FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES Self-Para | Jonah Basilone Word Count: 1,727 tw: blood, gore, violence, guns, knives, death
The first time someone called him Ghost, Jonah was twenty-three and covered in someone else's blood.
He'd been missing for forty-seven minutes. But not officially. Officially, he was "off comms." Officially, his team had lost visuals on him after the second breach. Officially, the mission was still active and they were attempting to reestablish his location.
Unofficially, everyone thought he was dead. Honestly, even Jonah would have thought the same.
The building had gone dark after he and his team cut the power. No cameras or communications. No clear ways out. Just abandoned concrete halls, locked doors, and people with way too many weapons. The last thing Jonah remembered hearing through his earpiece was someone saying his name.
Basilone. Then static. Nothing.
He tapped the side of his headset out of instinct. Once, like his training demanded. Twice, out of annoyance at the situation. Still nothing. There would be no one to acknowledge him, direct him, or tell him where friendlies were or where hostiles were moving. He was alone. The silence settled around him immediately. Not peaceful silence. The kind that made every footstep sound a closer than it was. The kind that reminded him with every passing second that if something went wrong, nobody would know where to find him.
Jonah decided to focus the objective. Who would miss him anyway?
The hostage was somewhere on the fourth floor. Six guards between him and the stairs... Or more. He wasn't sure. Jonah moved anyway. Quietly. As quiet as possible.
That was the thing people misunderstood. They always imagined rage. Some violent, movie version of him kicking in doors and killing people like Deadpool. It wasn’t like that. It was quieter than that. A hand over a mouth. His knife in their ribs. Their bodies lowered delicately lowered to the floor so it wouldn't make too much sound.
The first guard never even saw him coming. The second turned just in time to realize someone was behind him. That small realization lasted longer than the entire fight. Then they were both on the floor.
Jonah slipped through the building one room at a time, sticking to the shadows and corners. Emergency lights painted everything in bright red. Every hallway looked the same and the doorways felt like a coin toss between good and bad luck. He listened. Waited. Counted footsteps so he would know who he could take them on. Then kept moving. The isolation sharpened everything. Without voices in his ear, there was only his own breathing. His own racing heartbeat. Every decision he made belonged entirely to him. If he made a mistake, that could mean the difference between life and death.
Jonah did not run. Running made noise. He did not waste bullets. Bullets made even more noise. He became something smaller in the darkness. Jonah was less visible now. Less Alive. He was a shadow moving between patches of emergency light, counting breaths that weren’t his, and deciding which ones he ended first.
The first time someone actually spotted him, it was almost bad. Really bad. A guard rounded a corner unexpectedly. Their eyes met. The man opened his mouth to call for help, and Jonah closed the distance before the sound came out. The struggle slammed them both into a wall. A grunt. A crack. Silence...
Jonah caught the body before it hit the floor.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, his hands were slick with blood. His shoulder burned where a bullet had skimmed him and his cheek was split open from when someone missed him by inches. He barely noticed. Not right now. He could process all that later.
The fourth floor felt different from the rest of the building. Quieter. Dead in the worst of ways. Like it was waiting for him. The emergency lights were weaker now, leaving long stretches of hallway swallowed by pure darkness. The air smelled of dust, old wiring, and gun oil. Jonah felt uneasy again. Somewhere far away, a pipe dripped, the sound echoing across the floor like a clock counting down.
Jonah paused. For a moment, the entire floor felt abandoned... Then he spotted the guard at the far end of the hall.
And another... And another.
Okay, not abandoned... Guarded. More guarded than whole his trip up there.
The hostage was in old storage room with a bag over his head and his wrists zip-tied tight to a pipe. Jonah crouched in front of him.
"Don't scream." The man screamed anyway.
Jonah winced. Not what he needed, but he understood considering the man's condition. "Alright, that's fair."
The hostage couldn't see much through the bag, but he could hear Jonah's soft voice. Could hear the fighting outside. Could hear men shouting. Then stopping completely. One after another, footsteps started down the hall. Three men? Three. Fast. Jonah cut the man free and shoved him behind a row of shelves, spinning back around as the door burst open.
The first guard died in the doorway when Jonah shot him in the head. The second guard fired at Jonah twice. One round went through a shelf. The other shattered a light, raining down glass. Jonah put him down before he could get another one off.
The third got close enough to swing a knife. That one took a lot more of his strength. The knife caught Jonah’s arm and Jonah slammed him into a metal rack in response. The rack collapsed. Boxes exploded across the floor. The guard kept fighting him.
From behind the shelves, the hostage watched through gaps in the metal. At first, he thought there had to be more than one rescuer here to help. Nobody moved like that alone. Nobody stayed that calm. The stranger barely even spoke. He just appeared wherever he needed to be and somehow somebody else ended up on the floor.
The hostage never saw panic in Jonah's eyes. Never saw hesitation in each of his movement. Only the focus. That mattered.
When it was finally over, Jonah stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard, muscles weak, blood dripping from his jaw onto the floor. The hostage stared at him, frozen, like he wasn't quite sure if he should be afraid of his supposed rescuer.
Jonah wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You good?"
The hostage blinked. "What?"
Jonah tilted his head, still breathing heavy. "Can you walk?"
A small, frantic nod. "You're not going to--"
"Then walk."
The hostage obeyed immediately. Not because he trusted Jonah, but because he wasn't entirely sure Jonah was real at all. They made it out through a separate stairwell just as his team breached the lower level. Jonah heard them before he saw them. Boots. Orders. Weapons up. Someone shouted, “Contact!”
Jonah stepped into the hall with one arm around the hostage and a pistol in his other hand. Half the team aimed at him. Then froze.
For a second, nobody spoke. Jonah looked at them. They looked at Jonah. At the blood on his face. At the hostage clinging to him. At the hallway behind him, where bodies lay scattered in the dark like a haunted house. Finally, one of his team members lowered their gun first.
"Jesus Christ."
Jonah blinked slowly. "Little dramatic."
The man stared past him. "Where the hell did you go, Basilone?"
Jonah thought about it. He could have told them the truth. That he had followed the screaming. That he had counted footsteps to survive. That he had turned every corner expecting to die and just kept moving anyway... Instead, he shrugged. "Upstairs."
A few people laughed, mostly because the alternative was processing what they were looking at. Another team member walked past him, following the trail he left behind. He saw the first body. Then the second. Then the third. Then the fourth.
He started counting them out loud. "Four."
A few steps later:
"Five."
Then:
"Six."
The laughter behind him got louder.
"Keep going!" Someone called, Jonah felt self-conscious.
"I’m trying," the counting team member replied, disappearing around the corner. A moment later, his voice echoed back again.
"Seven."
More laughter.
"Jesus." A pause. "Eight."
Someone whistled. A blush crawled up Jonah's neck.
"Nine."
The laughter started dying.
"Ten."
The counting team member reappeared a few seconds later. Nobody was laughing anymore. His expression had changed. Not scared. Not exactly. Just... thoughtful. Like he had walked through something strange. He wasn't making direct eye contact with Jonah.
"You disappeared," he said. Jonah adjusted his grip on the hostage before the man could collapse.
"Signal dropped," Jonah replied softly.
"No." The team member shook his head. "You disappeared." His eyes flicked back toward the hallway. He nodded toward the bodies. "And then everybody else did too."
For a second, nobody said anything. Then one of the younger soldiers snorted. "He's a ghost."
A few people laughed immediately.
"Yeah," someone said.
"Guy vanishes for an hour," another said.
"Comes back looking like he crawled out of a horror movie."
"That's what I mean! He's a ghost!"
More laughter. Someone pointed toward the hallway.
"Seriously. We lose Basilone and suddenly half the building dies."
"That's not funny," the counting team member said. Then he thought about it. Looked down the hallway. Looked back at Jonah. And slowly added, "Alright, it’s a little funny... "
The laughter came back. Louder this time. Even the hostage looked confused enough to join in. Just a little, but enough.
Jonah frowned. "What?"
"Nothing, Ghost," one of the senior members said.
"Don't start."
That only made them all laugh harder.
At first, it was a joke. A stupid one. The kind that should have died before they all even got back to base. But later, people kept thinking about it. About how Jonah had vanished. About how nobody had seen him for nearly an hour. About the trail of bodies leading through four floors of darkness. About the fact that every story about him seemed to start with someone saying they lost sight of him and end with someone else not making it home.
The laughter faded. The nickname didn't.
It followed him out of the building. It followed him into the next briefing. The next safehouse. The next mission. By the end of the month, even people who had never seen his face knew what they called him.
Ghost.
Jonah hated it in the beginning. Not because it wasn’t true.
Because it was.
