There was only electric lighting in the Church for the Wayward Soul, inside and out, for Vegas was a city of light. But Father Monroe was much more acclimated to its darkness. The Church was tucked in the corner of a shopping center off the beaten path, its retired patron there to spend the remains of his life helping those who most needed it. More oft then not, his schedule was free, as so few admitted they needed help even in these times where it was most necessary. And that very fact was why he was here in the dead of night, having been summoned outside of usual hours to his confessional booth. Once again in relative darkness, once again a vague shape on the other side of the screen. Who it was and what Father Monroe knew about them did not matter in this moment between them and what they had to say to God.
“I-I’m sorry, Father, I’ve never done this before.”“It’s far from difficult,” Monroe rasped out. “Make the Sign of the Cross, and then repeat after me. ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.’”
“Forgive me Father, for I have s-sinned. I saw my f-father today, my blood father, for the first time in a long time...” He went silent. For a few moments Monroe only heard breathing. It was not from nervousness; it was the kind one made when they slipping away, as though desperate for something they weren’t sure they’d be able to get again.
“I’m sorry.”“Take your time. This is what I’m here for.”
There was a rattle, a slight alleviation of relief. His voice came again, the words weak with pain but firm with resolve to say them.
“I saw my father today, and for the second time, he told me...he told me that the Devil is inside of me. And now I say, in front of God, that...I think he’s right.”
OUTPOST 36 – CADMUS PROJECT FACILITY
PRESENT DAY
“And that’s T-minus 600 seconds, everybody!” A slight murmur of excitement came from the crowd, certainly over capacity limit for the testing chamber. Men and women (predominately men) stood or sat about, all faced towards a large screen with a display of the nearby outdoor desert, a bright moon visible on this clear eve. Most of the Material Sciences division was here, as were a good number from other departments. Cadmus officially started a mere two months ago, and it was still in the process of scouting out new talent to fill out its seemingly endless array of labyrinthine chambers. While levels of security existed based on the nature of the project, the Gamma Beam experiment was in development for years before its Team Leader was hired onto Cadmus, and after several weeks, it was about to engage its first test. They were here not to see Dr. Bruce Banner’s success be realized, but to see the vision of Cadmus come to fruition: this place where all of the hopes and ambitions for these geniuses in so many fields to become reality. The Gamma Beam was only not the hope of Bruce, in this moment, it was the hope of Cadmus.
But Bruce turned away from the crowd. Of split mind, a part of him wished he could preform the experiment in small scale back at Michigan State, but he also knew it would be a dead end. The value of Cadmus was great in so many ways, but an offhanded remark from some of his peers elsewhere claiming a sensation reminiscent of the film Oppenheimer had his stomach tumbling. He felt sweat starting to bead. Leaning down, he pulled up his glasses, he massaged the bridge of his nose with his fingers, staying such until a voice ran across his shoulders.
“It’s really the opposite of Oppenheimer when you get down to it.” Jumping up, Bruce turned to see a familiar face standing nearby and watching a large screen, Betty’s face framed in auburn locks. She turned to face him with a light smile.
“They’ll get it. Everyone here is going to have the chance to change the world in their own way. You just got the chance first.”Aiming to give a stiff nod and a smile in response, she turned back to the screen, leaving Bruce to nod his head without purpose. Turning back to his console, he ran a set of knuckles across his forehead, feeling the fool for his social inability while another murmur rumbled through the crowd. A few were pointing at the monitor. Bruce looked to see a shape, among the stone, faint in the night. “Is someone out there?”
Bruce might as well have be doused in water for how fast he shot up, leaning in to get a closer look. Whatever it was, it moved unevenly, practically stumbling. Looking back to the room, he met eyes with Betty.
“Are they going to be alright?”Bruce’s heart sank as the pressure set in. Though partly concealed by the stone and aimed outwards, the Gamma Beam emission would go miles into the sky, its unique properties allowing a tunneling focus that Bruce believed would be able to disable the systems of any constructed nuclear warhead, even those protected against electromagnetic interference, allowing it to fall without detonation in wastelands well before they reached their target. The end of nuclear war as it was known. But this was the first time it was being tested: it’s ultimate range was only projected and they needed proper measurements to deduce efficacy. This room was well protected, but the residual radiation, though short lived, would not leave anyone close by unharmed, to put it lightly.
Slipping a string off of his neck, wielding the key it was strung to, he looked over to his assistant, Glenn Talbot, still in his chair looking for guidance.
“We have to stop the experiment.”“Sit back down you little control freak. Security can handle it.” Standing a full head taller than Bruce, decked out in his Air Force attire, gray mustache and dark eyes glaring down at the mild-mannered scientist, General Ross puffed out his chest as the room went completely quiet.
Looking back to the screen, Bruce scoffed,
“Yeah, they’ve been keeping a handle on it so far. We have 5 minutes until anyone out there is dead.”“And if you stop this, this whole project is dead until we get the materials to resume. Too fast a change in temperature means we have to rebuild half the damn thing! You said as much yourself. And until it is resumed– if, I mean, and that’s a big fucking if, you’ll be working on other teams with your thumb up you ass, fucking Boy Genius. Sit back down.”Hands already in motion, Bruce kept his eyes locked with Ross, slapping the key in hand against Ross’s chest.
“Fine then. If I’m not allowed to stop the experiment, then you can. You outrank me.” Ross’s yells of protest only meeting his deaf ears, Bruce stormed off, running to the nearby maintenance exit where he would reach the darkness.
Panting, Bruce made it to the top of the short staircase, throwing open a small service hatch. Scrambling up into the chill of the desert. Only the faint edges of moon-bathed stone and sand could be parsed as his eyes slowly adjusted. A particularly odd formation stood out to him, where the Gamma Beam Emitter rested amongst nature, the camera streaming to the room a dozen or so meters away hidden to his sight.
“HEEEEEY!” Bruce called out into the night.
“What the fuck?” Came a slight slur of speech from the darkness. There was a sound of glass slapping into the dirt. Bruce ran after it, and there was a cry of fright. Bruce ascertained that it couldn’t have been someone older than 18 at most. He fell and Bruce was on them in moments, trying to drag him up.
“Did you follow me out here you fucking sicko?”“You’re next to a military base and if you- gah, don’t stop struggling you’re going to die!” As Bruce struggled, he retched from the scent of alcohol, his skin crawling at the recognition.
“I don’t care! Why do you think I came here?”Bruce growled,
“If you really don’t care then the least you could do is stop struggling!” Bruce looked back at the Gamma Beam Emitter. Reading his internal clock, he knew the discharge wouldn’t quite have triggered yet, but he was only praying that if Ross didn’t see this wayward child as a person, the least he could do was see Bruce as one. But that was only a prayer.
“That fucker,” Ross hissed, storming after Bruce as the slam of the door closing echoed past him.
“Dad!” flowed a voice that was like water to his clay heart.
His own tone shifting to a softer one, Ross still had as much stern edge as could muster while he demanded,
“Don’t call me that at work!”“What are you going to do? Follow him? Or let him die?”Ross’s nostrils flared as he bit back his real feelings on the matter before taking the key in hand to the console. Nodding to Talbot, who withdrew a similar key, the two both slotted them in at the same time. It was what, at the time of its conception, felt like a standard security matter for anything involving radioactive materials that could erupt in chaos at a slight mishandling, but as the pair turned the keys to a swift countdown, a faint ‘click’ being heard loudly from Talbot’s side, the General looked over to see him looking in abject horror, half the key in hand, the other stuck in the lock.
“You shitlicking-” Looking to the rest of the room, Ross roared,
“We need a set of pliers NOW.”On screen, Bruce’s faint white coat could be seen as he looked around at the camera as he struggled with the intruder. Security was nowhere in sight, and someone was going to have Hell to pay for letting all of this happen. There was a bustling as a few stepped forward with multitools on their keychains, the desk getting crowded as they tried to right the wrong of Talbot’s panic borne haste, the man hovering about as though he there was anything he could do. The countdown was at less then five seconds. At this point, an emergency stop would ruin the Ray irreparably, if it even would stop. Betty started for the door, and Ross followed his beating heart right to her, even though there was no chance anything could be done.
“Bruce!” she shouted as he pulled her into her arms, the spot he most wanted her most to be at when they both knew it was where she least wanted to be, especially at that moment. The steadily rising mechanical noises hit a zenith, and the screen flashed with a bright light for but a moment. A starstruck crowd watched Bruce leap to the youth, tackling him down before they both fell and were still. Betty tried to pull herself from Ross’s grasp but he couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her see what he witnessed.
The death of Bruce Banner was not so dramatic to the world of the living in front of the screen. There was no kaboom, the residual radiation was undetectable to human senses. Those watching shifted from horror to mystification as the two bodies were still. And yet, knowing that the radiation was cooking him from the inside, Ross saw the white labcoat flapping in the wind, and knew that his quiet death was haunting enough.
“Turn it off.” His command was met with vacant stares, so he demanded again,
“We don’t need it any more. Turn it off!” One of Bruce’s team members found the remote and switched it off, Ross finally releasing Betty. She stumbled from his grasp and slowly reached a chair, freed by its occupant jumping to his feet during the crisis. For a moment, her lip trembled, but then she saw her father, and she scowled, holding it to him. She would thank him for it later, Ross knew, still protecting her as much as she wanted to be free from it. And he would continue to do so as he was obligated to do.
“The Gamma residue has an infamously low retention rate, considering how powerful it is. By morning, we’ll be able to recover the bodies with a few men in protective gear. Brace yourselves folks, because this is going to be a shitshow.”“What if they’re not dead?” asked Talbot, his voice a small prayer, his face white as a sheet.
Ross gave a long, slow, exhale.
“Then they’ll be wanting for it.”
Bruce didn’t know why he did it. Radiation cared little for a bit of flesh and bone. If it penetrated into his body and mutilated his cells one by one then the young vagabond would be meeting the same fate in due time. If there was any effect it would simply be that he would die a slower and more agonizing death. And all Bruce had accomplished was dying a useless death. A trolley problem where he’d opted to jump onto the tracks instead. But even as he came to that realization, he recognized that he was still thinking, therefore he ought to Be.
He came to regret that election to Be, for as soon as he found himself once again in existence, it was not an enviable one. Where he was once dry he was now drenched, surrounded in water like slime. His eyes peeled open and he saw a face, rotted and desiccated with stringy hair but yelling in silence full of wroth. Pushing against the dirt of the riverbed he broke the water, his bare flesh meeting stale, stagnant air. His ears were met with the tearing of water and screams and cries. A fist found his flesh, and another. He recoiled, trying to dodge but there were only bodies of all shapes and sizes, all covered in blood and bruise and grime, all screaming, all striking out and biting and kicking. He pushed himself away, standing to look for a way out, the road of the river stretching endlessly under a brown sky choked with clouds like smoke. Crags of black rock held true to either side like the sides of a valley. There was no boatman, and yet like one views their own dream and know the context within it as though it was true, he knew himself to be on the River Styx, afloat in Hell itself.
Another strike met him and laid him out, Bruce once again sinking. He scrambled, his own anger flashing as he found footing and struck back. Pushing past, he splashed his way to the nearest riverbank, pushing and punching what felt like every step of the way. He hated to hurt others but when he suffered a blow, his first instinct to retreat would only push him back into the water where he would suffer the pain of drowning endlessly until he surfaced again where he would be struck, and striking back was the only way to bear the pain. He didn’t know where anyone was going. Some seemed to be pushing upstream, others down. It felt so obvious to go to the riverbank that Bruce knew there had to be something wrong, but until he discovered it he wouldn’t be able to rest. So he pushed and smashed and kept going until his hands reached the black stone. He climbed up, seeking reprieve from the muck. A few tried to pull him back but he kicked them away. His bruised flesh scrambled on the stone and it sliced him, the blood offering him no warmth. He slipped and fell, skin shaved from his hand and he knew it would never heal, the filthy water burning his cuts. Those damned in the waters singled him out like monkeys dragging him from the ladder by throwing sharp stones that stung his flesh. Until they didn’t. Fear gripping them, they shuffled backwards, watching something. Bruce heard a breathing above him, and a rare droplet of warm water found his flesh. He turned to look up. A mass of muscle and brown scales bore over him, a long body with a row of sharp teeth in a mouth that seemed to take up half of it’s body starting to sprawl open, a green light like death shimmering through. Bruce tried to run but the blades of stone aimed to hack him to shreds. The devil was upon him, and the suffering that had feigned endlessness was now over.
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