The Last Living Man in Sales

Marcus stood before the bathroom mirror at 2:47 AM, watching tap **water** cascade over his hands in the office tower's twenty-third-floor restroom. His once-thick **hair** had thinned over three years of quarterly targets and existential dread, each strand falling like a deadline missed.

He wasn't actually a **zombie**—though some mornings, shambling through the fluorescent-lit corridors with lukewarm coffee and rehearsed enthusiasm, he felt uncomfortably close. The real zombies were his colleagues, eyes glazed from endless Zoom calls, souls eroded by the gentle corrosion of corporate compromise. They moved through the world with purpose, at least. Marcus had forgotten what purpose felt like.

"You're still here?"

Elena leaned against the doorframe, the only person who still saw him. Her **hair** was messy from pulling at it during her own marathon of meaningless meetings. She held two cups of terrible office coffee.

"Still thinking about quitting," Marcus admitted, accepting the cup. "Still **running** the numbers on what it would cost to actually live."

"The cost is everything," she said, and something in her tone made him finally look at her—really look at her. Not as coworker or convenient confidante, but as someone equally stranded in this glass-and-steel purgatory.

"What if we ran?" he asked, the **water** still running behind him, drowning out the building's mechanical heartbeat. "Not from something. Toward something."

Elena's response was measured silence, then a smile that reached her tired eyes for the first time in months. "I've got a cousin in Portland. She says there's real **water** there—rivers, oceans, rain that actually smells like life instead of recycled air conditioning."

Marcus turned off the tap. The mirror reflected two people who weren't zombies anymore, merely waking up to the fact they'd been sleepwalking through their own existence.

"I'll need to pack," he said.

"I'll help you steal office supplies," Elena countered. "For the road."

They left at dawn, before the zombies arrived for another day of performing enthusiasm, two formerly living people finally choosing to start running toward whatever came next.