The Corporate Afterlife

The first time Marcus called me a zombie, we were twenty-three and drinking lukewarm coffee on his fire escape. He said it with affection, then—how I'd shuffle through my overnight shifts at the hospital, pale and unblinking, saving lives while half-dead myself. Now, twenty years later, the name feels less like endearment and more like prophecy.

I stand at the edge of Marcus's hospital room, watching the machines breathe for him. The cancer has hollowed him out, left something architectural and wrong in its wake. His skin pulls tight against his skull like parchment, and for a terrible moment, I see the pyramid beneath the flesh—the geometric certainty of death, base broad at his shoulders, tapering to the terrible point of his chin. All those years we spent building something together—friendship, business, a shared belief that we could outrun our own mortality—and here we are. The structure was always there.

"You look like shit," Marcus whispers, eyes fluttering open. He's lost thirty pounds in three weeks. The man who once ran marathons now can't lift his own head from the pillow.

"You're one to talk."

He laughs, then coughs, a wet, rattling sound that makes me grip the bedrail until my knuckles white. We built our security firm from nothing, spent nights handcuffed to office chairs, dreaming of the day we'd stand atop our own empire. We made it. And now?

Now I spend my days walking through corporate headquarters, past rows of workers bent over keyboards, their faces illuminated by blue light. They move as one—typing, clicking, responding—performing the rituals of the living while something essential calcifies inside them. I used to think Marcus was joking when he called them the walking dead. Now I recognize the look in their eyes because I see it every morning in the mirror.

Marcus's hand finds mine, cold and papery. "Remember what we said? About not becoming them?"

"We promised."

"We lied." He smiles faintly. "You're already one of them, aren't you? Walking through those halls, half-alive, wondering when the life got traded away."

I want to deny it. But I think of the spreadsheets, the board meetings, the endless climb upward. Every promotion took something—time, sleep, pieces of myself I can't name. The higher I ascended our corporate pyramid, the more I began to understand: the only people at the top are the ones who've forgotten how to feel anything at all.

Marcus squeezes my hand, a ghost of pressure. "Don't let them take the rest of you. The world's full of zombies already."

He closes his eyes. I stand there as the monitor traces his heartbeat, a rhythmic erosion of time against bone. Outside, the city hums with the movement of millions, all of us climbing structures we built, all of us becoming something we swore we'd never be.

I press my lips to his forehead and walk out into the corridor, where fluorescent lights buzz like dying insects. Somewhere in the distance, a printer chimes. The living continue their march.