The Dead Pool

The vending machine orange juice had separated. Rodney shook the carton, watching the pulp settle, then checked his phone again. 11:47 PM. The office was silent except for the hum of the server room and his own breathing.

He'd been part of the death pool for six months now—$50 entry, winner takes all when someone in the department finally cracked. They'd drawn names like lottery tickets. Rodney had drawn Linda from Accounting, who'd cried in the breakroom last Tuesday. Linda had drawn some guy in IT who nobody really knew.

The coaxial cable behind his desk had been fraying for months, exposing copper wire that caught the fluorescent light. Maintenance had put in three tickets. Rodney had started pulling at it when the panic set in, unwraving the copper like it meant something.

"You're still here?"

Rodney jumped. Linda stood in the doorway, her cardigan misbuttoned. She held an actual orange, peeling it slowly. The citrus smell hit him—sudden, sharp, overwhelmingly alive.

"Could ask you the same thing," he said.

She crossed to his desk, dropping orange segments onto a napkin. "Kevin's name was on the news today. That IT guy? Found in his apartment. Two weeks." She ate a segment, juice dripping down her chin. "Nobody collected."

Rodney stared at her. "We bet on when people would kill themselves?"

"When they'd quit, get fired, breakdown—whatever." Linda shrugged. "Death was just the joke we made it sound like. Kevin wasn't even depressed. He was just done."

The fraying cable glinted behind her. Rodney thought about the copper inside, all those signals traveling through damaged wire, somehow still carrying through.

"I drew you," Rodney said.

Linda smiled. It wasn't unkind. "I drew you too."

They stood there as the building's automated lights clicked off, plunging them into darkness. Somewhere in the distance, a pool alarm chirped—someone in the corporate housing complex probably testing the waters at midnight.

"Fuck this pool," Linda said, and she wasn't talking about swimming.

Rodney pulled the cable the rest of the way out.

"Yeah," he said. "Fuck it."

They left their badges on the desk and walked out into the orange streetlights, neither one looking back.