Shriveled? Swellegant.
It was a sidewalk cafe, a group of comfortable tables and chairs situated on a wide brick walkway in the shade of swaying palm trees. Near Blizzard's headquarters in Southern California, even in mid-January you could make an outdoor lunch date and sit outside in comfort. Across from me, toying gingerly with a salt shaker as he opened the menu, sat an animated skeleton. The flesh on his face had dried into grotesque folds, and his dark sunken eyes scanned the specials. He looked up at me and smiled -- a gesture recognized only by the tension in his cheeks, since what remained of his teeth were always visible.

He was one of the "living dead," a walking oxymoron. And while all of my GameSpy cohorts were over at Blizzard seeing World of Warcraft and even getting a chance to play it firsthand, I was stuck with the rank job of interviewing Blizzard's zombified undead consultant. His role in game development was as an advisor to ensure the undead race was accurately depicted. Why couldn't I have been assigned a Night Elf? My admittedly limited understanding of Night Elves has led me to believe that many of them are females who wear next to nothing.

That wasn't the case for the man across from me: he wore a cobweb-encrusted faded grey suit and threadbare button-down shirt. If he'd worn a tie to his funeral, it had long-since been torn away.

A waitress padded her way to our table, peering at us both over her tablet. The putrefied zombie snapped his menu shut. "I'll have the brains," he declared. "And some Tazoberry iced tea." To me, he added: "So tangy!" At which point, one of his teeth clattered to the table.

"Suddenly not hungry," I told the waitress, my voice cracking.

In life he was known as R.J. Thomas. In death, they just called him Thomas. Each weekday morning he'd crawl out of his shallow grave (or emerge from the rusted trunk of an avocado-colored '76 Plymouth Volare) behind Blizzard's Irvine, California offices and shamble wetly into his cubicle downwind of the art department.

"I got the job thanks to my experience in the massively multiplayer game space," Thomas explained. "I've been doing MMORPG customer support for years. I was good at talking to the customers -- it's one of the advantages of being brain dead."

"Are there any others?"

"Not many," he admitted, thanking the waitress as his food came. "I pity the old buggers that buy the farm after retiring ... and then, uh, sell it again, I suppose ... after all, your pension payments stop when you die. And no social security." Suddenly, he grinned, his eyes bulging while some flies darted out of his skull: "On the plus side, death is the cheapest divorce you can get."