Trapped

“Ellen?” a weak voice called through the rubble. “Is that you, Ells?”
My breath caught in my throat, and I rushed to the voice. He sounded so weak, so helpless. And I knew his voice - my best friend. I vaguely remembered him rushing toward me as the cave’s ceiling gave out above me and I remembered jumping toward him and feeling the weight of rocks on my shoulders and the hands I’d thrown up to cover my head.
“Nate?” I asked, then coughed at the dust rising still. “Nate, where are you?!”

That’s not a good way to start, is it? Especially not a good way to start a summer vacation. Not for two seventeen year olds, fresh out of their Junior year in high school.
This whole disaster started with a camping trip, where my friends Jennifer, Lacy, David, John, Travis, Nate, and I had gone to the state’s biggest park. They allowed camping, and we chose the most remote lot we could find. It was a really pretty lot, too, in a clearing big enough for our two tents and with a nice, clear stream running right by. It all went downhill when Nate and I went off to explore and found the cave.

“Don’t worry, Ells,” I tried to tell her, even as I winced from the pain shooting up my leg. “I’ll be all right. At least it wasn’t your leg this time, eh?”
From a few shafts of light showing around us, in which we could clearly see floating dust particles, I noticed the tears on her cheeks, but also the grim half-smile on her lips.
“You idiot. Your bone is sticking out and totally grossing me out,” Ellen told me, her voice shaking slightly but altogether better than I expected. I actually had expected her to be dead, what with the collapse starting right above her head.

Told from the alternating views of Ellen Peterson and Nathan Thompson, the two main characters.