They’d just started investigating the aftermath when Ethan shouted, “Oh my God! What the hell happened to my truck!?”

For the last couple of minutes, Benjamin and his friends had endured the end of the world. At least, it had felt like it at the time.

It was his own fault, though. He’d been laying in his sleeping bag wondering how a weekend that was already one part sunburn, two parts bug bites, and three parts regret could get any worse when the universe had given him an answer: pure, unadulterated insanity.

They’d all woken to a series of earthquakes and found the skies on fire with eerie green aurora that should have never come this far south in the summer. It covered the sky in wavering sheets of translucent emerald light that would have been beautiful if it wasn’t terrifying.

After that, the stars started glitching out, vanishing ten or twenty at a time. Whole constellations just disappeared. The new stars that replaced them just looked wrong, though. Instead of the cold blue-white light he was used to, these new ones had a golden hue that looked malevolent against the green-stained sky.

Benjamin managed to record most of it. The commotion had been enough to force him and his friends from their tents once the shaking stopped. Almost everyone else in the nearby campsites seemed to have the same idea, and soon, pretty much everyone but Emma and Matt had emerged from their tent.

Now Benjamin, Raja, and Ethan stood outside in t-shirts and shorts, shivering in the cool night air as they looked for answers by flashlight. Well, Ethan and Raja were searching, at least.

Benjamin couldn’t help. He was too preoccupied with trying to make sense of what had just happened and desperately scrolled through his video, looking for clues. It was like a time-lapse video on an acid trip, and his mind rebelled at the very idea of what he was watching.

As a YouTube video, it would have been compelling, but right now? If it wasn’t a nightmare, then Benjamin was certain they should have all died as the ground beneath their feet exploded, and the Earth was consumed by a coronal mass ejection that burned the world to ash. That hadn’t happened, though. Instead, the cosmic fireworks show had just fizzled out.

Benjamin abandoned those attempts and spun to face their parked cars as soon as he heard Ethan’s cry. The sight was disturbing. Benjamin’s Prius and Matt’s Cherokee both sat there undisturbed. Ethan’s new Tacoma, though, had been cut cleanly down the middle from bumper to bumper. It had been parked just to the right of the other vehicles, and now the right half was missing entirely.

“I mean, nothing natural could cut something that clean,” Benjamin answered as his mind raced and he looked for something more relevant to say. There was nothing, though. He was too stunned to give a better answer.

He knew from his internship it would take a laser or a water jet hours to do that, even though the whole process had only lasted for the few minutes it had taken the stars to go insane.

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Ethan sighed.

“I mean, I think the bigger question is, where did the other half go?” Raja pretended to search for the missing piece with his flashlight like it could have wandered off somewhere as he spoke. Even though the man joked, he was still as worried as Benjamin had ever seen him.

“What do you mean?” Matt asked, coming out to join them. “The other half of what?”

Benjamin turned to answer him, but when he saw Emma trailing a few steps behind in her oversized hoodie, he remembered how they’d pissed him off earlier and turned away as he sought to suppress the ugly surge of emotions that the happy couple inspired.

He wanted to tell them about the light show or show Matt the video he’d taken. Instead, all he could think about when he looked at either of them was their announcement earlier that afternoon, and that still pissed him off too much to think about right now.

Let someone else explain what’s going on to the lovebirds, he thought angrily as he looked around the other campsites and busied himself trying to develop a few theories or at least rule some out.

For the moment, all he could say for certain was that whatever had actually happened because it had woken everybody up. That, unfortunately, ruled out the possibility he’d dreamed the whole thing, eliminating all the most likely options.

Raja answered Matt’s question with another joke while the rest of the group talked about whether or not the insurance was going to cover this. However, Benjamin ignored that as he attempted to answer Raja’s earlier question. Where could half a truck go?

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The clues he found were troubling. First, he noticed the RV on the far side of the campground resting at an odd angle. Only, it wasn’t just leaning; somehow, it had been cut down the middle in the same way as Ethan’s truck. The front half was still sitting where it had been, but the back half was missing, causing the windshield to point skyward at a 45-degree angle.

“Look at that shit. That’s crazy, but I think I figured it out...” Raja said, coming over to join Benjamin.

He let the tension linger for a few seconds before he continued. “Two words. Chop. Shop. Get it? Chop shop? Because these cars have all been cut in half...”

Raja laughed uproariously after that, but he did manage to make Benjamin crack a smile as he started laying the facts down in his mind. It was almost like a big circular piece of their campground had been picked up and set down somewhere else. That was the only way any of this made any sense. Cars and tents were sliced precisely, half an RV was just gone, and trails and roads simply dead-ended where they met an imaginary circular line and were replaced by tall grasses.

“Guys,” Benjamin said nervously, trying to figure out how to relay all this to them without freaking anyone out, “I think some real crazy shit has happened. Like maybe we’ve been teleported—”

A pillar of green light erupting not far from the campsite interrupting him. It was impossible to get a real sense of scale in the dark, but it seemed to stretch to the sky and shut everyone up as they gawked. For a moment, he could only look at the emerald blaze, which was so intense it forced him to shield his eyes.

Then, the fountain of fire parted, revealing a doorway, and several people walked through it. With the glare, it was impossible to see any details, but Benjamin wasn’t looking at the people. He was videoing the fire since he already had his phone out.

The flames vanished completely after the last person walked through the strange gate. However, by then, he was already searching through the video to see if his eyes had played tricks on him. Zooming and pausing showed that they weren’t.

The embers and sparks that the unnatural pyre spat out were more than that. They were letters, or symbols, or something. Benjamin couldn’t really tell because they weren’t from any alphabet he’d ever seen before, but he supposed it could be Cyrillic.

He was still looking down at his phone and obsessing over these details while he attempted to process them when Matt said, “Those guys have fucking swords. This is about to turn into a Renaissance Faire or a horror movie real quick, guys. What do you think we should do?”

Benjamin looked at Matt just in time to see Emma cling to him in an eyerollingly stereotypical way. He would have said something snarky about it, but when he looked past the cute couple to the approaching troop of Lord of the Rings rejects, he decided that maybe Matt had a point. It was impossible to make out much about the two wearing the dark robes, but the other five had swords and armor and seemed to mean serious business.

“If we all just get in your car and floor it, there’s no way they can—” Benjamin started to say.

“Everyone stay calm and come this way,” a voice rang out from the black-robed man in the center of the group. He wasn’t shouting, and yet it was still impossibly loud. “You are in grave danger standing so near the woods unarmed, but we will protect you.”

There was a strange reverb in his words that made Benjamin’s head feel fuzzy, and the hint of an accent implying English definitely wasn’t this guy’s first language. Benjamin wanted to argue that the dude obviously seemed like a villain and that they should get the hell out of there. He wanted to turn around and run for his life. He wanted to do a lot of things.

He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t imagine doing anything but what he was told. Even though he was certain that was a terrible idea, he started to follow his friends down toward the strange group without a care in the world. At the same time, his suspicious thoughts dissipated on their own.

Until now, he’d been dealing with his fading buzz and annoyance at Matt and Emma, but all that vanished instantly and was replaced with a feeling not unlike being high. Part of him knew that was a bad sign. This wasn’t like him, but he couldn’t make the rest of his mind care. Still, he struggled and squirmed against the feeling of absolute trust, but the most resistance he could offer was to ask, “Are you guys sure we should be doing this?”

“It’s fine,” Emma said, “This is a dangerous situation, and we have to trust him, Ben. So, please try to relax and don’t do anything weird.”

That cut him off as he recoiled from her words, and all he could do was walk down the slope in dejected confusion as more and more of their fellow campers joined them.

The Bryson Meadows Campsite had been pretty big, so eventually, at least three dozen people were slowly walking down the slope with them. That group consisted of everyone from young couples to college students like them, all the way up to retirees living their nomadic RV lifestyles.

Almost all of them were in shirts and shorts. However, a few people were wearing only their underwear, making their strange procession even stranger. It was a lot less awkward than it should have been, though, and for some reason, this was fine, and any attempts to understand that disconnect slipped from his mental grasp.

As they approached, the black-robed man’s assistant was doing something with his hands. Then suddenly, a large pavilion tent appeared in a shower of glyphs and sparks. These weren’t the deep greens of the last spell that the men had cast. They were cerulean and…

Wait. It was only after that thought that Benjamin realized it; these guys were casting magic like it was going out of style. The implications of that boggled his mind. Teleportation? Summoning? Did that mean they were in another world now? Was he okay with that?

That made it even more ominous when the black-robed mage pulled open the tent’s doorway and said, “Alright, everyone, right through here. That’s right - line up over there. The sooner you are all reprogrammed with your systems, the sooner we can retreat back to the safety of the city and integrate you into our great plan.”