Tudge looked at his watch.

“Hurry up, or you’ll be late for school!” his mother called from downstairs.

“Alright, I’m coming!”

He pulled his blazer on and adjusted his tie and slipped the object into his pocket. He’d found the object exactly seven nights earlier when those weird lights appeared in the sky. Man was some sight! When it started, everyone just stopped what they were doing to go and watch. The lights were colourful and resembled the northern lights, only the bands were chopped up into small strips. They kind of looked like a bunch of colourful barcodes floating in the sky, but it was all pretty weird. What was particularly weird was the small glass-like cube that had fallen from the sky into his backyard and now rested in his blazer pocket.

Tudge hurried down the stairs where his mother stood by the front door and ushered him out. His father and his sister were already in the car waiting. He got into the car next to Lindsay, then his mother got into the car and they pulled out of the driveway.
“Do you two have your lunches?”

“Yes, mom,” he and Lindsay replied in unison.

“Do you both have all your books?”

“Yes mom…”

He slipped his hand into his pocket and felt the object. Its sides were smooth and its corners were sharp. It was a perfect cube, in fact, as he’d measured all the sides. Each side measured 1.23 inches exactly, and its corners formed 90 degree angles precisely. As for its consistency, Tudge did not know, but it had a very glass-like look and texture, and its color was cerulean. It was a very beautiful object actually, which is why he hadn’t shown it to anyone yet.

Beside him, his sister Lindsay sat, eating a bag of grapes from her lunch bag which was supposed to be her snack, although she hadn’t had time to have breakfast since they rushed out of the house. She was seven years old, and wearing her uniform and skirt. At the moment, they were heading to school.

“Everything’s been so hectic,” his father said out loud. “Now we have only one car since the other one’s in the shop because people are driving crazy these days!”

“Just keep your eyes on the road, dear. You don’t want to get into another accident. You’re lucky you weren’t hurt. After all, you were going 40mph when you hit that car that just stopped in the middle of the road. They’ve been saying on the news that that isn’t the first case but it’s been happening all over the world. Cars veer of the road because their drivers just disappear. Not only drivers, but people just walking in the street—vanished! Then that plane went down the other day…”

“I know, dear. I told you about all those things, remember? I still can’t believe people just ‘disappear’, but what other explanation is there? It’s all they talk about in the news now, but I swear those news people don’t even know what’s going on anymore! They have all these scientists blabbering on about why thing think this and that—that’s not science! They don’t even understand what they’re talking about…”

Tudge and Lindsay sat in the backseat quietly the whole time, listening to their parents talk. Tudge didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but he knew things were getting pretty weird lately. For some reason though, holding that small cube in his pocket helped though when he felt nervous. Just holding it in his hand made him feel somehow… relaxed. He was somehow reassured that things would be okay.

That was when his mother shrieked.

“DARRYL!”

Tudge and Lindsay suddenly looked to their mother, who was now panicking and her eyes were wide with fear. When they looked to the driver’s seat, they noticed that their father who had been there only moments before was now gone; vanished.

“DAD?” Tudge cried out. His heart began to race, and he felt sick to his stomach.

Lindsay began to scream. The car was now veering down the highway uncontrollably without someone steering, although it had been going to fast to slow down anytime soon. However, at hearing the sound of her daughter’s terrified scream, Diane Turner suddenly snapped out of her shocked state and realized what she had to do. Unbuckling her seatbelt, Diane quickly pulled her body over into the driver’s seat and then pulled her legs around, throwing her foot down onto the brakes.

The tires screeched and rubber burning on asphalt as the car pulled over to the side of the road. Behind them, they heard a car horn blaring as the car suddenly swerved around theirs, barely missing them.

“Are you kids alright?” they mother asked, her voice fraught with fear and tension.

Tudge’s heart was still racing, and he and his sister stared at their mother with wide eyes. Lindsay was now crying profusely, her face red and full of tears.

“Ok…” his mother said, trying to think of what to do. “We’re going to get somewhere safe. We have to get somewhere safe…”

Suddenly, there was a loud crack in the sky. The three of them looked out the windows to the sky, where great grey clouds were now suddenly formulating. They saw the fields around them suddenly began swaying wildly as a great wind roared through, and bolts of lightning struck down in the distance.

However, that wasn’t the only thing they saw in the skies—the lights had returned. Though the sky was shrouded in storm clouds, they could see the strange lights through the clouds, hovering over the earth ominously.

“Oh my god…” their mother uttered, were mouth gaping.

Lindsay had stopped crying, as she was too scared to cry anymore. Both her and Tudge were too scared.

“We’re getting out of here, we can’t stay here anymore,” their mother said, throwing open the door. Tudge and Lindsay felt a great wind rush through the car, and when their mother stepped out, they could see her briefly stumbled as she struggled to keep her balance. She walked around to the car to backdoors on the other side.

“Come on kids, we have to—“

Both Tudge and Lindsay witnessed their mother’s disappearance. As she reached for the car door, her hand suddenly disappeared, and then the rest of her body. Her form just dissolved.

Tudge panicked. He was scared, he was confused and he didn’t know what to do. His body was stiff and couldn’t move, but he felt his hand reached into his pocket for the cube. He felt it in his hand, hoping for some kind of comfort, but nothing was happening. He looked at his sister, who sat completely still in her seat, evidently just as scared as he was.

Around the car, the fabric of the planet began to fall apart. The driver of the car that had passed them only a minute before had vanished, and now his car began to dissolve too. The trees began to dissolve. The vast fields around them began to dissolve.

Tudge watched as this happened all around them, and he held his sister’s hands, which were now trembling. His hands were trembling too. In between their hands was the cube.

With one final loud crack, the skies suddenly split apart as they too dissolved, and the last thing Tudge and Lindsay saw were each other before the world went blank.