Daddy's Coffin

He remembered the night his father went missing. It was a Thursday, in early September. Normally, everyone was home safe by dusk. He didn't know what had kept his father at the refinery later than normal, but something had and they had gotten him. The human occupants of the city had a strict curfew: be in your home by nightfall. It was common sense, really. After all, anyone who was out after dusk was asking for a death wish.

That was the longest night of his young life, the night his father didn't come home. An hour after dusk, his mother stopped pacing the house, and sat on the couch. She bowed her head and he could hear her voice catching in between garbled prayer.

She sent him to bed early, despite his shrill protestations. Even at such a young age, he somehow knew it was because she didn't want him to witness her impending breakdown. Three hours after dusk, and they both knew he was gone for good.

Lying in bed, he thought back to when the vampires had first taken over the city. They had started with the law enforcement first, until there were no more human police officers. They were extremely crafty about their take over-they operated at night, of course, and it was so gradual and quiet that by the time everyone realized what was going on, it was too late to stop it.

The vampires kept a small group of officials human and they acted as ambassadors for the vampires, holding press conferences and delivering whatever rules the blood suckers had enacted.

Life had some weird changes, then. During the day, almost everything was the same, except for the surplus of blood banks that popped up everywhere. And the citizens of the city could forget about receiving any of the blood collected if anyone was in need of a blood transfusion-all that blood went to the vamps, drying up the hospitals' supply.

The vampires had a laissez-faire policy about human health management. If someone was in a serious car accident, or got a part severed off at an industrial job, forget about extensive surgery and recovering in the hospital. The hospital now served as morgue-it was where the ambulance took the dying. The vampires kept it as ethical as possible; meals were served for the slower dying ones, and those that somehow survived, were allowed to leave. But that meant surviving the night shift at the hospitals, where the entire shift was vampire and the newly turned also prowled, using the dying as a launch pad before they left the hospital and went to hunt the streets. Rumors were always circulating that there were rogue vampire that helped the humans using their vampire powers to heal the sick and broken, but rumors were just rumors.

He was ten when the vampires took over and eleven when his father disappeared. His father had always been so careful leaving work, his can of mace always in his hand. He had been attacked once before, four months after the take over and had been lucky, having a switchblade on him that he used to decapitate it with. Then he bought the mace and hadn't had a problem. Maybe they had been watching him for a while and had ganged up on him.

His mother was a wreck for a few weeks, but eventually resigned herself to the fact that he wasn't coming home, at least not in a form that would get him in the house.

When the boy was twelve and a half, his father came to see him one night. He awoke to light tapping at the window by the foot of his bed. He sat up and looked out the window, but he couldn't make anything out, except a hulking shape on the porch roof.

"Son." It was the merest whisper of a word but it snaked its way into his bedroom, through the window.

"Dad?" the boy whispered, his hands on the window.

Twin red orbs suddenly glowed on the other side of the window, and he gasped, scrambling backwards away from the window.

The red circles faded and then a face appeared, glowing preternaturally. It was his father, the undead version. The boy took in his father's gaunt face, sunken eyes, and pale skin. He was crouched on the porch roof, easily, as if he was standing on level ground. He was about four inches away from the window, staring intently at his son.

"I miss you, Troy," his voice, almost hypnotic, floated into the boy.

"Dad....Mom said that you might come and see me. She said not to talk to you."

The boy was so conflicted. He knew that this ghoul wasn't his real father, but it still was him, in a sense.

The apparition on the other side of the glass sighed.

"I know, son. I never meant for this to happen. I miss you and your mother so much."

"Can't you fix it?" the son hiccupped, tears streaming down his face. "Can't you come back to us?"

"No, son." He replied. "I cannot be with you and your mother anymore. But I want you to know that I love you both very much."

"Dad!" the boy cried out, as his father faded from sight.

He never saw his father again. Life went on as almost normal, with the nighttime just as treacherous as always. He never told his mother about the visit. She didn't need that kind of grief in their precarious situation. Even at his young age, his heart went out to his mother. He understood how frustrating the situation was, the lack of termination. There was no dead body, nor was there was a live one. There was nothing.

Just an absence.