Any time I talk to you is a bad time. He felt a distant pounding behind his eyes, and rubbed them.
“No, Colonel, not at all. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a report here regarding your data from the animal studies. There appear to be discrepancies in your results.”
The pounding increased. It looked to be the start of a long, long night.
love
It was difficult to differentiate Christmas from any other time of the year out in the desert, but the Banners did their level best, as did everyone else in the neighborhood. That wasn’t particularly surprising since there was a great deal of common ground for all the residents. Everyone either worked at Desert Base or else was a family member of someone who worked there. The town didn’t even have a specific name as such. It had just sprung up in proximity to the base out of necessity.
The small, artificial Christmas tree, the same one the Banners pulled out every year, glittered in the corner. Bruce, now three years old, was gallivanting around the room astride a hobbyhorse while Edith took films of his pure childish joy with a Super 8 camera.
David, for his part, was feeling more relaxed than he had in a long time. It had been ages since Ross had expressed any suspicions about, or even overt interest in, his work. His newly relaxed attitude had spread to how he treated his wife and son, and they had been grateful for the change. He watched Bruce jump around a bit more, and then reached into his briefcase and extracted two small, floppy cloth dolls. It was hard to tell what the bizarre-looking animals were supposed to be, specifically. They had long ears and whiskers, but the feet were closer to cat paws than they were to rabbit feet. They were somewhat mutated-looking, really, which was probably what drew Banner to them when he’d spotted them in the Base Exchange, looking rather shabby and forgotten on an upper shelf and marked down to fifty cents each.
“Bruce,” he called, and the boy turned and looked. His face immediately lit up with an ear-to-ear smile, and he dropped the hobbyhorse as if it had leprosy and bolted toward the two dolls. He jumped up and down, David holding them just out of the boy’s reach in amusement. He finally relented and gave them to him when Edith good-naturedly chided him about “tormenting the boy.”
And then he and his son played with the stuffed toys.
Just . . . played.
He didn’t conduct any experiments on him. He didn’t seek out any mutagenic properties. He didn’t try to find ways to excuse himself so he could make notations in his journals. He. Just. Played.
For one evening, David Banner had a taste of the nice, ordinary life he could have had and which, he knew on a fundamental level, would never be his. And because of that, as the boy laughed with that pure, unbridled, unrestrained laughter that only children can command, David Banner discovered there were tears running down his cheeks. Tears in mourning for that which he would never have, and that which he could never be.
“It’s my fault . . . it’s all my fault,” he whispered.
It was a horrifying discovery for David Banner to make, that he loved his son. That was a development that simply didn’t fit into the overall plan. And he resolved that that night, that very night, he had to reestablish the status quo.
Edith had been invited over to a friend’s house to make a fuss over their new baby. In point of fact, both Edith and David had been invited, but he had begged off, citing a sudden headache, and insisted that Edith go on without him. As soon as she was gone, with Bruce settled down for the night, David went into his study and pulled out a syringe and a test tube.
“Need blood samples,” he muttered. “It’s the only thing that will do. Have to study the mutagenic properties. Absolutely the only thing that will do.”
He padded upstairs and opened the door to Bruce’s bedroom. There was the boy, in his pajamas, smiling and bouncing the two floppy dolls around without a care in the world.
David smiled and said, “Bruce, I need you to do something. Give me your arm.”
The boy obediently extended his right arm. He had no reason to doubt, no reason to have any suspicions. He blinked in surprise when his father gripped his wrist firmly . . . and gasped when a hypodermic was driven into his arm, whereupon he let out a shriek like the damned consigned to the abyss.
“David! What the hell are you doing?”
He yanked the syringe clear, spattering drops of blood, and Bruce was howling in hurt and fury as Edith stood in the doorway. Perhaps she’d forgotten something, perhaps she’d gotten bored quickly, perhaps she’d been seized with some massive fatigue. It was impossible to say, and in the final analysis, it didn’t matter. Like a thief in the night he froze there, and between Edith’s yelling and the boy’s howling, he had no idea where to look first.
And then Edith went dead white and pointed, her finger trembling. David turned to see what she was looking at.
It had been several years since the famed “tendinitis” incident, and Edith had more or less managed to file away the distant and unwanted memory; perhaps, she had even chalked it up to an hallucination. But what she was seeing now was far, far worse than the previous episode.
As Bruce shrieked in protest, his feet began to swell, his arms distorted, and the entire right side of his head bulged out. Then they receded but other things bubbled and rippled, his skin undulating as if a swarm of bugs were making their way beneath the surface and spreading throughout his body. Bruce seemed oblivious to
