It was dark. It was loud. The floor was cold and rumbling. He could hear an engine. He suddenly became conscious. His mouth was covered somehow. When he tried to move his hands, a dull but intense ache radiated from his wrists.

He couldn’t see anything. He could only feel the ground, and some protruding objects which were digging into his leg and back where he lay. He felt a sudden lurch, from the ground beneath him. He decided he was in a trailer.

He began to struggle. He knew not where he was, or how he had gotten there, but he wanted to be out. He strained, against his bonds, against is pain. He realized he couldn’t move his feet either. His breathing became faster. He kept struggling, but he was making no progress. Another lurch from the truck bounced him up in the air a little bit, and he landed on his back, with his hands behind him, and felt one of his wrists snap. He tried to gasp in pain, but he could only breathe through his nostrils. He just felt more pain, but he didn’t know which wrist was broken.

He tried to calm down. He began to mentally recite everything he still knew and could not be taken from him; he somehow knew this would calm him down. His breathing slowed just a little. But something was wrong:

He began with the most obvious thing, his name. But he couldn’t think of it — oh god — and his breathing began to accelerate — where was he from? He couldn’t remember. What did he look like? Who were his parents? Were they still alive, did he have kids, did he have any siblings, why aren’t there any answers there?

His chest began to burn. He was breathing as hard as he could, but his nostrils could only allow so much air flow. He felt his head begin to float. He was seeing stars. He took the largest breath he could, which wasn’t very big, and blew as hard as he could at the duct tape on his mouth, trying to get it off — it wasn’t working — he suddenly began writhing and twisting as hard as he could at his bonds.

He had moved a bit too far to the right. Before he knew it, he had fallen off of a high surface, and onto a lower surface of the trailer. His back landed on a box of some sort, and his back bent backwards. His head collided with the ground, and the starts multiplied behind his eyelids. He didn’t stop. He kept breathing as hard and fast as his body allowed, and kept struggling. His chest was on fire, he was in too many kinds of pain. His breath was short, and hard. The fire began to rise into his neck. He couldn’t struggle as hard anymore. Where who when what was he?

The ground lurched again, and something in shifted in his neck. But it didn’t hurt. He actually stopped hurting. He was grateful for a split moment, but his next breath was stifled by something indeterminate. He tried as hard as he could, but his lungs would not inflate. He could not struggle anymore, or move at all.

His heart dropped. He knew it was over. Adrenalin was coursing through him, but he had calmed. He remembered stories about people dying, about how their life flashed before their eyes, but he could remember nothing. He was calm, but he was in despair. He could make no physical movement, and his mind began to drift.

He also remembered people seeing a light; all he saw was darkness. The pitch black in front of his eyes somehow became darker. The fire in his throat was quenched by a creeping horror of what was to come. He thought most came to peace when they died, but he felt no such feeling.

The stars had disappeared. All he saw was nothing. The horror subsided, as did his consciousness. A deep nothingness swallowed him. He no longer existed.

The uninhabited body now lay still in the back of a trailer.