Starting Fires

Day 1
August 3, 2010

Some people don't like libraries, but I find them to be a comforting place. It was a hot summer day and at least a half-hour walk from my house to the public library, so walking into the air-conditioned building was doubly refreshing for me. My brother was really there to browse the movies, but I always want to wander through the shelves of books, reading the titles and the authors and pulling out whatever caught my eye. I couldn't come to read all of what I looked at, but it was fun to imagine, and God knows, my mind knows no bounds.

"Hey, Liam," Harrison, my brother, called out. "You wanna come over here. I'm having trouble deciding."

I stuck my head out from the shelves and shot him a dirty look. He shrugged and turned back to the rows of DVDs as I returned to my books. What was that? Probably nothing.

When I turned around again, I was met by a rather burly man. I looked up and stepped back, offering to let him through. He checked his wrist and furrowed his brow, looking back at me.

"There something wrong, sir?" I asked.

"What's your name?" the man asked, scratching his head.

"Liam Foley," I replied, starting to feel uneasy.

"You're... hm," he muttered, gazing at his wrist. He was wearing a leather jacket on a day like this. There was something wrong with this situation. "Damn waste of my time."

"Can I help you?" I asked, honestly confused.

"In theory, yes," the man sighed, rubbing his forehead. "In practice, you're pretty useless. In what forms of combat are you proficient?"

"I really don't see what you're getting at here," I said, turning away.

"Would you just stay put?" the man growled, grabbing my shoulder. "I wanted this to be quick and clean, but your age is somewhat... troubling." His accent was very British, Cockney to be precise.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked, pulling away.

"I can't tell you my real name," he explained, prompting an eye-roll from me. "Don't give me that. Just call me 'Titan.'"

"Are you some shady government agent come to--" I began, chuckling to myself.

"I'm not a government agent," "Titan" growled. "I'm not American, Russian, Chinese, Korean, or Middle Eastern. I am a high-ranking military officer from an... well, it's complicated."

"Mercenary?" I guessed, still not taking this seriously.

"Wise up," Titan continued to reprimand me. "This is a serious situation. Would you believe me if I said Atlantis." When I started walking away, I heard a clicking noise. "I really didn't want to have to do this."

"Is that a gun?" I inquired, looking at the object in his hand.

"Yes, it's a gun," he sighed. A Desert Eagle to be precise. This one was chambered in .50 caliber Action Express with a seven round magazine. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that at that particular point in time. "Get a move on. Bring your brother."

Harrison poked his head around the corner, so I signaled for him to follow. When he saw the man with the gun, he froze in terror, his eyes going wide. Surprisingly, he looked a bit more intelligent when he was confused.

"Long story," Titan apologized. "Sorry about all this but we have to get a move on. We can't just waste our time looking for something to watch. If you live, I recommend Citizen Kane."

"If we live?" Harrison gasped, stepping away.

"Look, I'm in a dangerous business," the stranger sighed, not wanting to spell out everything to us. "If Ben's right about Liam over here, you two will be in some pretty bloody situations."

"You mean we'll have to kill people?" I clarified, my opinion of this man lowering by the second.

"If it comes to that," Titan replied. "Now if you'll excuse me, I just need to set up a contingency." He rolled up his left jacket sleeve, revealing some sort of pad on his wrist. It looked like a smartphone, but it seemed a bit more adapted to a military use. He swiped and pressed the touchscreen for a moment before looking up and making a quick hand gesture that I didn't bother to observe.

"What was that supposed to accomplish?" I asked, looking around.

When my gaze drifted back to Titan, there was a mirror image of my brother and myself standing right in front of me. They didn't mirror our actions and instead returned to what we had previously been doing, totally ignoring the three of us completely.

"What was that supposed to accomplish?" Harrison repeated, making a more Neanderthal face of disbelief.

"Well, those two are just about as real clones as you can get," the very odd man explained. "I just looked up a spell, cast it, and now no one will know you're gone. They're not really people, just elaborate illusions that look, feel, and sound real, and have the same mannerisms as yourself, with some physical improvements. We're still working on an android form so we don't have to go through the hassle of casting one of these spells."

I looked at Harrison, then at Titan. Then at Harrison, then at Titan. This action was repeated for a minute or two before I shrugged and said, "That's proof enough for me. I'm with you, Titan fella."

"Commander General," he corrected, holstering his weapon. "Codename: Titan. Atlantean Marine Corps. My real name is classified as confidential. Now let's go before this building gets blown to pieces. I kind of like the selection here."

"Blown up?" Harrison asked, still amazed at everything that was going on without him.

"So where are we going?" I asked.

"First of all, we're heading off to get you armed up," Titan replied, opening the door of an olive green Jeep Wrangler JK. "Liam, you ride shotgun. Harrison, get in the back."

I went around to the right side of the vehicle and opened the door as Harrison bitched about liking to ride shotgun. When I pulled myself into the car, I found that there was a shotgun on the seat. It was a Model 1887 10-gauge with a 5 shell tubular magazine and a sawn-off barrel.

"What did you mean when you told me to ride... shotgun?" I asked, settling down and closing the door.

"If anyone tries to ram us off the road, I want you to wreck their cars," Titan explained, putting the key into the ignition. "You probably don't have the guts to kill the drivers. Not yet, anyways."

I decided not to argue with that as the engine started and he gunned it out of the parking lot.

"So you're a soldier, then," I stated, a questioning element laced into my voice.

"A Marine," came the response.

"So, a soldier," I reinforced.

"No, I'm a Marine," Titan corrected once again. "Big difference."

"Yes, you're in a Marine Corps, but their soldiers, right?" I tried to clarify.

"No, Marines are Marines," the Marine growled. "Soldiers are in the Army. The Marines are stronger, better, and our arses ride in Navy equipment."

"Whatever you say, soldier," I muttered, relaxing in my seat.

With that, Titan took his hands off the wheel and turned to face me. "Do not call a Marine a soldier!" he yelled, shaking his finger at me. "I could snap your neck like a twig if I had a mind. It's a shame you're precious cargo because you belong in a landfill with the rest of the junk you call America."

"Could you please put your hands back on the wheel?" I yelled, hugging my seat for dear life.

"No, Liam, I am talking to you!" the Marine growled.

"Yes, but you're not driving!" I pointed out, squeezing my eyes shut. "Please, for the love of God, drive!"

"I am not finished," Titan went on. "You can be a smart-arse all you want, but nobody likes a guy like that. Shut up and shape up!"

"We're gonna fuckin' die!" I wailed, curling into a ball.

"And another thing!" Titan continued yet again. "If you are who I'm looking for, stay out of my way on missions. I might just 'accidentally' shoot someone who pops up in front of me."

"Eyes on the road, eyes on the road!" I cried, ducking down below my seat.

At long last, Titan turned back to face the steering wheel, muttering curses to himself.

"Hey, where'd the road go?" the Marine asked, looking at the forest through which he was driving.

***

The ride was actually rather uneventful for a time. It seemed that Titan was the only stranger of importance on the lonely roads of Killingworth, Connecticut. That was a good thing, however, as I did not enjoy being shot at, and I'm sure neither did Harrison. Our Marine friend, I wasn't so sure about.

"Where are we going?" I asked, still a bit shaken up from the idiocy of being yelled off the road.

"Hartford," came the brief answer.

I peered out of the windshield, raising an eyebrow. "Shouldn't we take Route 81?" I asked. "We ride that up to Higganum, then take Route 9 up. That's the fastest way I know."

"We take the back roads because people won't follow us here," Titan explained in more detail. "They'd be expecting that we'd take Route 9 because we don't have time to waste. They would be waiting for us, then come at us from all sides, tearing this car apart until the three of us were gory little stains on the asphalt. Does that sound like a quick ride to you?"

I shrugged and picked up the shotgun again, examining it.

"Oh, you should probably load that," Titan observed. "There's a box of shells under the seat. Here, let me get them."

"Jesus Christ, no!" I yelled as he leaned down under my seat. My reach came just short of the steering wheel, but the crazy bastard came back up just in time to swerve back onto the road while handing me the shotgun shells.

"You gotta trust me every once in a while," he laughed.

I grumbled something rude to myself, clumsily loading the lever-action shotgun. Once the task was done, we all leaned back and relaxed in our seats. A car pulled up beside us, a silver Honda Civic, beginning to pas us. Titan sighed and rolled down the window.

"Hey, jackarse!" the Marine yelled. "No passing zone!"

"Nein!" came the foreign response. "Sie sind der Esel!"

"Leiten Sie diese!" a second one said, throwing something into our open window.

"Shit, grenade!" Titan exclaimed, grabbing the small sphere. He then clamped down on the spoon and inserted a cotter pin he had in his pocket back into the thing and threw it back at the Germans' car they swerved off to the left, hitting a tree and the back flipping upwards, coming back down with a crash.

"The grenade didn't explode," I pointed out, a questioning tone overlaying the observation.

"Well, I expected some dumb move like that," the General explained, "so I brought a few extra cotter pins so that I could throw them back just to spook whoever threw them. They crashed the car, making it look like an accident. No trace of us. I should have seen the German thing coming, though. Gotta brush up on the language."

Another Civic sped up beside us, obviously very angry at their friends' failure. They rammed into the side of our Jeep, hoping to push us off the road.

"I just got this thing repainted," Titan growled, stepping on the brakes. When the car stopped, he hopped out and grabbed his Desert Eagle from the holster under his jacket and aiming at the car stopping just in front of him.

I grabbed the shotgun and slowly approached the vehicle, hearing angry German voices. Four men got out of the car, armed with G36 assault rifles.

"Go on, shoot them!" Titan commanded.

I leveled the gun to eye-level and seized up. My hand was on the trigger and they were just ten meters away. Holding my breath, my finger depressed the trigger. The blast caught the two on the right of the car, nearly blowing them apart. A few stray pellets hit another fellow on the other side, knocking him down. The fourth one was shot in the head by Titan, whose finger had actually slipped on the trigger when the shotgun had gone off. Luckily, his aim had not deteriorated from the surprise.

"Come on," he said. "We have to keep going. I don't think your police force will like this all that much."

I stood there, amazed at what I had done. It felt different from the apathy of pressing a button on a controller and causing a computer-animated mass of pixels to fall to the ground with no health. This was real. It was bad.

"Don't think about it," a voice in my head told me. "It was you or them." Literally, it was a voice talking inside my head. It was demonic, snakelike. As it spoke, scorched lines danced across my vision, causing my head to throb with pain. When the voice concluded its statement, the strange apparitions disappeared with it. I walked slowly back to the car where an amazed Harrison sat in the back seat.

"You still wanna ride shotgun?" I asked, pulling the lever action of the weapon out and back to chamber the next shell.

My brother shook his head in refusal. I sat back, still tense from the entire experience. This moment would haunt my nightmares for things to come. And that voice. What was it?

***

We got to Hartford after another hour of quiet driving through obscure little towns in Connecticut. My hands were still shaking as we pulled into a parking garage. Titan lay a hand on my shoulder before turning away to exit the vehicle. When we were all out, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clacker remote which detonated a C4 charge under the hood of the Jeep.

"Can't leave behind traces of our presence," he muttered, gazing at the shotgun around which my quivering hands were still clamped.

He led us into an elevator and held out the touch-pad on his wrist, holding it up to the buttons and touching the pad a couple of times until the elevator began to descend. I looked around, my brow furrowing as the elevator continued to go down. Harrison was the one to point out the elephant in the room, well, elevator, but let's not get too literal, eh.

"How is this happening?" he asked, pointing out that the floor indicator announced that we were at the ground floor, but we kept going down.

"Well, we're not much of a secret organization without clever hiding spots, are we?" Titan chuckled. "We have a base under the parking garage. We'll see what you really are. If you prove to be fake, we'll wipe your memories and kick your arses back to your house. If, in the frighteningly likely chance you are what Ben thinks you are, then you'll suit up and ship out."

"That sounds encouraging," I mumbled. "Could I get that memory wipe and ass-booting early?"

"No, we need to see if we're right," came the snapped reply. "Don't be that way for God's sake. Ben's got a damn fine intuition, and I'm afraid he's bitten off more than he can chew this time."

The rest of the elevator ride was spent in more awkward silence as Harrison and I drowned in our anxiety. This didn't exactly happen every day, now did it? And was that a good thing? God knows...

"Here's our stop," Titan announced as the doors opened to a simple cave carved out of the rock. There were a few computers strewn about with a couple of technicians at each one. There was a tunnel off to the right and in the middle of the room sat a desk on which was a flash drive. Titan walked over and picked up the object, inserting it into a port on his wrist-pad.

"Bluff," a serious voice stated randomly from the speakers on the pad on Titan's wrist.

"Call," Titan replied, looking down at the blank screen.

"Good to speak with you again, Titan," the voice spoke once again. "I assume you have the HVI if you're contacting me."

"I got him," the General confirmed. "Liam Foley, and his brother Harrison for good measure. Anglo-Irish descent, ages 12 and 16, respectively."

"I had a bad feeling we'd catch them at a bad time," the contact sighed.

"Well so did the Saviness," Titan pointed out. "Now send me the confirmation files so that I can scan Liam."

"You present a good point, son," the person at the other end of the line replied. "Files patching through."

"Received," Titan muttered as his screen glowed blue. "Stand still, Liam."

I stood ramrod straight as a blue glow swept across my body. Lines of code ran across the screen of Titan's wrist-pad. After a minute or so, the light turned white and the Marine's shoulders sagged in disappointment.

"I'm not the guy you're looking for, then?" I asked, my brow furrowing.

"Oh," Titan said, surprised. "No... yes, but... well, I'm kind of sad because, well... you... you are. So young. 12 fucking years old."

"That's not our problem," the voice at the other end of the line chimed in. "Liam Foley is our hero. We insert the Foleys into your team as covert operatives; they don't technically exist. Give them codenames, don't let anyone know who they are or where they come from. We are the only four that know about the portal technology and we'd like to keep it that way for now. Until we find a way to refine it."

"And the only way to do that is to implement the hero," Titan growled. "Bye, Ben. I'll see you later. You two, come with me. I'm going to teach you a thing or two about yourselves."

"Like what?" I asked.