Wednesday at the End of the World

The zombie apocalypse began at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday, which Martin found irritatingly inconsiderate. He'd been in the middle of explaining why the quarterly projections needed revision when his colleague Sarah had bitten into the marketing director's neck.

Now Martin sat on his apartment balcony, wearing his grandfather's fedora—a felt hat that smelled of mothballs and tobacco—watching the city burn. He held a wilted spinach leaf in one hand, staring at it as if it might explain everything. His cat, Barnaby, wound around his legs, purring with maddening normalcy.

"You don't care, do you?" Martin whispered. Barnaby flicked his tail.

Below, a zombie shuffled past carrying a palm frond. Martin wondered if it had been a landscaper, or if the zombie mind simply retained fragments of what it once touched. The absurdity of it—death walking with a tropical souvenir—made him laugh until tears came.

He'd always lived like this, he realized: waiting for something to happen while life continued without him. The quarterly projections. The unread books. The messages he'd never sent to his ex-wife.

"Spinach," he said aloud, tossing the leaf into the chaos below. "That's what I was eating when everything changed."

Barnaby jumped onto his lap. Martin scratched behind his ears, the cat's steady heartbeat anchoring him to what remained. Tomorrow—or whenever this ended—he'd live differently. He'd say the things. He'd make the changes.

The zombie with the palm frond looked up, eyes empty, and Martin understood: some things, once they begin, cannot be revised.