Blood, Gate, Salvation
When paramedic Shane Everhart discovers a mutilated corpse in a blood-soaked warehouse, he is thrust into a world of nightmarish horrors and apocalypse-bound prophecy. As the city devolves into violent chaos and humanity teeters on the edge of annihilation, Shane learns he is the final guardian—humanity’s last hope to prevent hell on earth. Gory, gripping, and relentless, this vivid horror epic drags you into the fight for the world’s soul.
Ashes and Dawn
The city did not greet the new morning so much as crawl into it. Sunlight—weak, chalk-white—slid through ash a hand’s breadth thick. Where once there had been towers and neon and the rumble of ambition, there were now husks: windowless, half-collapsed, their steel frames picked clean by flame. The city had survived, if such a word meant anything anymore, but it bore the wounds. Carcasses of buses littered intersections, looping in wild grotesques; names and faces of the missing fluttered from rain-soaked fliers on every door.
Shane limped down the main street, the battered chest hanging at his side, Mara’s coat—stiff with old blood—draped over his shoulders. His skin was cobwebbed with fading, cracked glyphs, now as gray as the ash drifting on the wind. He felt hollowed, a bell whose clapper had rusted clean through. Each step was an argument against collapse, but he moved anyway, because that’s what the living did—one foot after another, through whatever ruin the world delivered.
It was not silent. Emergency crews moved through the streets, sirens now a memory, replaced by the low drone of generators, the chopping of helicopters collecting war footage. Media vans formed a blockade at the city’s battered hall; reporters in crisp suits parroted words like "gas leak," "ecoterrorism," "hallucinations brought on by chemicals in the water." None mentioned the rites, the glyphs, the red moon. No one could utter Azazel’s name without their tongues refusing.
A few blocks away, a funeral pyre burned atop the old playground. What bodies couldn’t be identified were heaped in careful layers, marked with flowers or medals or, sometimes, just cheap plastic fireman’s hats. Shane stood at the edge, heat licking at his boots, watching faces blur into smoke: firefighters, paramedics, the stoic librarian who’d swung a chainsaw in Hell. Father Callahan’s cross hung atop the flame, the metal blackening, then crumbling away.
He wanted to weep, but all his tears had burned up long ago.
I. The Rites of the Mourning
Outside what remained of First Avenue Church, survivors held vigil—mute and shivering, some bandaged, some barely repaired by makeshift stitches. A priest with one arm led them in a whisper-voiced hymn for the lost. At his feet lay a row of photos: Sonia, younger, radiant; Eric, at a company BBQ, mouth full of laughter; Mara, caught mid-argument with a glint in her eye. Shane crouched beside the pictures, pressing his palm to the cracked step. It was the same palm that had closed the gate—a hand that shook now, not with rage, but exhaustion and a need for contact in a world gone numb.
He laid a bloodstained sliver of the old altar stone atop Mara’s picture. He didn’t speak; there were no words he hadn’t already screamed into the pit. Instead, he sat, feeling the heat of other mourners radiate through the chill. They watched him—all of them. Some with gratitude, some with terror, some with the blankness of trauma.
After a time, he found his way back to the flattened remains of St. Luke’s cemetery. Most of the graves had split or caved, earth chewed by demon hands, but a handful of names remained legible. Sonia’s, chiseled into a piece of ambulance door. Eric’s, painted in black marker atop a brick. Mara had no stone—just the coat she’d worn, folded and left atop a hill of dirt. Shane knelt, pressing his forehead to the mound. Words came, slow and halting: "I sealed it. You were right: pain is a kind of hope here. I miss you."
He rose when the sun was just past its zenith, the sky cut by a single trail of black smoke. Moving hurt, but staying hurt worse.
II. The City Wounds Itself Clean
Down at City Hall, uniformed National Guard clustered in tight knots, their faces drawn, eyes skipping over what remained of the inhuman. Power-washers blasted streets; work crews scraped at the last of the scorched, spiraling glyphs. Police captains nodded brusquely at clipboarded officials who muttered about "containing panic" and "repairing vital infrastructure." On every crumbling light pole, flyers promised: "We Will Rebuild Stronger." No one asked about the missing hours, the night the city screamed.
Shane watched as a crew daubed over a still-glowing mark on the hospital’s entry. It refused the grisly gray latex, bleeding through again and again until someone simply bolted a metal plate over it. Most people drifted by, heads down. A few older faces made the sign of the cross—wards old as any city, older than the names on the street signs.
From an alley, a young girl watched him. Fox-thin, brown-skinned, hair in wild tangles. She lifted a hand, tracing a spiral in the air. Shane froze—his heart detonating in his chest for one sick instant. But she only smiled and ducked away, her work jacket flapping behind her. He chased after, panicked—a laugh boiling up not entirely his own. But the alley was empty.
It left him, unsettled. How quickly survivors shifted—they averted eyes, memorized fresh cover stories, clung to the myth of safety. The world had just barely avoided obliteration, and yet the city—bless it, curse it—rushed to forget.
He didn’t know if that was cowardice or resilience. Maybe it was both.
III. The Vigil, and a Warning
Night fell, a bruise leaking slow light down the glassless skyscrapers. Shane spent it atop the main bridge, feet dangling over the edge above a river that stank of rot and hope. He smoked, watching ash spiral off into the wind. A battered radio crackled beside him; the only station left played old jazz and Civil Defense warnings. "Boil your water," the DJ intoned. "Stick with your family. Tell your kids the monsters are gone."
He almost laughed.
Beneath, in the water, drifted bobbing shapes that could have been logs, that might have been more. Once, Mara’s voice drifted over his shoulder: You can mourn after the work. Now, mourning and work were the same thing. He wondered, not for the first time, what life could be if the world wasn’t always at the edge.
As the first pale light of morning pulled colors from the fog, Shane crushed his cigarette, preparing to leave. He paused, gaze caught by a shimmer in the sidewalk. There—between cracks in the concrete—ran a new glyph, subtle, thin as veins in marble. Not the old spirals; something else. It pulsed imperceptibly, the shade of burnt bone, as if the world itself wanted to remind him: All walls hold—until they break.
He knelt, touching it. Warm, not from the sun, but from within. It felt like an eye opening. Shane sighed, then climbed to his feet, the battered chest tucked tight to his ribs. Behind him, the city smoldered, but out ahead, a faint gold burned at the far edge of the world.
He walked on, neither hero nor martyr—just man, battered and haunted. In the city’s wound, rebuilt brick by salvaged brick, he would keep watch. He had saved the world. But for how long?
A single, invisible eye blinked open far below the city, where the deepest shadows never receded. The world was not healed. But for this day, it was enough.
END