Chapter Two:
Blood and Dust
Bullets shredded the cold, stagnant air. Griffin’s ears rang from the sharp crack of gunfire ricocheting off the crumbling walls of the subway station. The stench of smoke, sweat, and cordite filled his nose.
“Fall back!” he barked, grabbing the boy by the shoulder and shoving him forward into the dark.
Vesper flanked them, dragging the old woman, her jaw clenched and eyes locked ahead. Gunfire stitched the air behind them, and the Authority’s black-armored boots thundered down the stairs in pursuit.
They weaved through back alleys and rubble-strewn streets, ducking into doorways, crossing collapsed scaffolding, pushing past overturned dumpsters and skeletal ruins. The smoke from burning barricades choked every breath.
Griffin motioned toward a broken wall. “There!”
The group slipped through a jagged gap in the concrete. Beyond it lay a narrow crawlspace that emptied behind a collapsed clinic.
They emerged coughing, scraped and breathless. Griffin paused, rifle raised, scanning the shadows.
No pursuit—yet.
He turned toward Vesper. “You good?”
She nodded, wiping blood from a cut along her hairline. “We’ve got maybe five minutes before they fan out.”
Griffin checked the boy, then the woman. They were alive. Scared, but moving. He exhaled.
“This way,” he said. “We’re close.”
Marshal stood at the mouth of the station, surveying the wreckage through the swirling smoke. A sergeant approached.
“They broke contact, sir. We think they’re heading north. Multiple tracks.”
Marshal didn’t answer. He was staring at a single footprint in the ash—deep, deliberate, left heel dragging slightly.
Griffin.
He closed his eyes.
He remembered Delta Corridor. Griffin covered a retreat with a busted knee and one magazine. Held the line when others broke. The same stubborn streak. The same damn footprint.
The sergeant waited. “Orders, sir?”
Marshal opened his eyes. “Three squads. Staggered formation. No flame. We drive them into containment. We box them in.”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldier left.
Marshal stared into the smoke, jaw tight. You couldn’t just disappear, could you, Reaper?
He stepped forward into the street, already calculating every path his old friend might take.
The mission is the mission, he reminded himself.
Even if it meant hunting ghosts.
The safe house was a half-collapsed garage tucked behind the ruins of a former clinic, now nothing more than a moss-choked husk. Its metal roll-up door groaned in protest as Griffin shoved it closed, sealing them in.
Inside, the air was thick with the smell of old oil, damp concrete, and mildew. A single red emergency lamp flickered in the corner, its battery nearly drained, casting everything in bloody shadow.
What no one else knew—what Griffin had kept quiet even from most of his own team—was that the garage wasn’t just a shelter. It was a front. Beneath a loose panel of concrete in the far corner, hidden beneath stacked tires and a rusted toolbox, a tunnel ran underground to one of his supply caches. Food. Water. Ammunition. Enough to hold out for weeks, if necessary.
Griffin hesitated, eyes flicking to the corner.
He wasn’t sure about showing Vesper the tunnel. Too many unknowns. Too many risks. But then he looked at the boy—alive, because she hadn’t left him on the street like so many others would have.
That counted for something.
Vesper set the old woman down on a blanket someone had laid across a wooden crate. Her movements were methodical, not unkind but focused—stripping off gloves, checking the woman’s side, applying pressure where blood was still weeping.
The boy sat curled on the floor, arms around his knees. He didn’t cry. Just rocked slightly, silent, watching.
He wore a tattered stocking cap, torn jeans, and an oversized A-Team T-shirt that hung off his thin frame. In his lap was a dented metal lunchbox—one of the old-school ones with faded cartoon decals and a bent latch. He held it to his chest like it was life itself.
Vesper crouched beside him. “Hey,” she said softly, reaching for the lunchbox. “Let me clean your face.”
The boy flinched and clutched it tighter, his small hands white-knuckled.
She pulled back, nodding. “Okay. Keep it close. Just breathe.”
Griffin watched from across the room, arms crossed, still not making up his mind about her. The way she moved. The way she spoke to the kid. She wasn’t a soldier—not in the same way he was—but she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t lie.
He hadn’t decided if that made her more dangerous or more trustworthy.
“We’ll need antibiotics,” Vesper muttered, more to herself than him. “And gauze. That wound’s not deep, but it’ll rot in two days if we don’t clean it.”
Griffin nodded, still scanning the room, his mind ticking through inventory, options, threats. “We’ve got a stash two clicks north. Hidden under a burned-out church. I’ll send one of mine.”
“No,” Vesper said. “I’ll go. You’re more valuable here.”
Griffin eyed her, brow raised. “You sure about that?”
She looked at him. Not sharp, not cold—just direct. “Yeah. I am.”
A long silence stretched between them, broken only by the hum of that dying red light and the slow, ragged breathing of the woman on the crate.
Griffin finally spoke. “He knows it’s me.”
Vesper didn’t ask who. She just nodded once, grim. “Marshal.”
“Yeah.”
She walked to the wall, leaned her back against it, slid down until she was sitting in the dirt. Her pistol rested across her knees.
“So what’s the play, Commander? We keep running until he catches us, or we hit him first?”
Griffin stared at the ceiling, where black mold had begun to bloom across cracked plaster.
“We buy time. Get the civilians safe. Then we take his game board away—piece by piece.”
Vesper let out a low breath that might’ve been a laugh, or might’ve been exhaustion.
“Big plan.”
“Only kind worth having,” Griffin said.
Vesper shifted, and Griffin caught the grimace she tried to hide. Her hand pressed briefly to her ribs, the fabric of her jacket darkened just a shade too much.
“You’re hit,” Griffin said flatly.
“Just a ricochet,” she muttered. “Nothing deep.”
He crossed the room, grabbed a med kit from a shelf, and dropped it beside her.
“Take your jacket off. I’ll patch it.”
She shook her head. “I’ve got it.”
“You’re bleeding,” he said, his voice low but firm. “Let me help.”
“I said I’ve got it.”
Griffin crouched in front of her, one eyebrow raised. ” What’s the matter, afraid you’ll streak like a girl?”
Her glare was sharp and instant. But after a beat, she relented with a grunt and peeled back her jacket, revealing a shallow but nasty graze just above her hip.
Griffin didn’t say anything more. He just got to work, cleaning the wound with practiced hands while she winced and hissed through her teeth.
He didn’t miss the way she kept her eyes locked on him, unflinching, as if daring him to judge her pain.
He didn’t.
“Could’ve let the kid die,” he said quietly, as he wrapped gauze around her side.
“Didn’t,” she replied.
“No. You didn’t.”
They sat in silence a moment longer.
The old woman stirred, eyes glassy but alert. She looked around the room, scanned the shadows and the low flicker of light, and slowly got to her feet. Her gait was unsteady but determined as she crossed to a crate where a stash of bottled water was stacked.
She cracked one open with trembling fingers and drank greedily, some spilling down her chin. When she pulled it away, her lips smacked slightly. She sighed—a low, deep breath of satisfaction.
“It’s been a long time since I could drink without worrying about anything,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Griffin nodded silently.
One of his men handed her a foil-wrapped protein bar and a tin of beans. She sat cross-legged on the floor and tore into it without ceremony. The woman was ravenous, chewing and sipping her water, trying to pace herself but failing.
Vesper, watching from her seat, nodded toward the back wall. “Drink up. There’s more.”
The woman slowed, her chewing cautious now. She looked around the room again, voice quieter. “Is it safe here?”
Before anyone could answer, she asked, more curious than afraid, “You guys are them, aren’t you?”
Vesper stood slowly, puzzled. “Them?”
The woman looked between the two of them with dawning recognition. Her eyes lingered first on Vesper, then on Griffin.
“You’re Ghost,” she said. Then turned to Griffin. “And he’s Reaper. Right?”
Vesper blinked, then glanced toward Griffin.
Griffin, still crouched with the med kit, met her eyes. After a long pause, he gave the smallest nod.
The woman smiled faintly, the corners of her mouth trembling. “Didn’t think you were real. They talk about you two in the camps. They say you guys are going to save us. Are you going to save us?”
Vesper and Griffin looked at each other and remained silent. They hadn’t set out to save anyone. That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to fight—and if something got saved in the process, so be it.
(Outside, the city burned quietly…)—beneath smoke, beneath ash, beneath the weight of everything that had already been lost….)