Hero's Call

Chapter Eleven

Acolyte Seven had spent the previous week in a pretty rigid routine. He started every day around seven in the morning and teleport to the Buckland police station, arriving about an hour before Sgt. Buck Strickland would arrive for work. Seven would sit on a bench in the lobby of the station, not moving or speaking to anyone. He had tried to get information from some of the low ranking officers on his first trip, but it was clear that Sgt. Strickland was the only one that could give him any real answers. Most the officers in the station gave him a wide berth anyway. They all knew that the An'Fari people existed, but none of them had ever seen an actual extra-terrestrial before. It made them all a little uneasy.

After a fruitless attempt at getting information from Sgt. Strickland, Seven would teleport himself over to Buckland General Hospital. He would sit patiently next to Devon Macledowny's hospital bed and wait patiently in the hopes that the culprit would turn up, his guilt driving him to do so. Devon had been in a coma since the incident. Seven knew it was an accident. It had been too long since something of that nature had happened for most humans to recognize it for what it was. They were convinced it was a malicious attack, and with no eye witnesses, they weren't apt to drop the notion just because an alien told them differently. The hospital yielded no results, just as the police station had failed to do.

With the remainder of his day, Seven would wait quietly inside the Culpepper's damaged house. There was a mountain bike hidden quite well in the bushes off the side of the house. Whoever had put it there did a good enough job hiding it that even the Buckland Police had failed to see it. Seven wasn't sure if it was Devon's or the culprit's, but he knew someone would turn up for it eventually. So he waited...and waited...and waited.

Seven had started the new day just as he had every one of the last several. He began everyday with the thought that maybe, just maybe, he'd finally find the Hero that had sent Devon Macledowny through the side of a house. He walked into the Culpepper's kitchen and grabbed a banana that was much more on the brown side than most humans would enjoy, but which Acolyte Seven enjoyed quite a bit. He wolfed it down in three quick bites without peeling it. Earth fruit was something of a delicacy to the An'Fari. Seven couldn't understand why humans threw out the peel of the banana. That was where the most flavor and nutrients resided.

He walked out the front door into the crisp autumn air. He was quite enjoying his time on Earth so far, although his mission had not moved forward as he would have liked. It gotten cold, but never too cold for his easily adaptable An'Fari physiology. The sun burned brightly overhead, and a small flock of birds were chirping merrily in an oak tree next to the house. Seven mentally noted that the bike was still tucked safely away behind the bushes.

The idea that the bike's owner would return during the day and reclaim their property had crossed Seven's mind. He pushed the thought aside when the construction crew had showed up and spent most of the day working diligently on repairing the Culpepper's house. It was unlikely the fledgling Hero would risk being seen in broad day light, and if he did, the workers would be able to tell Seven exactly what he looked like. As a precautionary measure, Seven had placed a small tracking device under the bike's seat. One way or another, he'd find the identity of Devon Macledowny's attacker.

The first of the workers had just pulled up to the Culpepper's house which Seven identified as Juan Domingo, a severely underpaid illegal immigrant carpenter with a pencil thin mustache and a penchant for dirty jokes. He got out of his truck and began pulling supplies out of the bed.

"Good morning, Juan," Seven said in an even tone.

"Buenos días, Siete Acólito," Juan said in reply. They nodded a brief goodbye to one another and Seven vanished into thin air, teleporting himself to the police station.