Your eyes shot open, your head pounding furiously as you gasped again and again, sucking in the desperately-needed oxygen to fill your starving lungs. You reached a trembling hand to your damp face, wiping the cold sweat from your forehead as your mind raced frantically trying to determine where you were. The ground beneath you lurched from side to side in the darkness, making it impossible to remain still even while sitting. You searched your mind, trying to remember where you had been before, what you had been doing, where you were going, but it was all hazy as if just waking up from a bad dream. Maybe you were still asleep. Maybe this was all a nightmare. But if that was true, why couldn't you remember—
The room suddenly pitched, shoving you forward. Your hands shot out before you, painfully colliding with the sharp, metal grating of the floor beneath you. You bit back a yelp, shifting to reduce the weight from off your stinging hands as much as possible. The air that blew across your damp skin, making you shiver, was stale and thin. It was getting hard to breathe. The blackness that entrapped you seemed to be a substance that was steadily tightening its grip around your arms, legs, mouth, and throat. You gasped for air again and again, but you just couldn't get enough. Your head felt light, but in the darkness, you couldn't tell if you were beginning to black out or not.
Then, a bar of horizontal light shot through the walls around you from the ceiling, falling to the floor and beyond. You blinked against the sudden brightens, then watched as it continued downward until it was out of sight. Then more bars of horizontal light whizzed by you, again and again. And it was only then that you realized the room you were in was not a room but a metal box of sorts that was rapidly moving upwards, in what reminded you of an elevator shaft.
You looked up, seeing more bars of light coming at you as the metal box you were in shot upwards towards and then past them. You felt for the side of the box, wincing as your sliced hand met the wall, then shakily, carefully, forced your legs to lift you up. The box lurched and you stumbled a moment, your foot striking against one of the multiple, crate-like boxes you were amongst, abruptly halting your otherwise painful fall. Returning your gaze to the grated, metal ceiling a few feet above your head, you put a hand up tentatively as your fingers touched the cool groves, then more firmly, pushing, then slamming your hands against it, trying to cause something to shift or give way.
"Help!" Your voice was so hoarse it surprised you at first, but you swallowed dryness trying to shout through it. "Someone, please...help me!"
Each time you struck the ceiling an explosion of pain shot through your stinging hands. The metal above you rattled with each stroke, but otherwise held firm.
Your hands were aching as well as your ever-shifting feet that were trying to hold you upright in the jerking cage. You blinked through your tears, trying to fight off the overwhelming flood of panic and fear that was crashing into you. Darkness invaded the metal box once again, bringing with it a panic so real it was almost unnatural.
