Hulk by Peter David Read Free Book Online Page A

behind him.
     
    Not for the first time, Bruce Krenzler had the oddest feeling that he was staring into the mirror at someone else’s face. Or perhaps it was something other than that. Yes. Yes, it felt as if he were studying his own face, but eyes other than his were gazing back at him with intensity and curiosity and . . . hatred.
    Why hatred?
    Why not?
    The query and the reply ran through his head, one stumbling over the other, and the impact of their collision nearly jolted him from his reverie. His mind split ever so slightly, and he saw himself from beyond the restrictions of his mortal shell, as if he were having an out-of-body experience. How ludicrous it would have seemed to someone on the outside looking in. Here he was, standing bare chested, a towel wrapped around his middle, staring into a mirror as if his own reflection were simply the most irresistible thing he’d ever laid eyes on. He would have come across to an observer as a world-class egomaniac. Or a narcissist.
Or an actor
, he added mentally, and tried to laugh at his little unvoiced jest. Oddly, he found he couldn’t.
    His straight black hair was still slicked down from his having showered minutes before, but his skin had dried. He studied his face more closely. His ears stuck out a bit on either side. He thought he looked like a reasonably intelligent individual, and then wondered whether that again wasn’t the consideration of someone who was too self-obsessed for his own good.
    Bruce looked a bit older than he felt. He was reasonably muscled. He didn’t get the chance to exercise all that often, because he was so busy in the lab. He used to have much more of a tan, but lately he’d been eating, sleeping, and breathing in the laboratory, and some days it seemed the only reason he came home was because Betty practically forced him to.
    Something flickered in his eyes when he thought of Betty. Again, he wasn’t sure what it was, and that bothered him a lot. He thought of the time when they’d been on their way up to the cabin, and Betty had gazed at him lovingly and spoke of how the eyes were the window to the soul. Bruce had laughed and said in an offhand manner, “Yes, but whose soul?” When Betty had asked him what that was supposed to mean, he didn’t have an explanation. He still didn’t.
    “My God, Bruce,” he said out loud. Although the shade was drawn in his bathroom, the light of dawn was visible through it. “Could you possibly waste time any more comprehensively than you already have?”
    He then wondered for some odd reason if he was going to respond to himself.
They always say talking to yourself is no big deal; it’s when you start replying that you’ve got a problem
.
    He didn’t reply, which provided at least some temporary degree of relief.
    Deciding that he’d been screwing around for far too long already, Bruce quickly lathered up his face and began to draw his razor across it. He did so with the same careful, methodical strokes he always used when attending to—well, just about anything, really. Betty had once said that with the slightest push, he could easily trip over into the realm of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I could never have OCD,” Bruce had assured her. “I’m too anal retentive.” That made Betty laugh, and the matter had been dropped. Not forgotten by Bruce, or Betty, truth to tell, but dropped nevertheless.
    The razor moved across his face. He watched it carefully. Gradually Bruce realized that there was something wrong with his reflection, but he couldn’t fathom what it might be. Finally he noticed it: He’d stopped blinking. He was so fixed on what he was doing that his eyes were just staring, like the orbs of a serpent. Or a madman.
    He blinked. It took an effort, but he did it. One blink, slow, methodical, and then open, and there were those eyes again, set in his relatively nondescript face, and
damn
, but it felt as if someone else was staring back.
    You’re losing it, Bruce.
    Yes.