Chapter One - All The Rage

The creature was driven by rage. Al Calavicci needed no one to tell him this. Nor did he need anyone to bring up its obvious corollary : Things were all kaka. While crouched in a barely safe corner of the main project area, he prayed to God above that the rifle he hurriedly loaded with a tranquilizer dart would do the trick.

"If you don't take him out, baby, then we got nothing. Nothing at all."

To most on the staff, the howling, incoherent, perhaps even psychotic thing wore Sam Beckett's face. To Al, it appeared as another man, one who looked familiar. Perhaps he could have placed the man's face, given time and clarity. But until the lunatic, smashing and growling with arms extended in what looked like an absurd flexing motion, was taken down, they were out of time and short on clear thinking.

"Tina! Make very damned sure everyone is clear when I make this shot. I hadda load the contents of five trank-darts into this one!"

The underrated woman who both respected and regretted Al's devotion to Beth did as she was asked. Dr. Beeks was abnormally shaken by what she saw, and poor Gooshie seemed a few grades above catatonic. For his own part, Al felt twinges of feelings that hadn't resurfaced since his regression therapy over his time as a prisoner in North Vietnam. But far from making him helpless, these reminders only served to make Al want to bring the psycho down all the more.

"Just turn your back to me, nut-burger. Just let me plant this beauty straight in your spinal column."

It was a sword that cut both ways. Sam leaping into a paraplegic didn't cost him his legs, and a psycho leaping into Sam did not become a rational, loving genius. Like a pencil in the water, time bent the leapee's image to look like Sam's, but the same person remained underneath, presuming this attacker was a person. Surveying the damage, Al thought Sam must have leaped into a particularly nasty asylum for the criminally insane. Ziggy and the Accelerator were safe, but a lot of equipment had not been so lucky, and while Al didn't know what all of it did, at least some of it looked hard to replace.

"There you are, pal. Yeah, that's it. Just flex, and leave yourself wide open for...Donna?!"

Doctor Donna Eleese-Beckett was an anomaly in Al's eyes. There was sometimes the oddest feeling that she hadn't always been there, when of course she always had. Al and Beth had returned Sam's favor and gotten the nervous bride to the church on time. A quick visit to the grave of the father she had barely reconciled with before his loss had done the trick.

"Donna, you're blocking my clear shot."

"Forget it, Al. This is Sam's image destroying Sam's work. I won't allow any further violation of either one."

The only thing more insane than Donna attempting to talk the psycho down was the fact that he-it?-seemed to be responding. Like a simian fascinated by a new and unexpected thing, the eyes of the Sam-alike followed Donna's upraised arms and seemed entranced by her even tones.

"That's it. We're not your enemies. There's nothing and no one here to harm you. There's no one that wants to."

"Speak for yourself, Doctor."

Al was not relaxing his sniper's stance. What Donna was doing was stupid, and oh-so typically do-gooder. She was Sam's perfect match, no doubt. He damned her for her foolish risk, as he sometimes damned her for her perfect tolerance of Sam's Swiss-Cheesed affairs of the Leap. No one was that good and pure. No one cried while watching the award-winning documentaries made by the psychic reporter who may have been Sam's other great love. No one treated Doctor Sammy Jo Fuller like a long-lost sister, knowing what they knew about who her father was.

"No one else."

He also damned her for the fact that he loved her almost as much as he loved Sam. The authority the often-arrogant Ziggy tried to assert sometimes just naturally flowed to the founders of the project. If their word and their desires weren't law, they were the next best thing. Yet seeing Donna in such obvious peril reminded Al of old idle fantasies in which a well-placed CIA agent took out Ho Chi Minh in the mid-1950's.

"Just lie back. We are your friends."

Al nearly dropped his rifle when he saw the man, who to everyone but himself was Sam's mirror image, sit down against the wall as though exhausted. Just as astonishingly, Donna took and squeezed his hand. It was then that Admiral Calavicci remembered an important, often forgotten fact about Ho Chi Minh. In his early days, he had actually sought America as an ally. If the label he had worn had not been socialist or communist, how different could history have been?

"No, wait...I promise I'll be back."

Donna pulled her hand away in time, just as the perhaps hopelessly confused lunatic rose up yet again. She backed away and fell down, though not hard enough to injure her, so far as could be seen. This was just enough for Al to do what he had to. For the world was not a nice neat place, and sometimes the labels were there for a very damned good reason. The dart struck near the attacker's spine, both insuring that he could not pull it out and that it would be delivered quickly to the brain, that, as Jim Morrison so aptly put it, must have been squirming like a toad. Just not any more. Despite Vietnam, not to mention having watched the entire run of Friday The 13thhfilms with his girls, Al did what he called ‘the big stupid' and kicked the fallen man. He did not move or stir. Al thanked God again, this time that adrenalin had a down side once fully spent.

"Everyone take a hand in moving him back to the waiting area. I know he looks like Sam, but put that out of your minds and I mean way the hell out!"

Gooshie pointed at the now-still escapee as Tina helped a flustered Donna up and to a chair. She seemed chastened by the near-miss, enough so that Al let any choice words he had for his best friend's wife slip by. All along, Al had seen the dark-haired man as he was, though there was still a twist awaiting him even in that. Now though, Al was no longer alone in seeing the leapee in his true aspect and likeness.

"Hey, Admiral? Why is he changing from being Doctor Beckett?"

"Geez. Goosh, describe him to me."

He did, then so did Dr. Beeks, Tina, and a pair of security guards who, unlike Talbot, were not on their way out. One and all, they told Al of watching Sam Beckett's image shimmer and fade suddenly, to be slowly replaced by the face and form of the man Al had seen all along.

"But I'm the only one who can see him for who he is. And that's only because I trans-leaped with Sam that one time."

While various minds began to ponder this supposed impossibility, one of their very best gasped so loudly, it was nearly a scream. Donna Eleese-Beckett had looked at the morphed escapee, and then she looked quite pale. Verbeena Beeks tried to calm her.

"Donna? You look like you just saw a ghost."

Donna nodded, and pointed at the unconscious man being led away back to the waiting area.

"Him. Didn't we establish his basic era of extraction as the late 80's to very early 90's?"

Al nodded. Experience had allowed Ziggy to gain broad information just from the initial scans, although nailing down specifics still meant physically talking with Sam and his counterpart.

"Somewhere in there. Why?"

Donna just shook her head. The impossible was at violent war with the merely improbable.

"Then we're all seeing a ghost. Al, I know that man. His name is Doctor David Bruce Banner. He was one of my college instructors. I say was, because David Banner died in 1977!"

Now it was Al's turn to gasp. He now knew from where he knew this man. He also knew that, had things gone differently, the man he had taken down could have easily been the one holding the handlink, the lifeline of the leaper. He said one word.

"Banner?"

AUGUST 15TH, 1991

The hell had passed. Sam Beckett now walked the Earth once again. But the pain in his body raised the obvious question. Where had he been, and who had sent him away? The rage he had previously felt was not the filthy, soot-like, lung-choking rage of people like the hateful Oswald. Yet though it had been cleaner, it had still been enough to displace Sam without a fight, and apparently to ruin his wardrobe. Previous leaps had shown him certain patterns. When he was disheveled, alone and without his own bearings or Al to guide him, there were three types of people that quickly found him. They were the very helpful, the very bad, and the law.

"Hey, you! Freeze."

Bingo-bango-bongo, as Al would doubtless say, were he there. Were policemen drawn to time travelers, Sam wondered? All he had to do was sport so much as a missing button, and they arrived from miles around. At least in those leaps he could remember.

"Boy, that wildman tagged you good, didn't he?"

Sam sighed in happy appreciation. This man was a professional. His look was one of concern.

"Yeah, I guess he did. I think I still have my money, Officer. Your town have a thrift shop?"

In fact, Deputy Stan Kirby did better than that, securing Sam some cheap clothes and shoes, not to mention coffee and a sandwich, all in exchange for a promise not to loiter. It was a promise Sam was more than happy to keep. For in the ruined pockets of his leapee's pants, he found a scrawled set of words. They contained the name of a town, a town that was the unknown man's destination. It was in many respects also Sam's ultimate destination.

"Stallion's Gate, New Mexico."

In hours, he had, despite the heat, moved across the state border into New Mexico. Only when resting did he realize that his disorientation and general rush had somehow precluded him from again looking at the mirrored face he now wore. But he had seen it when he first arrived, so he tried to envision it. This proved easier to do than he would have thought, and he just as easily attached a name to that face.

"David Banner?"

Before his brain had the wherewithal to process this impossibility, Sam felt not rage but panic. It was a reminder from the visiting part of his Swiss-cheesed memories that, whenever his rage was released, he must move even at night, or even during the day in the desert.

"The wildman. The giant. The green, hulking giant."

Sam got up and started walking again. For when the giant appeared, so did the reporter. He was pursued by an investigative reporter.

"Mister McGee, don't make me angry."

McGee. Jack McGee. Sam knew that name from his own life, though just where it came into play was not for him to recall just then. But one thing he did know, though not from his own life, was why the reporter was after him. Jack McGee knew a secret. Not the biggest secret, but one that was big enough.

"He knows its me. He knows that I–that I am the creature. That I turn into the creature."

No. David Banner, somehow alive fourteen years after his funeral, turned into the creature. Sam didn't. Sam Beckett didn't turn into the monster, what McGee called The Hulk. Except that now he did. Having leaped into his old friend, Sam now also shared his curse.

"Just what the hell did you get us into, David?"

Next- Chapter 2 - Driven By An Unknown Force