Dan ran in mindless panic, the roar of the vacuum cleaner jabbing into his skull through his ears with unthinkable pain. The noise lessened and intensified in a strange pattern until Dan realized that his son was pushing forward and pulling back on the vacuum cleaner as he thoroughly cleaned the carpet of any debris he had tracked inside the house. What a time for his son to develop a dutiful sense of responsibility!
Dan felt the very air around him move, threatening to stop him in his tracks and suck him backward into the vortex being created by the monstrous vacuum cleaner. He saw the shadowy gloom beneath the enormous sofa, but he didn't seem to be making any reliable progress toward that possible shelter, and his gigantic son with the huge vacuum cleaner drew uncomfortably closer and closer with each passing second.
He felt very like a small, mindless bug, scurrying with adrenaline-fueled energy in the path of a gigantic, mechanical monstrosity. "No!" Dan cried as he lowered his head and shoulders and plowed across the carpet.
At some point, awareness crept into his thoughts that he wasn't going to win the race. Dan screamed when the suction of the approaching machine sucked him into a vast tunnel. He zipped through the passage toward the spinning blades of the rotors producing the suction. Screaming the entire time, he ricocheted off one of the rotors, but otherwise passed through the massive blades in one piece. The momentum from his high-speed deflection carried him through the rest of the machine's enormous machinery into a deep, dark bag filled with dust, dirt, and other debris.
His lungs choked on fine particles that clogged the cramped confines of the dust bag contained in an upright canister in the guts of the machine. Breathing became difficult. His lungs burned as he suffocated. "Got to get air," he muttered. "Can't breathe..." He began to see stars. Bruised, battered, and now subjected to more tortures, losing consciousness would have struck him as a mercy if Dan had been awake.
Eventually, Greg turned off the machine, scanned the carpet, and felt satisfied with a job well done. He...