Startling Stories: Banner (2001 series) #4

Bruce Banner is in a small town; after stealing some clothing from a clothesline and begging for some money for a sandwich, he sits on a park bench, eating and looking at the account of the gas station “accident” in a discarded newspaper. Then he notices the pigeons are dropping from the sky. And then Banner passes out, along with everyone in town. The army moves in and carries Bruce Banner away….

A battered Doc Samson shows General Ross the captive Bruce Banner in a glass containment cell, with gas pumped in to keep him in a state of euphoria. Ross surprises Samson by introducing a neurosurgeon to give Banner a lobotomy; Samson balks at destroying such a valuable brain but Ross tells him that the matter is settled. Samson and the happy Banner chat: Samson explains that the secret weapon was to attach a tracking device to Hulk so that they tracked Banner to the small town and dropped an airborne sedative. Banner surprises Samson by admitting that the lobotomy sounds like a good idea. Ross really has no choice. Banner reveals that after his accident they kept him on drugs so that he could function but one day they stopped his meds and took him out in a plane and dropped him on an enemy city and Hulk destroyed the place. The gamma bomb wasn’t the next stage in warfare, Hulk was. Banner admits he doesn’t want a lobotomy, he wants to die. So Samson cuts the oxygen feed to the cell, leaving just the gas on. In the dark, Banner’s heartbeat grows quieter…then stops….

A few moments later, the heartbeat resumes. Louder. Much louder….