“Ayo Tyrone! About time! Late as usual!” Called out a nasally voice just as Tyrone rushed though the set of sliding doors. “You really must be on black people time huh?”

Tyrone had been working at Sergeant Mills for five years now as a security guard, and still found himself surprised by the surge of employees that constantly flowed in and out of the building. the company was massive, being the global headquarters of Sergeant Mills, the self-proclaimed best snack and cereal company in America.

A tall man in the striped suit bumped into him, the man’s weasel like face twisted in disgust as he swiped at his now slightly wrinkled sleeve and collar.

“My bad man, you good?” Tyrone gestured at the man, making sure he was okay.

The man’s face fixed itself as he noticed Tyrone’s blue polo shirt, marking him as security. “I’m fine. Watch where you are going next time.” The man beat a speedy retreat as he walked past the security desk and entered the building.

“Oh, I’m fine. Thanks for asking asshole.” Tyrone mumbled under his breath. “It’s going to be one of those day, huh?”

“Hey Ty! What you are muttering over there, get yo lazy behind over here so I can leave! They had me stay behind to cover for you kid.”

Shaking his head, a slight curl to Tyrone’s lips took form as his fellow coworkers began to laugh at his expense. He was more than used to the friendly ribbing the other guards would dish out; it was all in good fun. They never piled in on one person everyone was fair game, even the company employees when they weren’t around or within earshot.

“Kid? Dude, I’m nearly thirty! And chill, old man. I called early letting SOC know I’d be a few minutes late. I had to pick my mom up from her appointment.” He said with a grunt as he set my lunch bag on the office chair beside the opening to their breakroom. SOC was short for Security Operations Center; it was basically just the office space where their supervisors were located. “Don’t worry, you still have time to get home to be yelled at by your loving wife.”

“Hey, Rone!” A pudgy Asian man waved to him, a gentle smile on his round face. “Ignore Lenny. How’s your mom doing? Is she okay?”

Chip was an odd one. In truth the guy was the nicest guy Tyrone had ever met, too nice even, which made it easy for others to get him to take their shifts. Once Tyrone had gotten fed up with his laid-back friends’ gentle demeanor and asked him out right why he was so damn nice, figuring it was an act. Chip just beamed at him and said that it wasted less energy being nice than being an asshole. That was the first and last time Tyrone ever heard him swear. A complete weirdo, but he still couldn’t bring himself to dislike the dude.

“Sixty-one years old and still kicking like a stubborn mule.” Tyrone sighed as he hung his jacket in the small room that functioned as their break area, then with a grunt he sat beside him at the guards’ desk. “She’s alright, just her Meniere’s sprouting it’s ugly head.”

“The only ugly head around here is you, Ty.” Lenny cackled unabashedly. “Still can’t believe you shaved your head! Looking like a Family Dollar Deebo!”

Lenny was nearly the compete opposite of Chip. Despite being one of the oldest guards’, the man jeered and joked like a spiteful teen. And worst yet, he loved to think that his age made him everyone’s boss. Tyrone was all for respecting his elders, but sometimes the old head liked to spout uncalled for jibes in his ‘playful’ banter.

“You’re one to talk, looking like a dried-out Denzel!” Tyrone snapped. “Matter of fact, isn’t it time for you to get yo tired ass outta…”

“Guys!” Chip hissed at us. “There’s still employee’s arounds, keep it down a bit.”

Lenny and Tyrone both had the decency to look embarrassed as we took in the few questioning glances and shocked stares aimed our way. Even though it was passed ten and the building was technically closed, there were still quite a few employees lagging to do work in the lobby or leaving after staying behind to finish projects. Tyrone and Lenny always exchanged in disgruntled spats like this as one of us was coming on or leaving a shift, we didn’t hate each other, it was just how we talked. Though Tyrone did get a little heated towards the end there, he’d already had a stressful day being his mom’s chauffer earlier.

“Sorry, just some friendly banter.” He offered their audience with a small wave and a fake smile plastered on his lips.

“Look at you code switching.” Lenny whispered beside him even as he waved at the stares with a matching fake smile.

With his eye’s rolling Tyrone turned away from Lenny. “So, it’s just us today, Chip?”

“Oh! You’re ignoring me now?” Lenny crossed his arms over his chest, his dark brown wrinkled face twisting in a snarl. “You youngins ain’t got respect for no one.”

“Sorry Lenny.” Chip broke in before the old guard could fall into a rant. “And yea Ty, it’s just us. Oh, and the guys at SOC. I think it’s Mark and Garson over there now…”

Chip was cut off as everyone’s cellphone began to emit the same beeping ringtone.

“What the hell…” Tyrone muttered as he glanced at the alert flashing on his cell. Squinting in mild irritation, he read the brief message stating was a national alert.

“What’s that?” Lenny leaned over, trying to look at Tyrone’s cell screen. “Getting a text from yo momma? I know it isn’t your girlfriend, highly doubt that!”

“Nah, I stopped replying to your daughters’ text a while ago” Tyrone snapped as the automated voice on the phone told him to tune in to the live broadcast as the president addressed the nation. “There’s a national alert going off…”

“Oh, hell nah, I’m definitely heading out then. See ya!” Lenny began to rush as he put on his jacket and grabbed his car keys.

“But the president...” Chip began.

“The president is a dumbass!” Lenny snickered as he weaved through the crowded lobby, tossing back a wave in goodbye as he slipped through the exit.

People were already muttering as to what the alert could possibly be about, the global warming crisis? Australia and California were back on fire, thanks to drought and a haywire gender reveal party. Or perhaps a declaration of war? There’d been talks about militia movement in North Korea and Syria.

Perhaps it was about the latest government project that had been leaked online a few days ago, something about teleportation. The world seemed to be in a constant flux of disasters lately, many felt that the apocalypse was just around the corner. Tyrone tapped the link underneath the alert and mentally crossed his fingers, hoping it wasn’t bad news. It’s probably nothing, just a test maybe.

Sitting right beside me, Chip looked around nervously. “You sure that’s okay? SOC doesn’t like it when we have our phones out...”

“SOC is probably doing the same thing right now, it’s a national alert- AH!”

Just then the entire building shuddered as the earth shifted underneath their feet, everyone in the lobby cried out in shock as the lights flickered and everything hanging on the walls fell to the ground.

“Was that an earthquake!?” One of the employees shouted as he leaned against the wall, looking over at us for answers.

“T-that’s impossible right?” Chip stuttered, he was already out of his chair and halfway underneath the desk. “Minnesota doesn’t get earthquakes, right?”

Tyrone’s mind reeled, he’d been born and raised in Minnesota, there’d never been anything close to an earthquake in all his life living here. “N-no, there was one back in the seventies, I think. My mom said that…”

He nearly jumped from his seat as the video finally loaded and the speakers on his phone blared to life, but the video was having buffering issues probably due to so many people bogging down the Wi-Fi. With a few keystrokes, Tyrone copied over the link and loaded the video on his desk computer. He looked up to see that everyone else was now staring down at their phones, even a few walked around the desk to look at his computer for a better view.

The screen was black for a minute, but then flashed into life as it opened into a crisp view of the oval office. The chair at the presidential desk spun around and people gasped as they saw that it wasn’t the president sitting in the chair but instead the vice president, Chris Harmening. And he was completely sloshed.

The white-haired man flashed a sloppy smile at the camera, holding his bottle of what looked like Hennessey up high in a half-hearted salute. The desk he sat at was a complete mess, the drawers had been pulled out and looked as if someone had been frantically searching for something. Harmening mumbled to himself as he began folding a once important document into a paper airplane, apparently oblivious that millions of Americans were watching.

“Uh sir?” A disembodied voice whispered. “We’re live.”

Harmening shot upright, then tossed his half-crafted airplane to the side. “Uh, greetings my fellow Americans. Hmm, I’m sorry to interrupt you but… Ah screw it! Jackson, to hell with the cue cards. We don’t have time for fucking formalities, we don’t have much time for anything really… This is probably the last time… Ahem, sorry people, my fellow Americans. But there’s no time for pussy footing around this one. We are completely and utterly fucked.”

The vice president exhaled a long breath, took an even longer sip from his bottle to alcohol and then continued.

“I’m just going to jump right to it! Earlier, last year we began experimentation with the idea of teleportation, long story short we were surprisingly successful. We started off small, y’know? Rodents to a few inches across, then a few feet, and finally a couple of miles. We were making history!” He gulped an impressive amount of alcohol before continuing.

“And then we got greedy. No more mice or monkeys, it was time to ship over the real meat and potatoes. It was the Challenger 2 tanks that did it… We tore a hole through time and space. A tiny little hole, the size of a baseball. You’d think we’d stop there; you would be dead wrong. We began interacting with the tear…”

Harmening was a complete mess now. He’d grabbed a handful of tissues and was swiping at the sweat on his brow, his face twisted up in regret and anguish.

“You have to understand, the tear was spilling out insane amount of energy… Energy we could use. Every device we had close to the tear became overcharged within minutes! From the trace amounts we were able to sample, it easily put nuclear power to shame. Our experiments didn’t go unnoticed, especially once we started trying to siphon the energy.” Again, he took a long sip from his Hennessey bottle. Finishing it, he glared at the empty bottle before tossing it over his shoulder. Clearing his throat, he went on as if he hadn’t even stopped talking.

“This energy we thought we could use to our benefit is now going to tear our world apart, literally. And the thing that came with the energy, this system… It told us we somehow tapped into its complex paradox of power, an interstellar labyrinth that linked galaxies far beyond ours and now we’ll pay for it with our lives, all our lives. Once the tear ripped open fully, the intense radiation instantly killed everyone at the facility. Including the president, God rest his soul. I-I’m all that’s left, those things coming from the tear killed everyone else…”

Just as it seemed that Harmening was at the brink of completely breaking down, a voice behind the camera shouted in alarm. Eye’s widening, Harmening pulled a pistol from the drawer closest him and snarled as an impact of something crashing through a door sounded. The camera teetered and everyone all watched at the edge of their seats as what looked like a bear with the head of a boar and thick muscular arms of a man slammed a person into the presidential desk, the sound of the man’s bones crunching made bile rise in Tyrone's throat.

The boar bear thing roared in anger as Harmening fired his pistol at its chest, but the bullets did close to nothing, only succeeding in making it angrier. The beast stomped hard on the man’s head, popping it like a watermelon. Then it lunged at the Vice President who seemed resigned to his fate as he still sat at the office chair firing his pistol without pause at the creature.

The camera was knocked over and all they could see were the feet of the creature and Harmening firing a few more shots. Then there was the screaming, the anguished screams of a man being torn apart by a bloodthirsty animal. Tyrone blinked numbly as the video feed died and he found himself staring at a black screen, which flipped back to the news which displayed a shocked anchorman.

“Uh, l-ladies and gentlemen we’re going to take a quick commercial break. Jack, what the fuck was that! Was that a damn manbearpig…” The screen flipped once more to a cereal commercial, cutting off the anchorman as he lost composure.

“Uh, what the hell was that?” One of the onlookers behind Tyrone hissed out. “This has to be a deep fake! A hoax, maybe antifa edited the footage…”

“Bill, shut the hell up.” Another voice snapped. “This is the same video playing on my phone, it’s certified right from the oval office… That is real.”

“Uh, guys.” A woman looked up from her phone, her eyes budging from their sockets in fright. “There’s reports all over of earthquakes and tsunami’s… Yellowstone is apparently erupting. My family lives in Wyoming, oh god no!”

The ground rumbled again causing everyone to either scream or hunch down in anticipation for the building to crumble down, it was beginning to make alarming creaking sounds. They all launched into action then, strange presidential video put aside, it was about surviving now. But it was too little far too late now. The ground was now constantly rumbling.

“We need to get out of here before- WHA!” Tyrone started to shout, but then the ground shifted drastically underneath them.

His mind boggled as he felt himself being lifted a good two feet off the ground, then come down hard as gravity reasserted itself. While being launched into the air, he overcorrected and came down at a weird angle. His vison went white as he smacked his head on the edge of the guards’ desk.

People were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, going every which way. Chip helped Tyrone to his feet, shouting something, but Tyrone’s head was ringing making it hard to focus on Chip’s words.

Over Chips shoulder he could see that the windows had shattered, through the windows he saw that the sky had turned a menacing shade of red. The clouds in the sky were churning like a witch’s cauldron as a storm was beginning to brew.

“Ty, we got to get out of here man!” Chip shook him frantically, making his already rattled mind spin into a head splitting headache. “The building, it’s falling apart! We have to-GAK!”

A large section of the ceiling had broken free and fell directly onto Chip. About two hundred pounds of concrete and plaster falling from over fifty feet, Chip didn’t stand a chance. Tyrone gapped at the splatter of visceral which was once his friendly coworker.

Before he could even fully react, a slab of concrete the size of a football bashed the side of bald head. An audible crunch echoed through Tyrone's ears, making him wonder if it was the slab breaking apart or his skull cracking open. Thankfully, he didn’t have to worry for long as everything went black.