In the factory changing room, Bruce heaved deep breaths, his back against the wall. He listened to the drip of the showers as he tried to lower his pulse rate, slowly easing it down from a very dangerous 187 toward a safer 100 beats per minute.

A noise on the factory floor startled him, and his pulse jumped again. It was the bully calling. “Gringo!”

He couldn’t stay in the locker room, waiting to be found. He crept out amid the machinery, pausing every few steps to listen for footsteps. He could hear the tough guys whispering, drunkenly following him. Their leader would want Bruce’s head on a stick for interfering with his pursuit of Martina—and for the embarrassment of having the manager yell at them like schoolchildren. If a fight became inevitable, so would...

No. No monster today.

Bruce threaded through the banks of bottling machines, getting closer to the far side of the factory, where he could see an exit sign dimly glowing green. Under it was a steel door. He pushed gently on the latch and slid out the door.

The leader was waiting for him. He laughed and shoved Bruce back into the factory. Bruce stumbled backward and then turned to run, but the other tough guys were standing behind him. They gathered around Bruce and began to shove and kick him against the machines.

Bruce caught one of them with an elbow and got free for a moment, but the others pinned him against the wall.

“Please,” Bruce begged, “don’t do this.” His pulse hit 140 beats per minute.

The leader pulled off Bruce’s backpack and slapped his face. “What?” the leader sneered. He flung the backpack away.

“No! Not the computer!” Bruce said. He was still gasping for breath, and his pulse was starting to get out of his control.

“Not so tough now, huh? Try those fancy moves again. Come on, we all want to see.” He gave Bruce a hard push, and Bruce fell back onto a knobby piece of equipment, crying out in agony.

The commandos raced into the factory and heard the sounds of pain and laughter. Blonsky signaled for his men to split up, and he slid on his night-vision goggles. He could see the heat signatures of a cluster of men, glowing neon green in the darkness.

The four guys continued to bully Bruce with two of them pinning him against a labeling machine.

“Please stop,” cried Bruce. His pulse climbed to 150 beats per minute. “Me. Angry. Very bad.”

“You bad angry?” the leader replied. “I bad angry!”

Behind him, Bruce spotted a quick motion in the shadows. A black-clad figure crouched in the dim light. Panic flooded his body, and Bruce’s pulse shot up to 175, climbing rapidly to 190...then higher...

“You don’t understand!” he yelled. “Something really bad is going to happen here!”

“Yeah,” the leader agreed, “something bad is going to happen.”

A commando’s night-vision scope alighted on Bruce’s face, then dropped to sight on his neck.

Bruce saw a gleaming tranquilizer gun’s muzzle, peeking out from the shadows. He lunged to the side, pulling the tough guys with him. The leader punched Bruce in the gut, and Bruce crumpled.

Blonsky fired the tranq gun, missing Bruce but nailing one of the tough guys in the neck.

Bruce gasped as his pulse leaped past two hundred, his heart throbbing.

Blonsky peered through his night-vision goggles at the cluster of green men. One of the shapes dropped where the tranq had hit him; another was already huddled on the floor. Maybe Banner was a fighter after all, he thought. Then a strange blast of green light flared. All the commandos’ Geiger counters spiked.

In the van, Ross saw the radiation spike and bolted forward in his chair.

Blonsky ripped off his night-vision goggles, then signaled for the other commandos to hold position. He watched as the tough guys, the two who were still upright, nervously backed away.

Blonsky couldn’t clearly see what was happening, but it looked like Bruce was being twisted into strange shapes. Then Bruce let out an anguished scream, and a strange tearing sound filled the factory. “Anybody else seeing this?” asked one of the other commandos.

All of them were. Where Bruce had been lying on the ground, groaning in pain, now there was...something else.

“Shut up!” the leader hissed, and he launched a kick at Bruce’s warping body. That was the worst mistake of his life. His foot met something insanely hard. Almost too fast to see, the leader was launched upward by his leg, across the expanse of the factory. He crashed through an office window and hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the sheet metal. The sounds were nearly drowned out by an inhuman howl from the creature in the shadows.

When the roar faded, everyone in the factory fell silent.

Then, yelling, the remaining pair of bullies bolted from the shadows. An enormous, muscular arm reached out after one of them. He was dragged screaming into the darkness, and a moment later, his body was flung back out into the open, sprawled on the factory floor.

The other one ran right past Blonsky and the other commandos like they weren’t even there, disappearing into the night.

“We’ve got a bogey of some kind,” one of the commandos said. “Please advise.”

“That is the target!” Ross roared. “Use every tranq you’ve got! Do it now!”

Two of the soldiers advanced toward where the giant lurked between enormous juice tanks. They rapidly fired their tranquilizer darts into the darkness. The projectiles fell to the concrete floor, their needles bent as if they’d hit a wall.

A massive foot stepped out of the shadows and crushed the darts. The beast charged, heaving the bottling tanks out of the way with unbelievable strength. The creature then stomped toward the commandos.

Soldiers whipped out their submachine guns. “Go live!” one screeched. Bottles exploded around the factory, and the bullets ricocheted off the roof. The commandos pulled together into a tight formation, moving through the factory and searching for their target.

Blonsky and his partner ducked behind a bank of machinery. The body of one commando landed nearby, hitting an on switch. The machinery roared to life, trundling broken bottles down the belt with loud clanks and bright blinking lights.

Between another set of vast tanks, Blonsky saw that the creature was on the move. His partner opened fire, but the tanks prevented a clear shot.

Blonsky spotted a set of stairs to the catwalks above. He raced for it while his partner backed up two other commandos firing at the creature. They could see they were hitting it, but the bullets were bouncing off, ricocheting into machinery and pinging to the ground. The creature didn’t even slow down.

Up on the catwalk, Blonsky peered down as the creature disappeared into a cloud of steam in an open middle area. His partner pulled an antipersonnel grenade off his belt and hurled it into the steam. The soldiers ducked for cover.

The grenade hit something and detonated, rocking the factory. The beast’s massive form was outlined by the explosion, but then steam covered him again.

The soliders waited. No way anyone was walking away from that, Blonsky thought.

Then the pounding of heavy feet shook the floor. A roar and sickening sound of tearing steel echoed through the room. Out of the steam, a gargantuan metal tank lurched forward, like a gigantic sled, pushed by the giant. It clipped the supports of the catwalk under Blonsky and smashed into the soldiers on the ground. The commandos screamed as they got caught in the heaving machinery. It smashed into the far wall of the factory, rupturing in a fountain of green guarana soda.

In the van, the soldiers’ cameras blinked off, the monitors turning black. All Sparr and Ross could hear over the microphones was moaning.

Inside the factory, Blonsky sprinted along the catwalk above the creature, looking for a clean shot. He got one when he reached the corner. His bullets raked across the beast’s shoulder blades.

Enraged, the creature spun around, swatting the bullets out of the air with his giant hands.

Blonsky reloaded his weapon, his eyes remaining locked on his target. But then he froze in awe as the beast stepped out fully from the shadows.

He was humanoid but the size of three men. Four, maybe. And green. His skin looked like it was stretched to the limit over unbelievable masses of muscle. The creature glared up at him with rage, then snarled and flexed his shoulders, grabbing a forklift and hurling it easily up at Blonsky like he was throwing a baseball.

Blonsky dove to the side as the ma-chinery crashed into the catwalk where he’d just been standing. The catwalk lurched and Blonsky hung on desperately.

The creature grabbed a steel block of machinery off the assembly line and hurled it. This projectile wasn’t aimed at Blonsky. With an earsplitting crash, it smashed a gaping hole through the wall of the factory.

“No!” General Ross shouted. He was not going to come this close and then miss Bruce. He pulled the van’s door open and dashed outside.

“Sir, no!” Sparr shouted.

Ross had just reached the side of the bottling plant when the wall exploded in front of him. He ducked around a corner for cover, then peered around the edge.

The giant stepped out of the hole, his eyes glinting as he looked around. Then he took off running.

Ross watched, his chest heaving, as the beast barreled away into the night. cTX6v1FaIbwcp/Z+1gkVMawiOsV9AsqG28+N7ugC0Snw/WWoBEc8/Jqp2eGGIZbO