Can't breathe.
Wood pressed against his face, his chest, trapping his arms at his sides in a space so narrow his elbows hit the walls when he tries to bend them. He pushes up. Nothing. The lid won't move. Pushes harder, shoulders and chest straining against it. Still nothing. Nailed shut maybe, or buried under soil, or both, and the air is thick and stale like it's been breathed too many times already.
Coffin. He's in a coffin and he's buried.
Panic comes sharp. His chest pulls but doesn't get enough air. Has to get out, has to move, has to—
His bladder throbs. Has been throbbing. The pressure is unbearable, worse than the fear, worse than the dark. He can't hold it anymore.
Gets his hand down—difficult in the narrow space, elbow jamming against wood—and pisses. Warmth spreads down his leg, soaks his pants, pools under his back before draining away through cracks in the cheap wood beneath him. He lies there in wet clothes. In a coffin. Buried. The moisture keeps seeping down through gaps he can feel opening as the wood softens.
Waits.
Has to wait. Feels the wetness pulling away from his skin as it drains. Where's it going? If there's six feet of packed soil below him he's finished. Can't dig through that. But if there's space, or loose earth, or—
The wood under his back feels different now. Softer. Wet.
He braces his shoulders against the lid and kicks down with both heels.
Crack.
Small sound, splintering. The bottom board giving way. He kicks again. Harder. His heel punches through and suddenly cold soil is flooding in, filling the space around his feet, rising fast up to his knees.
Kicks more. Widens the hole. More soil pouring in.
His foot dangles through into nothing. Empty air.
There's space below me.
No time to think. He twists, forces himself toward the hole. Wood splinters tear his shirt, catch his skin—something sharp drags across his ribs in a hot line. Doesn't stop. Gets his hips through, then chest, squeezes his shoulders through the gap—
Falls.
Not far. Maybe two feet. Lands on something soft that shifts wrong under his weight, and when he puts his hand down to push himself up it sinks into cold flesh.
Dead flesh.
The smell hits him then—rot and earth and human waste all mixed together in the darkness. His eyes are adjusting. Not much light but enough to see shapes. Bodies. He's lying on a pile of bodies. His coffin was suspended above a mass grave and he just broke through into the corpses.
The pile shifts under him. Settling. The dead adjusting to his weight.
Move. Don't think. Just move.
He climbs. Hand finds an arm—stiff, cold as stone—and uses it for leverage. Knee presses into someone's chest and ribs crack with a sound like green wood breaking. His foot slips on something wet. Catches himself on a skull that rolls away when he grabs it. Falls forward, face-first into a stomach that gives under the impact.
The smell is in his mouth now. In his throat. He gags but keeps moving. Has to get up, has to get out.
Climbs over shoulders and hips and legs tangled together without ceremony. Some bodies are fresh—skin intact, clothes still on them. Others are just bone wrapped in dried leather. All thrown in a pile together. Just disposal. Industrial death.
His hand sinks wrist-deep into something he refuses to identify. Moves it, finds something more solid—pelvis maybe—pulls himself higher. The pile slopes upward like a hill made of corpses and it keeps shifting, sliding, bodies rolling past him as he disturbs the balance.
His head hits packed earth.
Still underground. The ceiling. He's at the top of the pile but still buried.
Digs. Fingers claw at damp soil that comes down in chunks, falling on his face, in his eyes, in his mouth when he gasps. Tastes like clay and rot. He spits and digs faster. His fingernails bend back—one tears completely and the pain is sharp—but he doesn't stop. Can't stop. Blood makes the clay slick under his fingers.
The air down here is almost gone. He's breathing fast, shallow, vision starting to blur.
His hand breaks through.
Cold air rushes in and he gasps, widens the hole with desperate clawing, gets his head through into real air, fresh air, *air*. Then shoulders. Has to pull hard because the bodies below are sliding again, avalanche of corpses collapsing into the space where his coffin was. Doesn't look back. Just pulls. Chest out, waist, legs—
Out.
He collapses on solid ground.
Breathes. Just breathes for a while, in and out, the air cold and sharp but *real*, not the stale nothing from the coffin. His lungs pull it in gratefully even though it tastes like metal and smoke.
Eventually sits up. Slowly. Everything hurts.
The sky is gray. Uniform heavy gray like sheet metal. He's lying at the edge of a pit—twenty feet across, maybe fifteen deep—and through the hole he climbed there are bodies visible in the pile below. Some fresh enough to have faces. Others just bones and scraps.
Looks at himself. Wishes he hadn't.
His hands are destroyed. Nails broken or missing, palms bleeding, fingers caked in clay-mud that's definitely not just clay. His clothes are torn ribbons soaked in piss and grave-filth. Feet bare. Cut in dozens of places. Blood mixing with the clay.
Something's in his mouth still. He tongues it, spits—small clay disc hits his palm. There's a symbol carved in it. Circles with marks radiating out like a child's drawing of the sun.
He stares at it. Waiting.
Nothing comes. No recognition. No memory.
Drops it. The disc lands face-up in the mud.
Stands. His legs shake but hold. Barely. He's weak—starving probably, definitely dehydrated—and when he tries to remember the last time he ate or drank there's just nothing there. No memory of it. No memory of anything before waking with wood pressed against his face.
Tries to remember his name.
Nothing. Empty space where the answer should be.
Where is this?
Nothing.
How did he get here?
Nothing.
The terror of it is worse than the grave. He can survive being buried. Can't survive being nobody.
The ruins stretch in every direction. Collapsed city—buildings like broken teeth, streets buried under rubble, everything gray and dead. There are people in the distance. Maybe a hundred meters away. Moving between buildings. They don't approach. Just going about their business.
Should he call out? Walk toward them?
Doesn't know. Doesn't know if people here are safe or dangerous. Doesn't know anything.
Wind picks up. Cuts through his wet clothes. He's shivering—cold and shock and exhaustion all hitting at once.
Has to move. Find water. Shelter. Figure out what the hell is happening.
Picks a direction. Away from the grave. Into the ruins.
Each step is work. His legs don't want to hold him and his cut feet leave bloody prints in the clay-dust. He passes a wall fragment, goes around it. His hand brushes stone and comes away gray with dust that adds to the layers already covering him—grave-clay and blood and filth and now dust.
The people he saw are gone. Disappeared into buildings or behind rubble. He's alone again.
His foot catches on something. He stumbles, catches himself on a broken wall. Pain shoots through his torn palm.
Stands there breathing hard, looking at the endless ruins stretching ahead.
I was in a coffin. Buried in corpses. Broke out. Can't remember my name. Can't remember anything.
A laugh bubbles up. Sharp. Half-hysterical. Echoes off broken stone.
Could be worse. Could still be in the coffin.
Small victory. Only victory.
He keeps walking. Into the gray, into the unknown, because staying still means thinking about the empty space where his identity used to be and that's worse than moving through a dead city with bleeding feet and no plan.
So he walks.
And doesn't look back at the clay token lying in the mud, symbol facing the sky, marking the place where someone crawled out of the earth.