My Guild Threw Me to the Monsters, So I Woke Up Three Days Before the End novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Pumpkin Painting

Danny can't give the after-school director a reason to cancel Friday, so he signs on to chaperone and moves every table to the back of the church, and at 4:12 the sky opens.

I didn't sign it.

Rosie folded her arms over her sweater.

"Everybody's going. Everybody in the whole program is painting a pumpkin except me."

"We'll see," I said.

"We'll see means no. Everybody knows that."

I called my boss, Lou Pavlik, and told him I had the flu.

I'd carried furniture for Pavlik Moving for eleven years, and I'd never called in sick once.

"You sound like you saw a ghost," Lou said.

"Close," I said.

At three that afternoon I picked Rosie up from school and walked her to St. Stan's myself.

It was a big stone church with two tall towers, in the old Polish neighborhood on the East Side.

I knew how it would look in twelve years: two stumps where the towers had been, and the back half still standing.

The after-school program met inside, at folding tables set up right under the towers, by the front doors.

Ten kids were already there with juice boxes.

The woman in charge was tall, with a dark blond braid, a Bills hoodie and a clipboard.

She was about thirty, and she had a chipped front tooth she didn't bother to hide when she smiled.

"Marta Dudek," she said, and shook my hand. "You're Rosie's dad. She says you can carry a fridge up three flights by yourself."

"Two flights. On the third I had help."

"She also says you're the best dad in Buffalo."

"She charges for that one," I said. "I owe her a quarter."

Rosie ran off to the art table, and Marta tucked the clipboard under her arm.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Hudak?"

"Danny. I need you to cancel Friday."

"The pumpkins?"

"All of it. Send the kids home at three."

She looked at me.

"I've got kids here whose parents work until six on Friday," she said. "Half of them can't leave a shift early without losing the job."

"I know."

"So give me one reason that isn't a feeling."

I couldn't tell her the sky was going to open.

I couldn't tell her that I'd walked past this church every week for twelve years with a hunter's pack on my back.

"I don't have one," I said.

"Then I don't have a cancellation."

She said it kindly, which was worse.

"Then I'm coming," I said. "Friday. I'll chaperone."

She studied me for a second.

"Fine. I could use somebody to carry the pumpkins."

"I'm good at carrying."

I went to the nearest folding table and started dragging it away from the front doors, toward the back of the church.

There was a side door back there that led out into the rectory yard.

"What are you doing?" Marta said.

"The light's better back here."

She looked up at the windows.

"The light's worse back there."

"Then it's warmer."

"It's the same church, Danny."

I kept dragging.

The kids thought it was a game and started carrying chairs after me.

Marta watched for a second, then picked up the other end of the table I was pulling.

"If you're going to be crazy," she said, "be fast. Snack is at three-thirty."

We moved all six tables in about ten minutes.

When we were done she looked at my hands.

They were shaking again, and I put them in my pockets.

"I was a medic in the Army," she said quietly. "One tour. Guys came off the convoys with their hands doing that."

"I'm fine."

"That's also what they said."

Rosie came over and handed Marta a drawing.

It was a horse with a long yellow braid and a clipboard.

"That's you," Rosie said. "As a horse. That's a quarter."

Marta paid her out of her hoodie pocket without blinking.

"She's been running a business out of my art table all month," she told me.

"She does that."

"She gave me change."

"She doesn't do tips."

Marta laughed, and the chipped tooth showed.

"Rosie says her godfather is Ray Kostelnik," she said. "The tow guy."

"He is."

"My little brother, Shane, drives a truck for him. Ray gave him a job when he got out of the Marines and nobody else would."

I knew Shane Dudek.

He'd be the best shot in the Ironworks guild, and I'd carry his rifle cases for nine years without ever learning he had a sister.

"Ray's good to people he likes," I said.

It was true, and that was the worst part.

That night I signed the slip, and Rosie hugged me like I'd bought her a pony.

On Friday I picked her up from school with a long iron pry bar from work under my coat.

At ten after four, eleven kids were painting pumpkins at the tables in the back of St. Stan's.

Rosie was painting my face on her pumpkin, with a nose that went sideways.

"Your nose is broken," she said. "So I made it broken."

"It was a dresser."

"I know. You tell everybody."

Marta was going down the line with paper towels.

The pry bar was under the table by my foot.

My phone buzzed with a text from Ray. "Leaving the yard now. Save me a pumpkin."

The clock over the choir loft said 4:11.

Then it said 4:12.

The light in the stained glass went brown, then gray, then dark.

Every phone in the church buzzed at once and went dead.

A little boy at the end of the table looked up from his black pumpkin.

"Mr. Danny," he said. "Why is it night?"

Then the sky opened.

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