"They're using door handles," Kevin said. Nobody needed to explain why that mattered.
Everyone was on their feet now, groggy and terrified, staring at the security monitor where five executive zombies descended the stairwell with the organized precision of a board meeting adjourning for lunch. They took the stairs one at a time, hands sliding along the railing. One of them paused at the landing and appeared to straighten its tie.
"That's David Chen," Bradley said quietly. He'd emerged from the greenroom, his suit even more rumpled, his silver hair wild. "Executive VP of Operations. He was with the company for twenty-two years."
"He's been with the company a little too long," Marcus said.
"Is now the time?" Rachel snapped.
"It's always the time."
Kevin was already moving. "Priya, how many exits does this room have?"
"Four. Main doors -- north. Service entrance -- east, behind the stage curtain. Emergency exit -- south wall, behind the curtains. And a set of double doors on the west wall that connect to a smaller meeting room."
"The main doors are barricaded. What about the others?"
"Service entrance has a deadbolt. Emergency exit has a push bar, no external lock. West doors have a standard lock."
"The emergency exit. That's the weak point." Kevin pointed at the monitor. The executive zombies had reached the first floor and were moving south -- directly toward the corridor that ran along the ballroom's south wall. "They're coming from that direction. If they can use handles, a push bar won't stop them."
"We need to barricade it," Carl said. His voice was shaking but his hands were already reaching for a chair. Badge Carl, Kevin thought. The man rose to the occasion when occasions got terrible.
"Carl, Derek -- south exit, stack everything against it. Marcus, west doors. Karen, weapons. Priya, monitors. Rachel, with me on the main barricade."
They moved. The room erupted.
"Kevin." Priya's voice cut through the noise. "Camera two. They've reached our corridor."
Kevin sprinted to the monitors. The executive zombies were in the hallway outside the south wall. They moved with terrifying economy -- no wasted steps, no aimless shuffling. David Chen stopped at a door. Tried the handle. Locked. Moved on. Tried the next. Locked. Moved on.
Methodical. Systematic.
*They're checking every door.*
"They're going to find the emergency exit," Kevin said. "How long do we have?"
Priya calculated with terrifying speed. "At their current pace, approximately four minutes."
Four minutes. Kevin looked at the south wall. Carl and Derek had managed to stack eight chairs and a folding table against the emergency exit's push bar. It was something. It wasn't enough.
"More," Kevin said. "We need more weight on that door."
Bradley stepped forward, grabbed the podium -- a solid oak lectern that must have weighed eighty pounds -- and dragged it toward the south wall with a grunt. For a sixty-five-year-old man, he moved it with surprising force.
"I didn't build this company by standing around," he muttered.
Two minutes.
Kevin heard it before he saw it on the monitors. A sound from behind the south wall. Not banging. Not scratching. The smooth, mechanical sound of a push bar being depressed from the outside.
The door shifted inward half an inch. The barricade held. The push bar released. A pause.
Then it was pressed again. Harder.
The door shifted a full inch. A chair at the top of the pile wobbled.
"They're testing it," Priya said from the monitors. "They're testing the resistance and adjusting force."
"That's not possible," Derek whispered. "They're dead. They can't problem-solve."
"They were executives, Derek. Problem-solving was their entire job."
The push bar engaged a third time. This time, the force was sustained -- constant pressure, increasing gradually. Kevin could hear the metal frame of the door groaning. The folding table at the base of the barricade began to slide on the polished floor.
"It's not going to hold," Rachel said.
She was right. The barricade was heavy but not anchored. Each push moved it another inch, and each inch gave the zombies more leverage. Through the widening gap at the top of the door, Kevin could see gray fingers curling around the edge.
"Fall back to the stage," Kevin ordered. "Elevated position. If they get in, we funnel them through the chairs."
The group retreated toward the stage as the south door continued its slow, grinding surrender. Kevin overturned tables as he went, creating a maze of obstacles between the door and the stage. It wouldn't stop them, but it would slow them. Maybe.
The door burst open.
The barricade exploded inward, chairs and table and podium scattering across the floor with a crash that echoed through the ballroom like thunder. Five executive zombies stepped through the gap with the measured confidence of people entering a meeting they intended to dominate.
David Chen was in the lead. His suit was gray, his skin was grayer, and his eyes had the flat, dead focus of someone reviewing a disappointing spreadsheet. Behind him, four more -- three men and a woman, all in executive attire, all moving with that horrible purposeful stride.
"Oh, God," Derek whispered. He was standing on the stage, gripping a chair leg he'd broken off as a weapon, his face the color of wet concrete. "That's the entire executive committee. They did my performance review--"
"Derek, FOCUS."
But Derek was gone. Not physically -- he was still standing there, holding his chair leg. But his eyes had glazed, his body rigid. He'd frozen. The same way Tanya had frozen. The same way prey freezes when the predator is too close and every survival instinct collapses into a single, useless command: *don't move and maybe it won't see you.*
The executive zombies reached the overturned tables and navigated them -- not quickly, but not stumbling. They moved furniture out of their path with systematic efficiency.
"Priya," Kevin said. "Whenever you're ready."
Priya Sharma stepped off the front of the stage.
Priya crossed the distance to the nearest executive zombie in three strides, dropped her center of gravity, and delivered a palm strike to its sternum that sent it staggering backward into a table. The sound -- living hand against dead flesh -- was wet and final.
The zombie recovered. Of course it did. No pain response, no flinch reflex, no survival instinct telling it to stay down. It came back at her with arms outstretched, jaw working.
Priya sidestepped, grabbed its arm, and executed a hip throw that put the thing on the floor hard enough to crack a tile. Then she stamped. Once. Twice. The sound was like a pumpkin dropped from a second-floor window.
"Jesus," Marcus whispered.
The other four converged on her. Kevin jumped off the stage and met them.
He'd never fought anything in his life. His most violent daily activity was aggressively closing browser tabs. But the chef's knife didn't care about his resume.
He drove it into the nearest zombie's throat, felt resistance and then give, pulled it free and drove it in again. The zombie grabbed his arm with cold, iron-strong fingers. Kevin twisted, kicked, felt the grip loosen. Rachel appeared beside him and swung the fire extinguisher like a bat, catching the zombie across the temple with a sound like a church bell.
It went down.
Marcus was on the stage, wielding a laptop he'd found somewhere -- a chunky corporate ThinkPad built like a brick -- slamming it into the face of a zombie that had climbed the stage stairs. The screen shattered on the third impact. Marcus didn't stop.
"PERFORMANCE REVIEW!" he screamed, which made absolutely no sense but also perfect sense.
Karen threw her adding machine.
She didn't want to -- Kevin could see the anguish on her face as she wound up like a softball pitcher -- but the zombie lunging toward Carl left her no choice. Nine pounds of vintage Casio accounting equipment caught the thing square in the jaw, snapping its head sideways with a crunch that echoed off the cathedral ceiling.
"That was a 1987 Casio HR-150TM," Karen said, her voice trembling. "They don't make them anymore."
Carl had wedged himself in the doorway to the greenroom, blocking it with his body and a chair, hyperventilating so hard Kevin could hear it from across the room. A zombie pushed against him, reaching past the chair, and Carl -- sobbing, shaking, his face a mask of terror -- held his ground. He braced the chair against the doorframe and pushed back, keeping the dead thing at arm's length through sheer desperate willpower.
"I HAVE OVER FORTY MERIT BADGES," Carl screamed, which was perhaps the least intimidating battle cry in human history but somehow worked because the zombie couldn't get past him.
Then it was over.
Five executive zombies lay on the ballroom floor, truly dead, surrounded by broken chairs, shattered laptop screens, and one irreplaceable adding machine. The group stood among the wreckage, breathing hard, splattered with things Kevin chose not to identify.
Derek was still on the stage. He hadn't moved. His chair leg raised, his eyes wide, his body locked in the position it had assumed when the fighting started. Nobody said anything to him. The look on Derek's face -- the slow, dawning recognition of what he hadn't done -- was punishment enough.
Kevin's arm was bleeding.
Adrenaline had masked it during the fight. But now the chemicals receded and the pain arrived. A long, deep cut across his left forearm, from elbow to wrist, where a zombie's fingernail -- or maybe a piece of broken chair -- had opened him up like a letter.
"Kevin." Rachel was beside him, her hands on his arm, her eyes scanning the wound. "Kevin, sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding all over the floor. Sit down."
He sat. She knelt in front of him, taking his arm in both hands, turning it toward the emergency light. Her fingers were warm against his skin, and he could feel her pulse in her fingertips -- fast, but steadier than his.
"It's not a bite," she said, and the relief in her voice was so raw it made his chest ache. "It's a cut. Deep, but clean. Carl!"
Carl appeared with his first aid kit, hands still shaking, eyes still wet. But his fingers were sure as he cleaned the wound with Perrier, applied antibiotic ointment, and wrapped it in tight, even strips of cotton tablecloth.
"You need stitches," Carl said. "I can't do stitches."
"Butterflies," Priya said. She was cleaning her hands on a tablecloth, methodically, finger by finger. The group watched her with expressions that mixed gratitude with something approaching awe. "Use the butterfly bandages from the kit. Close it up, wrap it tight. It'll hold."
Rachel applied the butterflies herself, pressing each adhesive strip into place with a precision that bordered on tenderness. Kevin watched her face -- the furrow between her eyebrows, the way she bit her lower lip, the strand of hair that had escaped her tablecloth tie.
"You're staring," she said without looking up.
"I'm monitoring the medical procedure."
"You're staring at my face, not the bandage."
"Your face is near the bandage."
She looked up. Their eyes met, eight inches apart, close enough that Kevin could see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes and the tiny scar on her chin from a childhood bike accident she'd told him about once, a lifetime ago.
"Thank you," he said.
"For the bandage?"
"For everything."
The room was full of dead executive zombies and this was entirely the wrong moment for this.
"You're welcome," she said softly, and her thumb traced a small circle on the inside of his wrist before she let go.
Kevin stood up, flexing his wrapped arm. It hurt. But he was alive and unbitten, and Rachel Kim had just touched his wrist in a way that made the apocalypse feel survivable.
"Alright," he said. "We need to re-barricade that door. And we need to talk about what just happened, because those things were not normal zombies."
"Executive material," Bradley muttered from where he sat against the stage, looking at the body of David Chen with an expression Kevin couldn't read. "Always were."
Kevin knelt beside the nearest executive zombie. Its suit was expensive, its shoes were leather, and clipped to its belt was something that caught the light: a white plastic rectangle with a magnetic strip and a small chip.
A keycard.
Kevin unclipped it and turned it over. The text read: *EVERGREEN MOUNTAIN LODGE -- PENTHOUSE LEVEL -- AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.*
"Penthouse level," Kevin said. "What's on the penthouse level?"
Bradley looked at the card. Something shifted behind his eyes.
"That's where the board was staying," he said quietly. "Private suites. Executive lounge. Full kitchen, private security, reinforced doors. The works."
Kevin looked at the keycard. Then at the ceiling, as if he could see through it to the top floor.
"How many board members were at the retreat?" he asked.
Bradley swallowed. "All of them."
