Red Hulk finds
himself seconds away from death, killed by Omegex, and he is reliving his past
as General Thunderbolt Ross, courtesy of Zero/One. He sees his endless,
fruitless pursuit of the Hulk and his daughter’s love for Bruce Banner in what
Zero/One calls cyclical loss as she cannot understand why Red Hulk would want
to return to an inferior state of humanity. She continues to study him as he
demands to be sent back to his death. They board her ship as she must replenish
her energy and her assistant Jacob Feinman hands Rulk a note saying that he
must convince her that humanity matters or else she will destroy most of the
population. She has judged him a failure; he tells her to look back father and
she returns them to his family’s farm. They review his birth with a father who,
as a career officer, was rarely home so Thad was raised by his mother. They
jump to his childhood interest in the military, too, his mother’s affair with a
local man who acted as father to the boy, the death of his pal Henry’s father
in a plane crash (seen at the beginning of issue #39) leading to his interest
in aviation, his learning to fly and purchase of an old airplane, explained as
following in Henry’s father’s footsteps since Henry, who had suffered a
breakdown, could not. Then comes his marriage to Karen and the birth of Betty,
then Karen’s death from cancer. The gamma experiment that created the Hulk,
Ross’ ironic training of Reginald Fortean to hunt the Hulk and now he is sworn
to kill Red Hulk, and implanted nano-mines in Rulk’s brain to explode when he
returned to his human form. Zero/One alters them, allowing them to be expelled
from Rulk’s body naturally. Through this all, Zero/One maintains that the Red
Hulk body is superior to Ross’ human body. And then Omegex locates them in the
field out of time. Rulk asks Zero/One for help but she declines as she is in no
danger. Uravo the Watcher arrives with Annie to observe with Uravo promising to
keep Annie safe in the battle. As Omegex overpowers Rulk, Uatu the Watcher also
shows up to see the end. Rulk determines that if he is going to die he will die
as a man, and he resumes his Thaddeus Ross form. Omegex stands for a minute…and
then dissolves into nothing. Uatu explains that when Omegex could no longer
detect Red Hulk, it assumed it had destroyed its target and therefore shut
down. Ross points out to Zero/One that he defeated his enemy by becoming human
but this does not change her conclusions. As she boards her ship, Jacob Feinman
hands Annie his journal and they leave. Uatu privately tells Uravo that he
engineered this all to destroy Omegex when it reappeared; if his plan had
failed, only one death, Red Hulk’s, would have occurred but all went well. And
he defends his interference in history as ensuring that the human race would
continue to give him something to watch….