The Last Living Soul in Marketing

Elena hadn't meant to become a zombie. It happened gradually, the way dehydration happens in office buildings—so slowly you don't notice until your skin is paper and your thoughts are static.

Three years of quarterly targets and team-building exercises had reduced her to something that walked and talked but didn't quite inhabit herself. The fluorescent lights hummed in a frequency only the undead could hear.

"You look like shit," Marcus said, sliding into the chair across from her in the breakroom. They'd been something more than colleagues once, before the restructuring, before he transferred to Operations.

"Stevens has me presenting the Q3 strategy to the VP at four."

"That's bull, Elena. You know it's bullshit, right?" Marcus leaned in. "He's setting you up to take the fall when the numbers miss. Again."

She wanted to be angry at him. Anger was better than this—this shriveled approximation of feeling she carried around like an organ harvested and left on ice.

At home, Barnaby would be waiting. Her elderly golden retriever, the only living thing that still looked at her with something resembling recognition. Sometimes she came home so drained that she'd sit on the floor of her apartment, his head in her lap, and whisper to him about projects she didn't care about and metrics that meant nothing. He'd thump his tail against the floorboards, steady as a metronome, the only honest thing in her life.

"Remember when we used to talk about opening that restaurant?" Marcus asked quietly.

The memory hit her with surprising force. Late nights at the office, stolen kisses in the server room, plans whispered over bad coffee. Then Stevens had offered her the promotion, and Marcus had taken the transfer instead of competing against her, and somehow they'd both just... drifted.

"I have a meeting," she said, standing up.

"Elena." His hand brushed hers. "Don't do this to yourself anymore."

The third floor was a zoo of людей pretending to work. Stevens caught her eye from his office doorway, doing that thing with his chin—the summons.

She kept walking.

"Elena!" he called after her. "Where are you going? We prep in five!"

She pressed the elevator button for the ground floor, then thought better of it and pushed seven instead. The roof.

The wind hit her face. Below, the city churned, indifferent and alive. She pulled out her phone and typed out a text to Marcus: *I think I still have that restaurant business plan we wrote in 2019.*

*Still have the folder,* came the reply instantly. *Meet at the dog park in an hour?*

Barnaby's tail thumped against her legs twenty minutes later as she watched him waddle through the autumn leaves, more interested in sniffing a particularly exquisite patch of dirt than in playing with the younger dogs. Marcus stood at the fence, watching them.

"I quit," she said, and the words felt foreign in her mouth, like a language she'd forgotten she spoke. "I mean, I'm going to. I'm going to do it."

Marcus grinned, and for the first time in three years, something in Elena's chest expanded.

"Good," he said. "Because I have a friend who's looking for a partner. Small place in the Warehouse District. Needs work."

Barnaby chose that moment to discover a squirrel and give enthusiastic, if futile, chase. Elena laughed—really laughed, until tears came.

The zombie hadn't died. But something else had begun to live.