"Hey, wake up! Come on, wake up!"
It sounded like a woman's voice.
"What's wrong with you? Hey, wake up!"
Someone was pushing me—probably a woman's hand. Not too hard, but annoyingly persistent.
Whatever I was lying on, it definitely wasn't a bed. Hard as a rock, jostling and wobbling all over the place. It reminded Jack Young of riding in his grandpa's old wooden cart when he was a kid.
With a clunk, the hard board beneath Jack Young jolted, bouncing his head up and then slamming it back down—ouch, that hurt!
"What the heck?" Jack Young snapped awake, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. Looking around, he realized he wasn't at home. Nope—he was in one of those wooden carts you see in TV dramas, the kind they use to haul criminals off to the market for execution.
Only this cart was bigger, and there weren’t any holes for your head or wrists. It looked more like a giant wooden box. The cart was being pulled by a cow, creaking along. That jolt earlier? Probably the wheels hitting a pothole.
Jack Young was locked up inside this wooden box, along with four other girls. But these girls? Their outfits were, let's say, a bit "retro"—rough cloth, long skirts, totally like the peasant costumes from those old period dramas.
"Hey, you okay?" The speaker was a girl with a face smeared in black—yep, the same one who'd been calling out to him. Jack Young could tell she wasn't born with that color; her face was just covered in some mystery gunk, making her look all dusty.