4

Bruce Banner had gotten pretty good at running away and hiding. Once he’d tried it in Brazil and stayed gone for years. Then he’d been forced to come back, when General Ross tried to make him into a weapon. Bruce carried gamma radiation in his blood, and it gave him the power and the curse of changing into the unstoppable green Hulk whenever he lost control of his emotions. The farther he stayed away from the army, and from S.H.I.E.L.D., the more likely he could live a normal life.

Now he was working with the poorest of the poor in a shantytown inn on the outskirts of Calcutta. The need here was endless, and doctors were few and far between. Bruce did what he could to combat the spread of disease—and also to atone for the damage he’d done when he changed into the Hulk. He had come a long way since then, but he knew the monster always lurked within him, and he had to do anything necessary to keep it from getting out. That’s what drove him, a desire to be a force for good in the world, despite the Hulk always trying to get out.

Late at night, he was ministering to a sick family, attempting to keep their fevers down without access to advanced medicine, when he heard a commotion at the door.“There is sickness here! Go!”the family’s mother said.

Bruce looked and saw a little girl at the door.“You’re a doctor?”She spoke English, but repeated the question in Hindi.“My father’s sick, and he’s not waking up! He has a fever, and he’s moaning! But his eyes won’t open!”

“Slow down,”Bruce said in Hindi. He’d gotten pretty good at picking up languages in his travels.

“My father,”she said, begging.

“Like them?”he asked, pointing at the sick children on the bed. They coughed and stirred in their fever.

The little girl just held out one hand with money in it, doubtless everything her family could raise.“Please,”she said.

Bruce went with her, ducking away when a jeep full of soldiers passed. She led him into another house, then climbed through a window inside it and disappeared. He stopped on the porch, looking in through the open windows. The house was empty.

A prank? A trap of some kind? Bruce looked around, thinking out loud.“Should have gotten paid up front, Banner,”he said.

Then he heard a voice from the shadows where he had just looked.“You know, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked quite a place to settle.”

Bruce turned and saw a young woman coming out of the house. She didn’t look dressed for a fight. She wore a black dress with a shawl over it and carried no visible weapons.

Bruce didn’t know what she wanted, but he figured it wasn’t good. She wouldn’t have decoyed him all the way out here to the edge of town just to say hello. Anyway, he figured he might as well continue the conversation while he found out.“Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,”he said.

“Then what is it? Yoga?”

He didn’t bother to answer that.“You brought me to the edge of the city,”he said.“Smart. I assume the whole place is surrounded?”

“Just you and me.”

“And your actress buddy? Is she a spy, too? They start that young?”

She looked him dead in the eye and said,“I did.”

“Who are you?”

“Natasha Romanoff.”

“Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff ? Because that’s not going to work out for everyone.”

“No, of course not. I’m here on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D.”Bruce sighed. Some things you just couldn’t outrun, he thought.“How did they find me?”

“We never lost you, Doctor. We just kept our distance. Even helped keep some other interested parties off your scent.”

“Why?”

“Nick Fury seems to trust you. But now we need you to come in.”

“What if I say no?”

“I’ll persuade you.”

“And what if the other guys says no?”

“You’ve been more than a year without an incident,”she said.“I don’t think you want to break that streak.”

“Well, I don’t get what I want every time,”Bruce said, trying not to sound bitter.

Agent Romanoff got more businesslike and direct.“Doctor, we’re facing a potential global catastrophe,”she said.

“Well, those I actively try to avoid.”

She pulled up an image on her phone and put it down on a low table.“This is the Tesseract. It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet.”

He came to look at the image.“What does Fury want me to do—swallow it?”

“He wants you to find it. It’s been taken. It emits a gamma signature that’s too weak for us to trace. There’s no one that knows gamma radiation like you do.”

Bruce almost thought she must be joking with him. Gamma radiation had destroyed his life, taken away everything he’d ever had ... and now they wanted to exploit how much he knew about it?

“If there was, that’s where I’d be,”Romanoff added.

“So Fury isn’t after the monster,”Bruce said. He wanted to be sure what he was getting into.

“Not that he’s told me.”

“And he tells you everything?”

“Talk to Fury. He needs you on this.”

“He’s going to put me in a cage?”

“No one’s going to put you in a—”

“Stop lying to me!”he roared, slamming his hands on the table. In an eyeblink, she was up and across the room, a gun leveled at Bruce’s head.

He felt a little bad when he saw how much he’d terrified her. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents didn’t scare easily, but if she’d read Bruce’s file, she would have known what he could do. No wonder she was scared. Bruce backed off and gave her a smile.“I’m sorry. That was mean. I just wanted to see what you’d do.”What he really wanted was to cut through the song and dance, find out what Nick Fury really wanted and decide whether or not he would go along with it.“Why don’t we do this the easy way, where you don’t use that and the other guy doesn’t make a mess,”he said.“Okay? Natasha?”

She lowered the gun.“Stand down,”she said, apparently to no one.“We’re good here.”

Outside, Bruce heard the sound of guns being lowered and hammers uncocked.“Just you and me,”he said, quoting Natasha’s words back at her to show he knew she was lying. He knew she wouldn’t have come alone. Bruce Banner was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.