Chapter 15: Entry in Davenport
The train to Davenport did not feel like a journey into a city, but a descent into a different dimension. The familiar, orderly world of Eldridge—with its quiet suburbs and predictable rhythms—fell away with every clack of the wheels on the track, replaced by a landscape of escalating dread.
From their window, Noah and Luna saw the evidence flicker past like scenes from a dystopian film. A police car, its windows smashed, sat abandoned in a field of overgrown grass. A billboard for a family restaurant was defaced with a single, stark message: THE WORLD IS DEAD. 2012. The towns grew more frayed at the edges, their main streets dotted with boarded-up windows and gatherings of people who did not look like they were waiting for a bus, but for an instruction.
Luna's hand found Noah's, their fingers interlacing, a silent pact against the rising tide outside. They were no longer just grieving parents on a personal quest. They were two civilians willingly traveling into a warzone, armed with nothing but a photograph, a ghost's phone number, and a resolve that felt frighteningly fragile against the scale of what they were witnessing.
"We don't look for him," Noah said, his voice low, his eyes fixed on the passing chaos. "Not directly. We find a place to stay. We observe. We understand the rhythm of this place first."
Luna nodded, but her grip tightened. The logic was sound, but logic felt like a paper shield against the raw, screaming energy they were approaching. The Architect wasn't just a man here; he was the atmosphere. His philosophy had become the city's weather.
When the train finally shuddered to a halt at Davenport Central, the change was immediate and visceral. The air that washed into the carriage was thick with the acrid tang of smoke, old gasoline, and something else—the sour smell of collective fear and fury. The station itself was a monument to neglect and panic. Graffiti crawled up the marble pillars, and the great board announcing arrivals and departures was dark, a dead eye in a screaming face.
They stepped onto the platform and were immediately absorbed into a river of people moving with a frantic, purposeless energy. These weren't commuters. These were refugees in their own city, their faces etched with a volatile mixture of exhaustion and fanaticism. The distant, percussive thump of a helicopter echoed somewhere above, a monstrous insect buzzing over a dying animal.
They managed to find a taxi, a dented sedan with a driver who eyed them with a mixture of suspicion and pity. "Where to?" he grunted.
"A hotel. Somewhere… central," Noah said, avoiding specifics.
The driver barked a short, humorless laugh. "Central? You want to be in the belly of the beast, huh?" He shook his head but pulled out into the traffic, which was less a flow of cars and more a stagnant, honking river of metal. "I'll take you to the edge of the quarter. You go further in on foot. My car doesn't have a death wish."
The journey through the city was a silent, horrifying tour. Davenport was a patient in the midst of a violent seizure. Some streets were eerily empty, littered with the debris of past conflicts—shattered glass, torn clothing, the blackened scars of fires. Others were clogged with humanity, a slow, churning mass of protesters whose chants were a monotonous, guttural drone.
"The world… will end… in 2012!"
"No gods…no masters… only truth!"
The signs were less about political demands and more about existential screams. PEACE IS A LIE. YOUR MORALITY IS A GHOST. The words were pure Architect, distilled into slogans and sprayed on walls.
Their hotel, when they finally reached it, was a bleak, six-story structure that had clearly seen better decades. The man at the reception desk didn't look up from his phone, simply sliding a key across the counter in exchange for cash. No ID, no questions. The room was on the third floor, overlooking a narrow alley. It smelled of mildew and despair.
Noah dropped their bags. "We can't stay locked in here."
"We need evidence," Luna agreed, her voice steady though her hands trembled slightly as she unzipped her backpack. She pulled out a small, high-definition camcorder. "If we can't find Voss yet, we document the world he's built. It's all connected."
And so, they went back out, two ghosts with a camera, walking into the heart of the storm.
The protests were not the organized marches of the early news reports. This was something far more primal. The air vibrated with a low, constant roar, a sound composed of thousands of individual shouts, breaking glass, and the distant wail of sirens. The crowd was a single, multi-headed organism, capable of moments of eerie, placid silence before erupting into sudden, terrifying violence.
Luna held the camera, her finger on the record button, panning slowly. She captured images that felt like fragments of a nightmare. A young woman, her face beatific and empty, gently placing a flower on the windshield of an overturned, burning car. A group of men using a steel bench as a battering ram against the reinforced door of a bank. The eyes of the people were the most chilling—some burned with fervent conviction, others were hollow and dead, and many flickered with a raw, animal panic.
"They're not just protesting the government," Luna whispered, lowering the camera for a moment. "They're protesting reality itself."
They had moved with the edge of the crowd for nearly an hour, a tactic that felt safer than being absorbed into its core. But the organism was unpredictable. A sudden surge from the center, triggered by some unseen stimulus, sent a ripple of panic through the masses. The orderly flow dissolved into a stampede.
"Luna!" Noah grabbed her arm, pulling her towards the relative shelter of a recessed shop doorway. The crowd pressed in around them, a suffocating wall of bodies and noise. For a moment, they were trapped, carried along by the current of fear.
It was in that moment of chaos that the shot rang out.
It wasn't the controlled pop of a police firearm. It was a sharper, more brutal crack—a handgun, fired at close range from within the crowd.
Noah felt the impact before he registered the sound. A white-hot punch to his side, just above his hip. The force of it spun him, and he crashed into the brick wall of the doorway, his vision blooming with red and black spots. The pain was a distant, secondary thing, overshadowed by a wave of nauseating shock.
Luna screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the riot. Her camera clattered to the ground. Her world shrank to the terrifying, vivid red blossom spreading across Noah's light jacket.
"Noah! Oh God, no!"
Her training as a mother, that primal instinct to fix, to protect, kicked in with a ferocity that overrode her own terror. She ripped the scarf from her own neck, a cheap, cotton thing, and shoved it hard against the wound. Noah grunted, his face a mask of pain and disbelief, his knees buckling.
"We have to move! Now!" she screamed into his ear, her voice the only anchor in the roaring chaos.
With a strength she didn't know she possessed, she hauled him to his feet, his arm slung over her shoulder. She half-dragged, half-carried him, stumbling out of the doorway and down the nearest alley, away from the main thoroughfare. She didn't look back to see who had fired the shot, or why. It didn't matter. In the Architect's world, violence was as random and meaningless as everything else.
She turned corner after corner, moving deeper into a labyrinth of decaying industrial buildings and deserted lots, her only goal to find silence and shadows. Finally, she found it: a small, concrete courtyard behind a shuttered auto-body shop, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. It was littered with rusting barrels and weeds pushing through the cracks, but it was empty and, for the moment, quiet.
Gently, she lowered Noah to the ground, his back against the rough brick wall. His breathing was shallow, his face pale.
"It's… it's not that bad," he gasped, lying through clenched teeth.
"Don't talk," Luna ordered, her voice trembling but her hands steady. She kept pressure on the wound, the scarf already soaked through. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone—no signal. They were truly alone.
As the adrenaline began to ebb, a crushing despair threatened to take its place. They had been in Davenport for less than three hours, and they were already bleeding and trapped. The hunt for a ghost had nearly gotten them killed. Luna looked up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the buildings. It was deep indigo, the first stars pricking through the haze of the city's smoke. It felt like looking up from the bottom of a grave.
And then, the sky began to fall.
It started with a single, brilliant streak of silver, carving a flawless line across the darkness. Then another, and another. A meteor storm, silent and magnificent, igniting the heavens in a display of cosmic indifference.
Luna stared, transfixed. The beauty of it was an affront, a cruel joke. "Noah, look," she whispered.
He lifted his head, his eyes hazy with pain, and watched. For a long moment, there was no sound but their ragged breathing and the silent, glorious destruction happening light-years away.
"He would have loved this," Noah murmured, his voice thick.
Luna didn't need to ask who. A single tear traced a path through the grime on her cheek. "He did. He always wanted to see the Perseids from the countryside."
In the face of the universe's sublime spectacle, their mission felt both insignificant and monumentally important. They were two tiny, fragile beings, hunting a monster in a city tearing itself apart, under a sky that didn't care if they lived or died.
It was then that a voice, calm, cultured, and unnervingly close, cut through the silence from the shadows behind them.
"A beautiful night for the end of the world, don't you think?"
Luna's heart stopped. She spun around, instinctively placing her body between the voice and Noah.
He emerged from the deep shadows of a broken doorway, a figure of absolute darkness. He was tall, clad in a sleek, tailored black coat over a black shirt and trousers. The lower half of his face was obscured by a simple, black cloth mask. But his eyes… his eyes were a piercing, intelligent blue, and they seemed to absorb the faint starlight, reflecting nothing back.
He took a few silent steps forward, stopping a respectful distance away, his hands held loosely at his sides. He made no threatening moves.
"I saw you two stumble in here," he said, his voice muffled only slightly by the mask. It was a baritone that was both soothing and unsettlingly detached. "You looked like you could use a friend. This is not a part of the city for tourists. Or for the wounded."
Luna's mind raced, a frantic scream of It's him! warring with the necessity of the moment. He didn't know who they were. He thought they were just more victims of his beautiful, collapsing world.
"We… we got separated from our group," she stammered, the lie tasting like ash. "There was a shot…"
The man in black nodded slowly, his gaze flicking to Noah's blood-soaked side. "I am not a doctor, but I have some experience with trauma. The bleeding seems to have slowed. You applied pressure correctly." His compliment was clinical. "May I ask your names?"
There was a beat of silence. Noah, gathering his strength, answered, his voice a raw scrape. "I'm Noah. This is my wife, Luna."
"A pleasure to meet you, despite the circumstances," the man said, and he gave a slight, almost imperceptible bow of his head. "You can call me… a concerned citizen. It is a rare thing, to find people appreciating the celestial show amidst all this." He gestured vaguely towards the distant sounds of the riot, as if swatting away a fly.
"It's hard to ignore," Luna said, her guard still impossibly high, her every instinct telling her to run, but her body rooted to the spot, protecting Noah.
"Indeed," the man agreed, turning his blue eyes back to the sky as another cluster of meteors streaked past. "It reminds one of the sheer scale of things. All our little dramas, our protests, our pain… it is all so very small from a galactic perspective. We assign it such grand meaning, when in the end, we are just stardust and temporary chemical reactions."
His words were a softer, more poetic version of the slogans on the streets. The same poison, distilled into a seductive elixir.
"It's still beautiful," Luna countered, defiance in her tone.
"Oh, it is," he conceded readily. "Beauty is not dependent on meaning. In fact, it is often more pure without it. A falling star does not need a reason to fall. It just does. Its purpose is its own existence, and its end." He looked back at them, and his eyes seemed to smile. "You two seem to have a strong purpose. To brave this chaos together. That is a powerful bond. A reason to keep going, perhaps?"
He was probing, ever so gently. Not as the Architect hunting his pursuers, but as a philosopher curiously examining two interesting specimens.
"We have our reasons," Noah said, his voice gaining a sliver of its old strength. He was studying the man, every movement, every inflection, storing it away.
"Good," the man said softly. "Hold onto them. In a world that is losing all its reasons, a personal one is the most potent thing you can own." He glanced towards the mouth of the alley. "The patrols will be sweeping this sector soon. They are not… discerning. You should not stay here."
He reached into his coat, and Luna flinched. But he only pulled out a small, sealed bottle of water and a clean, white handkerchief. He placed them on the ground a few feet away.
"For the wound. It is not much, but it is clean." He straightened up, a sliver of absolute darkness against the meteor-strewn sky. "It was a privilege to share this moment with you, Noah, Luna. A moment of clarity in the noise. I hope you find what you are looking for in our dying city."
He gave them one last, lingering look, his blue eyes holding a universe of unspoken thoughts. Then, he turned and walked back into the shadows from which he came, his footsteps making no sound. He was simply gone, as if he had been nothing more than a collective hallucination born of pain and fear.
The meteors continued their silent, brilliant suicide above. The cloth in Luna's hand was soaked with her husband's blood. And the ghost they had come to hunt had just offered them water and a moment of his time, a friendly phantom in the apocalypse he had designed.
The chapter of their investigation was over. The game had now truly begun.
Chapter 15 ends
To be continued