Not every day does one wake up dead. Alfonso Luongo had dedicated much of his life to pondering solutions to the pesky little problem that haunted all of creation at the end of that all too brief a moment of consciousness we call living. That solution had turned out to be surprisingly elegant in its simplicity, and he now dearly wished he had written it down for someone, or even mentioned it to them before rushing headlong into immortality by consuming the contents of that bubbly vial.
As it now stood, he had been spending much of the day scratching the lid of his coffin, which was turning out to be of the highest quality. If the money spent on that vessel for the last journey of a man's earthly remains was a sign of the affection his kin had for him, Alfonso's family must have loved him very much. He hated them for it. Of course he did not like to think of the six feet of dirt pressing down on his humble abode that would await him were his nails sharp and strong enough, but he was a man who had always taken a step at a time. And he was grateful for not having been cremated, though he accepted the possibility that gratitude might wane should his stay be prolonged beyond reason.
He had however noticed something rather unsettling that temporarily distracted him from his ever weakening nails: he seemed to be unable to locate a pulse. And now that he began to think about it, his breathing was rather shallow as well. Shallow was a more comforting way to express it than non-existent.
He quickly grasped the situation, though he did not care for it much: he had found a cure for death, much like he intended, but therein lay the problem. Death being another disease that lurks in the shadows, ready to bounce on the weak and susceptible, means it must be treatable, but to cure a disease one must first be contracted by it, and that's precisely what he had, a cure, not a preventive potion. He had died on the floor of his laboratory, and was now doomed to wait in his coffin until all the world would change, and by some unforeseen development the very ground would spit out his casket.
It would be a very long wait.
Anyway, the wait was over, and the buried man could feel the earth all around him moving. He wondered what it could mean, were they moving the cemetery? were they exhuming his corpse? were grave robbers afoot? Whatever the reason was, he was hopeful it would lead to him breaking out from him underground prison, to roam the world as a breathless and bloodless fiend that feasts on human flesh and brains.
Yes, indeed, that seemed to be another side effect of his home made remedy for dying, or perhaps of the untold centuries of mental degradation caused by immobile solitude and regret, an inconsolable lust to devour raw meat. Although now that he reflected on it at length, he didn't really see any pressing need for it to be human meat, as such.
Now he heard scraping, someone was just outside his coffin. He tried to push the thing open, but it still wouldn't budge. He had thought enough time would decay any casket, though he did admit that he had lost the sense of time quite soon into his experience, and really had no clear idea how long he had waited. It had felt like an awful lot of years. But suddenly the noises stopped, perhaps startled by him pounding the coffin from within. That's the sort of thing people don't like when they dig up other people they expect to be dead.
The oddest thing that he had experienced in quite a long time happened, and not only owing to a lack of competition. Bright light began to stream in through the entire length of seam that separated the lid from the coffin, until the entire lid launched up into the air with explosive speed in a pillar of white light. He covered his eyes so as not to be blinded, but though he could not see through the brightness he found the light did not hurt his eyes. He was not sure if that was another perk and/or detriment of being dead, or some singular quality particular to the light itself, and did not have much time to think about it.
