Help! I'm Housing a Hero

Chapter 14

     I deposited myself on the bed and wondered how much damage the radiation had done to my body. It wasn’t like I had a radiation sensor anywhere telling me that I was about to explode. I couldn‘t help but wonder what Frank meant when he said that radiation wasn’t a problem for me. All I knew that whatever he injected me with was far from protecting me from radiation. It was to knock me out. If he was that sinister I wondered if Mum even knew. She seemed oblivious to his work even when I was in the x-ray room banging on the door. Maybe she was too in love with him to realize that he was a monster.

     I flipped on the television and attempted to watch anything that wasn’t news but every other channel had someone being interviewed for destruction or their opinions on the events. I stopped on one channel that had people talking about Hero. There was one man in particular that seemed to be Hero’s doctor of sorts. They were eagerly interviewing him and for some reason it was interesting.

     “So what you are saying is that Hero is not a human?” The newscaster asked.

     “Well- he is a human in the sense of some things but he is not completely human, no. He is not from Earth. He is a remarkable creature from an unknown planet. Even he would not tell me about it.”

     “What makes you think he is telling the truth? Couldn’t he have formed these powers by accident?”

     “He has no reason to lie, and someone as unexplainable as that all you have to go on are the facts that he tells.”

     “So you don’t think that he was bitten by a radioactive beetle or maybe took a bath in radioactive waste?”

     “I am sorry to say those presumptions are only to be found in comic books. He isn’t the only hero we have had on Earth. I know that there have been others, some just wanted to stop by to examine the world, others came to escape.”

     “Are you trying to tell us that there are aliens that came to Earth just to protect us?”

     “Oh no, not in the slightest. In fact, I believe that they came here for other reasons such as observing, studying, and experimenting. When I asked Hero why he was here he did not seem to know anything about his past or the reasons for his Earthly visit. I tried all sorts of things such a hypnotism and memory exercises but he just can’t remember.”

     “Are there other aliens here now or do they come in shifts?”

     “I do not pretend to know everything about these aliens. I have only ever encountered about five and two of those were not in person.”

     “How do you go about finding these aliens?”

     “They sort of find me.”

     “So an alien superhero comes from somewhere amidst the planets and lands on Earth just to find one person, you, and then they go away?”

     “It isn’t like that- I don’t know why they come to me. I think that mostly it is by accident or because of the work I do.”

     “And what work is that?”

     “I am just a scientist.”

     “These stories are terribly interesting, and may need some debating but let’s move on to the past week.” The newswoman did not sound anywhere near convinced of his story. It seemed the more he explained the more impossible she thought his story was. I didn’t get the feeling that he was lying, though I did think he might have been a bit loony. None the less, I was interested and I wanted to hear what he had to say.

     “Do you think Hero could have done something different to survive the explosion?”

     “He could have run away from it.”