The Dead Pool

The water in the rooftop pool was still, too still, like the surface of Emma's life these past three years. She floated on her back at midnight, the corporate Halloween party finally dying down below. The so-called zombie apocalypse had happened three hours ago—her colleagues, once vibrant and ambitious, now stumbling drunk in cheap costumes, embodyoring the very thing they'd become in this office.

Marcus found her there. The bull of the sales department, the man who'd trampled every objection and closed every deal with the brute force of someone who'd long ago sacrificed something essential at the altar of quarterly targets. He stood at the pool's edge, his zombie makeup smeared, his horned headpiece nowhere to be found.

"You're missing the afterparty," he said, his voice stripped of its usual bullish confidence.

Emma paddled to the edge. "I think I've been dead for years, Marcus. I'm just now noticing."

He sat on the tile, legs dangling in the water, fully dressed. The old Marcus would have stripped to his boxers and cannonballed. The new Marcus just watched the ripples.

"I got the promotion," he said quietly.

"Congratulations."

"My wife left me yesterday."

The water lapped against the pool walls. Emma thought about all the deals Marcus had closed, all the money he'd made, all the hours they'd both given to the machine that slowly, inevitably, turned them into things that looked human but weren't quite anymore.

"We're all zombies," Emma said. "Just better dressed."

Marcus nodded, then did something she'd never seen the bull do: he cried. Silent tears cutting tracks through his smeared face paint. Emma reached out and took his hand, their fingers tangling above the dark water.

"Get in," she said.

"I can't swim."

"Neither can I," she said. "Not really. Not in anything that matters."

He slid into the pool anyway, and they floated side by side in the cold water, two corpses who'd forgotten they were supposed to stay dead, finally beginning to remember what it meant to be alive.