Page 177 of King’s Ransom

Helpless.

Thoughts of taking my last breath ran across my mind. Would it be a sudden final choking inhalation? Would I gasp at the lack of oxygen?

Thoughts of Audrey. Of her smile, her perfume, of our time together.

Damn.

I picked up the hypodermic syringe that the Unperson had tossed into my box, the one filled with Duramorph.

I could just inject myself with its contents and go to sleep . . .

. . . and run out of air while I was dreaming.

A small mercy, he’d called it.

A painless way to die.

It didn’t seem like such a bad option now.

No.

Fuck that.

I wasn’t going down without a fight.

And then it hit me.

A thought.

An idea.

A way out.

Concrete.

That was the thought.

Being buried alive in dirt is practically impossible to escape from, because even if you somehow managed to crack open your coffin, you can’t dig your way out through the dirt.

It’s too loose. It would cascade into your coffin like a miniature avalanche.

Dirt is also heavy and crawling through it would crush your chest and lungs. You’d suffocate trying to claw your way through it to the surface.

But I’d been buried in concrete.

And concrete isn’t like dirt.

It sets or, to use the technical term, it cures.

(Remember, before I was a detective, I was a chemical engineer.)

Basically, concrete transforms from a liquid into a solid.

This ‘curing’ of concrete is a chemical reaction where particles of calcium and silicon bind to water molecules, creating crystalline structures called calcium silicate hydrates.

As time elapses, these crystalline structures grow and fill the spaces in the concrete, making it harder as more time passes.

(This process actually never stops, although it diminishes over time. It’s been said that the concrete in the Hoover Dam, which was poured in the 1930s, is still curing to this day.)