Dead Drop

Elena sat in her parked car, three houses down from the target's suburban split-level. This was the fourth night of the surveillance operation, and she was running on coffee and existential dread. The Agency called her a spy, but most days she felt like a glorified peeping tom with better encryption.

Inside the house, Mark Benson moved through his living room with the shambling gait of the dead. His marriage to a foreign diplomat made him a person of interest, but after watching him for a week, Elena suspected the only secret he was keeping was how completely hollowed out he'd become by his own life. Zombie wasn't the right word—zombies at least had drive—but the numbness in his eyes was terrifyingly familiar.

A golden retriever appeared at the back door, tail wagging with desperate enthusiasm. Mark let the dog out into the fenced yard and watched it chase its own tail, his expression unreadable in the harsh kitchen light.

Elena's phone buzzed. Her handler: "Get the intel or come home."

She'd been doing this work for twelve years. Four countries, three identities, two close calls that still woke her in cold sweat at 3 AM. She'd convinced herself that the sacrifices meant something, that protecting national security was worth becoming this hollowed-out vessel who couldn't remember the last time she'd felt something real.

The dog in the yard suddenly stopped running and looked straight toward Elena's car. She held her breath. Then it returned to its joyless circles.

Zombie. Spy. Dog. The three words spun together in her mind, some kind of cosmic joke she couldn't quite decode. What was the difference, really? They were all just running in circles, pretending the pursuit meant something, pretending there was purpose in the repetition.

Elena started her car.

"Coming home," she typed. Then she deleted it and drove away, leaving Mark Benson and his golden retriever and the whole shambling performance behind her, finally ready to feel something again.