Zombies Don't Cry Read online

  “It doesn’t matter what you feel right now,” she assured me, brutally. “You’ll get the hang of being different soon enough. The people you knew and loved will help you with that, if not much else.”

  It wasn’t her embittered tone that struck me so much as her use of the past tense; People I knew and loved.

  But I still love them, I thought. Mum, Dad, Kirsten…Helena. Surely they’ll still love me, zombie or not. They aren’t bigots.

  What I said aloud, warily, was: “What do you mean, not much else?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not supposed to do that—not according to the retraining manual. Just because we’ve got pink eyes, though, it doesn’t mean we have to rose-tint the world. I’ve seen your family, mind—your mother, your father, your sister. They’ve all put in their stints of duty while you were in the post-mortem coma. They seem nice. Maybe they’ll let you down gently, if at all.”

  “Yours didn’t?” I asked. It wasn’t the first question that sprang to mind, but it seemed the most polite.

  “Well,” she said, “I did kill myself. They were bound to take it personally, I guess.”

  “But you’re okay now?” I asked, solicitously. “You’re not about to do it again?”

  “Technically,” she told me, “I can’t. I’m already dead, so I can’t kill myself. Nobody’s contrived to put a word in the dictionary, as yet, for what zombies do instead, in spite of the…incidents. None of the improvised suggestions has caught on to the extent of becoming common parlance.”

  I didn’t needed to ask what the “…incidents” were. Whatever zombies did instead of “killing” themselves had been featured on Resurrection Ward too. I was beginning to regret not having been a more assiduous viewer; I had a feeling that I might have need of every last drop of the show’s educational value, even if it was set in a place that didn’t really exist, at least in the Royal Berkshire Hospital.

  “What about Helena?” I said. “You’ve seen her too, I assume.”

  Nurse Pearl hesitated.

  “She’s my girl-friend,” I said, emphasizing the present tense ever so slightly.

  “I’ve seen her,” the zombie nurse admitted.

  “She has visited—while I was…pupating.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the jargon, but I was fairly sure that the afterliving liked to refer to the post-mortem coma as “pupation,” thus implying, if only in jest, that their new status was analogous to that of a butterfly, whose previous existence had been merely larval.

  “Yes,” said Nurse Pearl. “She did visit.” Past tense again.

  “And she’ll be back, as soon as she hears that I’m awake,” I said. “When’s visiting time?”

  “The doctors haven’t given the go-ahead yet,” she told me. “The Burkers will probably want to do a few more tests—and then there’s the psych evaluation. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Burkers?” I queried, having misheard it as burkas.

  “Bad joke,” she said. “Burkers as in Burke and Hare. Resurrection Men. Popular slang two hundred years ago, now back in fashion, in certain circles, with the irony reversed. Who says the afterliving have no sense of humor, eh?”

  I didn’t laugh. “How long will the tests take?” I asked.

  “A couple of hours, maybe—longer if your nerves and muscles aren’t playing ball. Same with the psych evaluation—an hour or so if you get the answers right…no limit if you screw it up.”

  I’d seen psych evaluations for the risen dead on Resurrection Ward too, and had run the gauntlet of those designed for the living on more than one occasion. I had no fear of them. I’d never felt saner in my life…although, even as I formulated that thought, I realized that it was the kind of observation that might be open to misinterpretation, given my present circumstances.

  “Can I have my phone?” I asked. “Or was it a casualty of the bomb-blast?”

  “Even if it hadn’t been, you wouldn’t have been able to use it,” she said. Her voice was back in neutral.

  “Can I borrow a laptop, then? I need to do some research on the web.” Actually, I wanted to check my email. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but I figured that it must really be piled up.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  And then—just like that—she was called away, to attend to the needs of a living patient.

  I looked around again. Nobody was looking in my direction. Suddenly, as the only person on the ward who was—as yet—in the ranks of the afterliving, I felt very much alone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I suppose that I had had more forewarning of what it might be like to join the ranks of the afterliving than anyone else in Reading, except for medical professionals, even if I hadn’t taken full advantage of the forewarning in question. As a case-worker in the Ombudsman’s Office, I had seen far more of the afterliving when I was alive than most living individuals, and had certainly had far more one-to-one conversations with them than even medical professionals generally contrived, or bothered, to have. It’s not difficult to conceive a sense of grievance when you’re a zombie, and the OO is the dustbin of English desperation, where appeals against injustice go to die, never to rise again. I’d been very well aware of the absurdity of the whole bureaucratic process even before I died myself—to the extent that I knew there would be no point going to the OO as a zombie client.

  Having worked for the OO, I already knew how vanishingly unlikely it was that I’d get my old job back, however unfair that unlikelihood might be. Parliament had been quick to license resurrection as a medical procedure, for reasons of political expediency, but it was being vey slow indeed—for similar reasons of political expediency—to follow up its instant creation of a new category of citizens with the corollary legislation that would give them the same rights as everyone else.

  To put it bluntly, it wasn’t illegal, in 2042, to discriminate against the dead, even if they were just as capable of doing their old jobs as they had been when they were alive. Given that unemployment among the living was running at almost twenty-five per cent, even in Reading, it wasn’t entirely surprising that unemployment among the afterliving should be running at more than ninety per cent.

  The law will catch up with our formal entitlements in the end, I suppose—though maybe not in a standard lifetime. Justice is another matter; if I were a cynic—and I never met a zombie who wasn’t—I’d probably argue that there never had been any and never would be. Thanks to the wonders of biotech, unicorns and flying pigs are even more commonplace nowadays than zombies, but justice? That really is incredible.

  I’d been told more than once while on duty in the offices of the OO, by zombies who were taking the art of grievance to a new level, that the reason zombies can’t manufacture melanin, and are therefore albinos, is that the Resurrection Men planned it that way, as a deliberate biotech plot intended to mark them out and prevent them from passing for the living, thus making it far easier for everyone else to discriminate against them.

  I’d also been told more than once, by Englishmen of Pakistani or Jamaican or Somali or Turkish or Indonesian or Nepalese descent—all the other people, in fact, that England’s so-called Defenders were trying to defend their mythical England against—that the reason the Resurrection Men had elected to make zombies whiter than white was to make even easier to discriminate against people of color. Some people seemed genuinely to believe that the greatest biotech miracle of the twenty-first century had been cooked up, in its entirety, simply to give existing “white” people an opportunity to claim that that people of color had no right to complain about discrimination, since people devoid of color had it even worse than they did. That belief, of course, didn’t stop them complaining that the Resurrection Men were also discriminating against them by favoring “white” people for resurrection—in spite of the fact that devout Muslims and Afro-Anglicans were the loudest advocates of the thesis that the afterliving were actually demons sent to plague the living by Satan or Iblis, and that God-fearing people should never sig
n consent forms licensing the use of resurrection technology on their loved ones.

  I’d been cynical enough, even as a living person, to think that all of those arguments, except the most blatantly paradoxical and hypocritical, might have a seed of truth within them. I had, however, been quite content to take refuge in the standard script supplied for my use by the Ombudsman’s Office, which required me to point out that there were other physiological distinctions between the living and the afterliving that science had yet to explain, and that none of those were the kind of device that might have been planned for the purposes of stigmatization, so that the albinism of the afterliving was almost certainly an accident of physiological happenstance rather than any kind of cunning conspiracy.

  I still believed that when I woke up to the afterlife myself, partly because it still seemed convincing, and partly because I didn’t want to think that the Royal Berks Burkers were anything but angels of mercy, who, having regrettably failed to save my life, had done the next best thing.

  * * * * * * *

  By the time I got a chance to have another chat with Nurse Pearl, the first afternoon of my afterlife was wearing on and I was already bored out of my skull. The other patients in the ward were beginning to take notice of me, though—at least, the guy who put his stiffened index-fingers together in the shape of a cross when I tried to get out of bed condescended to notice me.

  He made the same sign of the cross whenever Pearl strayed too close to his bed, although she always left it to the other nurses on the ward actually to attend to his needs. Evidently, patients were allowed to exercise their rights of choice in matters of care, if not in the matter of who got the next bed.

  I assumed that the patient with the busy index-fingers wasn’t really trying to ward off demons, and that the gesture was more joke than insult. He was probably bored out of his skull too, and desperate for any distraction he could improvise. If I’d been able to do it, I’d have gone over to his bed, wiggled my fingers at him and moaned “woo-oo-oo” just to play my allotted part in the comedy, but I was still attached to the catheter as well as the drip; standing up was pretty much out of the question, let alone walking around. I don’t suppose he’d have laughed, though, any more than he’d have expired in mortal terror.

  Nurse Pearl didn’t bother to ask me how I was feeling when she was finally able to get back to me, but she had the grace not to make a show of being bored while she answered questions she must have been asked a dozen times before. It was her job to answer them, as best she could, but it was also her responsibility as one afterliving individual to another, and she took that seriously.

  “Just give me a few tips,” I said, trying not to sound as if I were pleading. “The things to watch out for that only fellow zombies know…you know what I mean.”

  “Not really,” she lied, perhaps diplomatically. “The afterliving aren’t all alike, any more than the living are. One zombie’s meat is another man’s brain, as they say, inaccurately and in really bad taste.”

  I didn’t laugh at the appalling joke, but that was because it was so appalling, not because I’d lost my sense of humor.

  She hastened to add: “On which subject, you might find that your appetites are a trifle peculiar. I’m assured that the cravings are no odder, and no worse, than the ones living women routinely get when they’re pregnant, but I wouldn’t know. Our dietary requirements are supposedly slightly different, although the physiologists haven’t worked out exactly how yet, let alone why. Don’t worry about it is the only real advice I can give you on that score. You’ll work out your likes and dislikes in time.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What else? Be careful of direct sunlight, of course—I know that one.”

  “Right. Most indoor light won’t hurt your eyes or skin, but you might have to be careful if we get a sunny day tomorrow—daylight can be fierce, even though window-glass. When you get out, you’ll have to be very careful, even if you only have go out in order to get back and forth from the Center. It’s June, unfortunately, and the sun is higher in the sky than at any other time of the year. It might not feel hot, but the danger of burning is very real. You’ll be given factor-32 sun cream when you’re discharged, and a repeat prescription for more. Use it religiously.”

  “Right,” I said, hoping that I’d remember.

  “When the sedation wears off, you’ll almost certainly get restless leg syndrome and various prickling sensations—but all that will fade once you start on physiotherapy at the Center. To be perfectly honest, calling it physiotherapy is distinctly overgenerous, but it is exercise, and it will get you fit. Stan runs the Center, so we have to put up with his little idiosyncrasies. You’ll find out what I mean soon enough. Apart from that…you might as well take things as they come, because there’s really not much I can do to prepare you for it.”

  “I’ll still be able to play football, won’t I? I mean…obviously, I’ll still be able…but I won’t have lost my skills?”

  “Probably not,” she said, with what seemed to be undue wariness. “But that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to get a game. What kind of football did you play?” Past tense again.

  “Real football—soccer. Does it make a difference?”

  “Not in practical terms—I only asked because we have an ex-rugby player at the Center. Bad tackle caused a cerebral haemorrhage. I thought you might have something useful in common. He’s the next youngest, in terms of death date, after you and me, at least until….” She changed the subject abruptly: “I’ll bring you a laptop once the consultant gives me the thumbs up—then you can do your own research—but you’d be wise not to believe all you read. And if you’re hoping to catch up with your email, forget it. Your account will have been cancelled. You password won’t work.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. It was the first practical reminder that feeling like myself wasn’t sufficient to being myself. No matter how similar to the old me the new me turned out to be, the old me was still legally dead. All my socioeconomic contracts would have to be remade…if possible.

  I still had the mirror that Pearl had given me earlier. I’d been looking into it at intervals for hours. I took yet another peep. “Can’t complain, I suppose,” I said. “I was no oil painting before. My facial hair will still grow, won’t it?” I wasn’t absolutely certain about that, because my face looked uncannily smooth from where I was propped up on my pillows.

  “Yes,” she confirmed, “your hair will grow, on your chin as well as your head. It will probably be markedly different in texture, though—softer and silkier. I gave you a depilatory this morning, before you woke up. You won’t need another for several days—maybe a week.”

  “Thanks,” I said, absent-mindedly. “Could you possibly let Helena in to see me before tomorrow, if she comes, or are you absolutely committed to following doctor’s orders?”

  “Absolutely committed,” she told me.

  It didn’t seem to be an appropriate time for making jokes about the legendary slavishness of zombies, so I didn’t attempt one.

  “Do you know how many other people were killed in the bomb blast that took me out?” I asked, after a slight pause.

  “Seven,” she told me. “Thirty-four injured, not counting trivial cuts and bruises. The worst one ever in Reading, and the worst ever credited to England’s Defenders, although there’ve been higher casualty-counts in Slough and London, courtesy of jihadists. I was on duty when the victims began to come in—I don’t usually work A and E, but it was all hands on deck that day. It caused some problems for the patients already in care, but mercifully not enough to generate a morality-blip. The last thing you need after an incident like that is to trigger an automatic inquiry.”

  “And how many of the seven were zombifiable?” I asked, not having much interest in the intricacies of Hospital Trust computer monitoring.

  “Five attempts were made, but you were the only one who pulled through. The burns on your head, torso and arms were superficial—it was a singl
e piece of flying glass that actually killed you, slicing cleanly through your heart and lung. The people who caught the nails that were packed around the plastic explosive weren’t so lucky—their wounds were far messier.”

  “Lucky,” I repeated, with no particular inflection.

  “Very,” she insisted.

  Obviously she wasn’t about to license any suspicion that being reincarnated as a zombie might be considered less than lucky. How could she? She’d thought being alive was so unlucky that she’d killed herself.

  Maybe some day, I thought, being a zombie would seem the preferable option to all the living, and no one would even hang around long enough to breed, thus bringing the human story to a terminus of sorts. Zombies could enjoy sex—Resurrection Ward was very clear about that—but thus far, there was no known case of any female zombie falling pregnant. Nobody was yet prepared to declare it absolutely impossible, but nobody was yet prepared to rule it possible either.

  I took the safer route in the discussion of luck. “Taking a piece of flying glass full in the chest has to be reckoned pretty unlucky, in my book,” I observed. “One of those freaks of chance that make truth stranger than fiction. Being within the blast-radius of a suicide bomb in Berkshire was pretty unlucky, too, given that the newsblips keep telling us that we’re still more likely to get struck by lightning, let alone drown in the bath. Where did the psychopathic idiot blow himself up, exactly? I’ve been thinking hard, but the last thing I can remember is going to the library in my lunch break to restock my e-reader.”

  “The ground floor of the Oracle, near the entrance to TK Maxx.”

  “I must have been taking a short cut back to the office. Why there? It’s not exactly ghetto territory.”

  “I don’t think he was trying to target the immigrant population as such, or even protesting specifically about demographic change in Reading. He was just making a point.”

  “The point in question being that the self-appointed defenders of mythical England are just as crazy as the self-appointed defenders of the mythical Prophet—that if Islam can produce suicide bombers by the score, the Bulldog Breed can’t be found wanting in the fatal fanaticism department. At least there’s no possible question of resurrecting suicide bombers…is there?”