4Chapter 1
(Matthew Tanaka)
I didn't know what to do with myself anymore. Twenty-four days, that's how long it took. Twenty-four days of loafing around, watching TV, and browsing the internet. It all just seemed so pointless.
It's been twenty-four days since I was discharged from the military. After four years of service, four successful years in the Navy, I decided I didn't want to reenlist. And now what was I doing? Sitting around at my parent's house. I had nothing to do until I started college in another two months.
I grew up in a relatively small town in Illinois. Not many people here joined the military even though it was a relatively big military state with the US Navy Recruit Training Command located just North of Chicago. In fact, out of my graduating class, only one other person joined with me, my best friend, Jake Dekker. But he joined the Air Force.
Life just seemed so routine, wake up, eat, watch TV, work out, sleep, rinse and repeat. It wasn't a bad life, don't get me wrong, but after being in the Navy where I actually had responsibility and tasks every day and then coming to this, it was a big change.
Either way, I was about to start school in New Haven City and I couldn't wait. I'd never been there before so it seemed almost like an adventure. Young guy, huge city, couldn't be any better, right?
I sat in the my living room cleaning my neighbor's rifle and pistol collection. Timothy Kent was his name. He had a pretty big collection of weapons and as soon as he found out I used to be a weapon's specialist in the Navy, he put me straight to work. There were your standard 9mm pistols and .223 rifles, a few shotguns, but then he had some stuff I had never even fired before, let alone cleaned. Tim taught me a lot and took me out to the range a few times. At the very least it kept me occupied.
"How's it going there, Matt?" Tim asked as he walked through the doors of my house. When it came to Tim, I had a literal open door policy with him, especially when I was handling his weapons.
It was getting later in the day, and amber rays of light was beginning to shoot through the branches and leaves of the trees in my front yard.
"Pretty good. Just got done with your Sigs."
He picked up one of the pistols I had finished cleaning, a 9mm pistol and inspected it. The slide racked back smoothly, the metal grooves sliding seamlessly against each other lubricated with a layer of CLP oil.
"Very nice," he said as he replaced them in their cases. He fished out twenty dollars and handed it to me, usual payment for a few hours of labor.
"Did you hear about New Haven City?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yeah, don't know what's going on there." New Haven City had been through some weird phenomenon lately, cold snaps in the summer, rain that seemed to come from nowhere, hail followed by sky high temperatures and humidity. It wasn't enough to deter me from wanting to go to school there however. It was one of the biggest and diverse cities in the world.
"Well, thanks Matt. We'll go to the range again soon."
I nodded, "No problem Tim, glad I could help."
"And now an update to the attack on New Haven City," the news reporter said, "Earlier this evening at approximately 9:24 PM Eastern Standard Time, an explosion rocked the city outside a local coffee shop. Three are confirmed dead and dozens more are injured. We're now getting reports that an unidentified survivor of the blast was caught on nearby traffic cameras and on video from witnesses to have been putting out flames, apparently with ice." A grainy video of a man appeared wearing a t-shirt and shorts, mostly unremarkable except for the fact that it appeared a blast of ice and frost was shooting from his hands and freezing over flames left over from the blast.
"Authorities do not yet know the identity of the man in the video, or how he was putting out the fires, but when firefighters arrived on scene, most of the flames were out and nearly everything was covered in layers of solid ice."
A younger man, probably in his twenties, appeared onscreen, apparently the witness that shot the amateur video, "After the blast I just saw this guy walk out from the ruins and start shooting ice at the fires! It was unbelievable! Ice was just coming from his hands, he was like a superhero or something, I don't know man."
It went back to the news anchor. "Viewers of the video, which has already reached nearly a half a million views on the internet, have dubbed the unnamed man simply as Frostbite.
"Police and firefighters have confirmed that the blast was in fact intentional, however if this was a terrorist attack, no terrorist organizations have yet to come forward and accept responsibility for the attack.
"The bomb itself appears to have detonated from a car on the sidewalk near the coffee house. Authorities say the car apparently disintegrated in the blast and apart from video footage from traffic cameras, there's no evidence that the car even existed in the first place."
I just stared at the TV, jaw dropped. This was unbelievable. An attack in New Haven and some kind of superhero shooting ice from his hands. This kind of thing only happened in movies and comics, not in real life! What was going on here?
Every single news channel was devoted to the apparent attack and the acts of the good Samaritan Frostbite. This was huge, a potential terrorist attack and a potential man with superpowers, or at least, a really cool invention.
The entire country, and probably a good chunk of the world, scrutinized the video over and over again. Some say it looked like he had something in his hand that was shooting the ice. Others say he was the one that created the blast in the first place so that he could come in and appear to have saved the day. Then of course, there are those that say he's a superhero. I was relatively unconvinced. It looked like he was shooting ice, sure, but how does someone even get a superpower? I was a huge comic book fan and I would love to see a real superhero, but I also knew reality said he probably had some kind of machine rigged to make him look like he was doing that.
Also strange was that the blast left absolutely no remains of the car it blew up in. One would think that there would at least be shrapnel and whatnot. I mean, I never did handle bombs very much but I didn't think there was any kind of bomb that would just make a car cease to exist like that. Was there?
My guess was that the attacker was a terrorist born and raised here stateside, and made the attack independently. It had to be, I mean, if I were a terrorist organization, I would immediately take responsibility for anything I did like this. The fact that they're all so slow on the draw just tells me that even if somebody does take responsibility for it eventually, they're probably liars trying to get some free publicity.
Then again, I'm a US military vet of four years about to go to college for the first time, not a seasoned CIA intelligence agent, what did I know?
But everybody knew that Frostbite was the big story here. Was he real? Probably not, but who knows? It's nice to dream, isn't it?
A/N: Sorry I took so long to write the first chapter. I didn't give up on this, promise. I actually wrote a first chapter pretty quickly after the prologue, but I reread it, thought about it, and completely scrapped it because it was, well, bad. I decided to go in a completely different direction with the story and I like the way it's going so far. Writing first person as two different characters isn't something I really like to do but I think I can make it work here. Thanks for reading guys!
New Haven City is a fictitious city if any of you were wondering.