Two young small-town teenage boys decide to have a day of adventure, which includes swimming, fishing, eating out, taking a bicycle trip to a nearby town, and watching a movie. They wind up being distracted by two young women who trick them into following them. From this, they wind up in a situation where four or five hours of a day just go missing, and they cannot explain how this happened. For some reason, they also notice a change in their behavior that seems to make no sense to them or anyone else they know.

Eventually, they are contacted by several people who claim to be trying to help them. This causes them to get into a lot of dangerous and complicated situations, which also cause them to contact a number of other people.

The story involves youthful ignorance, mistrust, and overtrust, and boys discovering a world that contains extreme treachery and selfishness but also extreme integrity, self-sacrifice, and courage.

The boys must learn who to trust and what to trust, who not to trust and what not to trust, as they find themselves involved in the long war between good and evil. They are caught between these two forces, and even though they have previously known about this historic conflict, they will now learn just how severe it really is.

While this story is fiction, it involves many topics that are very real.