I don't know how long it was before I woke up, but it wasn't my intentions to at all, and I had a headache. A really bad headache.
"Is he dead?" One voice asked.
"Kick him, he'll wake up if he isn't." Another responded.
"You guys are idiots." Another voice said, sounding extremely annoyed. "He's breathing."
"I still want to poke it!" Yet another voice exclaimed. Next thing I knew, I was being poked in the side.
With a grunt and a groan, being that I suddenly felt a wave of soreness, I rolled over and pushed myself up to a sitting position. My eyes were suddenly met by the eyes of four other guys, all standing near each other except one, who wore a dirty skull and cross bone bandanna around his head. He was standing a little closer to me with a tilted head. "Damn, nice black eye you got going there." He said.
I blinked a few times, confused as to why these guys were in my room, and why my room looked like a prison cell. Then my eyes registered a little better, and I stared right into the eyes of a face I recognized.
Ashley Purdy.
"Y-you're Ashley." I stated. He gave me a hard look that said, "Obviously." He didn't say a word though.
"Yeah, that's Ash. He's been here a few weeks." Another one of the guys said. This one had a ripped black shirt on. "I'm Jinxx."
"A few weeks?" I asked, my eyes widening. "But I just heard about him running away on the news today!"
"Uh, yesterday. You've been out for a good while." The only other guy besides Ashley to not speak to me said. "I'm Jake, that's CC." Jake pointed at the guy who'd originally been closest to me, poking me to see if I was alive. "But Ash over there may have only been missing for a couple days in the human world, but here it's been over a month."
"The whole space time continuum is different here." Jinxx said matter-of-factly.
"Here? Where is here?" I asked, my whole body really starting to react to the fact that I'd been punched in the face and taken to some weird ass location that supposedly wasn't in the human world.
Jinxx sighed, shrugging. "We're not really sure where here is, but we know it's not part of the human world. They told us it wasn't." His emphasis on the word they showed me that they were someone not to question. "In all reality, people only started disappearing about a year ago. But they've been here for three years."
"I sure have." I heard the soft voice of a woman and took a glance through the bars of the muddy cell. Across from my cell, barely six feet away, a girl sat in yet another disgusting cell, holding one of the bars gently, as if it could be broken so easily. If only. Her dark brown hair fell in wavy locks down her shoulders, and her hazel eyes shone brightly. She was the definition of beauty.
She must have realized I'd been staring, because she smirked at me, something flashing through her eyes too quickly for me to see. "It's been a long three years too."
"Hey Jewels," CC waved kindly across the walkway, smiling at the pretty girl. "Lauren doesn't happen to be awake, does she?"
"You have quite the crush, dude." Jake said, punching CC on the shoulder playfully. CC laughed and shrugged. "Hey, you can't tell me she's not hot."
"I'm more into Ella," Jake smiled wide, and I stared at him and CC with raised eyebrows. We, whoever they were, were trapped in some dusty old gross prison cell in a place that was supposedly not in the human world, while there's some form of evil dudes that are the reason for us being here, probably plotting our death or starting a child army... And they were talking about girls.
"Can we please take a few steps back!?" I blurted out, looking down at the ground blankly. When it went silent, I sighed and continued. "I have to go home. My mom is going to be so mad that I'm not home. Well, by now she's probably called the cops because I'm always home by eleven at night and no later, since I don't even have friends to hang out with, but she has no idea what's going on, and she's going to be crying because we got into an argument about me being out after dark before I went home, and I didn't even say I love you back, I just said you too because I was so mad, but then there was that kitten, and the guy, and the cat dying, and then-" I stopped, trying to catch my breath. It was harden then I thought. I could feel myself going into full on panic attack mode, and I didn't know what to do to stop it.
I'd had panic attacks before, and there had been bad ones, but normally I would just sit down, sing to myself, drink water, and it'd go away.
I started shaking, my lips quivering, my throat feeling utterly dry. I tried to grab my throat, but I suddenly had no sense of what or where my body parts were.
This was all too much for my body to cope with. I could feel my mind drifting off, and before I knew it, I was staring at the back of my eyelids.