My Guild Threw Me to the Monsters, So I Woke Up Three Days Before the End novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Porter at the Wall
His best friend shoves him off the gate ramp into the crawlers, and he wakes three days before the sky opens to find his daughter alive and a permission slip that says he searched the wrong building for twelve years.
The last thing I ever carried was a crate of shotgun shells for the man who killed me.
That was on the ramp at the east gate of the downtown wall, twelve years after the sky over Buffalo opened.
The wall was shaking under the crawlers, the gray, dog-sized things that had been falling out of that sky since the first day.
I set the crate down at Ray Kostelnik's boots.
Ray had been my best friend since the ninth grade.
Now he ran the Ironworks guild, and I was its porter.
Every hunter had a mark on the back of his hand that showed his rank.
A porter had no mark.
He carried the hunters' shells, their water and their wounded, for a bowl of soup and a cot.
Ray put his hand flat on my chest, the way he always did when he said hello.
Behind me, his right-hand man took hold of my left arm.
"Sorry, Danny," Ray said. "Somebody's got to hold the door."
He shoved, and I went backward down the ramp into the crawlers.
Up on the overpass, a woman in a white coat was running toward the gate.
She was the only Gold in Buffalo, the highest rank a hunter could reach.
Everybody knew a Gold got one request, and the whole wall prayed hers would close the sky.
She was shouting a word I couldn't hear.
At the top of the ramp, the big steel gate dropped shut with me on the outside of it.
The first crawler found my leg, and the second one found my throat.
I woke up to the smoke alarm.
"Daddy! The waffles are on fire. A little."
I was in my own bed, in our upstairs flat in Kaisertown.
I put my hand on my throat, and it was whole.
Rosie stood in the bedroom doorway in her green school sweater, holding a fork.
She was eight years old, with her mother's red hair and a gap where her front tooth used to be.
Twelve years ago, the last time I saw her, she was waving at me from a school bus window.
I went down on my knees and held on to her.
"Daddy, you're squishing me."
I couldn't let go.
"Okay," she said into my shoulder. "But squishing is a quarter."
I laughed, and it came out wrong.
"Why are you crying? Is it the waffles? I only burned two."
"It's the waffles," I said.
My phone on the nightstand said Tuesday, October 20, 7:04 a.m.
The sky opened on Friday, October 23, at 4:12 in the afternoon.
I had three days.
I was thirty-four again, and nothing hurt.
I threw the waffles out the kitchen window and fanned the smoke alarm until it quit.
Rosie sat at the table behind a sign that said HUDAK DRAWING COMPANY in purple marker.
She slid me a drawing of a man asleep with his mouth open and lines coming out of it.
"That's you snoring," she said. "That's a quarter."
I gave her a dollar.
She counted out three quarters from a pickle jar and pushed them back.
"I don't do tips," she said. "It's unprofessional."
I put the drawing on the fridge and held the handle until my hands stopped shaking.
My phone buzzed with a text from Ray. "Coming by at 7:30 for the rifle. Bringing donuts for my goddaughter."
The first time I lived this morning, I'd handed him my father's deer rifle at the door.
On Friday at 4:13 he shot the first crawler in Buffalo with it.
Every person in the city heard a voice inside their head say his name.
That was how the Ironworks guild started.
He knocked at 7:31, and Rosie beat me to the door and jumped at him.
"Uncle Ray!"
He caught her with one arm, holding a box of donuts up high.
Ray was built like the tow trucks he owned, with a shaved head and a red beard.
"Your dad looks like something I'd tow," he told her.
"He cried about the waffles," Rosie said.
Ray set her down and looked at me.
"Danny. You okay, buddy?"
He put his hand flat on my chest.
I stepped back from it before I could stop myself.
Ray's eyebrows went up, and he headed down the hall.
"Rifle still in the hall closet? I'll grab it and go."
I got there first and leaned against the closet door.
"I'm keeping it this year."
He laughed, waiting for the rest of the joke.
"I'm not lending it out, Ray."
"Since when do you say no to me?"
"Since this morning."
He looked at me for a long moment, still smiling, and then he shrugged.
"Your dad's rifle, your call. You just lost half a deer."
He gave Rosie the donuts on his way back to the kitchen.
"Friday I'm coming to see your pumpkin, kiddo. My yard's two blocks from that church."
"It's going to be a pumpkin of you," Rosie said. "Looking at it costs a quarter."
"Put it on my tab."
Rosie pushed a paper and a pen across the table to my plate.
"You have to sign my paper," she said. "Or I can't go Friday."
It was a permission slip.
"St. Stanislaus Church, Peckham Street. After-school pumpkin painting. Friday, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Student: Rose Hudak."
Last time I'd signed it with a donut in my other hand and never read a word.
On Friday a crawler nest came through the roof of her school.
I thought she was inside, and I dug in that rubble for six days.
For twelve years I'd looked for my daughter in the wrong building.
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