I tried to shout again, “Hey!” I yelled, before breaking into another coughing fit.
“Ghost? Ghost, is that you?” I thought I heard a soft voice, but my head was swimming and confusing my senses.
“Ghost!” this time the voice was closer, concerned. I felt the weight on my arm shift and the feeling return.
I gingerly rolled over and saw a figure silhouetted against the entrance to a torch-lit tunnel. I began to take a deep breath but stopped abruptly as a harsh smell filled my nostrils.
“He’s awake” the figure in the doorway spoke out, the voice a low growl.
“Who’s there?” I asked, panicking slightly. The figure remained still a moment before slowly moving off down the tunnel. “Hey!” I shouted, “I asked you a Qu...”
A gloved hand clasped over my mouth. I struggled for only a second before I realized the hand belonged to the girl.
“Keep it down, will you?” she whispered, “The dead could still be right above us”.
I looked directly upwards for the first time and saw the hole some distance away, the setting sun shining down.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“A few hours. I didn’t think you had made it at first. I mean watching you fall...” she faltered, a hint of guilt in her voice. “Well, at least you’re awake now. We can get moving when you feel up to it” she recovered, getting to her feet.
I sat up, pain stabbing through my body, every inch aching. I propped myself up against the cold wall behind me. My eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness and I surveyed the room trying to make sense of where I had ended up. I had landed in a large rectangular room with tunnels leading out of either end.
In the middle there ran a groove cut into the stone and covered by a metal grate. Rubble lay everywhere and a large piece of the intricate marble that was once the floor of the town center stood upright against the opposite wall. As I looked at it my mind drifted back to the bandits and whether they had escaped the dead ambush. I sincerely hoped not.
“I know what you did for me up there,” the girl said. I looked over, she seemed to be preparing something but I couldn’t make out what as her back was turned while she fiddled in her pack. “I want you to know I appreciate it”
I didn’t know how to respond to that so I just let my head rest back on the cold bricks and smiled.
She glanced back at me, perhaps unnerved by my silence. “We need to do something about your wounds” she began, “That was one hell of a fall you took, not to mention the bullet lodged in your shoulder there.”
She finished whatever she was doing with her pack and walked over holding a large medical supply box. She sat cross-legged in front of me and slid open the clasps. She really was the picture of beauty and even in the darkness, it was impossible to break my stare from her.
She was around the same height as me, her body slender and toned under the skin-tight sneaking suit. She had her long brown hair tied back in a low ponytail and her eyes were big and fierce. She narrowed them slightly as my gaze met hers. I coughed and looked down, looking instead at the assortment of bandages and ointments in the box.
“Take off your shirt,” she said. I blinked. “Take off your shirt” she repeated, “I need to be able to dress your wounds, don’t I?”
I looked up at her and she smiled, raising her eyebrows. I complied and moments later I was stripped to the waist, shivering slightly in the cold breeze. I looked at the painful wound in my shoulder, dirty and bloody.
“Let me check you over before we get to the nasty business of removing that bullet,” she said leaning forward.
Instinctively I made to block her, but she took my hands and pushed them gently back to my sides. The feeling of her hands on my body was a welcome one as she ran her fingers over old scars and applied slight pressure against my ribs while checking for any breakages.
“Tell me your real name,” she said suddenly, sitting back. For a moment I was caught off guard before she continued, “I mean I know your runner name, Ghost, right?” I nodded slowly. “But what is your birth name?” I reached up to run my hand through my hair, “Oh wait, sorry” she said, stopping me before leaning forward and wiping away the blood from a cut just above my eye.
I smiled and tried to think of an answer to her question. In truth, I had never been known by any other name, at least not to my knowledge.
She looked at me with a slightly concerned look on her beautiful face, “You must have a real name” she said. “I mean the people in my zone call me Smoke, which is, of course, my runner name, but my real name is Kaatje.”
I looked back at the ground, thinking hard. Memories of my mother and father passed through my mind, painful memories, but no matter how hard I tried I failed to remember a time when any other name was used.
“Rick” I lied. “My name is Rick”. I looked up at her and she was smiling again.
I worried that perhaps she somehow sensed I had made that up, but probably just thought I had hit my head a little too hard. Either way, I allowed my eyes to linger on her perfect face.
“A pleasure, Rick,” she said, “Now let’s get that bullet out.”
She unclipped a gleaming pair of what looked like pliers from her medical kit before handing me a short piece of wood from the surrounding debris.
“Put that between your teeth and bite down because this is going to sting a little and I haven’t got anything to use as a painkiller”
She moved forward and positioned herself so that her legs were on either side of mine. In any other situation, I suppose I would’ve enjoyed this level of interaction. I placed the foul-tasting board between my teeth and took a deep breath as she splashed water on the wound.
Blinding pain erupted behind my eyes as she pushed the pliers into my shoulder causing me to bite down hard on the wood. I tried to fight back but she held me against the wall with surprising strength, pinning my legs beneath her before I could kick out. I could feel the metal rubbing and twisting against my collarbone as blood ran free down my chest and I began to fear I might black out. With one final excruciating twist and a cry of triumph, she pulled the pliers free of the streaming wound to my great relief before pressing gauze to the open hole and finishing up by wrapping a bandage over my shoulder.
I spat out the wood as she sat next to me breathing heavily, sweat pouring down her face. “Thank you” I managed. She brushed her hair out of her face and rested her head against my good shoulder. “Anytime,” she said laughing.
We sat for a while and talked. She told me that she had been on her way back from a scavenging run when she nearly ran into a group of bandits with hostages in tow, some of which she recognized.
Her eyes went cold as she told me of how she had gone back to find her zone ransacked and burning. When the survivors called for her aid in controlling the fire she turned her back and ran in pursuit of the bandits. She tracked them to the town center with revenge in her mind, but upon seeing their true numbers she had retreated to the shadows and toyed with the idea of ambushing them one by one.
She was captured shortly after alongside myself. She asked me what I was doing out there and I described the situation regarding the growing numbers of refugees arriving in our zone and the desperate need for water. I told her how I had watched her progress from a nearby rooftop and noticed a sniper doing the same, so had resolved to somehow warn her of the imminent danger.