Darkness.
That was the first thing Ben felt—not silence, not pain, but an endless, suffocating dark pressing in on his mind. He tried to move, but his limbs felt heavy, like they were carved from stone.
A hiss broke the silence. Glass cracked. A cold rush of air swept over his skin, making him shiver. Slowly, painfully, his eyes fluttered open.
He wasn't in his bedroom. He wasn't anywhere he recognized.
Above him loomed shattered lights, flickering weakly in a ruined ceiling. The walls around him were lined with broken glass tubes—like coffins, except these coffins had claw marks tearing through their steel frames.
Ben stumbled out of his own tube and collapsed to the floor. His throat burned as if he hadn't spoken in years. His first word came out as a whisper.
"...Hello?"
The sound echoed through the ruined chamber. No answer. Only the faint dripping of water, and somewhere far off, a low, wet groan.
A memory struck him—the man in the white coat. The strange liquid burning down his veins. The words: "Sleep, and when you wake, the world will be saved."
But the world wasn't saved.
The floor was smeared with dried blood. Papers littered the ground, filled with formulas and sketches of twisted anatomy. And through the cracked steel doors at the end of the hall, Ben could see something moving. Shambling. Dragging its feet.
The groan grew louder.
Ben's chest tightened. His instincts screamed at him to run, but his body barely remembered how to stand. With trembling hands, he grabbed a rusted metal pipe from the debris.
Step.
Drag.
Step.
The figure emerged. Its skin sloughed from its body in strips, its eyes cloudy, its mouth hanging open in a silent scream. A zombie—something he'd only seen in movies, now crawling toward him in the flesh.
Ben tightened his grip on the pipe. His heart pounded. He had no idea what year it was, why the world had fallen apart, or even if anyone alive still remembered his name.
But right now, none of that mattered.
Right now, it was survive… or die.