Dead Man's Signal

The notification lit up his iphone at 2:47 AM — a baseball score update from a game he'd stopped watching three years ago, back when his father was still alive and the world still made sense. Marcus stared at the screen until it dimmed, then stared at his reflection in the darkened glass: hollow eyes, slack mouth, something shambling and pathetic looking back at him.

He'd become what the office jokes called them — corporate zombies. The pyramid-shaped org chart on the twentieth floor had been designed, or so they claimed, to promote upward mobility. But Marcus understood its true purpose: it kept everyone looking up, never noticing how they were being consumed from the inside out.

"Three more quarters," Elena had whispered during yesterday's budget meeting, her fingers brushing against his under the conference table. Her skin had been cold, room-temperature wrong. "Then we can get out."

She didn't mean they'd quit. She meant something else.

Marcus found the baseball tickets in his father's old wallet last weekend — box seats, Dodgers versus Giants, September 1995. His father had bought them but never used them. The week of the game, Marcus's mother had been diagnosed. The tickets had yellowed with age, edged in brown like dried leaves or old blood.

He kept them in his phone case now, a reminder of futures that never arrived.

The iphone buzzed again. Elena: "My signal. Meet me?"

Marcus stood from his bed, his joints creaking, and walked to the window. The city lights stretched toward him, a billion electric nerve endings pulsing in the darkness. Somewhere below, the dead were walking. Above, the pyramid rose floor after floor, teeth swallowing the sky.

He typed back: "Where?"

"Roof. Bring the tickets."

Marcus understood suddenly, with the clarity that comes only to those who have already died: she didn't want to use them. She wanted to burn them.

He dressed in the dark, already feeling the warmth returning to his skin.