As tears pooled in the corner of his eyes, he dropped his face into the palms of his hands. The sunglasses fell from the top of his head and clattered to the ground. His JanSport backpack rested on his shoulders. With eyes empty of life and blood streaks drying above his temple, he recounted the carnage he saw. 

“I’ve been everywhere, man, crossed the deserts bare, man; I’ve breathed the mountain air, man, but never once have I seen a battlefield like this,” Marcus Andrews, an on-campus religious personality and survivor, said through more tears. 

Amid a shortage of unsuspecting freshmen and transfer students on campus, religious folks on campus suffered from a horrible battle after running into each other and asking “Hey man, do you got a minute?” or “Do you think you’ll get into heaven?”

Following the recent closure of all nonessential buildings on campus and the transition to a fully online academic program for the rest of the semester in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, students wandering through The Plaza have been hard to come by.

In a feud that would have made the Hatfields and McCoys turn pale and head for the hills, religious people on campus began bumping into each other with increasing frequency and asking if the other had some time to talk about “our Lord and Savior” or if they thought they were a good person.

As religious personalities engaged in debate, tempers flared. 

“How can YOU THINK THAT YOU ARE A GOOD PERSON, WHEN I WAS THE ONE WHO ASKED YOU THAT SAME QUESTION FIRST?” one religious personality was heard yelling shortly before being put into a chokehold and being body-slammed by the other religious personality.

After the unsuspecting innocent students who were just minding their own business began to disappear from campus, the religious people turned on each other, looking for their next victim. 

Echoes of “Well, you’re actually going to hell,” and “You need to give up your life in order to truly live,” rang out across campus, but not before they were drowned out by the sound of heavy artillery fire and firebombing attacks by competing religious personalities. 

Shrines to educational success and the endowment of the state’s future, like the Clark Building and the Braiden Dining Center, were lost among the fighting. Cultural landmarks that served as the bedrock to an educated society were wiped from the CSU map as different sects of the same religion bombarded each other with airstrikes and stone tablets of cherry-picked Bible quotes about forgiveness and love.

“This fight is a righteous fight, and we shall prevail no matter the cost to our brothers and sisters, no matter the cost to the campus,” said Darrell Johns, another religious personality, while loading a package of munitions onto a commandeered Housing & Dining Services golf cart. 

Many students who remained on campus after spring break were stuck in the Corbett and Parmelee embassies and feared for their lives as the fighting took over campus. 

“Can’t they just get along?” sophomore Jessica Honner said while cowering under her desk amid heavy anti-aircraft fire from the southern part of campus. “We all have faults, and nobody is perfect, but in the end, we’re all mostly good people deep down inside. Can’t they see that?”

As the Do You Got A Minute rebels took over the Morgan Library and the southern half of The Plaza, the Do You Think You’ll Get Into Heaven resistance fighters were holed up in the Lory Student Center and were established on the roof of the Computer Science Building. 

With the conflict zone spreading rapidly, University President Joyce McConnell feared for the students still stuck in the embassies on the north side of campus. 

“We’ve got to get them the blazes out of there!” an exacerbated McConnell said to reporters on the south lawn of the Administration Building just before getting aboard CAM Force One and flashing a double peace sign.  

The destruction on campus even garnered international attention.

“What happened on this campus should be registered as a war crime under the Geneva Conventions,” said Maj. Lt. Gen. William Pitterpatter, an official from the United Nations’ war council. 

“There was no need for the destruction of a site as holy as the B wing of the Clark Building, and now this community has lost a treasured cultural site,” history professor Mike Mickelsons said after returning to campus and finding his office destroyed. 

The B wing of the Clark Building was on UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites list as a place of “extreme cultural importance and a significant source of plutonium and asbestos,” according to UNESCO’s website. 

In a rapid turn of events, as the number of fighters on each side of the heaven and hell debate dwindled, a peace deal was signed early Wednesday morning. Leaders from each guerrilla outfit met in the middle of The Plaza and asked each other if they had a minute before negotiating. 

Each side vowed to only ask questions to innocent freshmen that can easily be manipulated or to people who look like they can easily be swindled into cutting off any sort of meaningful emotional ties with their family and friends.

Forrest Czarnecki can be reached at editor@collegian.com or on Twitter @forrestczar.