My Guild Threw Me to the Monsters, So I Woke Up Three Days Before the End novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: First Mark

Danny kills the first crawler, every head in Buffalo hears his name, he picks the class nobody picks and holds up a falling church, and then Ray arrives with the second mark and an old job offer.

The sound came first, a long ripping roar that shook dust down from the ceiling.

Every kid at the tables screamed at once.

"Everybody to me!" Marta shouted. "Hold hands! Nobody lets go!"

They ran to her.

Rosie ran to me instead and grabbed my belt loop.

"Side door," I told Marta. "The yard. Now."

The big window over the front doors burst inward.

Something dropped through it and landed on the front pews, right where the tables had stood on Tuesday.

It was the size of a big dog, gray and hairless, with six legs and a mouth made of bone.

I'd seen ten thousand of them, and my legs still went cold.

It turned its head toward the sound of the kids.

It came down the aisle at them, fast and low.

I picked up the pry bar and stepped into the aisle.

It jumped at the boy with the black pumpkin.

I swung the bar into the side of its head, and it went sideways into a pew.

It came up again, hissing.

I hit it a second time, and then a third, until it stopped moving.

The church went quiet except for the kids crying.

Then a voice spoke inside my head, flat and calm, and I knew every person in Buffalo heard it too.

[First mark in Buffalo: Daniel Hudak.]

"Did you hear that?" Marta said over the kids' heads.

"That's my dad!" Rosie yelled. "Daddy, you're in the sky!"

The back of my right hand burned.

A gray mark the size of a quarter sat in the skin.

That was Iron, the bottom rank.

Three words lit up behind my eyes: Brawler, Marksman, Porter.

In twelve years I'd watched a few thousand people choose, and I never saw one of them pick Porter.

Hunters said Porter was the class for people who liked carrying other people's bags.

I'd carried other people's bags for twelve years.

I picked Porter.

[Porter: carries what others can't. Rises by what it carries to safety.]

Above us, something in the towers cracked.

"Go!" I shouted.

Marta pulled the line of kids toward the side door, and the front of the church came down behind them.

Stone poured through the ceiling where the tables used to be.

A beam as thick as a telephone pole broke loose over the back pews and swung down at the kids.

I got under it.

It hit my shoulders, and I waited for my back to break, and it held.

It felt like the end of a couch, the way it did when Lou forgot to lift his side.

Eleven years of moving had taught me to set my feet before the weight came, and I'd set them without thinking.

I stood there holding up the roof of St. Stan's.

"Under my arm!" I said. "Go under my arm!"

Marta pushed the kids through one at a time, counting out loud.

"Eight, nine, ten."

Rosie was the last one, and she wouldn't let go of my belt loop.

"Rosie. Go with Marta."

"No."

So I walked out with the beam on my shoulders and my daughter hanging on my pants.

I dropped the beam in the doorway behind us.

Peckham Street looked like the end of the world, which it was.

The sky over the city had a long black tear in it, stretching from downtown out over the lake.

Gray shapes were falling out of it onto roofs and cars.

A chunk of the tower had knocked a minivan onto its side across the sidewalk.

A woman was pinned under the edge of it, screaming.

Three men were pulling at the van and getting nowhere.

"Move," I said.

You don't lift a van on its side straight up.

You tip it, the way you walk a fridge back onto a dolly.

I got my hands on the roof rack and rocked it once, and the minivan rolled back onto its wheels.

The woman crawled out on her elbows.

When I turned around, there were twenty people on the sidewalk staring at me.

"That was you," a man said. "The voice said your name."

Down the block, a woman in hospital scrubs was running toward the church, shouting a name.

The boy with the black pumpkin tore out of Marta's line and ran to her.

She grabbed him off his feet.

Marta watched them with her hand over her mouth.

"One," she said, and her voice shook.

Then she turned to me.

"Every one of them goes home to a parent. Every one."

"Okay," I said.

A tow truck turned onto Peckham Street and came toward us over the broken glass.

Ray's right-hand man was behind the wheel.

He drove Ray's biggest truck, and twelve years from now he'd be the one holding my arm on the ramp.

Ray got out of the passenger side with a tire iron in his hand.

There was gray blood on it, and a dull gray mark on the back of his hand.

"Second," he said, holding up his hand. "I got mine at 4:13, right in the street."

He laughed, but his eyes went to the mark on my hand and stayed there.

"Nobody announces second, Danny."

The right-hand man leaned out the truck window.

"What'd you pick?"

"Porter," I said.

He laughed so hard he hit the horn.

"The first mark in the city, and he picks the guy who carries the bags."

Ray grinned at Rosie and Marta and the nine kids behind them.

"Get them in the truck," he said. "My yard's got a fence."

He clapped his hand flat on my chest.

"Come on, Danny. You can carry for me, like always."

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