Vitamin Z

The fluorescent lights hummed their funeral dirge as Elena clocked into Vitality Corp. At 32, she'd mastered existing without living—corporate zombie, consumer of wellness trends she secretly loathed.

Marcus dropped neon vitamin pills on her desk. "B complex. Changed my life."

Elena doubted that. Marcus smelled like stale coffee and had been divorced twice. But she accepted the bottle anyway.

Her supervisor Chen emerged like a sphinx from his office—inscrutable, enigmatic, terrifyingly competent. "Elena," he said, dark eyes unreadable. "Your wellness campaign concept was... interesting. What were you thinking when you created it?"

The truth burned: she'd designed it drunk, weeping over her ex's wedding photos. "That people want to feel alive. That they're tired of being..."

"Zombies?" Chen supplied.

The word hung between them.

Chen nodded slowly. "The walking dead among us. Consuming, producing nothing." He gestured to the vitamins. "Do you believe they help?"

"I don't know."

"Marcus sleeps in his car," Chen said. "He hasn't gone home in three weeks."

Elena's stomach twisted. Marcus had claimed he was renovating.

"He is renovating," Chen said. "His lies."

That evening, Elena found Marcus in the break room, staring at a blank TV screen.

"Chen told me about the car," she said.

"Did he also tell you he lives here too?" Marcus said. "Behind the filing cabinets. Two years."

Elena went to Chen's office. Found him on a camping cot surrounded by philosophy books.

"Sit," Chen said.

"Why do you live here?"

"Here I am useful." He closed his book. "Out there, nothing."

Elena thought about her silent apartment, the vitamins she took religiously, the wellness she sold to the already-dead.

"We could help each other," she said. "Live. Not survive."

Chen's sphinx eyes softened. "That requires vulnerability. Trust. Risk."

"Are you willing?"

Elena took Marcus's vitamins from her pocket, set them on the cot. "I'm tired of things that don't work."

Chen smiled—a genuine emotion she'd never seen. "Then let us begin."

The next morning, she found Chen and Marcus in the break room, laughing together over coffee.

For the first time in years, the fluorescent lights didn't feel like a funeral dirge.

She still felt like a zombie sometimes. The vitamins remained in her drawer. But now she had something pills couldn't provide: two people who saw her, riddle and all.