Fifteenth Floor Zombies

The elevator dinged at 8:47 AM, and Maya stepped into the fifteenth floor office, her heels clicking on the polished concrete. She was forty-two, divorced, and increasingly certain that she'd been dead for three years without anyone noticing.

The morning meeting was already assembled around the conference table—a modern glass slab that reflected their hollowed expressions. Marcus, their regional director, stood beside an easel displaying a pyramid chart of quarterly projections. His orange tie—a desperate splash of color against his charcoal suit—seemed to throb with its own frantic energy as he pointed to the apex they were all supposed to be climbing toward.

Maya caught her own reflection in the glass: dark circles under her eyes, skin the color of parchment, eyes that hadn't truly focused on anything since the miscarriage two years ago. She was a zombie, she realized. Not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but something worse—the kind that showed up to work, sent emails, attended dinner parties, and felt absolutely nothing.

"Remember how we used to play baseball?" her ex-husband had asked during their last phone call, his voice thick with nostalgia. "When winning actually meant something?"

It had meant something, once. Standing in the outfield at dusk, the air thick with insects and promise, heart hammering when the ball came soaring toward you. Now she stood in this glass-walled office, playing a different kind of game where the rules kept changing and nobody kept score.

She'd brought a spinach salad for lunch—some pathetic attempt at self-care that usually ended up wilting in her desk drawer while she ordered takeout. Today she'd actually eaten it, sitting alone in the break room while colleagues discussed weekend plans and upcoming weddings. She'd felt like an anthropologist observing a primitive tribe, fascinated by their rituals yet entirely unable to participate.

Marcus was still talking. "We need to leverage our core competencies," he said, and Maya wanted to laugh at how easily corporate language stripped words of meaning. Leverage. Competencies. Synergy. All words that once meant something specific, now reduced to verbalPlace markers for territory she'd long ago ceased trying to claim.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: "Your brother's getting remarried. Spring. You'll come, right?"

Maya stared at the screen. Spring was four months away. An eternity. Or maybe no time at all.

"Maya?" Marcus was looking at her. "Thoughts on the new initiative?"

She looked up, surprised to find herself still in her body, still seated at the table, still expected to perform. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled like an open wound—buildings jutting against the sky, people moving through streets like blood cells in some massive, unknowable organism.

"I think," she said slowly, "that we're all pretending this matters more than it does."

Silence. Then nervous laughter from the junior associate. Marcus's orange tie seemed to pulse.

But Maya meant it. They were all zombies really—dead inside, going through motions, climbing pyramids that led nowhere. And maybe that was okay. Maybe you could be dead and still keep going. Maybe the spinach was still nutritious even if you didn't taste it anymore.

She picked up her pen. "But I'll have those projections by end of day."

Outside, the sun moved across the sky, indifferent to them all. Inside, Maya kept moving, zombie among zombies, pretending there was still somewhere left to go.