They walked in silence.

  The sound of the crowd faded behind them, replaced by the dull scuff of their shoes on uneven pavement. This part of town was quieter at the best of times, mostly terraced housing, rows of it, red brick and satellite dishes, chipped paint and short walls cluttered with weeds.

  Old bins stood near the kerb like sentries. A few still had last night's takeaway boxes wedged on top. One of the upstairs windows was left wide open, a stray curtain hanging out, blowing in the breeze. No faces. No noise. Just the wind and the uneven thump of Paul's trainers.

  Even without the warning earlier, it wasn't hard to notice something was off about the whole thing.

  Lee didn't say anything, but he felt it behind his ribs, tension that doesn't build, just arrives, like opening mail you didn't expect and finding a bill you have no knowledge of owing.

  The terraced houses stretched on, then simply stopped. No bend in the road, just a hard line. Tarmac gave way to cracked gravel, then raw dirt, then grass.

  Where the rest of Murry Street should've been - more houses, the old SPAR with its overpriced deals in the window, everyone's favourite Chinese takeaway, the Lotus Garden - there was nothing.

  Just open land. Barren of infrastructure or any hint that there was once a town here.

  It didn't even look unnatural. No scorched earth or twisted debris. Just neat, unfamiliar green, and off to the right, what looked like the edge of a forest in the distance, staring back menacingly.

  Paul stopped dead. "It really is all just gone."

  Lee stepped up next to him. His mouth opened, then closed. Starting to speak before he had fully finished the thought he was trying to get across was something he found himself doing often but even seemed to fail in the face of what looked back at them.

  He couldn't say what he was feeling. It was similar to panic and shock. A kind of weird mix between that feeling of your stomach dropping out and a sudden cold chill running down your spine.

  Parmo drifted up behind them, arms folded. His eyes were locked on the horizon. "This has to be some kind of joke. How? Why? What are we going to do?"

  Liam stood just behind him. Quiet. Watching.

  Lee took a slow breath and blinked.

  "This can't be it."

  He turned in place, scanning both sides, checking he wasn't missing something obvious. To the left, the edge of the road frayed into gravel, like a worn path in a countryside park. Beyond it, a wide stretch of green rolled away in soft, gentle hills.

  No street signs. No high wall at the end of the street concealing the local cemetery. No motorway hum in the distance. If this was the same in other parts of the town, then that also meant no way south to York.

  Just fields.

  "My kids are at my mum's," Lee said quietly. "In York."

  He didn't finish the thought. The others knew what he meant.

  Parmo swallowed, then muttered, "Mine are home. Back in Trimdon."

  It hit harder once it was said aloud.

  This wasn't just a weird power cut. Wasn't a strange one-off event. It was a total upheaval in their reality. A line drawn around what was here and what wasn't.

  Paul crouched and picked up a loose bit of concrete. Tossed it underarm into the grass. It thudded softly and rolled a little, then stopped.

  The grass didn't shimmer. Didn't react. It was somehow both totally alien and natural.

  The wind moved across it gently, the only sound for miles other than what could be heard coming from behind them.

  He too was worried. The dogs were home alone. His mum would check on them, right? Surely people must be panicking by now, trying to get hold of those missing, making sure they're safe. This has got to be on the news by now. How does part of a town just disappear into thin air?

  Liam stepped forward at an unhurried pace, moving just enough to break the moment's weight.

  He looked at the edge of the road, then back at the others. "Let's head back."

  Everyone could see he was trying to put on a strong front, to reassure them, but they knew he was feeling it too. Liam's family was close-knit, his worry more for the panic they must be going through than any danger he and his friends might find themselves in.

  Ste stood still, watching for movement or weirdness. He was worried for his friends more than himself, but his mind was already spinning. Years spent away from home for work had taught him to adapt, to see problems as puzzles rather than catastrophes. What did all this mean? Had this happened before and been covered up? Did the government know more? Was this some kind of experiment gone wrong? He didn't have answers, but he was already coming up with ways to find them.

  No one had left their worries behind. The grassland stretching out before them felt like a knife twisting in the heart, the vast open space endless and cold in its sheer loneliness.

  Paul turned and started walking.

  Lee hesitated just a moment, then followed.

  No jokes. No guesses. Just the quiet weight of not knowing what the hell this meant.

  ***

  They came back quieter than they'd left.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  No one said it out loud, but the group looked different now, not injured or panicked but marked in some way. Like they'd seen something they couldn't understand.

  As they stepped into view, the crowd's attention snapped toward them like a magnetic pull, conversations dying mid-sentence and heads turning in unison.

  Mike was the first to step forward. "Well?"

  Paul answered first. "The road's gone. Ends in gravel. After that, grass. And a forest off to the right. That's about it."

  A long pause. Then: "No buildings?" someone called out.

  Lee shook his head. "Yeah nothing. no SPAR, no takeaway, no cemetery. Nothing. The town just ends."

  "You sure you didn't take a wrong turn?" someone else asked, not accusing, just desperate.

  "We know the street," Liam said. "It's just not there anymore. Even if we did take a wrong turn, how do you explain an open plain and a forest in the middle of what is supposed to be rows of houses?"

  The silence that followed wasn't total. There were still murmurs, shifting feet, the sounds of birds overhead. But emotionally, everything came to a halt. The atmosphere tilted from unsettled to serious.

  Mike looked at the others who had stepped up earlier, the café worker, the gym lad, the salon owner. He gave a small nod and turned back to the crowd.

  "All right then. That confirms it. Town's cut off. That means this isn't just a storm or a tech outage. It's something else entirely. We need to start acting like it."

  People listened in and focused, they knew something needed to be done and Mike seemed to have his head on better than most.

  "We start counting what we've got, food, clean water, meds. If it can spoil, it gets used first or stored if we can link up some of the solar the keep fridges and freezers on. We figure out shelter next. No one sleeps rough. If your place is fine and you've got a spare bed, offer it. If we have anyone who's good with locks then we need to try and get into some of the housing around here. We can appologise to people if we manage to get home. Someone needs to check the electric situation. We're lucky Monkhaven was one of the towns that had that solar power upgrade a few years ago. Without it, we'd be back in the stone age. Still, we need to know how many panels we have, what's being powered, that sort of thing. We need to make sure essentials are running. No sense in powering stuff that's not needed. Also, we need a kind of town census. We have no idea how many of us are stranded here or how much of the town is still standing."

  Someone in the back piped up: "I can check the gym. We've got fridges, solar, and loads of space for storage."

  "I'll go through the café's stock," said the barista. "We've got bags of dry goods, oats, pasta, milk powder."

  A woman near the front raised a hand. "Civic's got two old defibs and a crate of supplies from last year's health fair. I'll get 'em."

  Momentum built quickly after that. It wasn't a frenzy or chaotic like it would have been if no one stepped forward, just a sense of motion and direction. Communal co-operation.

  Lee stood a little back from the crowd, arms folded, watching people organise. It was good, in a way. Or at least better than the stillness from earlier. But it didn't settle the ache in his chest.

  He glanced at Parmo. The man looked hollow, eyes fixed on the concrete like it held answers if he stared long enough.

  Paul and Ste weren't talking either.

  It wasn't that they didn't care about the plan. They just weren't in it. Not fully. Not with their heads still out at the edge of Murry Street, staring into that impossible scenery, realising how much might have been cut away.

  "They were only meant to be gone a few days," Lee said, barely above a whisper.

  Parmo swallowed. "I was only hanging around for another hour before getting a taxi when all this kicked off. My brother was keeping an eye on the girls, which is something at least."

  No one knew what to say.

  Liam crouched near them, elbows on knees, looking at the dirt between his shoes. "We'll find out more soon. Right? There's got to be something outside of here. A road. A signal. Something."

  Then, without sound, the UI flickered to life again.

  It caught Lee's eye first. His breath hitched.

  Floating symbols. Different this time. Sharper, more defined, like a message written in ink instead of pixels. The shape of the message was clearer now. Everyone in the group saw it at once.

  Text formed in jagged, almost living lines, not typed, not spoken. Just there.

  "All is not lost.

  Those beyond the veil remain.

  Grow strong.

  Strike forward.

  The path to them lies ahead.

  Seek power.

  Seek understanding.

  The world reshapes around will."

  The lads just stared.

  Paul gave a shaky exhale. "Well, that's new."

  Parmo stood up slowly, rubbing the side of his face. "You think that means they're alive?"

  Lee didn't answer. But something in him had steadied. Not yet hope, not fully anyway, but a thread of it.

  Liam looked up at the sky, then back at the others.

  "We do what the message said and move forward, one step at a time. If we spend all our time worrying like this then nothing is going to happen. its obvious no one from home is going to know what happened so we have to figure this out ourselves. Lee, Parmo, your kids are safe right? They're with family? Then as hard as it is, try to do what you can without overthinking. We'll get through this together."

  The rest of the lads all nodded their heads, a slight look of determination taking shape on their faces.

  Then the UI pulsed again, but not with a message this time. Just a small, flickering icon in the corner. The kind of thing you'd see in a game menu, a settings screen maybe, where "Audio" and "Controls" sat in their own boxes.

  It flashed once. Then stayed.

  Lee narrowed his eyes.

  "That there before?"

  Nobody answered. But now, they had something to look into. Something to do.

  Once again something had changed but this time, the friends weren't as nervous.