Tommy awakened. He blinked; raised one hand to rub his eyes and the hand was stopped by something soft yet firm.He blinked again, squinted and tried to see better. No good; pitch black and although he was a man who had little natural fear he had begun to panic right then. Fear was everything in the rational world that you did not understand. Every battle you had refused, run away from: And fear was the great unknown. The things that you could only know with any degree of certainty after you were dead: And then only if there could even be such a thing as knowledge after you had passed from life. He doubted there was. He had not always doubted there was, but he did now.He tried to sit up: His body was weak, but he managed to get it to start to rise when his head had slammed into the same immovable surface. Hard, iron hard, unmoving. In a near full blown panic, he raised his hands as slowly as he could from his side and felt at his surroundings. The shape was not familiar, but in another way on a subconscious level it seemed completely familiar to him: The shape, the volume; the texture of slippery satin against his fingers, the hard surface beneath the satin. A recessed seam running across side to side; another, longer seam traversing the sides that he could not bend his hands into any sort of shape to follow. He continued along, feeling, probing, when he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to breathe. He had been so caught up in discovering this mystery that he had completely forgotten. He had never heard of anything like this happening to anyone, but he had no doubt that it had just happened to him. He was not breathing. He had not taken a breath in... He had no idea, a while. He tried to open his mouth and then the real panic set in. He could not open his mouth. His lips seemed joined together, unable to part. He put a little extra effort into it and felt them part with a hard, low ripping sound. Flesh stripped from flesh, like when your lips had dried out and then stuck together... Okay... Okay, don't panic, it's all fixable. He had probably just pulled a great deal of skin from his lips, but it would be fine. It would be...His fingers felt at his lips: It was not going to be fine. There were chunks and pieces of his lips attached to both lips. Thread woven from one to the other had held them together. Some ones idea of a joke: The thought had flashed across his mind, but even as it did he knew it to be untrue. No one would play that trick, not on him. Lita would never allow anyone to get that close to play that trick even if they had thought to.The truth of the situation hit him just that fast and he began to claw and tear at the satin lining. He tried to scream, but he could pull no air into his lungs. He felt his nails digging at the slippery satin, catching on the wood just below the surface and breaking, snapping off as the panic took over completely and he tried even harder to fight his way out of the casket...The end is coming and the only thing that can save the human race may also be the one thing that will destroy it forever: The Zombie Plagues...