The Last Inning

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed with a relentless appetite for souls. Elena dragged herself to the kitchenette, feeling like a zombie from the neck up. Her eyes burned from the quarterly report, and it was only Tuesday.

"You look like something the cat dragged in," Marcus said, leaning against the counter with his third coffee of the morning.

"That's because I'm dead inside," she managed. "This job is eating me alive."

Marcus — her oldest friend, her anchor through the divorce, through her mother's decline — studied her with that quiet intensity that always made her heart skip a beat. "Remember when we played that zombie baseball game in college?"

Elena almost smiled. The memory surfaced: midnight, drunk on cheap wine, they'd invented rules where getting tagged meant you had to walk like the undead. The absurdity of it all. The freedom.

"I bear the emotional scars," she said, and Marcus laughed, the sound warm against the sterile office air. "But that was before. Before we became these... creatures in cubicles."

His hand brushed hers, deliberate. "What if we left? Both of us. Just drove west until we hit ocean."

"You have a mortgage. I have a cat who requires prescription food."

"Details." He stepped closer. "We're the walking dead here, El. Playing baseball in a league that doesn't matter, for prizes we don't want."

She wanted to believe him. God, how she wanted. But the bear of responsibility had settled on her chest years ago, and it refused to budge.

"Ask me again when I'm thirty-five," she whispered, and in his eyes she saw the weight of every moment they'd never seize.

Marcus finished his coffee. "Game's not over," he said, walking away. "Bottom of the ninth, and we're still at bat."

Elena watched him go, the zombie in her chest stirring with something dangerously like hope.