Terminal Velocity

The zombie apocalypse didn't come with gore or explosions. It came in the form of fluorescent lights, quarterly performance reviews, and the slow erosion of everything Maya once cared about. She sat at her desk at 7 PM on a Friday, watching her friend Emma pack up her things.

"You coming to drinks?" Emma asked, running her fingers through her hair—still impossibly thick and dark at thirty-five, unlike Maya's, which had started surrendering to silver strands during the divorce.

"Can't," Maya said. "Zach's deadline."

"Zach's deadline, Zach's emergency, Zach's everything." Emma leaned against the doorframe. "You've been covering for him for six months, Maya. He takes credit. You take the fall."

"He's going through a lot."

"Aren't we all?" Emma's voice softened. "Remember when we were going to change the world? Now we're just corporate zombies, haunting these cubicles until something better comes along. But nothing better comes along. We just keep rotting from the inside."

The word hit Maya like a physical blow. Zombie. That's what she'd become. Not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but something worse—the kind that still showed up, still smiled at the right times, still performed the motions of living while everything meaningful drained away.

"I hired a stylist," Maya said suddenly. "For tomorrow. Going to dye the gray."

Emma's expression shifted. Something like pity, something like understanding. "Maya. Your hair isn't the problem."

"I know." Maya looked at the spreadsheet on her screen, the numbers blurring together. "But it's something I can fix."

Emma crossed the room and hugged her—a rare gesture in a workplace where emotions were contraband. "What if we're both zombies? What if the only way out is to eat each other's brains before we completely lose them?"

Maya laughed, a genuine sound that surprised them both. "Is that your way of saying we should get drinks?"

"It's my way of saying I quit, and you should too. Life's too short to spend it dead inside." Emma pulled back, her eyes bright with something Maya hadn't seen in years. "So, friend. What's it going to be?"

Maya looked at her screen, then at Emma, then at the reflection in her monitor window—a woman she barely recognized, hair streaked with silver, eyes alive with something waking from a long slumber.

The zombie sat up. The zombie stood. The zombie walked out of the building and into the night.