Gate Crasher Apocalypse – Harry Richardson

The foreman swung in response. Danny ducked under the hammer, stepped inside the arc, and hit it three times in the ribcage before it could recover. Bones cracked. The bleed ticked. Fury climbed. The foreman’s backhand caught Danny across the chest with the hammer’s shaft. The impact picked him up and put him on the ground six feet away. He rolled, came up on one knee, and was already moving again before the foreman could close the distance. His ribs were bruised but not broken.

The regeneration was working on them before he finished standing up. He circled left, hit it in the damaged shoulder again, and this time the bone gave way completely. The arm separated from the torso and crashed to the floor still gripping air. The foreman swung the hammer one-handed. Slower now. Unbalanced. Blood Scent registered it as wounded, the dim heat signature brightening to something warmer as the damage accumulated. Danny put the axe through its skull with a two-handed overhead strike that split the bone down to the jaw.

The foreman dropped. The sledgehammer rang against the stone floor. 「Monster Slain: Skeletal Foreman (E-Rank Elite)」 「Experience Gained: 1,580」 「Fury Stack: 67 (+5 elite kill bonus)」 Danny stood over the foreman’s remains breathing hard, his headlamp throwing a cone of white light across the quarry floor that was now a boneyard.

Fragments everywhere. Dust was still settling. The faint scratching sounds of the last few skeletons still moving somewhere in the dark at the edges of the chamber, too far away to have reached the fight, too mindless to have stayed away. He went and found them. Four more miners in the corners of the quarry floor, standing in their endless patrol loops. Four more kills. Four more stacks. 「Level Up!」 「Level 7 → Level 8」 「Fury Stack: 73」 「Damage Bonus: +73%」 「Attack Speed: +44%」 「Pain Tolerance: Significantly increased」 The quarry floor was clear.

Thirty-four undead destroyed. Danny checked his body. He had minor scratches, but they were fading. Bruised ribs from the foreman’s hit were almost healed. The puncture wound in his forearm from the second tier was completely gone, not even a scar. His Fury was at seventy-three, and the decay clock hadn’t started because he’d been in constant combat since entering the Gate. No gap longer than five seconds. No window for the stacks to drain.

Danny Gallagher felt the drop before he heard it. A groan of steel, a crack of concrete, and then the section of flooring twenty feet ahead of him fell into the basement level in a cascade of burning debris and choking dust. He pulled back from the edge and keyed his radio. “Ladder 17 to Command. We’ve got structural collapse on the second floor, east side. I’ve got two civilians unaccounted for. I’m pushing deeper.” “Gallagher, pull back. We’re going defensive.” “Negative. I can hear them.” Through the roar of the fire and the complaint of a building trying to kill him, Danny could hear voices.

A woman screaming. A child crying. It was coming from somewhere past the collapse, in a section of the warehouse that nobody should have been in at two in the morning. Danny adjusted his mask, checked his air supply, then moved toward the screaming. That was what firefighters did. * * * Twelve years on the job had taught Danny Gallagher things that no training manual could capture. The way a building talks to you before it gives up.

The sound of load-bearing walls deciding they’ve had enough. The specific quality of heat that means you’ve got minutes instead of hours. This building was talking. It was saying get out. But Danny kept going. The Roxbury warehouse was old construction; brick and timber converted into artist studios sometime in the last decade.

The fire had started in the northwest corner and moved fast through the open floor plan, feeding on turpentine, canvas, and decades of accumulated dust. By the time Engine 7 and Ladder 17 arrived, the second floor was fully involved, and the first floor was filling with smoke thick enough to chew.

Danny moved through the smoke on the second floor, one hand on the wall, one hand holding a Halligan bar. His partner Marcus had stayed at the collapse point to relay radio communications. Standard procedure was to maintain contact. But standard procedure also said to retreat when the incident commander ordered it. Danny had never been good at following orders when they didn’t make sense. The screaming got louder as he rounded a corner into what had been a photography studio.

The walls were lined with half-melted prints and the remains of expensive lighting equipment. Beyond the studio, a door led to a storage area where the screams were coming from. He tried the handle. Locked from the inside or jammed by heat expansion. He slammed the Halligan into the gap between the door and the frame and twisted, feeling the lock mechanism give way Before the door swung inward.

A woman crouched in the corner of the storage room, holding a boy who couldn’t have been more than six. She looked at Danny through the smoke with wide eyes and a face streaked with tears and soot. “Boston Fire. We’re getting out of here. Can you walk?” She nodded. “Stay behind me. Keep low.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 7fe387742ae1b6ed
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,567,149 bytes (1.495 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 390
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 470.51 minutes
• Total Words: 94,102
• Total Characters: 549,747
• Average Words per Page: 241.29
• Average Characters per Page: 1409.61

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