October 29th, 9:00 PM

Sara was having a quarter-life crisis.

She sat in her car and was dry heaving, head between her knees, trying to make it all stop.

She should have said no. Sara had no idea what she was doing, and she turned a manageable crisis into a full-blown panic.

Sara wanted to prove she was responsible. She also didn’t want to admit she had no idea what she was doing when she received a phone call.

A nervous voice called her around 9 PM. He seemed to try to keep his voice low, and Sara had to ask him to repeat himself multiple times.

“We have an event 49,” the man whispered. “Should I lockdown?”

Sara groaned when she got the call. She wondered why someone was asking about the practice lockdown code. It made no sense to do it during the festival, even less sense at 9 PM.

“Let me think about it,” she said.

It's the practice for lockdown or something, right? Lockdown from something that can spread?

Sara couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do a practice drill, but she figured it must be because of the large influx of people.

Shouldn't they do it once the festival closes at 10 instead?

“I think you should wait until the day ends,” Sara told him.

"I...I don't think that's a good idea ma'am", the man whispered. "I think we should do it now."

“Fine,” she conceded. “Just let me know if anything happens.”

"I… I don't think I'll be able to," the man whispered. "Thank you for everything."

The call ended and Sara began to worry that she had done something wrong. She walked through her apartment and went to the kitchen. She made herself instant coffee inside her mug that said The Boss and decided to double-check something quick.

She went into her room, coffee in hand, and searched for something on the employer database.

Oh, I was confused, Sara realized. Event 94 is the practice for lockdown, and event 49 is the actual event. All the numbers are reversed for practice and the actual event.

She smiled, feeling silly that she had made such a simple mistake.

Then she started to reread the file, her head tingling, her eyes starting to water.

“Oh no,” she whispered.

She shot out of her chair, and quickly put her bra on, and slippers. She tied her hair up and grabbed her keys. Still wearing her grey sweatpants and a tank top, she rushed downstairs to her car and peeled out of the parking lot.

The drive was a regular twenty minutes, but she made it there in fifteen. When she was about to enter the campus grounds there was a police blockade. She pulled over to the side and got out, running towards it.

“Ma'am please step back,” one of the officers barked.

He was tired of nosy onlookers not trying to help and asking strange questions. Behind him was a giant pileup of cars. They piled on top of each other, in a strange position, seemingly leaning on nothing.

“What happened,” Sara asked. The officer groaned and recited what he was told to tell anyone who asked.

“A spatial abnormality has occurred,” he mumbled. “Possibly some idiot who can’t control his ability.”

“I need to go in there,” Sara pleaded. “I work there.”

“No one is getting in-”

“My father owns that place,” Sara shouted. “Let me in or else I will ruin you!”

The officer was now terrified of her once she mentioned her father. No one wanted anything to do with Maximillian, and if not for the money his business brought into town, he would have been a social pariah.

“No one can get in, we have tried,” the man shouted. “No one has come out either!”

“Let me go through and see myself,” she commanded. The officer shook his head and let her under the bold CAUTION tape, and escorted her to the pileup.

Upon further inspection, Sara saw that both sides of the pile-up seemed to smash into some invisible wall. In certain parts, under the glow of the street lights, the impenetrable dome seemed to almost shine.

On the other side of the wall, bodies were still inside the cars, and blood pooled on the ground.

“We can’t go in and get them out,” the officer explained. “We wouldn’t just leave them there when we’ve been pulling out the others.”

Paramedics were pulling people out of cars on the other side of the dome, and putting them in body bags. No one survived any of the crashes, as they didn’t stop and hit it straight on, at 45 to 50 miles an hour, unable to see an invisible barrier.

“This is your problem now,” the officer spat. “You own this place, right?”

Sara shook her head no rapidly. “I, I don’t-”

“You did this. I don’t know how, but we’ll find out. More people are coming to handle the situation and we will know.”

“I have done nothing,” Sara screamed.

“That's the problem,” the officer said coolly. “If you’re done here, I’d like you to leave the area and let us do our jobs.”

All of these events led to where she was now, crying in her car, wondering why she ever thought she could do anything. She got out her phone and called her mother, Delilah, who she thought would help.

Delilah instead told her something worse.

“I can’t do a thing until Dad comes back,” she said. “Everyone left for vacation but I’ll try my hardest to get a hold of him.”

“What should we do until then,” Sara asked.

“Damage control. We’ll get sued, but we can deflect the revenue losses by damage control now and down the road.”

That was not the answer Sara wanted or expected.

She’s exactly like Dad, she realized. They were made for each other.

“ I will be there in several hours,” Delilah sighed. “On my way there I will take care of this.”

“Yes, mom...."

“Don’t do anything,” Delilah commanded. “Don’t say anything. You know nothing.”

The call ended and Sara sat in her dark car, feeling scared and alone, the flashing ambulance lights burning into her eyes.

“I can’t do anything,” Sara whispered. “He was right about me.”

While Sara was wallowing in her pool of misery, everyone came to surround the invisible dome. Former and current Defense Program soldiers and employees came to aid in any way they could. Just like Mary Jane, they couldn’t get in. They couldn’t get over through the top, they couldn’t tunnel under it, they couldn’t break it.

One man could pass through objects. Everyone cheered when he arrived at the scene. Sara watched in horror as he attempted to pass through the barrier.

Instead of easily passing through, as he did with any other object he came into contact with, he failed catastrophically. He was passing through the barrier, but something happened as he tried to break through.

He struggled and grunted, as it was the most difficult object he had tried to get through in his entire life. He was not a soldier, but a simple businessman who had seen the commotion on the nightly news and came down to help.

He thought in his mind he would be a hero. Instead, his ability gave out halfway through, as he had no kind of training of any kind, other than doing the weekly employee payroll. He realized his mistake as he was halfway through. He was zealous as the people cheered him on, believing he was a hero all along. He tried to step back but it was too late.

His body split, right through. His right knee, hands, upper abdomen, and the head fell on the opposite side of the barrier while the lower half of his body slid down. His legs and arms stuck out as his head fell, his body thinking it was free-falling.

Cheers turned into screams of terror, and the nightly news had the best ratings they ever had in years.

Sara had seen some quite horrific things on many missions. This, however, was very different. Seeing soldiers who willingly left, knowing they would die was one thing. Seeing people who went about their daily lives, people who tried their best, but it was not enough, die made her ill. All she felt was intense guilt the more people tried to get in.

As the hours went on the insanity came to a roaring high. The local government tried to get people to leave, but they refused to. By now everyone knew that there were people trapped inside, most of them children.

Many children went on field trips to the local Hallow’s Eve Festival Slater Academy held every year. Families brought their children, teenagers went with friends.

People refused to leave, worried about their safety, trying to break in. The police called in the SWAT team, but most of them didn’t want to push the crowd back.

Many of them on the local SWAT team were graduates of the Academy. They had family members who still worked there, children who went there, and the law enforcement understood the other parents' pain. At one point the police department gave up. By 2 AM, news trucks from across the nation were all there, and large-scale protests had begun.

A conspiracy had spread that the local government was so tired of Maximillian Slater’s monopolization of New Springfield’s businesses that they were holding their children ransom inside a dome until he agreed to split them all up. This was a ridiculous conspiracy theory for many reasons, but they blamed the mayor anyway.

They failed to realize that the mayor’s oldest daughter, Julia Anderson, was stuck on the campus with all the other children.

The mayor of New Springfield and her family was met with a violent mob in the middle of the night and dragged out onto their front lawn, screaming and kicking. The angry mob took her husband and children hostage, demanding she stops immediately or else she would never see them again.

The mayor promptly looked at one of the rioters, and his head exploded. They ran off, unaware that she had an ability, afraid that they would be next.

Around 3 AM the police had four problems.

Conspiracy theorists believed they were helping children, people hurting themselves in attempts to break the dome, deciding if the mayor should be arrested for use of a deadly ability, and the usual daily crime.

At 4:22 AM the insanity was unmanageable.

People from other nations had arrived, tourists to see the madness. Food trucks were getting set up to cash in on the large crowd. T-shirts were being sold that said, I SURVIVED THE DOME. End Of Day harpers had their usual signs and were screaming at the top of their lungs. A fire had started on the campus grounds, further adding to the confusion, and no one could get inside to stop it.

Delilah arrived at what looked like Hell on Earth.