The Bull and the Walking Dead

Marcus stared at the terminal, the blue light reflecting in eyes that hadn't slept properly in three weeks. The bull market charged forward, unstoppable, magnificent—a beast that demanded to be fed. His portfolio swelled with numbers that meant nothing anymore. Forty-two years old and he'd forgotten how to want anything except the next quarterly bonus.

His apartment was a maze of cables. HDMI, ethernet, power cords tangled like black snakes across the hardwood floor. The cable guy had come last Tuesday, a young man with grease-stained fingers who'd looked at Marcus with something like pity. "You need a setup that doesn't go down when the power does," he'd said, replacing the frayed coaxial that Marcus had been too exhausted to notice was failing.

Lena had left six months ago. Her final words still haunted him: "You're already dead, Marcus. You just haven't stopped moving yet."

Tonight, staring at his reflection in the darkened window, he understood. The zombie wasn't the creature in horror movies—it was the man who kept going through motions long after the humanity had drained away. He was a corporate zombie, skull-crushingly successful and hollowed out by the slow erosion of joy, connection, purpose.

The bull market would crash eventually. They always did. But the real tragedy wasn't the coming crash—it was that he'd become something that couldn't feel the fall either way.

Marcus stood up, stepping over the cables that bound him to this half-life. Outside, the city hummed with millions of people feeling things he'd forgotten. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd call Lena. Or maybe he'd just walk until his legs remembered what it meant to be alive.

The screen flickered, demanding his attention. The bull charged on, and somewhere in the depths of what remained of his soul, something stirred—something hungry for more than numbers.