Zombies of the Twenty-Seventh Floor

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal song across rows of cubicles, each worker hunched forward like praying mantises, mechanical and hollow. Arthur ran his hand through his thinning hair—another gray strand, another small surrender. At forty-seven, he'd become exactly what he'd swore he never would: a zombie in a pressed suit, moving through the motions while his soul quietly packed its bags.

His phone vibrated. Sarah again. The third time today. He couldn't bear another conversation about their marriage's slow decay, about how he'd become a stranger who happened to sleep in their bed. The divorce papers sat in his drawer, signed and waiting, like a loaded gun he'd forgotten how to fire.

Arthur peeled an orange at his desk, the bright zest cutting through the sterile office air. For a moment, he was seventeen again, sitting with his father—Bear, everyone called him—on the porch of their childhood home. His father had worked this same job for thirty years, had sat in this same building, had died of a heart attack in this same fucking chair. Arthur had inherited it all: the position, the hair loss, the crushing weight of being the one who stayed.

"You look like hell," said Janet from the next cubicle, not unkindly. She'd been here twenty years. Her eyes had the same glazed quality as everyone else's.

"Rough night," Arthur lied.

He looked at the orange segments on his desk, impossibly vibrant against the gray corporate landscape. Something cracked open inside him—something that had been calcifying for decades. He thought of his daughter, six years old, who still hugged him like he was a hero instead of a middle-aged failure who couldn't keep his marriage together.

Arthur stood up.

"Where are you going?" Janet asked, surprised. "The Walker meeting starts in ten minutes."

"I'm not coming back," he said.

The words felt foreign, impossible. But his father's ghost seemed to nod approvingly somewhere in the fluorescent-lit air. Arthur walked past rows of the living dead, past the corner office with its view of the city, and into the elevator that would take him down to where real life still happened, somewhere, somehow.

He called Sarah from the sidewalk. "I want to try," he said. "Really try."

The orange taste still lingered on his tongue—bittersweet, complicated, and absolutely alive.