I am a teacher, or perhaps a teacher's aide at school after-hours. Or perhaps school is out early today. Either way, there are still some kids around, roaming the halls knowing that their parents will be te in picking them up. It is a cloudy, dreary day outside.

  There are flickering lights coming from one of the restrooms, but when two kids step out of the restrooms with guilty expressions, I assume they were just pying around with the light switch and let them off with a warning.

  Another teacher sees me in the hall and calls me over to where she's looking out the window at an utterly bizarre sight. A small cloud has come down and is flying low over the ground. The cloud dissipates and reveals a red-and-bck ship or drone. Neither of us know what to make of it. The drone turns around and comes towards us and then passes through the window, taking up most of the hallway. We watch, paralyzed in fear and wonder and it slowly drifts by and then out through another window.

  Neither of us know what is going on, but we decide that it's time to leave and get any remaining kids out too. The flickering lights from the restroom seem more ominous now in retrospect.

  We pick up four kids near the restrooms (the two from earlier and two others that had apparently been there with them) and head out, saying we'll get them home and trying to hide how afraid we are. Just outside the school's main entrance/exit I find two more kids poking at the blue-painted brick wall as if they are expecting something to happen; like if they find just the right combination of bricks a secret passage might open up. On any other day I'd write it off as a fun game of imagination, but now the possibility of them being right and finding something terrifies me. I warn them to stop and be careful what they're looking for, and offer to give them a ride home.

  That thirty seconds or so of turning around to address the wall-poking kids is all it takes to lose track of two of my charges. I catch up with the other teach and she says she thought they were with me. We send the remaining kids off with some parents who have arrived and go searching for the two missing kids, calling their names and checking my phone to see if they or any of their friends might have posted something on social media about where they might have gone.

  The internet is abuzz with stories (and irreverent jokes about memes, movies, and the rapture) about people and objects suddenly getting sucked up into the sky.

  Our search sts the rest of the day without success. Several times we hear crashing noises and soon after come across statues, cars, wn furniture, or tree branches that all look as if they have been dropped from a great height.

  We expand our search to the nearby woods, despite the sun nearly being down. In the dark with fshlights, we wander the woods, shouting the names of the missing children. We don't notice until too te that two trees are actually the legs of some giant entity.

  It chases us. We run. It catches the other teacher. It smashes her head against a rock, painting it red. I stumble over a rge stump and writhing roots emerge from the ground to entangle me and drag me down. The giant entity catches up with me and the thing within the stump decides it is a better meal. I am let go and the two kill one another.

  I find the two missing kids. They are scared and scratched up, but ultimately alive and without major injury.