The Last Witness

The fluorescent lights hummed, that familiar corporate lullaby that had been eating Elena alive for three years. She moved through the open-plan office like a zombie—not the pop-culture flesh-eater, but something worse: the walking dead who still showed up to meetings, still hit deadlines, still cared about quarterly projections. Her soul had decomposed somewhere around her second promotion.

"You're running the surveillance op tonight, right?" Marcus whispered, sliding into the chair beside her. He smelled like expensive cologne and cheap betrayal.

Elena nodded. She was always running something—operations, surveillance, errands for a boss who wouldn't remember her name if she stopped being useful. Corporate espionage had seemed glamorous once. Now it was just spreadsheets and violating people's privacy for shareholders who wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire.

Her phone buzzed. A message from David: *Pick up wine? Working late.*

David. Her husband. The man who'd stopped looking at her somewhere between her second and third affair. Not that he knew about them. Elena was good at secrets—professionally and domestically. She wondered if David was screwing his research assistant. She hoped he was. It would make everything so much easier.

The target tonight was a mid-level manager at a competitor. Elena would watch his apartment, photograph his visitors, document his routine. She'd become a spy who spied on people who mattered about as much as she did.

She left the office at eight. The city was already dark, windows lighting up like eyes opening to watch her pass. Elena didn't go home first. She drove to the surveillance location, parked her gray sedan between two identical cars, and waited.

Nothing happened for hours. The target ordered pizza. Watched television. Called someone and cried.

Elena's phone buzzed again. David: *Never mind. Going out.*

She sat in her car and remembered the last time she'd felt something real. It had been six months ago, in a hotel room in Chicago, with a man whose name she'd already forgotten. He'd held her afterward, traced the scar on her shoulder from the bicycle accident when she was twelve.

"You're sad," he'd said.

She'd laughed. "I'm fine."

"No, really sad. Like you disappeared years ago and something else has been walking around in your body."

Elena had dressed quickly and never saw him again.

A cat jumped onto the hood of her car—a calico with one torn ear. It stared at her through the windshield, yellow eyes unblinking.

"Go away," she said.

The cat didn't move.

Something tightened in Elena's chest. She realized she was crying, silent tears tracking down her face. The cat kept watching, this tiny witness to her disintegration.

"I'm a zombie," she whispered to the cat. "I'm already dead."

The cat yawned, curled up on the hood, and went to sleep.

Elena started the car and drove away. She didn't file the surveillance report. She didn't go home to David. She just drove, leaving the city behind, heading toward nothing and everything, running for the first time not from something but toward whatever might still be worth finding.