Vitamins for the Walking Dead

The fluorescent lights of the office hum at a frequency that made Maya's teeth ache. She sat at her desk, staring at the spreadsheet, feeling like a zombie—not the flesh-eating kind, but the modern corporate variety: hollowed out, moving through motions, dead inside while somehow still breathing.

'You look like hell,' Marcus said, dropping into the chair beside her. He smelled like coffee and desperation.

'Thanks.' She swallowed the vitamin D supplement she'd bought yesterday—part of her new regime of trying to fix herself from the inside out. As if a pill could cure three years of burnout.

Marcus held out his hand. In his palm sat two gummies shaped like bears. 'Want one?'

'You're thirty-two years old.'

'They're multivitamins. And they taste like childhood.' His smile didn't reach his eyes anymore. Nothing did.

She took the gummy bear. It was artificially sweet, chemically bright. 'Remember when we thought we'd change the world?'

'I remember when I thought I'd write a novel.' Marcus leaned his head back against the partition wall. 'Now I spend eight hours a day making spreadsheets that nobody reads, then go home and scroll until I pass out. That's not living, Maya. That's just not dying.'

The thought settled between them like dust. They'd both become something they never intended—creatures of habit and compromise, bearing the weight of expectations until their backs curved under it.

'We could leave,' she said softly. 'Tonight. Just... drive somewhere.'

Marcus turned to her, really looked at her, for the first time in months. 'You're not a zombie,' he said. 'You're hibernating. There's a difference.'

'Then wake me up.'

He stood up and held out his hand—his real hand, not the one offering vitamin gummies or excuses. 'Let's get dinner. Somewhere that doesn't have a drive-through.'

Maya took it. Her fingers were cold, his were warm. For the first time in a long time, something in her chest stirred, like a heartbeat she'd forgotten she had.