The Last Vitamin

The zombie apocalypse started on a Tuesday, which felt insulting. Tuesdays should be for spreadsheets and lukewarm coffee, not for watching your neighbor try to eat his mailman through the front door.

I'd been taking my vitamin D supplements religiously for months, ever since Dr. Patel said I was deficient. "Modern life," she'd said, "we don't get enough sun." Now I stood in my bathroom, staring at the orange plastic bottle, wondering if immunity was actually a thing.

My phone buzzed - Mark. "They're not getting in, but it's bad here. The pyramid storage facility across the street is on fire."

The pyramid. Of course. Mark's workplace - that multi-level marketing scheme he'd fallen for last year. He'd tried to recruit me, sitting at my kitchen table with his charts and his earnest talk about "financial independence." I'd told him it sounded like a cult. He'd stopped speaking to me for three weeks.

"Bear with me," he'd said when he finally called, "I think this could really be something."

I should have gone to him. Instead, I'd gone back to my own corporate pyramid - the one with normal W-2s and dental insurance. The one where I'd spent yesterday afternoon in a meeting about "synergy" while secretly fantasizing about throwing myself through the window.

Now the window was looking pretty good.

The sphinx of unanswered questions sat in my chest: Why hadn't I visited? Why had I let pride come between us when the world was literally ending? Mark was probably terrified, and I was here, safe in my suburban fortress, counting vitamins like they were ammunition against death.

I grabbed my keys. The gun range had been closed since Thursday, but I had baseball bats. I had car doors to lock. I had

The bear came out of nowhere.

One moment I was backing out of the driveway, the next there was black fur and teeth against my driver's side window. It roared, and the sound vibrated through my bones like I was empty, like I was nothing but fear and reflex. I slammed the gas pedal and somehow didn't hit anything important.

A bear. In suburban New Jersey. The rules had all changed.

Mark's phone went straight to voicemail. "Hey," I said, and my voice sounded foreign, like someone else was speaking through me. "I'm coming. Don't do anything stupid. Don't try to be a hero. Just... wait for me."

The pyramid was burning when I arrived. Flames licked up the sides of that ridiculous glass triangle that Mark had been so proud of, the one that was supposed to represent his "path to freedom." Smoke billowed across the highway like a terrible, beautiful cloud.

I found him three blocks away, huddled behind a dumpster with three strangers. He looked up when I called his name, and something in my chest shifted, like the earth finally moving back into alignment.

"You came," he said.

"I brought vitamins," I said, pulling the bottle from my pocket like an idiot, like a promise. "And a baseball bat."

He laughed, and the sound was small and scared and perfect. "You always did overpack."

The zombie groans were getting closer. The bear that had chased me here was probably out there, maybe joined by others - wolves, deer, everything wild and hungry. The world had gone completely sphinx-shaped, all riddles and teeth and no answers.

"I love you," I said, because now seemed like the time for truths. "Even when you're being an idiot about pyramid schemes."

"I love you too," Mark said, and his hand found mine in the gathering dark. "Even when you're being stubborn about... everything."

We watched the pyramid burn together. The zombies shambled closer. The bear roared somewhere in the distance.

And for the first time in my entire carefully planned, vitamin-supplemented, spreadsheet-organized life, I felt exactly like I was supposed to feel: terrified, and alive, and not alone.