"I am going to tear this Universe apart.”

  Once there was a man named David Gerhardt. David was a simple, earnest Midwestern man who lived a simple, earnest Midwestern life. As a business student in a no-name college in Middle America– as in the Middle of Nowhere, America– which he attended for the price rather than any renown or stellar reviews, he did as all business students did. He went to class, barely listened to his professor, did his homework when he felt up to it, and traded favors or money for the answers when he didn’t. David made a few friends, had a girlfriend or two, went to some parties, and slept in on the weekend. David would drink in the day, he would drink at night; David would drink before and after class. David would drink at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Alcohol, the real spice of life for any student studying a field out of the desire to make ends meet, rather than any true passion. All things being told, David was a truly average man in almost every way that mattered. Utterly unexceptional but for two things.

  David had a near endless tolerance for chaos in his life, and he was the luckiest person to ever live.

  Both of these things would be pushed into and through their limits starting on that cold Winter morning. It was two weeks before he’d be going home for break and he was walking to a morning class he was almost ten minutes late for. The chilly wind blowing into and through his letterman jacket felt wet on his skin, and did a number on the remainders of his hangover. He felt a buzzing in his pocket and reached for the hard lump sitting against his leg as he walked. Pinching the brick between three fingers, he slid the black object that was decidedly not any kind of berry out of his jeans. It caught once on the inside lip of David’s pocket before he grunted and pulled it out properly. Flipping the phone open, he saw a text from one of his bros flash up on the small screen on the top half of his phone.

  Matt B.: yo yo, sleeping in today cuz mr Bones cn get boned

  Another text popped up as soon as David opened the home screen to respond.

  Matt B.: give a brother a copy of todays notes when ur out of class please pretty please

  David groaned internally. Then he groaned externally. Neither helped much. Matt was a good guy, a great guy even. He was a dutiful friend, a passionate writer, and one of the funniest people David had met in his life. Unfortunately, Matt could also be a lazy asshole, a lazy asshole that definitely didn’t belong in the business major. Sleeping in and asking a friend for the day’s notes was practically his signature move. David would've told Matt to kick bricks, but he'd been at that party too. His frat-man needed a pedialyte latte, sleep, and some head. Galling as the man's inability to ever go to class could be sometimes, he knew Matt would always cop him the notes in some alternate dimension where the bastard actually went to class. David thought up a solid compromise.

  You: Copy them yourself, I’ll drop by after class and we can grab lunch at the dining hall or something.

  It had been nearly a week since they’d hung out anyway, so it would be a fun distraction from the daily grind if nothing else. David couldn’t even close his phone before Matt responded.

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  Matt B.: fine whatever. If you get here before i wake up i will beat you up >:(

  David flicked the text open to respond, but was interrupted by a bolt of lightning. He shrieked and whipped his head around, but by the time he looked up the bolt was barely an afterflash and a scorch mark on the brick ceiling of the Business and Mathematics building.

  David turned his head up to face the clear, cloudless sky and his jaw dropped. “What the-”

  He was interrupted by another lightning strike. This time he saw it. The lightning snapped down from the sky in a blue flash, painting the world in cerulean streaks as it crashed into the ground. David’s lips moved but he made no noise. He almost lifted his phone to text his friend, ask if he had just seen that. His hand closed before he could take it, though. If the lightning was real, he’d seem stupid for asking. If it wasn’t, he’d look crazy. A few other students around the courtyard were reacting, but that didn’t mean they were reacting to the same thing.

  David took another five mindless steps toward class before a third bolt of lightning struck. This time he heard other students shouting and screaming in surprise. Probably not a hallucination, then. Somehow, a mass delusion of a blue lightning storm in the middle of the day with no warning seemed even more ridiculous than the real deal.

  Lightning started striking faster, and he saw more flashes of varying colors along the horizon. The ground began to roil and shift, his mind was reeling from the absurdity of what he was seeing. Dozens of bolts of lightning of all shades of blue struck around the campus, leaving scattered pocks of scorched grass across the ground. Several hammered into the dorms, the main hall, and especially the Business and Mathematics building. David took cover under a tree and gripped his head in both hands. This couldn’t be real.

  Then the lightning started striking students. Instead of screaming and collapsing, their flesh began to ripple and warp. This couldn’t be real.

  As quick as the lightning storm came, it vanished. The chaos around him wasn’t so nice. The world was like a fresh watercolor painting, fuzzy and indistinct at the edges. Slivers of the ground peeled away and smeared into each other, like a child had taken a careless brush to the canvas. The people that had been struck, on the other hand, stretched and bent and contorted in all manner of horrifying directions. Their appendages knotted together until they took entirely incoherent shapes. David took a single step from the shadow under the tree. The closest thing that used to be a person turned its long, distended face in his direction. It looked like somebody had taken a person and forced them into a mold in the shape of some long, thin, fucked-up horse. Its ribs were splayed out wide, leaving the gut a cavernous divot before the curve of its hips met the long three-jointed legs. The feet-hooves each ended in five jagged claws that the man walked on like a spider-centaur from hell. The horse… monster… person… thing took a single step forward, then turned its head and snorted. It was not the sound you’d get from a normal horse. He shuffled back against the tree and tried to figure out just what in God’s sweet and holy name he was going to do.

  That was when his phone buzzed.

  “Matt.” he breathed. All of his friends, actually. He needed to text everyone, make sure they were okay. He needed to tell them what he was seeing. To make sure it was real and they could see it too, if nothing else. He opened his phone to text his friend, but it wasn’t Matthew Blaire that texted him. Nor was it any of David’s other friends at Camberman University. In fact, it was a number he had never seen before, one that had far too many digits to be a valid phone number in the United States. Or anywhere else.

  The screen flashed a bright sky-blue, bright as the lightning bolts whose aftershocks were ripping through the campus. David had to close his eyes to narrowly dodge being blinded. That radiant blue gleamed through his eyelids, burning itself into his vision. He ground out a curse and rubbed his eyes with his free hand, turning the phone away from his face. The light faded a touch, and he risked opening his eyes.

  A panel of shining blue light hovered a foot in front of his face.