CHAPTER 10

Seventeen days after the incident in the Racinho Favela bottling plant, Bruce arrived at Culver University. After so long out of the country, a commonplace sight like a college campus looked surprisingly foreign to him.

He strode over to a big stone building—the Maynard Hall of Physical Sciences—and watched the students and faculty enter and exit the hall. During a quiet moment, Bruce climbed up the stairs and peered through the entrance’s window.

There was a checkpoint with a metal detector and a guard. Bruce knew he shouldn’t be heading that way at all.

On the directory board, he saw a listing for Cellular Biology—Dr. Elizabeth Ross. Just seeing her name gave him chills, and Bruce hurried away.

He didn’t go far. He sat on a bench, waiting.

Finally two women walked out of the building.

Bruce froze as he got his first look at Betty Ross in years. She was as beautiful as he remembered, although her hair was longer and bangs covered her forehead.

He watched as Betty got coffee with her friend from a cart. The women sat at a small table in the sunshine, then said good-bye after their break was over.

Bruce had an overwhelming urge to run to her, but before he could move, a man approached her with a smile. Betty smiled back, and they embraced. Bruce felt like he’d been punched in the stomach as they linked arms and walked away together.

She’d moved on. She’d forgotten him. Maybe she even thought he was dead.

Bruce walked to the edge of campus and spent the rest of the day wandering the city thinking of what he could do next. After nightfall, hungry and alone, he had an idea. He headed for one of his favorite off-campus hangouts, Stanley’s Pizza. Stan, a thickset man in his early sixties, was an old friend. Just as Stan flipped over the sign on the door to CLOSED, Bruce knocked. Stan jumped like he’d seen a ghost and then opened the door.

The two old friends settled down to catch up at a table in a private back room. Stan brought pasta with his special sauce, and Bruce scarfed it down. He hadn’t been eating much since he left Brazil.

“There’ve been so many rumors—” Stan started.

Bruce smiled. “Stan, I give you my word,” he said, “whatever you’ve heard about me isn’t true.”

Stan patted Bruce’s leg. “Oh, I know it. I always knew it. But you know how I felt about you two… Have you talked to—”

“No,” Bruce replied, ducking his head sadly. “She doesn’t know I’m here. She’s with somebody?”

“His name’s Leonard,” Stan supplied. “He’s a head shrink. They say one of the best. But a really nice guy. Reminds me of you a little… Sorry.” Stan clapped his hands once, changing the subject. “Bruce, what can I do to help you?”

“I could use a place to stay for a few nights,” Bruce said.

Stan opened his arms wide. “You can have the spare room upstairs.”

“That’d be so great,” Bruce said. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d slept in a bed. “And there is, um… there is one other thing.”

The next evening, Bruce set off on a bicycle, dressed in a Stanley’s Pizza Parlor uniform, which included a T-shirt, hat, and sunglasses. After a few stops to deliver pizzas, he biked over to Maynard Hall and carried two pizzas up to the muscular guard at the lobby’s security desk.

“Hey, pal, I got a delivery on five,” Bruce told the guard.

The guard looked confused. “I don’t think there’s anybody up there.”

Bruce let out a groan. “Oh man, I’m gonna be in so much trouble if I don’t collect. You gotta let me try.”

The guard didn’t look impressed. “Tell you what,” Bruce said. “I got an extra medium. Take it on the house.”

The guard looked at the free pizza and thought about it, but just for a second. Then he nodded toward the elevators, letting Bruce through the checkpoint.

“You are the man,” Bruce said, and got moving.

As he headed down the hallway toward his old lab, Bruce suddenly started to feel nervous. This was the place where the experiment had ruined his life. But maybe that could change. Maybe now it could be where he put his life back on track.

The setup had changed in the last five years. Bruce could see through the glass walls around the lab, that instead of physics equipment, it now held computer terminals, with large supercomputer arrays along the walls. A graduate student sat at a terminal, staring with bleary eyes.

Bruce opened the door. “Those jerks in radiation called this in and then split,” he remarked, pointing at the pizza. “You want it?”

The graduate student smiled. “Whoever you are, you are my new personal hero.”

Bruce glanced around at all the computers. “Hey,” he asked, “you mind if I jump online for a second?”

“Totally, no problem,” the student replied, already opening the pizza box.

“Righteous,” Bruce said. He sat down at a terminal across from the student and quickly accessed the university’s main system, which requested a username and password.

Bruce typed in “Dr. Elizabeth Ross” for the username and then was momentarily stumped for Betty’s password. He tried “bettylovesbruce,” which was rejected. Then he tried another old password of hers: “Cells_Unite!”

Bingo! He quickly looked for records of his experiment, but searching under both “USMD Research Protocol 456-72328” and “Gamma Pulse” yielded no results. Neither did a search on his own name.

He tried a few more searches before recognizing that no trace of the experiment existed at all in the system. The military must have had the records deleted completely! Bruce sagged in his chair, defeated. They had erased him. Officially, he didn’t exist… but that wasn’t going to stop General Ross from hunting him down. To Ross, all that mattered was the gamma powers the experiment had given Bruce.

The only thing he could think to do was take advantage of this brief moment of Internet access and get in touch with Mr. Blue. Quickly, Bruce started up the software that would let him run the encrypted chat program.

B: Mr. Green! How goes the search?

G: The data is gone.

B: Without it… I cannot help.

There was a pause, then Mr. Blue added:

B: So what now?

G: I’ve got to keep moving.

With a sigh, Bruce realized that there was nothing left for him in that lab. It was time to go.