Derek was at an edge of a room of what appeared to be a bunker as he had a book before him on a table with a black pen that looked too old to be put on auction.
He had been writing in this book which had ink on too many pages behind this very one that was flipped open.
"It hurts.." these were the only words that were written on this open page that was before Derek. He seemed to have either run out of things to say or words to use. His face already had a full beard that could easily pass for unkempt. He had been in this bunker with the others who weren't in this room for 20 months. If his analysis and calendar system was to be believed, this wasn't 2099 anymore, it was November, 2100 and with every passing whatever that wasn't the sun or moon, he knew his end was just an ash away.
Derek, while seated on the chair, slipped into a memory, a vivid flashback where his mum had first been diagnosed as terminal and he could feel every emotion that was present that day right here.
"Derek, there's always a way; it's either we can't see it because tears are in the way of our vision or we are not looking" Derek's mother said in a hopeful voice that accepted this situation calmly to her weeping boy.
"Mum, you're dying.. you're dying" Derek said as he sniffled over every syllables.
"Aren't we all just a day away from death's attention? Not everyone gets the gift of knowing how soon theirs is. Let's make a ride of mine, son. Every moment, every minute, I want to live with you. You're the greatest thing life ever gave me." Derek's mother said with tears forcing their way through the curtain holding them back from within her eyes.
Derek couldn't say anything. He opened his arms and embraced her tightly, making just enough room for tears to be all that was spoken between them.
A tear still dropped off on Derek's page as he slipped out of this memory. He missed his mum and he couldn't go a day without thinking of her.
"It hurts to die. And sadly, it hurts not to. By the time you're reading this, 2099 is most certainly behind us and I'd be dead.. or vanished as it appears to mean." Derek finished the sentence on the page.
Ever since they got into the bunker, Derek had seen people die and vanish. Last year, he'd seen Mitchell die of oxygen shortage during one of their missions to get supplies in the outside world that looked like nothing that anyone from Earth would have remembered.
They'd lost Pamela too, to the arms of time. She was 22 that very day and all she ever wanted was to be a mother. Her dreams vanished as fast as her body and it broke Derek's heart so deeply that he withdrew from everyone in the bunker, knowing that he or anyone else could be next. Unlike Derek's mother, Derek found it difficult to embrace acceptance of what was always to happen.
Why was the world rigged cosmically that happiness could never find a home in him?
Derek feared for what was to become of the others in the bunker after he'd have vanished.
"What is the lot of the others? 109 bunkers of survivors…" Derek continued in the book before glancing at empty space.
It didn't take long for Derek, Philip and Hailey to figure out the number of bunkers that there were in the world. Philip, the son of the President of the United States who Derek had rescued was enroute to one of the bunkers before the aircraft crashed.
He'd led Hailey, Derek and nine others here to Ares' bunker here at Alaska. Derek still always wondered how the intelligence agencies of the country saw this coming, and was obsessed with why nothing was done to change its occurrence.
Derek, a few days into his curiousity had come across a magazine that was a product of Ares Photon Energy Company, the bunker's creation company, where he saw a well detailed map highlighting that there were 109 bunkers worldwide with capricide-insulated polymers which ensured the reverse-oxygen creation whose communal exchange of breath kept them alive, with two of these bunkers in every American state and just nine outside of the country in locations not given.
Derek had never hidden anything from the others who were struggling to come to terms with their newly imposed reality. He however was a source of inspiration for them all until they lost Mitchell under his leadership and he couldn't forgive himself for the guilt he nursed, believing that he was responsible for her death.
Hailey never quit trying to get through to him even when he resiliently pushed every one of them away.