Chapter 1 - A Different Life

Zachary Miller brushed a long strand of brown hair out of his eyes as he waited patiently for his last class of the day to shuffle out of the poorly designed and woefully narrow door that served as its only point of entrance and exit. His hands rested gently next to his long since atrophied, stick-like legs. He was tired, always tired, but today more than ever. He glanced for a moment at his ex, his most recent reminder that nobody truly loved him. Part of him wondered why he was still there, his parents gave him up, and now so had his childhood sweetheart. He rubbed an eye, a pit of sadness drilling through his stomach as he reopened a still fresh wound with his own drifting thoughts. It was the usual “it’s not you, it’s me,” bullshit that he had grown to expect in normal high school life; in reality he had been dumped for some prick who happened to be decently good at throwing a brown oblong ball down a field. The part that stung the most to him though, was the fact that it had been done in the most inhuman and cowardly way possible, through a text message.

                The line moved along, and soon he found himself staring absentmindedly at one of the TVs mounted in the main hallway that led out to the main door. For a moment he watched the white lettering of the captions fly by on the screen without actually absorbing the information. The colors changing his thin face with every passing second. He breathed in sharply, trying to jumpstart his brain and he focused in on the text.

                “In other news,” the reporter’s captions said as a graphic of some lines appeared on a map of Germany, “the European Self Defense and Reactionary Alliance has, with the help of the Guardian Foundation’s Sentinels, repelled another poorly veiled attempt of annexation by the New Soviet Union.”

                Zachary shook his head slightly as he continued to march down the hallway, his over-worn, long since expired sneakers scuffing slightly on the hard linoleum floor as his vision returned to a grainy and shaky snippet of footage showing two masked soldiers charging a line of Russian conscripts with no regard for their own life. Peace was their stated mission when they announced themselves one cold and blustery day in 2074. The Sentinels, bringing peace by evening the battlefield, if peace was dressing up in black and being cannon fodder. Zachary thought it was the most ridiculous premise ever, and woefully ironic at that. He approached the large double doors leading to the visitor’s lobby of the school and looked around at the massive tumor of students that all seemed hellbent on blocking the doors, as he scanned the crowd a twinge of panic and then confusion entered his system as he stared at what looked to be a pair of discount Child Protective Service agents. He was an orphan, and he knew that CPS would be his unwanted companion for at least one more year of his life. The less rational part of him thought that he was in trouble for a few seconds, but the rational side of him knew that he was exactly where he needed to be and was headed back to the place he begrudgingly called home; his “home” was no more than a disintegrating brick building supplanted in the depths of Washington D.C. a short walk away from the metro called the Patriot’s Capital Orphanage for Troubled Children. Of course, he knew just as well as every other “delinquent” there that the only real trouble was the lack of funding and subsequent lack of heating, food, and clean water. It was, for all intents and purposes, a shithole. He had seen CPS agents there at the orphanage too, and these suits sitting in the middle of the large, still overcrowded lobby of his school looked wrong; they looked too clean, and they lacked in the general look of “I hate my job” that all CPS agents had. Zachary shivered, the unwanted chill of an unexplainable fear creeping over him as he forced his legs to carry him forwards. “Just need to walk past them,” he mumbled to himself, “probably just school officials or something.” As he dragged his feet over the large, rather pretentious seal of his school the sound of dress shoes clicking on linoleum pierced his ear and he grumbled, “had enough today, just leave me alone damn it.”

                “Zachary Miller,” the suit said with a voice completely devoid of any human characteristic or compassion, “I need you to come with me.”

                Zach turned his head and stared for a moment at the gun strapped to the man’s hip, “what, why?”

                “We need to…” the man hesitated, as if expecting full compliance rather than a sudden off-hand question, “we need to talk.”

                 “Talk?”

                “Well I don’t need to,” the man said, “the egghead does.”

                “The what now?”

                A pair of heels began clicking somewhere behind the suit as he opened his mouth to explain, before he was quickly cut off by a boney, rather gaunt lady in a lab coat, “I’ll take it from here,” she said, “so you’re our little trouble maker?”

                “What?” Zachary asked, a look of bewilderment shooting on his face, “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

                She laughed, “no, you haven’t… you’re just oddly curious is all, and that’s why we need you.”

                “Who’s we?”

                “The Guardian Foundation,” she said, “I’m sure you’ve heard of us, we’re a bit… newsworthy.”

                “The Sentinels,” Zachary nodded in mild understanding, “yeah I know about you… sort of.”

                “Well,” she shrugged, “let’s just say that our Sentinel Corps could use you.”

                “Why?” asked Zachary, “my grades aren’t good, I’m not particularly athletic.”

                “We can fix that,” she said, “but in order to fix that we need you to come with us.”

                “Where?”

                “One of our bases,” the lady said, “we have a car waiting outside just for you.”

                “Why should I?”

                “Look kid,” the lady sighed, a small amount of her patience wearing away, “you live in a place that brings in a federal grant worth petty cash every five years, has no clean running water, and can barely feed you, why the hell would you want to stay there?”

                Zachary hesitated, she was right, and a part of him really wanted to take up her offer, if not just for the sake of a warm bed and food in his belly every night. The two things barely afforded by his current residence. But at the same time, the connotations regarding suddenly hopping into a car to enlist in an army without a flag and an army he had no business fighting in would entail weren’t the most promising. Chief among those concerns was the potential for sudden death at the hands of just another faceless soldier. He shivered on the inside, but the part of him that hated that orphanage told him that his time there was almost up, and his a*s would be out the front door as soon as he turned eighteen. Both parts of him knew that he had no real choice, either way he would be going somewhere that would drill every last semblance of individuality out of him and turn him into a killing machine. It was simply a matter of time.

                “So?” the lady in the coat cocked her head, “I won’t force you go or anything, but it would make things a little easier for both of us.”

                “Easier,” Zachary mumbled, taking a moment to gaze at the now severely thinned out crowd of students, the no-lifers who had things to do after school still milling about but thankfully not blocking the door, “what about this?”

                “This?”

                “School.”

                “We have a facility that’ll teach you for your remaining semester,” the lady said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about that though, the things they teach you in public school are less than useful most of the time.”

                “Fine,” shrugged Zach as he glimpsed his buss roll away in a cloud of exhaust  just outside of the door, “but it’s your fault if I get killed.”

                “You won’t,” the lady shrugged as she slipped her hands into her pockets and began for the front door of the school, not bothering to check if Zach was following, “I’m Doctor Sarah Valberk, Chief of Research at the Foundation.”

                One of the suits gave him a gentle push forward, curtly nodding towards the Doctor as she swept through the large, obscenely prison-like, metal doors, “we’ll head back to FOB Colombia Ma’am, Jacob is in the car.”

                “Thank you, agents,” Doctor Valberk continued, “and more like Head of Sciences but I like Chief of Research.”

                “Just where the hell are we going?” Zachary suddenly blurted out as he followed the doctor out to an unassuming black car which hummed quietly under the shade of a dried out and rather dead looking tree.

                “For now, your old home, and then the airport, we operate out of international waters for a reason,” the Doctor said as she opened a door and gestured inside of it, “come on kid, we don’t exactly have all day.”

                “Why back to…” he paused, “why back to that place.”

                “Well,” Doctor Valberk shrugged as she paused to get in herself, slamming the car door shut, “I can’t exactly just snatch you up from school, that’s what we call kidnapping… let’s just say that I have a way of ‘motivating,’ your old caretaker, money does do a good amount of talking.”

                “You’re going to bribe her?” Zachary asked incredulously.

                “Well the alternative is to just have Jacob over there put two in her chest and we call it a day,” said Valberk as she jerked a thumb over to the suit in the driver’s seat, “speaking of which hurry it up Jacob, plane leaves in two hours.”

                “Yes ma’am,” said Jacob as he pulled forwards. A plume of exhaust quickly evaporating in the early spring air.

                Zachary watched out the window as the car, with the aid of an awfully robotic sounding GPS, rolled down streets and roads he vaguely recognized until they stopped somewhere on the fringes of the District in front of a run-down three-story building, the only one on the block. An ancient wooden sign hung over the gate, The P trio ‘s Cap t l being the only letters still visible on the sun-bleached and faded glorified plank of wood. She was in there, his crappy Ex, the only person he thought he loved. Key word being thought.

                “Come on kid,” Valberk said, “you’ve got about five minutes to collect your s**t and say your goodbyes.”

                Valberk opened the door, stepping outside with a flourish of her lab coat and began walking with a weird, uncanny gait of authority. Zachary followed closely behind, the soles of his sneakers scraping on the worn and poorly maintained asphalt, flanked on one side by Jacob. As they walked in Zachary was immediately assaulted by the smell of stale of cinnamon and old mothballs as the cluttered and battered front desk slowly but surely loomed into view out of the dusty air.

                “Guess your caretaker isn’t here.”

                “Right,” scoffed Zachary, “caretaker.”

                “Well get your stuff while I wait here,” Valberk sighed while brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes, “just hurry up before I get Jacob to shoot the place up.”

                “Er,” Zachary said, “yeah.” He ran upstairs, opening his bag as he did so. He struggled for a moment as the gigantic, three ringed binder he kept snagged on a corner; but to him that was just a small obstacle as the excitement of finally leaving this place creeped through him.

                “Hey,” a voice called out to him as he fumbled for his door, a voice that startled him out of his blind rush to his room, and a voice that he hated now more than ever.

                “What do you want, Liz,” Zachary said without turning his head, “come here to mock me or something?”

                “N-no…” her voice dropped, “I wanted to say that… I’m sorry.”

                “You’re sorry,” repeated Zach, “right… that’s nice and all.”

                “I mean it.”

                “I don’t give a f**k,” snapped Zachary, “no signs of any issues, then one day you’re done with me.”

                A small pause washed between them, before Liz spoke up again, a slight tremor in her voice, “a-are you going somewhere?”

                “Yeah I’m leaving, my time’s up.”

                “But you’re still seventeen, did someone adopt you?”

                “I’m joining the military.”

                “Why?!”

                “Because it was offered to me,” said Zach as he pushed his door open. His door revealed his inner sanctum, the few items of interest and books he enjoyed stacked haphazardly on the particle-board desk which hadn’t moved in the last decade, “and because I have nothing else to live for here.”

                “You had me,” Liz replied, “and you can find someone else, right?”

                “Whatever,” Zachary shook his head, “I’ll find someone else away from here, can you just leave me alone?”

                “Don’t lie,” she said, “you hated me too.”

                “Stop trying to validate your lack of self-esteem,” Zachary said as he marched into his room, tossing the binder to a corner, “I thought we agreed not to speak to each other too, so start doing that.”

                “Jerk,” she hissed, “such a jerk.”

                “You did it to yourself,” said Zach, pulling open a drawer with a small notebook and a pen taking each with a profoundly odd sense of delicacy, placing each in his bag before reaching down and feeling for something, “I was perfectly content with our relationship.”

                “Ugh,” she hissed again, “here you go again with this.”

                “I wasn’t lying,” he replied, his fingers gliding on the underside of the desk, stopping at the edges of some tape before continuing until he found the tip of a leather sheathe. He pulled on it, revealing a foot long knife. His father’s knife, the only possession he had of his parents, sent to him in a poorly wrapped cardboard box on his sixteenth birthday, “I wasn’t lying for the three months we dated, and I’m not lying now.”

                “Right,” she said, leaning on his wall with a dull thump, “the unsmiling face of never-ending depression for three months definitely wasn’t you lying… bull-f*****g-s**t Zachary.”

                A pair of heels clacked down the hallway as Valberk’s pale and gaunt face appeared in the doorway, “ready kid?”

                “Yeah, almost,” Zachary said, quickly slipping a few of the books he hadn’t finished into his bag, “think I got everything.”

                “Can he wait for a minute?” Elizabeth blurted out, “I need to… I need to give him something.”

                “Sure,” said Valberk, “make it quick.”

                As she ran off Valberk turned to Zachary, “ex?”

                “Yeah,” nodded Zach as a question came to mind, “hey, why did you only choose me?”

                “Hm?”

                “For the program,” Zach continued, “there are about eight hundred students at my school, why only me?”

                “Oh,” Valberk shrugged, “genetics.”

                “What?”

                “Yeah,” said Valberk, “and no, I’m not running some secret eugenics project, I literally mean the Legacy Process would only work for you with a one hundred percent rate of success.”

                “How do you know?”

                “Remember that mandated drug test about three months ago?”

                “Yeah?”

                “That was us.”

                “Yeah, right.”

                “Look, kid, it isn’t hard to pay off the D.A.R.E Project in order to impersonate them for a day across the states, especially with them and their funding issues,” scoffed Valberk.

                “Then what about Liz?”

                “Her,” shrugged Valberk, “eh, sixtieth percentile.”

                “Then what makes me so special?”

                “Don’t know yet,” said Valberk, as she slipped her hands in her pockets, “that’s what the Process is supposed to do.”

                “Right,” Zachary rolled his eyes.

                “Here,” Liz came bursting back into his room, holding a small box with a little bow on it.

                Zachary raised his eyebrow, if there was one thing he knew well about Elizabeth, it was that she was overly fond of getting anyone and everyone gifts. Though usually they were poorly thought out. He took it gently before putting it in his bag as well, finally zipping it closed and slinging it on his back.

                “Guess this is goodbye,” said Liz, eyes slightly downcast.

                “Yep,” said Zach, walking out of his room with a newfound sense of purpose, “bye.”

                As his feet met the last step on the stairs, he could feel all eyes turned to him, boring into his soul like a diamond-tipped drill. He knew that feeling, or rather, he knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. His fellow orphans all had an inexplicable, yet universal agreement that not a word would be spoken whenever someone would be leaving for good. It only happened on some occasions, on the rare occasion that someone had decided to turn their life difficulty up by five points, on the rare occasion that someone decided that a broken child was better than one they could truly call their own, or on the fairly common occasion that someone had turned eighteen. As he stepped out into the lobby one last time, he could hear the hushed groans and gripes, the newer kids who didn’t know better, the newer kids who were promptly shut up by a few of the older kids.

                “About damn time someone took you,” Ms. Ponce grumbled from the front desk. She was an old hag of about seventy who had been stuck with the painful job of raising those who had no parents, and it was very clearly obvious that she hated the job. It was quite possible that she hated those who had the fortune of leaving even more. A terribly misguided hate, but understandable to say the least. It was the only job she had, the only one she could ever hope to have, especially at her age. It was a job she couldn’t leave, a place of toil and pain she was anchored to until her eligibility for her Social Security. An eligibility which would in all likelihood never come to be.

                “Yeah,” said Zach as he waved her off, not really caring to hear what she had to say, “took you long enough to get your a*s back to that seat and do pretty much nothing… same as usual.”

                “Calm down children,” Valberk smirked, taking him by the arm as she led him to the door, “let’s keep this little uh… transaction… quiet.”

                “Transaction?” asked Zachary as they continued out the door, “you bought me?”

                “Well,” Valberk shrugged uncomfortably, “I guess?”

                “Great,” scoffed Zachary, “from orphan to slave, what a life I have.”

                “You’re not a slave,” Valberk replied, the slightest hint of offense evident in her voice.

                “Oh boy, even worse, a tool.”

                “Oh, shut up,” Valberk grumbled, “melodramatic teenagers; you’re a soldier, or you’re going to be a soldier soon enough.”

                “Great, magical men in black uniform,” scoffed Zachary, “parading around T.V. looking ‘cool.’”

                “Those guys in black are not Sentinels,” Valberk chuckled, “they’re the press stand-ins we have, and Sentinels wear actual camouflage.”

                “Good to know,” Zachary said as they reached the car where Jacob was waiting with an extraordinarily bored face.

                “Let’s get rolling,” said Valberk as she opened the door and got in, “we’re a little bit behind, so step on it.” She pulled out a phone and began dialing a series of numbers.

                “Who’re you calling?” asked Zach.

                “District of Colombia’s Department of Transportation.”

                “Why?”

                She put the phone up to her ear, holding up a finger, “hi, Doctor Valberk from the Guardian Foundation, I need green lights for Vehicle Golf Whiskey One, thank you.”

                As she said this Jacob turned down one of the many, sprawling, lettered roads of D.C. and all the lights turned green in front of him as he did so.

                “Neat,” commented Zachary as he sank in his seat with the car’s ever-increasing speed.

                “Right?” agreed Valberk with an odd, out of place enthusiasm, “perks of the job, you get them as well, when you pass basic training and Tier School.”

                “Tier school?” asked Zachary, “What’s that?”

                “Every Sentinel gets a ‘Tier,’” Valberk said, “think of it as a special power assigned to them by the Legacy Process.” Valberk paused a moment, thinking of the best way to explain what Tier School was before continuing, “for example a Tier One Sentinel has their metabolism altered to a virtual standstill, they can go days without eating or drinking, and their training will revolve around that.”

                “That’s it?” Zachary asked, partially disappointed.

                “For them it is,” said Valberk, “but personally I think the ones who get the best training are my best creations, my Tier Tens.”

                “What do they do?”

                “Well nothing really,” Valberk replied, “they don’t have any active abilities, but they are immortal.”

                “What?”

                “Yep,” Valberk nodded with a more genuine enthusiasm, “unkillable, for all intents and purposes.”

                “What the hell,” Zachary shook his head as the car rolled onto the highway, “an unkillable soldier.”

                “Well, on the bright side we don’t rent those ones out.”

                “Then what do you do with them?”

                “Study them, send them out on deployment for the Foundation,” said Valberk, “things like that.”

                “How many of them do you have?”

                “Six.”

                “Six?!”

                “They’re extremely rare.”

                “I guess so,” said Zachary as he unzipped and reached into his bag, pushing aside the box Elizabeth had given him before pulling out a book.

                “So, why’d you two break up?”

                “Huh?”

                “You and that girl.”

                “Oh, Elizabeth,” Zachary sighed, “well she left me for a football player.”

                “Seriously?”

                “Yep,” Zach said, wanting the conversation to end with every word, “three months of perfectly fine, totally normal dating then just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “I’m dumped through a text message.”

                “What’d she say?”

                “It’s not working out, it isn’t you, it’s me… yada yada, bullshit and more bullshit.”

                Valberk suppressed a smile, the smile usually acquired with wisdom, “when did she break up with you and when did she date Mr. Jock?”

                “Last week,” said Zach, “and last week.”

                Valberk chuckled, “sorry to say kid, your ex was a s**t.”

                “You’re probably not wrong,” Zach sighed, “can we stop talking about it, please?”

                “Sure,” said Valberk, “guess it must have been pretty painful, I’m sorry.”

                “It’s fine, just drop it.”

                Zachary turned to watch the rather dull and unexciting traffic rush by him, a select few people turning on their lights as the sky reddened with a setting sun. He glanced for a moment uncomfortably as the sign for the airport rushed by, and despite him knowing that he had lost the chance to turn back, part of him wanted to anyway.

                “Almost there kid,” Valberk said as the car abruptly made a change to shift lanes, turning off the main road to take a mostly unnoticed and extremely underused service road instead, flanked on all sides by men in black uniforms.

                “I take it you know these fine people,” Zachary spoke quietly, gesturing to the many uniforms.

                “We take our recruitment a little seriously.”

                “Just a little,” chuckled Zachary as the car rolled through a set of open gates, revealing what looked to be a horribly disfigured and mutated airplane. Zach watched in a state of mild awe as the four engines on either end of the wing began to rotate forwards and backwards, shaking the entire car with the whistling scream and jet blast of its four engines with every rotation, “so… what the hell is that?”

                “I think the designation for it is the MV-34 Shrike, or something like that,” said Valberk as the car suddenly halted, “I’m not exactly the person to ask.”

                Zachary continued to stare, taking in every aspect of the aircraft as the engines came to rest at a forty-five-degree angle. It was oddly angular, and every window had a golden tint to it which the light from the setting sun began to bounce off of in a spectacular light. Its grey scaled paint scheme absorbed the rest, which made the tint look just a little more golden. The back of it split in two, opening like a shell which revealed four rows of red canvas benches.

                “Come on kid,” said Valberk as she opened the car door, the shrieks of the jet engines spilling in as she did so, “no time to lose now.”

                Zachary stepped out for the last time into the stale, blustery February air as it wrapped around him. He looked around, staring at the shabby buildings of a rundown and poorly maintained Dulles Airport and sighed, “I’m finally free.”

                Valberk raised an eyebrow and took a moment to pause her stride towards the Shrike, hands still in her pockets, “free?”

                “All my life I wanted to get away from this place,” Zachary said with a tone of conviction as he looked around at the nonexistent skyline of Washington D.C., “and all my life I thought that was a pipedream and a half.”

                “But here you are,” Valberk said, taking one hand out of her coat and extending it towards Zachary, “not entirely free, but you’ll get that when we’re done working with you, good enough right?”

                “Yeah,” said Zach as he stepped forwards towards the disfigured jet, “close enough.”