Ghost.
It was called the ‘walking ghost phase’.
This was the term for when the human body has taken in so much acute radiation poisoning, that it only has a matter of hours left to function - it just doesn’t know it’s dead yet.
Patients walk around, happily and merrily, the picture of perfect health, except behind the scenes, their blood cells are dying. Altered on a fundamental level from radiation overdose, they also stop making more.
Eventually, they become delirious, pass into a coma, and die a certain and slow death, as their irradiated bodies refuse to continue, interrupted on the atomic scale.
A house of cards with a marble thrown in the centre, the lattice begins to deconstruct. Destabilise.
David Bruce Banner knew all of this, of course. ‘Bruce’ to his friends, or what few friends he had, he had been studying radiation all his life, the benefits, the drawbacks, the takeaways. He’d spent many long nights researching what the power of the nucleus could do for humanity, and now he was experiencing it first hand.
He had been put in quarantine - to avoid spreading his radiation to others. Anyone who came within 20 feet of him would be hit with a dose of radiation, just a small fraction of the amount Bruce had endured himself, that would slowly break apart their cells, and give a more than one hundred percent chance of cancer.
Radiation was funny like that. Exposure was calculated in percentages - this much radiation gave you a 5.5% chance of some form of cancer, the next amount an 11% chance. More than eighteen units gave you a more than 100% chance.
Of course, exposure of the whole body to a sum of these units in one burst had more acute effects. Five of them at once meant certain death within 14 days. Eight of them was 99 times the lethal dose a human being could endure.
Bruce had just been exposed to over one hundred and fifteen of them. His body just didn’t know it was dead yet.
These units had a name, of course. A name Bruce knew by heart, as one of the names of the great radiation pioneers of the 20th century.
The unit was known as a ‘gray.’