Cole managed to get the shitbox onto the highway, the engine rattling like it hated every second of this escape. His mind was still trying to catch up.
What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck. This can't be real. Was that… was that a Fault?
He glanced into the cracked rearview mirror.
Through the vibrating reflection he saw the armory—
or what was left of it.
Concrete buildings twisted upward like pulled taffy.
The motor pool floated in spinning slabs.
And the sign that once read MONTANA ARMY NATIONAL GUARD ARMORY looked washed-out and fading.
The more he drove, the more the letters dissolved into nothing.
Cole gripped the wheel tighter.
But he didn't get far.
After a few dozen miles of completely empty highway—no headlights, no taillights, no stalled cars, no fleeing families—he blinked against the rising sun. The bright white glare forced him to yank down his sun visor and squint.
As he crested the steep hill, he saw it.
A sight so enormous and impossible that his foot eased off the accelerator on instinct.
"What… the actual fuck," he whispered.
The earth—the planet—looked split in half.
The highway simply ended.
Abruptly.
Cleanly.
A multi-mile-wide incision carved straight through the mountains to his left and the open plains to his right. The ground didn't just collapse—it separated. A canyon so deep he couldn't see the bottom, and so wide it swallowed the horizon.
Chunks of highway floated miles in the air, suspended like debris in zero gravity. Massive pieces of earth drifted in slow, impossible orbits, colliding softly with one another like a broken ring of Saturn hovering above Montana.
Some slabs spun.
Some pulsed.
Some were perfectly still.
Cole rolled his window down slightly.
There was no wind.
No sound.
Just an endless, cosmic stillness that made his stomach twist.
He whispered again, quieter this time:
"…This isn't real."
But it was.
And whatever had split the world open—It was moving north.
He pulled the car over and let the engine idle, the shitbox rattling like it wanted to die as badly as he did.
He sat there in the dead silence, staring at the wound in the world ahead of him. It felt, at least to him, like the end of his life. He didn't really care about that part. Not emotionally, anyway. His body still clung to life out of instinct, but his mind was… tired.
He still had a goal, though.
See if his roommate survived.
See if anyone he knew survived.
Just to know.
Cole reached into his uniform pocket and pulled his phone out. The screen lit up.
The time was upside down.
Not the phone.
The numbers.
They hung there on the display, rotated a full 180 degrees, blinking at him like some glitch in a cheap horror game. His lock screen wasn't the novel fanart he was sure he'd set yesterday—it was a picture of a rock.
Just a rock.
A small, ordinary, regular-ass rock sitting on dirt.
He stared at it. Confused. Or sad. Or something in between. Whatever emotion he was supposed to feel wasn't loading right.
He exhaled slowly, then—without warning even himself—shoved the phone out through the crack in the driver's side window.
It bounced off the asphalt once.
Then stopped.
Then floated.
The cheap smartphone lifted off the ground like it weighed nothing, rising slowly into the air, rotating in place as if reality was trying to decide which way was "down" today.
Cole watched, eyes wide, completely entranced.
He shook his head hard, trying to knock some sense back into his skull, and slammed both fists against the steering wheel.
"What the fuck is happening right now," he muttered through gritted teeth. "I need to think. Clearly. I need to understand what is going on."
Outside, the rock-wall pieces of earth drifted lazily in the sky.
The phone spun beside the car like a tiny satellite.
Inside, Cole sat alone in the driver's seat, trying to convince his brain this was still the same world he'd woken up in yesterday.
It wasn't.
It felt like he had teleported into one of his horror novels.
Only… he really wished he'd teleported into a harem novel instead.
But that was the least of his worries.
For the first time since everything started, an actual question formed in his mind—something other than another "what the fuck."
How the fuck do I cross that… whatever they call it?
A Fault, I'm guessing.
He leaned back, exhaling through his balaclava. Then he reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out his little green Rite-in-the-Rain notebook. He flipped it open to the first page. The thing was waterproof, came with a special pen, could survive rain, mud, hell—probably a nuke.
He'd owned it for over a year.
Never wrote a single word in it.
He was supposed to take notes during drill. Instructions. Procedures. Army stuff. But he never cared enough to try.
Now, though… now something in him clicked.
For the first time in his life, Cole felt almost interested.
Interested in this new world.
Interested in what was happening.
Interested because he finally had something that wasn't boring, wasn't routine, wasn't work or rules or laws being shoved down his throat.
He leaned back in the seat, staring up at the car's roof, letting rain patter lightly against his window.
And he let out a sigh—a strange one.
Almost relieved.
As if, deep down, he had always wanted something like this to happen.
Chaos.
Freedom.
A world where everything he hated didn't matter anymore.
No work.
No managers yelling at him.
No deadlines.
No expectations.
And probably…
no government anymore, either.
He stared at the torn earth ahead of him and whispered to himself:
"Okay. Fine. New world. Let's see what the hell you've got for me."