Page 174 of King’s Ransom

‘I’m not really thinking about them right now, to be honest,’ I said.

‘No, I imagine you are not,’ the Unperson said. ‘Ms Tan was very clear. She wanted you dead and buried and never seen again. Given that I went to some trouble to bury Aristo King alive at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I’ve decided that you shall suffer the same fate. That said, because I like you, I’m going to show you a small mercy.’

He threw something into my concrete box.

Something small and cylindrical and made of plastic.

It was a hypodermic syringe, filled with a few milligrams of clear liquid.

‘It’s Duramorph,’ he said. ‘If you want to die in your sleep, inject yourself. It will be a more pleasant way to go.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

‘It’s been nice knowing you, Samuel Speedman. Really, it has. Farewell.’

Before I could say anything in reply, Vasha drove forward on a forklift bearing a thick concrete lid. It must have weighed at least a ton.

She manoeuvred the lid over my concrete box.

As she did, I glimpsed Uri stepping up to the edge of the pit gripping the thick pouring hose.

No way . . .

Then Vasha dropped the heavy concrete lid into place on my concrete box with a resounding boom.

My coffin went instantly dark.

I was now trapped inside.

There was no way I could have heaved open the lid by myself—it was way too heavy—but they weren’t done.

I heard sloshing noises from outside: the sound of something slapping wetly against the roof of my concrete box.

I knew what that was.

It was the sound of concrete sludge being poured onto my box and into the pit surrounding it.

Concrete in which I would be entombed forever.

I wasn’t just being buried alive.

I was being buried alive in concrete.

Okay, then.

Buried alive. In concrete.

Not how I thought I’d die, if I was being totally honest.

(My money had been on an angry cheating husband shooting me when I discovered him with a hooker at a cheap motel.)

Being buried alive is such a common fear among people that it has a name: taphophobia.

I’d even read a book about it once.

Being buried alive had actually been a genuine issue in centuries past, so much so that people were sometimes buried with bells on their coffins with a string going inside; the buried person could ring the bell if they weren’t actually dead and woke up inside their coffin. It happened. More than once.

The fear is that you’ll spend a very long time trapped in a dark claustrophobic space, terrified and afraid, until eventually you starve.