Dead Pool

The office pool sat on Maya's desk, a spreadsheet of names with dollar amounts beside them. Not the usual March Madness brackets, but a betting pool on which departments would survive the next round of layoffs. She'd started it three months ago, back when she still had a sense of humor about things.

Now she felt like a zombie herself—shuffling through fluorescent-lit corridors, attending meetings where words like 'synergy' and 'right-sizing' circled like vultures. Her marriage had ended six months ago. Her ex-husband's parting words: 'You're running on empty, Maya. You have been for years.'

The irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent the last decade running a corporate espionage unit for a tech conglomerate, spying on competitors, stealing trade secrets, dismantling companies. Now someone was doing it to her own.

'Did you hear about the new VP?' whispered Sarah from accounting, dropping by Maya's cubicle. 'They say she's a corporate fixer. Her last company, she laid off forty percent of the staff.'

Maya nodded, not really listening. She'd noticed something else lately. Small things. Her computer logging activity it shouldn't. Her emails arriving in other people's inboxes before she'd even sent them. Someone was spying on her.

The question was: who? And why?

That night, as she sat alone in her apartment with a bottle of wine and the glow of her laptop, Maya found the answer buried in encrypted files on the company server. The new VP wasn't just a fixer. She was a hired gun brought in to dismantle the espionage division entirely. Maya's entire unit was on the chopping block.

But there was something else. A file labeled 'Project Lazarus.'

Maya opened it, and her breath caught. It was a list of every employee the company had deemed 'undead'—workers who'd stayed too long, lost their spark, become corporate zombies. Her name was at the top.

They weren't just laying people off. They were systematically eliminating anyone who'd lost their fire.

Maya closed the laptop. For the first time in years, she felt something stir inside her chest. Not fear. Anger? No, something more dangerous.

Hope.

She opened her email and drafted a resignation letter. Then another, to her biggest competitor. They'd been trying to recruit her for years.

The zombie was waking up. And she was hungry.