The Vitamin supplements

Maya adjusted her hair in the rearview mirror, noticing for the third time that morning how gray it had become. Thirty-five years old and already looking like she'd been through a war she couldn't remember fighting. The fluorescent lights of the office parking lot reflected in her tired eyes as she grabbed her beret—the only hat she owned that made her feel remotely put together.

Inside, the open-plan office stretched before her like a cemetery of ambition. Her coworkers moved with the stiff, purposeless rhythm of the undead. She'd started calling them zombies in her head, though she knew the truth was worse: they were just people who'd given up.

"You're back early," remarked Greg, the team lead who still had hope in his eyes. Maya found it almost painful to look at sometimes.

"Doctor's appointment," she lied smoothly. "Just need to pick up some prescriptions."

What she'd actually done was spend two hours sitting in her car, taking vitamins that promised energy they couldn't deliver, and contemplating the spreadsheet of her life's diminishing returns. The bottle sat in her bag now—expensive little capsules that tasted like nothing and accomplished even less.

"We're doing the quarterly review today," Greg continued, oblivious to her internal chaos. "Maybe you could present?"

Maya's stomach twisted. Last year's review had ended with her crying in the stairwell. The year before, she'd gotten drunk at a happy hour and confessed her existential dread to a junior analyst who'd looked at her with terrified pity.

"Sure," she heard herself say. "Why not."

At 5 PM, she found herself back in her car, not remembering the last six hours. She removed her hat and ran her fingers through hair that felt like someone else's. The vitamins were still in her bag, untouched. Behind her, the office building glowed like a spaceship that had forgotten its mission.

She took two vitamins anyway, dry-swallowing them with the desperate hope that tomorrow, something would be different. That she wouldn't feel like one of them—one of the walking dead, smiling through meetings she couldn't focus on, caring about metrics that meant nothing.

Maybe that was the real zombie apocalypse: not violence or virus, but the slow erosion of soul until you became something that looked alive but wasn't quite anymore.

Maya started the engine. Tomorrow she'd quit. Probably.