{Chapter 7}

White. Everything was white. I could feel my head burning as I squinted into the light. Surely I wasn't dying? I had felt no pain, nothing out of place, nothing had been there to suggest that I was slipping away. I had always thought dying would be painful, depending on the way your life was ended. Maybe my heart had just stopped beating in the suffocating darkness, maybe my fear of the darkness caused this to happen.

It wasn't just my physical feelings that had left me now, my concious mind was absent also, leaving behind only confusion, and fear. There was no other feeling I could replace either with. If I was dead, I had no idea why, and I was scared that I was. And if I wasn't dead, I had no idea why everything was a blinding white, and feared what caused it.

I closed my eyes. Something wasn't right. There was no way that I was dead, just moments before I had been standing in the forest, and listening to a deep rumbling that grew as the light did. I couldn't be dead, and the rumbling would still have to be there, if I could just focus my mind I would be able to hear it.

Opening my eyes again seemed like a huge effort. To stare into that blinding white after so long in the darkness burned my eyes, my head, and I could only do so for short periods of time. But with my eyes taking in what little there was to see, my other senses slowly adjusted, my hearing, my touch, my smelling ability, all came back to me.
I was standing on the path, surrounded by trees, and white light was dancing around me, eminating from four different points. The ground beneath me was shaking, and amidst the growls I could hear laughter. People were here, around me, moving behind those lights that tormented me. And the growls, the rumbling that was causing my ears to ring, and the ground to shake, was coming from machines.

Motorbikes. Cars were far too large to fit between the trees, and the ease at which the lights dodged among the tree trunks made it plainly obvious. I was surrounded by people on bikes, probably all boys, in the middle of nowhere. If I screamed, I doubt I would be heard over the engines, and I knew that would excite my tormentors further.

I readied myself, the bikes were coming closer. Breathing deeply, my eyes closed, I stood feet apart, hands by my sides, for when the pain would come, for when I would be wisked off my feet and into the trees where I would be powerless to whoever had taken me.