The Dead Collection

Marcus adjusted his fedora, checking his reflection in the office bathroom mirror. The hat was his armor — a affectation he'd adopted after Elena left, a small rebellion against the corporate dress code that demanded conformity in every aspect except soul.

He walked to his cubicle. The open-plan office was quiet at 7 PM, populated only by the stragglers. Sarah from Accounting sat three desks away, her face illuminated by the blue glow of her iPhone as she scrolled through endless feeds. Her eyes had that glazed, unfocused look — not of the undead, but of the deliberately disengaged. They were all zombies now, Marcus realized. Not the brain-eating monsters from pop culture, but something more insidious: employees who had died inside but kept showing up, kept collecting direct deposits, kept the machinery humming with their hollow motion.

He'd become one of them, hadn't he? Three years since the merger, two since the last meaningful conversation with his children. He checked his own iPhone compulsively, as if the device might deliver a message that would restore his capacity to feel something genuine.

"Marcus?" Sarah's voice startled him. "You okay? You've been staring at your screen for twenty minutes without typing."

He looked at her — really looked at her. For the first time in months, he saw another human being instead of a colleague or obstacle or furniture.

"No," he said. "I don't think I am."

She nodded, setting down her phone. "Me neither."

They sat there as the fluorescent lights buzzed, two zombies in a graveyard of productivity, finally awake enough to acknowledge they weren't living at all.

Marcus took off his hat and set it on his desk. It felt like shedding a skin. Outside, the city hummed with millions of people, alive or dead or something in between, all connected by invisible wires and lonely signals, waiting for something real to break through.