Vitamins for the Living Dead

Mara stared at the orange plastic bottle on her desk—vitamin D3, the doctor had said. You don't get enough sunlight working those hours. She'd been taking two daily for six months, yet still felt like something hollowed out by a slow tide.

The office at 3 AM was its own creature. Monitors cast a blue glow on faces that had been rendered slack by too many quarters and too little sleep. They moved like zombies, really—jerky, purposeful, dreaming of retirement packages that would never materialize. Not the shambling brain-eaters of pop culture, but something worse: people who'd forgotten what it felt like to want anything at all.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus. Again.

"You coming home?" he'd text. Then, five minutes later: "We need to talk."

She'd been sleeping in the office for three weeks. The corporate apartment was too quiet, filled with boxes she'd never unpacked. Marcus had stopped asking what was wrong. Maybe he'd sensed it—the way she flinched when he touched her, how she stared through him instead of at him. Like he was becoming part of the background radiation.

The elevator dinged. Paul, from operations, stepped out with a cable spool over his shoulder. He looked like he'd aged seven years since the project started.

"They want the data center rewired by morning," he said, not meeting her eyes. "Bullshit deadline, but you know how it is."

Bull. That was the word for it. The whole thing was bull—a massive, mincing bull that trampled through lives and left hoofprints in the shape of quarterly projections.

"My father used to raise bulls," Mara found herself saying. "He said they could sense fear. That you had to stand your ground or they'd run you over."

Paul looked at her then, really looked. "What happened to him?"

"He died standing his ground. Heart attack in the middle of a negotiation." She swallowed. "He died alone."

The silence stretched between them, thick with things they couldn't say. About the marriages dissolving in the next room. About the promotions that felt like consolation prizes. About the way they'd all stopped asking if this was worth it.

Paul set down the cable. "My wife left me two weeks ago."

"Marcus is leaving me. I just haven't gone home to hear him say it yet."

They stood there in the fluorescent hum, two zombies in the graveyard of ambition. Then Paul did something strange—he reached out and squeezed her hand, just for a second. His palm was warm. Alive.

"Take your vitamins," he said quietly, picking up the cable again. "And go home. Before there's nothing left to go home to."

She gathered her things. The bottle of pills went into her pocket. Outside, the sun was beginning to rise, pale and tentative over the city. For the first time in months, she thought she might try to catch it.