The ground starts to shake. It is as if we are in a snow globe that a child has decided to vigorously shake. Behind me I can hear Baylor, my brother, crying softly to himself. An odd sense of panic sits in the pit of my stomach as I hear the sirens wailing. I feel myself drifting away to the sounds of sobbing and screaming people above me. ...The low creak of metal and stone echoed through the pockets within the remains of the fallen tower. The sound of debris settling meant that time was on the side of no one, not those trapped within , nor the ones outside who were still covering their mouths and wiping tears from they're stained cheeks at the shock. Most were covered in concrete dust, others up to their ankles in it as they started forward in an effort to begin some amateur search. Too occupied with a hero complex to consider the dangers of what they were doing or whether they should think about what they're rummaging could be doing to the structural integrity of the disaster zone. Dust had barely floated to the ground on the outside, but inside the debris, it coated everything.

Bexley’s head turned slowly to the side as she came too, ears filled with that sickly groaning and a soft ringing sound somewhere in the back of her mind. She could feel the hard slab on which her head was pressed, lips dry and cracking, arms still bent uncomfortably up as they had been in an effort to protect, not only her own head, but her brother’s too. It was an instinctual action when she started feeling the floor coming the floor coming out from underneath herself, but she still must have been hit by something on the way down, so says the stickiness covering her forehead and eyes, making opening them a painful chore.Her first movement was to inch her hand slightly, resting it flat on her freckle covered forehead to feel where the split was. She found it relatively quickly, a swollen lump with a crack in it that must've been from the trauma, at her hairline towards the right side of her face, and she let out a soft sigh. She was calm; forearms pressed to something rough and somewhat crumbly, with her shoulder blades digging against the solid concrete slab.

Baylor

But then she remembered. BAYLOR! Where was he? She knew he couldn’t have gone far,so in the moment of silence she took a minute to steady her breath, trying to without opening her glued shut eyes, take stock of her own body. Sharp edges were prodding and jabbing at her from nearly every angle, but when putting in the effort she found her right foot able to do a full turn, and her toes able to move perfectly. Her initial relife was cut short when she attempted the same thing with her left foot, an excruciating shot of pain radiates up into her calf and thigh, making her clench her hands into fists.One of them coming to her mouth, so it did not become vocalized as a loud cry of pain. She knew even with her eyes closed, that she was in a small space and any cry would echo in her ears for ages after it had left her lips. With a hesitant hand she moved down her side to the left leg reaching down as far as she could without moving too much, and not finding anything. She deduced the problem was lower,which meant it was for another time. Her hand moved back to the ceiling of her makeshift tomb, shoulder once again screaming for relief, but she couldn't. She just couldn’t let go.

Bexley

Her ears continued ringing with the low rumble as she tried to tear her eyes open, finding success only to be rewarded with a thin rain of eroded granite (question 5)  and concrete dust floating down to blind her, drawing a combined hiss of pain and irritation from her, and her eyes snapped closed once more. She needed to see where she was, see if there was any light, any hope With her fists pressing into the crumbling, weathered concrete(question 17) above her, the logical part of her brain said she was making her situation worse, possibly wearing away at folded slab faster than the weight on the outside was planning to crack it (question 7). But without knowing how deep in the rubble she was, and how long she would be entombed, she had no idea whether the support of her arms was actually the thing keeping her alive. The dust in the air was clinging to her throat, to the insides of her sinuses; doing everything it could to make breathing the already stale air as difficult as possible. Her jerking was causing more dust to fall as her arms shifted against the slab above her, and she finally succumbed to agony in her shoulders, crumpling both hands down to cover her sticky, grimy face. Sobs were next, the usually stoic manager letting out hoarse, scared sobs that bounced off her walls, tears pouring down her cheeks, breaking through the bindings on her eyes like saline. She half expected her own sobs to be cut off by the falling slab, but the impact never landed and when she found the strength, she slowly opened her eyes.

Her hands were quick to rise back to her face, wiping desperately at the sludge formed by the combination of cement and her own blood so she could widen her eyes, trying her hardest to fight back against the absolute pitch blackness she found, turning her head from side to side to attempt to hurry the process of her eyes adjusting. She narrowed her gaze and fixed her eyes straight up at the crumbling slab that although was stable, was still making her nervous, and with a growl resigned herself to staring at the ceiling for as long as it would take to become accustomed to the darkness. It was slow, but soon more shapes were visible, and when she moved her hand up, just above her face, she could make out the curve of each of her fingers, then the rest of her hand, and eventually the lines on the inside of her palm. Moving her hand away gave her vision of her coffin; two slabs resting against one another to peak in the centre, a metal bar below them having obviously caught on something, preventing it from having crushed her, and debris of rock and rubble on either side of her. It felt somewhat like the perfect little pocket, large enough for her to stretch her arms out on either side, but not to be able to sit up fully. She found herself smiling a little at the concept, imagining herself as Gulliver, and this as a Lilliputian home. Reaching carefully behind her head, she searched for the end of her concrete tent, only to not find one, and glancing up was met with only darkness that was definitely off-putting

“Hold the elevator!” Bexley called, as she bounced between the bustling crowd, tugging a squirming 8 year old behind her, waving her free hand high in an effort to get the attention of the crowd. Finally stumbling out of the mass to shoot her hand out just as the elevator doors were about to close. The door hit her hand and slowly reopened, a groan coming from the group inside, packed in like a tin of sardines and only becoming tighter as they had to shuffle to make room for the tall, lean woman.the woman very aware of Tony from accounting breathing down her neck on the opposite shoulder from Lincoln. It seemed like it took an eternity for the doors to finally slide open, Bex letting out a relieved breath before she felt an impact in the shoulder Tony had been standing at, sending her files and briefcase spewing onto the ground outside the elevator. The cover on the folder having popped open with the impact, and Bex found herself staggering out after it with no idea what had suddenly decided to forcibly eject her from the elevator.Regaining her footing, she wheeled around to address whoever had violently shoved her, only to catch sight of a mass of blonde hair seeming to fly by her face. Her eyebrows could have been at her hairline with her shock, but seeing the girl who was in the rush was only more surprising since it didn’t seem from her stature she would have the strength. Bex took a moment to glance at Lincoln who was chuckling to himself as he bent to help her pick up her papers, hands raising in an exaggerated shrug before Bex redirected her attention to the woman walking away from her down the hallway.