They will take anyone.

Another account of when the world changed.

1] The Last Goodbye:

The first time I saw someone Vanish was when the mysterious otherworldly entities decided they needed a fifty something year old waiter named George in their world.

Of course, I had no idea that was what was happening at that time. All I knew was that someone was saying that George had collapsed in the bar of the restaurant I was working at.

A few months earlier George had been told to climb up a ladder to get something down from where it was being stored on the top of the walk-in refrigerator, and then he lost his balance while trying to reach for whatever it had been.

He ended up precariously balanced, half on top of the folding ladder, and half on the nonweight bearing support frame for the ceiling tiles. He had been stuck and calling for help.

Everyone else in the kitchen just stood there, looking back and forth at each other to see who was going to do something. This made me pretty irritated since I was the one the furthest away at the dish tank. I ended up having to stomp my way past all of them to climb halfway up the ladder and princess carry an elderly gay man down it to set him on his feet.

Not that the gay part mattered. But I hadn't spent any amount of time around anyone who was gay before that, and princess carrying one would not have been the way I would have planned, or wanted my first encounter with one to have gone.

He turned out to be a pretty nice guy. We didn’t end up close or anything. But he did become that work friend you chatted with briefly now and then.

It was nice to confirm that I didn't have a problem with gay people, I had just somehow gotten into my thirties without ever having to happen to meet any.

The reason I ended up rushing up to the bar that day was that I had gone through several first aid and CPR classes by that time in my life and I was concerned that everyone might be just standing around again. Waiting for someone, anyone but them to take the responsibility to do something. While George was lying there dying on the floor.

Instead, I found him neatly arranged on his back with one of the waitresses calmly talking to him. A dish towel had been folded up and set under his head and his feet were elevated with a seat cushion under his legs just below the knees.

While he looked terrible in that ghastly gray color some black people get when they’re sick, he was breathing and talking. After confirming with the manager who was standing nearby that an ambulance had been called, it seemed that everything that needed or could be done for him had been done. Which left me free to go back to washing dishes.

That was when George looked up, whispered "Oh." and slowly faded away. In a literal rather than figurative way.

It wasn't just his body going transparent and vanishing, but all his clothes as well. After just a few seconds there was nothing left but a dish towel, a cushion, and several very shocked and confused coworkers.

The police got called in and the restaurant was shut down early. I ended up enduring being asked the same questions several times by several different police officers. Starting with ones in uniforms and progressing through a few in suits. The last few seemed to be at the federal level, and after that, I was able to help finish closing the kitchen for the day and go home early.

I took a shower and caught a bus to visit my mom at the hospital.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

It was when I was talking to my mother that I learned that George hadn’t been the first person to vanish like that. Or the hundredth, or the thousandth.

People had been vanishing like that for months, maybe years, some had even been caught on cameras.

My mom brought up a video on her laptop. “Her name was Orihime Tanaka, she was fourteen years old.”

The video showed a phone being dropped by a small boy and skittering off into the street, far enough out for the kid to step off the curb and take a few steps out into the street before he started to pick it up.

Then a girl in a school uniform ran out, grabbed the kid, and spun around with him before throwing him back onto the sidewalk.

She nearly made it over the curb and back off the street before the truck hit her and sent her flying.

Her body vanished mid-tumble.

The video repeated in slow motion. She sort of compressed as the truck hit her before she began to break and it sent her tumbling away. One of her legs and a arm were bent in the wrong places, clearly broken.

Then she vanished into an Orihime Takana shaped hole in the air. In the video, you could see a brief glimpse of bright green grass and a clear blue sky.

Then it, and the girl, were gone.

The video was at the wrong angle to see much. But some of the witnesses claim to have seen a group of tall people that looked like Rivendale elves from the Lord of the Rings movies reaching out toward her with concerned looks.

Watching the video left me with a lot of thoughts and feelings that I would need to sort out later. But right then I just gave a nod of respect to Orihime Takana. She didn’t just stand there and look around for someone else to do something when a little kid was about to get killed.

I really hoped the tall folk would be able to do something for her. Something more than we would have been able to do. Who knows, maybe in that place she could even be able to walk again.

My mother had time to show me some other videos showing people in hospital beds and waiting for ambulances in stores or on the streets. Each disappearing. Some fading away, others disappearing in a flash of light, or with dozens of white bony hands reaching out the ground to drag them across a room into the shadows.

It was just the one guy. A manager with no family who nobody had anything good to say about.

Then visiting hours were over and I had to go home.

Where I went down the internet rabbit hole.

The Vanishing was what it was being called online. The Japanese used it as a plot in a lot of their comic books to the point it had become a genre called Isekai. Some people thought it was the rapture, but it was all sorts of people, both good and bad vanishing.

And it had been happening for years, maybe even centuries, or for all of human history. People disappeared all the time, for all sorts of reasons. If some of them literally vanished who would have even noticed? Even with witnesses, who would have believed them?

But for some reason, over the last few months, it had drastically ramped up.

Where a few thousand or so people had gone missing every year under circumstances that may have been Vanishings. Now it was a couple of thousand people being blatantly taken each month.

There was some nervous chatter about how the whole world might eventually be taken away. But humans numbered in the billions. We have over three hundred thousand people born every day, it’s not like we are going to run out anytime soon.

It could one day be a problem if the numbers keep going up exponentially. But how many people from Earth could they possibly need? Why are the number of people they are taking going up? Are they all going to the same place or different places?

We have no way of knowing, not unless some of them get in touch with us. For now, the only thing I could think to do was prepare.

I could be the next to go. Anytime. Anywhere.

The survival knife my dad had gotten me as a kid was still in a box in my closet, right where I had left it. The blade was decent with the back of it notched like a saw blade for cutting small branches. The handle had a compass in the pommel that screwed off so you could store some small items in the hollow handle.

Right off the bat, the old wax covered matches inside of it got replaced with a magnesium fire starter.

Next, the two elderly band aides were thrown out and replaced with two sewing needles and a piece of card stock with a strong nylon thread wrapped around it.

I kept the fishing line and the three hooks.

My carry concealed license was still good, at least in this state. So I will be carrying the knife with me everywhere, even tying it to my leg with a bootlace when I sleep..

And I had always slept in a tee shirt and jogging pants, so if I do get taken, at least I won’t be bare-assed and fancy free. Unless they get me in the shower.

I might not be one of the prime targets. The vast majority of people taken were either sick to the point that their doctors knew they could die at any moment, or people who had been lethally injured or were otherwise near death.

A smaller number of otherwise healthy people stepped through doors to other places or vanished in a burst of light. These people's methods of vanishing tended to vary the most.

Then Pacific Flight 294 crashed in a cornfield with no one on board. No crew, no passengers. The media got to the crash first and found the plane cracked open with nothing but empty seats.

Then the footage sent from the passengers' phones began to hit various media sites.

The clown like entity. His promises of danger and excitement. The circles of light people began to fall into.

The mysterious otherworldly entities had been known to come to earth to vanish people personally, but now they were doing it wholesale.

Two days later my mother was Vanished.