping. He put the address label on the shrink-wrap and headed off for lunch.

On his way, he saw the guy who had bumped into him in the locker room. Now he was giving Martina a hard time, cornering her and touching her face, telling her how pretty she was. His friends watched and made rude comments.

Bruce hesitated. He didn’t want to cause trouble, but he couldn’t just stand there and let Martina get harassed. He took a few steps toward her.

“Martina,” he called out in Portuguese. “Want to come have lunch with me?”

“Get lost, gringo,” the leader snapped at Bruce.

Bruce kept his eyes on Martina. “How about it?”

The group leader stuck his arm out in front of Bruce. “I said beat it,” he said with a growl. “You want a problem?”

Bruce raised his hands. “No problem,” he said.

“Too late,” the guy said. He shoved Bruce in the chest. His friends muscled in closer to Bruce on all sides.

Bruce’s pulse began to race. He glanced down at the pulse monitor on his wrist—it was climbing fast, past 100 beats per minute, heading for 120. “Okay, listen,” he told them in his broken Portuguese. “Don’t make me hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m—” Bruce bit his lip, realizing he’d mixed up a word. “No, wait...that’s not right...”

The leader looked puzzled for a moment. Then, thinking Bruce was mocking him, he shoved Bruce back, causing another spike in Bruce’s pulse. Things might have really gone wrong, but the manager saw the ruckus and shouted down from the catwalk.

“Get moving! Get out of here!”

The bully and his friends pushed past, laughing like there was no big deal, but from the looks on their faces, Bruce knew he’d be a fool to be caught alone with them.

As soon as they were gone, Martina let out a big sigh and thanked Bruce. He smiled at her, carefully controlling his breathing, and then went on to eat his lunch. UCAlEKErlZees9jXVj54spYtfK09hJTSECnkUrXJ2LiI6vtEYqQAhT7/pok4UVYF