Driven by Rebecca Royce

Author:Rebecca Royce [Royce, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: k12
Published: 2015-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

It proved to be really, really easy to annoy the Vampires. They simply didn’t like disobedience. I guessed most people were so concerned with not getting eaten by the undead they tended to do everything the fang-filled creatures told them to do. They had no idea what to make of the four of us—Rosa, Dave, Ken and myself—getting into so much trouble. For the record, a Vampire grumble sounds like a snake hissing. More and more, I was becoming convinced the transition from living human to undead Vampire inserted snake genes into the person’s DNA. k`1`2

I might have thought the situation humorous if the mines themselves hadn’t been such a horrifying experience—dark, with little to no ventilation. We worked endlessly, digging for coal and trying not to get hit by parts of the ceiling coming down on us. The screams I had heard earlier seemed to have to do with the cave-ins.

In Genesis, I had seen people in tremendous pain. Still, I hadn’t known the true horror of destruction until I was in the mines. That place, that nameless, timeless place where people forgot who they were before they arrived, taught me about true agony. It seemed to me that by the end of each day, only a portion of the people we’d started with could even look me in the eye. Humans—the non-Warrior variety—got sent down when they’d done something wrong. Apparently, it was work in the mines or get eaten, which was why it was crucial I not screw up my plan. I wasn’t going to end my days in the heat or the darkness that was all-consuming. I wasn’t going to die in the place Dr. Icahn had created to torture his own people.

I couldn’t forget Dr. Icahn, either. His face, a constant presence in my mind, had begun to represent something bigger than a man. He was the Apocalypse itself. For all I knew, he’d masterminded the whole thing.

I’d never lived in the Before Time, but Jason had, and I was more than a little jealous.

Rosa shook my arm. “Are you asleep on your feet?”

I blinked twice and glanced around the holding cell. “When did we get back here?” “Exactly.”

I smiled. She and I had developed an easy camaraderie. Rosa was tough on all of us, never letting anyone veer off the path. To my amazement, I’d watched her poke an undead guard with her shovel thirty times in an hour earlier in the day.

I sat on the floor. “This place is hell on earth.”

She nodded before she sat next to me. Ken and Dave were already out cold and snoring in the corner. “We’re technically not on earth, we’re below it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be funny; my brain can’t handle the subtleties at the moment.”

“It is mind-numbing down here.” She sniffed, and I hoped she wasn’t getting sick. According to the others, you didn’t last here long with even a cold. One second you were well, the next you were feverish and then you were dead.

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