A/N: I apologize for this chapter format being weird. :P I wanted to change it up a little bit and this was the only way I could do it!
SO! WHO SAW BIG TIME MOVIE? Was it NOT awesome? NO! IT WAS EPIC! And now I have plot bunnies bugging (HEHEHEHE BUGGING) me to write a spy fic/movie tag/sequel of sorts to the movie. Would you object to that? I HONESTLY WOULDN'T.
Enjoy!
…
Kendall shook. He couldn't help it. Despite the numbness, he could feel his chest shaking wildly, as if he were cold. And maybe he was cold—he couldn't tell. He couldn't feel anything from the neck down. Every time he tried to lift his arms, they flopped heavily and then pins and needles shot up from his fingertips on up. Something in the back of his mind told him that was not a good thing, but he didn't have the energy or the coherency to care.
He was going stir crazy trapped in here. There was literally nothing he could do without someone there to do it with. For a few minutes he took to talking to himself out loud, until the pain made him realize how crazy stupid that was. So he laid trapped beneath the rubble, trapped within the silence, going crazy and numb and shaking even though there wasn't much reason to.
His worry for his sister faded. His worry for himself faded—his worry for anyone, actually, faded to the back of his mind. He shook and his eyes closed and he was beyond ready to give up—that was, until he heard his name.
…
Logan now knew what it meant to have a panic attack. He remembered the feeling he had right before he woke—that something was wrong, way wrong, and that he had to wake up before something horrible happened. So his eyes snapped open, and the first thing he noticed was how dark it was.
The blackness was suffocating. It scared the crap out of him. Logan lay frozen, eyes wide but seeing nothing. His breathing sounded loud in his ears. He had to work on that—it sounded like he was hyperventilating. Even worse, the room seemed to spin. He couldn't tell how so, especially when it was just as black when he closed his eyes as when he opened them, but his stomach started doing flip-flops and the vertigo washed over him like he was being tipped upside. He suddenly couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't anything but panic, trapped in this frozen position trying desperately to see.
This isn't right.
Logan clenched his fists and pressed them to his temples. Now was not the time to panic. He couldn't panic now. He had to do something to get him out of this mess. One step at a time.
He took a deep breath, and then another. Slowly he started to calm down. As he opened his eyes again—when had he even closed them?—he noticed the faintest light allowing his eyes to adjust to the blackness. So that's how it felt like he could see and yet he couldn't. His eyes hadn't adjusted to the dimness yet.
Looking around confirmed that his sight was limited, but it was there. Logan sighed in relief and felt his heart start to slow down. It had been pumping so fast his chest ached.
Relaxing helped him focus on the next problem. There was something missing in this picture. He couldn't tell what. By the haze and pounding headache, Logan could tell he was concussed. But that had to be put on the backburner until he could figure out why in the world it felt like he was missing something important. It was so important—more than forgetting his homework on finals, more than leaving his keys on the kitchen counter, more than anything that might've been important to him before. But he couldn't put his finger on it.
Logan frowned and he tried to get to his feet. There was this thing blocking him. It was large and metallic and—
His eyes widened as he felt along the smooth surface until he got to the edge. It was the doors. Of course it was—the doors de-magnetized and collapsed inwards, as they're supposed to do in case of an emergency.
Feeling his way around the door, Logan slowly got to his feet and leaned against the railing—or at least, he tried to. The railing on the right wall of the elevator was definitely gone. He could feel where the screws usually went into the plaster. When had that happened? Logan wracked his brain but couldn't even get past the feeling that there was something missing that he needed.
"Phone?" he muttered to himself, checking his pockets. No phone. He squinted into the dimly lit blackness and made out the side of the panel beneath the buttons. The door was cracked open, and the sleek black telephone was in a heap of cords on the floor beneath it. It was obviously disconnected, so there went that plan.
He took a step and then looked down in surprise. The floor was wet. Why was it wet? Logan frowned. Hotel elevators usually didn't have carpet because people used the elevators coming up from the pool.
Pool! That jolted a thought a loose. Logan froze, thinking hard, grasping at the floating piece of importance. The pool… something he left at the pool? Someone in here who'd been at the pool?
All at once, he remembered. Carlos. Of course, Carlos—Carlos had been dripping wet when Logan had rushed into the elevator. He'd barely even noticed when he'd woken the first time—mostly because Carlos was more or less dry at that time. His eyes widened. Had they really been in this elevator that long? Better question: where the hell was Carlos now?
"Carlos?"
Logan looked, he really did. And it was so dark, he could almost convince himself that Carlos really was there, unconscious in the corner or maybe even trapped beneath the elevator doors. And as horrible as that was, he wanted so badly believe that his friend was still in this tiny little elevator with him. But he wasn't.
Logan lost it. His mouth opened but nothing came out, the terror choking him and closing his throat so not only could he not scream, but he couldn't even breathe either. Carlos was gone. He was gone. Where did he go? Where could he have possibly gone? Was he even in here in the first place, or had Logan dreamed all that up?
Was he seriously having a second panic attack in less than five minutes?
Tremors shook him from head to toe. Logan slammed the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying desperately to keep from crying. He shook so hard, he felt ridiculous, and he had the stupid urge to look around to see if anyone was watching him freak out like this.
"Calm down, Mitchell!" he growled at himself. Now was not the time to lose it! Find out where Carlos went, and then panic.
"Okay," he said out loud. "Okay." Carlos had been in the elevator with him. Logan remembered popping his dislocated shoulder back in. He winced—that was not something he ever wanted to relive. But that meant he had to have gone somewhere. Logan's phone was missing, too. So either he dropped it and it was somewhere on the floor, or Carlos had taken it.
A quick survey of the carpet confirmed that Logan's cell phone definitely wasn't on the ground. So Carlos took it. For what? To call for help? It was really hard to get reception in an elevator. So maybe he climbed out of the elevator after the doors were released, went to go get help.
Logan looked out into the void and blinked. He suddenly realized that the glow was coming from outside the elevator car, not inside like he'd originally thought. Logan edged around the door and leaned forward, peering up at where the light was coming from. His jaw dropped in disbelief. A few yards above him, the hallway's bright lights shone into the elevator shaft through the doorway. That's where Carlos went. He'd somehow used the beams crisscrossing the shaft to get up to the right level and then somehow pried the doors open.
He shook his head. Carlos did all of that with a previously dislocated shoulder? He knew adrenaline made people do things they never could've done without help, but that was unbelievable.
No. What was unbelievable was that he was going to do the same.
Logan shook his head. He really was crazy. But he had the choice of staying in the tiny, dark, cramped elevator with no one to keep him company or braving an elevator shaft with tiny beams with a concussion in order to get to safety. And he was taking the second option.
He braced his feet against the door and mentally calculated the distance between him and the ledge that jutted out from the wall about five feet in front of him. He might be able to make it, if he didn't fall. And if he could stay still and not sway in place, like most concussed people did.
That's a lot of ifs.
Logan closed his eyes. He could do this. All he had to do was jump. Piece of cake.
Heart pounded loudly, Logan launched off of the elevator. He was way short.
When he did crash into the walls, his elbow slammed against the ledge and he fell hard. It was only by some miracle that his fingers managed to latch onto the edge of the ledge, yanking his free fall to a very sudden, very painful stop. But he didn't let go as he dangled from the ledge, not daring to look down, not even daring to breathe. His swaying came to a stop and his fingers started to sweat, his shoulders felt like they were tearing out of their sockets, and Logan's head spun so much he wanted to throw up.
Deep breath. Logan breathed, closed his eyes, and pulled himself up. He almost fell again as he stood—the ledge was simply not wide enough for him to prop a knee up—but he held on and stood, back touching the shaft's wall, breathing heavily and shaking at how close he'd come to losing his life.
"Don't think about it," he whispered into the shaft. Maybe it was crazy to be talking out loud to himself. But it made him feel better.
He had to keep moving or he really would lose his mind. Logan looked up at the beam a few feet above his head. He didn't hesitate this time, shoving off against the wall to propel himself up. He caught the beam with a few feet to spare and hung there, swinging his legs back and forth to build momentum. Only when his feet crashed onto the hallway's carpet, projecting him face-first onto the floor, did he finally breathe.
"I did it." He stared at the sudden brightness, blinking, loving the feel of the flat, unimpressive carpet beneath his fingers. He stood unsteadily, nausea washing over him. But he waited, breathed, let the moment pass until he could finally stand and see and breathe again.
There. The staircase at the end of the hall. Logan stumbled blearily towards it, realizing that the fall had jolted him and his concussion more than he originally realized. But he pushed past it, determined to reach the staircase, and then… and then what?
He reached them and looked down. Carlos would be down there. Carlos and Camille—his heart ached to think about where she was when the earthquake happened. But when he looked up, he flashed to Kendall waving at him, telling him he was going back to the apartment with Katie to help come up with a present for Jo while she was in New Zealand. Kendall and Katie would've been in the apartment, he was sure of it. Would they have gotten out? Were they okay now? Or were they trapped in the room like he and Carlos had been?
There was only one way to find out. Logan took a deep breath. Safety, or his friends? Camille, or Kendall and Katie?
"Too late to do eenie meenie," he muttered to himself. Shaking his head, he made his decision, and made his way up the stairs.