That is, until the seventh night, when he was walking back home from the library. Further up the empty street, a mousy freshman girl hugged herself against the cold in a winter coat nearly bigger than she was. Hunched forward against the wind, she didn’t notice a creaking 1980’s Oldsmobile turn unto the street.

From a couple blocks back, Derek saw the red tail lights flare up, casting strange shadows across all the nearby buildings. A couple silhouettes got out of the car, and closed on the small huddled figure ahead. Some mocking exclamations in baritone were followed by a high-pitched scream. Before he realized what he was doing, Derek found himself tossing his backpack on the lawn and sprinting into the fray.

Once he got past the bulk of the car, the circles of yellow light cast by the headlights painted a grim picture. Two seniors in university hoodies and Salvation Army rags were holding the girl down against the pavement while a third ruffled through her belongings. All were heavily intoxicated. He froze, just before breaching the glow in front of the car. After they had unearthed her wallet, iPod, and cell phone, The third guy opened his jacket and reached for his zipper.

“Don’t you dare!” Derek yelled out, again without thinking.

The aggressor froze, and his two lackeys turned toward him, jerking their captive violently in the process.

“Well, well, well. It looks like we got ourselves a good Samaritan,” one of the captors smirked, after sizing up Derek’s rather unimpressive physique.

“Shall we show him what happens to good Samaritans?” the other asked, as the aggressor stalked toward Derek.

When the aggressor got within range, Derek took a wild swing that the older boy easily sidestepped. Still off-balance from his lunge, the return punch caught him square in the gut before he even had time to think. His lackeys dropped the girl, who was outright sobbing by this point, to the pavement and hurried over to joint in the beating.
And then the kicks came at Derek from all angles. Utterly helpless, he crouched into the fetal position and formed a protective ball. Just when he thought he could take no more, he found himself being lifted into the air. One of the boys punched him hard in the gut again for good measure, and then the other two swung him back and forth with increasing force before letting go.

For a moment, Derek was airborne. Then, he hit the frozen pavement with a horrible thud. Behind him, he heard three car doors open and slam shut, the whine of an engine sputtering to life in the cold, and then the squeal of tires fading into the distance.

He rolled over bumped against something warm and soft. The cushioned impact was accompanied by a whimper that was not his own. Barely conscious, Derek couldn’t muster the strength to slide over. The small part of his brain that wasn’t ringing with agony hoped that he wasn’t crushing the girl he’d taken the beating trying to save.
Slowly, he felt the warm padded mass slide out from under him, and the back of his head dropped the last inch to the freezing blacktop. In the moments that followed, he was reminded how cold the night truly was.

And then the stars were blotted out by the mousy girl’s face, dark hair and eyebrows set against sickly pale skin, heavily blemished by the scrapes and quickly forming bruises left from the attack. She lowered herself gently down onto him, and hugged him with the entirety of her being. Heat radiated down from his head to his knees, where the toes of her boots fell off each to a side. At first her embrace was as feeble as he felt, but the longer she held on the firmer it got. At first he thought it was his imagination, but abruptly she pulled back a bit and stared again into his face, this time quite intently. As he watched, the bruises on her face faded and the scratches and scrapes began to heal. Soon, a rosy color burst into her cheeks.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked, in an awed yet somewhat concerned.

Derek didn’t know and was still in too much agony to think about it.

“You’ve found yourself where you’re meant to be,” he croaked out, and passed out.

She fell back against him, shielding his battered and exposed frame with her warm. Had he still been aware of his surrounding, he would have felt the heels of her boots drift a couple inches further down his legs.

Unfortunately, the green planet had a red twin equal in size that had fallen into an unruly orbit among their common star. After centuries of close calls, the two planet collided with obliterating force. The impact shattered the planets into shards that exploded out in every direction toward the far corners of the unimaginably great void of outer space

The smaller fragments were caught by the gravity of the dying star, creating an asteroid belt much like the one that separates Mars from Jupiter. But the larger pieces shrugged off the dwarf’s feeble grasp and continued on, further and further into the darkness.

As the decades became centuries, and the centuries became millennia, two of the shards drew closer and closer to our fiery young yellow star. Finally, on a bright afternoon in late November, the shards collided with the intense heat of Earth’s atmosphere. By the time the mighty shard of the green planet hit the sidewalk of a sleepy New England college town, it was scarcely the size of tennis ball. With the entire region in the grips of a massive Nor’easter, no one was outside to witness the spectacular descent from the thick white sky to an unexceptional street on the outskirts of town.

In fact, it wasn’t discovered until the following morning, when Derek Peters unearthed it digging his car out from the massive snowbank. At first he thought, it was a dog turd. Disgusted, he was about to use the shovel to toss in onto his neighbor’s lawn when he noticed that the concrete was as blackened as the oblong pebble. Curious, he grabbed it with his glove and lifted it to his face for closer inspection. Though the strange thing clearly didn’t originate with a dog, it did have a strange odor — spicy, almost, and kind of wild. With a shrug, he stuffed the mysterious thing into his pocket and refocused on the mound of snow that separated the driver’s side of his car from the rest of the pavement.

Unbeknownst to Derek, however, the origin of that smell had jumped ship. The impact that had destroyed two planets was unable to overcome an insanely tenacious virus which had thrived in a hollow pocket of the shard for the entire length of the journey. The impact with the sidewalk had breached that air pocket and exposed a whole new world in which to thrive.

It hit Derek’s nostril en-masse, riding the nasal cavity to the pharynx, the pharynx to the larynx, the larynx to the trachea, and the trachea to the lungs. There it settled in and multiplied, being swept with every breath to every corner of his body.

For scientists, this virus would have been the Holy Grail. As it swept into each cell, it headed directly for the nucleus, and rewrote a specific segment of Derek’s genetic code. If humans could have gotten a hold of it, they could have reprogrammed it to eliminate genetic diseases and cure cancer.

Unfortunately, the virus that had survived millions of years and trillions of miles was unable to overcome Derek’s immune system. Though the virus left him bedridden and miserably sick for days, by the next weekend he was starting to feel more like himself, unaware that an unused and unremarkable slice of his genetic makeup had been transformed into something remarkable.

For days, Derek’s life proceeded much as it always had. At 5′ 9″ tall and 155 pounds, Derek was about as unremarkable as it is possible to be. Calling him handsome would be an act of charity, but he wasn’t notably hideous or deformed, either. He left the house considerably more than his roommate Jerry, a Computer Science major and [i]World of Warcraft[/i] addict he’d known since high school, but no one ever called his name out from across the quad. At parties, he was the wallflower in the corner, awkwardly clutching a red plastic cup full of beer that he never more than sipped. In the photos that popped up on Facebook the next day, he looked like a piece of furniture. Whenever possible, he signed up for lecture hall classes where he could fade into the anonymity of the crowd.

In other words, he avoided people, and they avoided him. But as he plodded along the third floor of the library one afternoon, his attention focused on keeping the dozen or so books in his arms carefully balanced, he didn’t notice the door of the women’s room fly open. The collision was spectacular. Boy and girl tumbled to the floor in a heap. Books scattered. Papers flew everywhere. Derek and his victim traded apologies simultaneously, as they struggled to untangle each other from each other.

As she helped him reassemble his pile of materials, the girl was struck by the seemingly unremarkable Derek: why hadn’t she noticed him around campus before? After taking a closer look at him, she concluded that he wasn’t her type. But what a cologne! Unlike most of the freshmen on campus, here was a guy who avoided bathing himself in Axe body spray. His aroma was subtle but tantalizing, earthy yet sweet. She flashed him her most flirtatious smile and fired off a wink, the first such attention Derek had ever received.

She headed off down the hall before he had time to recover. After turning the corner, she pulled unconsciously at the edge of her shirt, which had fit perfectly only moments before, but now exposed a thin slice of skin between the bottom hem and the waistband on her skirt. Her hand then slid down into a hip pocket, where she kept a stash of Kleenex to fend off her wicked cold. But instead of fishing one out, she paused. After an explorative snuff, she realized the snot in her nose had cleared up. In fact, she thought, I feel great!