Music blared through the headphones, drowning out all other sounds. Regardless, as Kevin rocked back and forth in time to the music he knew there was noise all around him. He kept his eyes shut as well to block out every reminder of what was going on around him.

Cold, damp air blew around, making him shiver. There was no sunlight to provide extra warmth that would counteract the chill so he contented himself with rubbing his arms and legs from time to time to chase away the biting numbness that would otherwise fill his extremities.

“One…two…three…four…” he counted out to himself. He spoke in a whisper but somehow could still hear it over the blare of his music.

As he counted, Kevin breathed in slowly, focusing on the breath, on his heartbeat. It was difficult with the conflicting rhythm of the music but he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off. The other sounds would be far more distracting.

“One…two…three…four…” he counted again, this time letting out his breath while he counted.

He’d been counting this way off and on for the better part of the last few hours. In fact, he’d been sitting there, not moving besides to rub his arms and legs and to rock back and forth to his music, for the past several hours. Every time his heart rate became too rapid, too thunderous in his chest, he began counting out. It helped but wasn’t a real, long-term solution. Just something he could do for now to keep from being overwhelmed. The same was true for his music. He knew if he kept it at such a loud volume that he’d do real and permanent damage to his eardrums. He could accept the short-term consequences of some additional ringing later on for now.

The ground beside him shifted suddenly. It wasn’t a large shift, but still he gasped and gripped his arms tightly around himself as if bracing for an impact or something. When it didn’t come and the ground remained stable he relaxed.

“One…two…three…four…” he murmured to himself once more.

A part of him longed for someone, anyone, to come and just tap him on the shoulder, to let him know they were there. Another part of him knew that most people who would see him would interpret his body language to mean that he wanted the exact opposite.

Kevin became aware of the throbbing pains that were scattered over his body. The pain tended to come and go. The better he was able to control his breathing and keep calm, the less he hurt. His right forearm, as well as the right side of his head, were the worst. They had taken the brunt of the damage when everything came crashing down around him. His ribs weren’t that much better, but his legs and left arm were all mostly okay. Just minor scrapes as far as he could tell.

Just a few short hours ago everything had been normal, just another day at the office, when…well, he wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. One minute he was typing away at his computer, inputting the lines of data he was supposed to analyze thar day, when the walls, the ceiling, even the floor, all just began to fall away. There was no way he could tell what the shaking he had felt was from. He doubted it was an earthquake, since the building had collapsed far to abruptly, and he hadn’t heard any sort of explosion so far as he could tell. Instead, it seemed as though the building had just decided all at once to come down.

He allowed himself a sarcastic grin as he considered the company name, Jericho Holdings. If ever there was a terrible case of irony, this was it.

His brief grin faded quickly as his thoughts turned, as they so frequently did, to his coworkers. Their shouts of surprise when the building first started to come down had all turned to cries of pain and terror. Then they’d gone silent. He’d given up quickly on calling out their names in the hopes of receiving any response.

The small pocket he sat in, the void within the rubble that he found himself in after everything had stopped tumbling, was only large enough for him to sit in. He couldn’t stretch his arms out very far to either side either without hitting debris. The water running beneath his feet, and that was mingled in the cold air around him, hinted at broken water pipes, spraying somewhere close by.

Where the breeze was coming from he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the HVAC system was still somehow running and creating the airflow.

“One…two…three…four…” he counted while forcing himself yet again to stop thinking about his current situation.

A drop of water fell onto his neck and ran down his back. He twitched shuddered as the droplet went, eventually running into the fabric of his shirt and getting absorbed. Another drip fell a few seconds later, and soon after that a third drop hit him.

He didn’t need this. Sure, it was just a drop of water, but people used to torture people with dripping water. As the dripping became more regular and frequent he knew it wasn’t going to let up any time soon. In fact, he figured it was condensation from the water in the air. If that was the case then he couldn’t expect it to stop until whatever the water source was got turned off.

Kevin tried shifting this way and that to see if he could get out from under the dripping but with how cramped the space was he had little hope in success.

The ground beneath him jolted. The shift was so severe that, even though he was sitting in a fairly stable position, Kevin was thrown to the side. He was able to get his arms up and around his head in time to keep from smashing his face against the rubble. Pain flashed in his arms as jagged edges of concrete, rebar, or any number of other sharp bits dug into his flesh.

Unlike the other times, however, the ground beneath him didn’t settle back down. Instead, it kept shifting and juddering as more and more pieces below came out of balance. Soon, pieces on either side of him began to crumble away and then, all at once, everything was coming down all around him.

Kevin screamed out but was helpless before the oncoming avalanche. He could no more hold it back than he could have stopped an oncoming car with his bare hands. And yet, through it all, he was surprised at how rarely any of the debris hit him. Even when it did hit him, it tended to be the smaller pieces and caused little to no harm.

Even with all of this going on around him, Kevin still managed to keep his eyes shut. He knew that if he opened them that he’d see…that he’d see what he had seen the first time he’d looked; the unmistakable remnants of his coworkers mingled with the rubble.

As he continued to sink further, something caught him underneath one arm. It wasn’t sharp but it was sturdy. At once he wrapped as much of himself as he could manage around the object. It wasn’t more than a foot or two long and not terribly thick but it held all the same.

A noise broke through the music in his ears. It wasn’t the noise of the collapsing building, but beyond that Kevin wasn’t sure what it was. It came again and Kevin thought it might be a voice. He shuddered to think how loud it must be for him to be able to hear even a faint bit of it, not to mention what they could be saying, or screaming.

Something caught the cable connecting his headphones to his cellphone and yanked them off his head.

“NO!” Kevin cried out, finally opening his eyes as he scrambled for the cable.

He didn’t expect there to be so much light and it dazzled him briefly, making him forget momentarily about his headphones. His ears also took a moment to adjust to the noises around him. Dozens of voices and the low grumble of heavy machinery overwhelmed him and for a time he could do nothing but blink at the blinding light and try to sort through the mess of sounds.

After what felt like several minutes but what was probably just a few seconds, Kevin realized he was being spoken to, and the speaker was actually right beside him. Kevin turned and blinked his watering eyes to clear his vision. A man stood beside him, a hard hat on his head and a bright orange vest on. Only then did Kevin realize that the thing he’d clung onto was the man’s arm. He was still holding onto it, in fact.

“You’re going to be okay,” the man told Kevin in a voice that made him think that this wasn’t the first time the man had said it to Kevin. “What’s your name?”

Kevin tried to speak, to answer the man, but instead he dissolved into bawling tears. He couldn’t control it, try as he might, and the man just gave him a comforting pat and held him for a time. He waved a few others over and together they put a neck brace on Kevin and then helped to lift him out the rest of the way. Before he knew what was really going on, he was on a gurney in the back of an ambulance.

Still sobbing, overwhelmed by the events of the day, he fell into unconsciousness and a dreamless sleep.