Zombies Don't Cry Page 6

  Nevertheless, it would be a brave and foolhardy zombie who could look a living man in the dark and sullen eyes and say: “I am no monster. I am no different from you.” Because we are different—and if we are made to be monsters by rejection, then we will monsters too. It isn’t our choice, but our destiny.

  I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it’s really up to you. You might think, dear reader, that you’re personally guiltless, that it wasn’t you, as such, who made Frankenstein’s monster into a monster: that it was really Mary Shelley, or the way of the world. Even if you recognized the real villains when you read the book or watched the movie, though, there’s still a sense in which you share in the responsibility, because it’s your world that it’s the way of, and your preconceptions that Mary Shelley was taking for granted and interrogating. You can’t get off the hook simply by protesting that your own hands are blood-free, because you’ve just washed them.

  Perhaps you don’t care—after all, you have a choice as to whether to care or not, and who am I to say that you should?

  * * * * * * *

  If I said that the Afterlife Center was jam-packed with friendly faces, I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth, although most of them made a sterling effort. Arguably, I’d got the best first.

  Methuselah really was keen to tell me anything I wanted to know, because that was the role he’d adopted along with his nickname: in life, he had only been a run-of-the-mill pensioner named Martin Creston; in afterlife, he was Methuselah, Zombie Rehab’s archetypal Wise Old Man. I liked him.

  Marjorie was effusively friendly, when she could actually tear herself away from her anonymous propagandizing—not so much, I assumed, because she fancied my youthful zombie body, although she put on a flirtatious pretence, but because she really was a committed believer in the necessity of community and mutual support. I liked her too.

  Stan really did want everyone to feel at home, because it was his Center and his flock, and he wanted everything to run smoothly and go with a swing...which was, I suppose, the logic of rockmobility. I even liked rockmobility, once I’d found out what it was.

  One of the things that the Afterlife Center’s program was supposed to provide, according to what Methuselah called “the Council regs,” was “physiotherapy.” Very few zombies came through the process of rebirth as smoothly as I had, mainly because the great majority were so much older, and had suffered much greater deterioration in life. In most cases, their tissues required much more radical rebuilding than mine had. A lot of them came out of their “pupation” with muscles that were, in effect, new: unpractised and untrained. I still felt like me, physically as well as mentally, but even zombies who remained convinced that their souls had made the transfer from life to afterlife relatively unscathed often felt that they had been reborn into new bodies that were in dire need of exercise.

  “Exercise” was a more accurate term than “physiotherapy,” for what we actually got, if not what we really needed. There were no ex-trained physiotherapists among the zombies of Reading, and the living physiotherapists attached to the local Hospital Trust were occupied more than full-time with the needs of the living. What we had instead was Stanley Blake.

  No one, so far as I could ascertain, knew exactly what Stan had done in life—apart from “a few weights” and “a little boxing”—but the most popular hypotheses were that he had either been a drill sergeant in the army or a professional dancer. Personally, I thought both guesses were absurd. No self-respecting drill-sergeant or dancing pro would ever have invented a monstrosity like rockmobility, which consisted of doing complex sequences of physical exercises, admittedly involving a lot of jumping around that might have borne a faint resemblance to street-dancing, to the accompaniment of loud, driving music.

  Stan was a Classic Rock fan, and not just any Classic Rock. He was a Heavy Metal man—an old headbanger. He wasn’t old enough to remember the heyday of Heavy Metal—even Methuselah would have been closer to the cradle than his teens back then—but that only meant that he had a true scholar’s sense of completism, that he felt capable not only of knowing everything about it but of a kind of definitive appreciation of its merits and uses. The fact that no one else agreed with him didn’t bother him in the least; his affection was truly religious—although that was a distinctly ironic observation, when one considered the titles of some of his favorite tracks.

  Marjorie Claridge had just been modest when she’d owned up to being a member of the Center’s lunatic fringe. By the time I’d been in the Center for two hours, I knew that as long as Stan thought he was in charge, lunacy would be not be in short supply.

  Stan scheduled two hours of rockmobility every morning except Sundays—which meant that everybody who was present, from Methuselah to Pearl, had to line up facing him, and copy his hectic but strangely rhythmic movements to the best of their ability, until they dropped from exhaustion, while the voices of testosterone-crazed young men echoed from the walls and screeched incomprehensibly in their ears.

  It was bizarre, but I have to admit that I really did like it, if only because I could do it—better, at least, than almost everyone else. I could claim no moral credit for that—it was simply a matter of age and the fact that my muscles and nerves had survived the ED suicide-bomb almost unscathed—but it still made me feel good. By the end of the week, I was a convert to the cause, even though I didn’t really like the music that much. I could see the point.

  “The thing is,” Stan explained, once he had cottoned on to the fact that I was ready to sympathize with him, “that there are certain respects in which we’re not like the living, and we not only have to accept that but make the most of it. The living all start off as babes in arms, and then they age, at a more-or-less steady rate. If they look after themselves, they can stay fit, even into their sixties and their seventies—hell, I’ve known eighty-year-olds who could still cut it down the gym…God, I wish we had a gym of our own, but….well, maybe someday, if Marjorie can get the banners flying….

  “The point is, though, that we’re in a different situation entirely. We don’t start off equal. The law might be changed soon to lower the age of eligibility from eighteen to sixteen, but nobody’s in any hurry to start turning out afterlifer babies who’ll be permanently stuck in infancy, so we start afterlife from various points in a spectrum that extends from earliest adulthood all the way through to Methuselah’s age, and there’s a sense in which we’re stuck with that. God knows why—it would be a lot pleasanter, I guess, if we got rejuvenated as well as resurrected, so that we all ended up your age, but we don’t, and that’s that….

  “Anyway, there’s a world of difference between a living person of sixty-one and an afterlifer whose death-date was sixty-one, like me. I’m just as ugly now as I was before, but I not aging any longer…or, if I am, not as fast. I’m not prepared to take it for granted that I can stay this way forever, if I’m careful enough and lucky enough, but I’m damned if I can see any reason why I shouldn’t make the absolute best of myself for as long as superhumanly possible. The living can throw in the towel if they want to, and just let getting older take its course, but we needn’t, and we shouldn’t, no matter where or when we start from. We can get fit, no matter what age of death we started from, and we can stay fit…even if we’re as old as Methuselah, let alone sixty-one. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you, Son? We don’t even know what we might be capable of yet, physically speaking, so we have to do our damnedest to push ourselves. We have to exercise—we have to dance.

  “You get my point, don’t you, Nicky. You understand why I’m doing this for the group?”

  “Yes I do,” I told him.

  “And you see the logic of the hard-driving beat? You see why we need to stomp as hard as we can, and get the rhythm pounding in our chests, instead of prancing around to pretty music?”

  “I’m not entirely sure that the words of Highway to Hell convey the right message,” I opined, mildly, “but I see what you mean.�
�

  “It’s a Classic,” he said, with an injured frown. “The words are ironic.”

  “And I appreciate the irony,” I assured him.

  Once I was free again, Dr. Hazelhurst sidled up to me and whispered: “Teacher’s pet.” He had turned up five minutes after rockmobility was due to finish, although nobody had actually lasted the full two hours except Stan himself, and even Stan wasn’t crazy enough to carry on stomping on his own. The chairs had already been spread out, and the beneficiaries of Stan’s crude physiotherapy were slumped in them, making a gradual recovery.

  “I’m just the new guy,” I said. “It’s kind of him to take the trouble to explain. Do you come here often?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Three or four times a week, at least. Research.”

  “Research?” I queried.

  “Unfunded research,” he amplified, proudly. “On my own time.”

  “Very impressive,” I commented, as that seemed to be what he was fishing for.

  “Oh, it’s not because I’m possessed by a spirit of generosity,” he hastened to add, obviously feeling that false modesty was likely to go over better than false arrogance. “I’m doing it because it’s a good career move. The lack of official funding lessens the competition, and the field’s wide open, as I told you back at the Berks. I’m limited, of course, in the kinds of research I can do—access to equipment and all that—but simply having a sample available, at this stage of the game, is invaluable. It’s too small as yet to be really useful—Reading’s quite a small town, geographically speaking—but as it grows…anyway, I’m hoping to add you to my roster of volunteers. You’d be invaluable.”

  “All guinea-pigs are equal,” I told him. “I can’t possibly be any more invaluable than anyone else, so flattery will get you nowhere. What’s in it for me, if you’re the one who gets to be famous if and when you find something interesting?”

  “Come on, Nicky—you’re a smart fellow, even if you do only have a degree in English Lit. You know perfectly well that every afterliving individual has an interest in the speed of discovery being cranked up to the max. The more we know about afterlife, the better-placed the afterliving will be to make all the crucial decisions in afterlife…and the cleverer the Resurrection Men will become in saving people from permanent death, before and after.” He meant that not only would Burkers be able to zombify more dead people, but that they’d become better able to preserve the zombified from whatever it was zombies did instead of dying, if they were careless enough to fall victim to nasty accidents.

  “I’m flattered that you bothered to look up my educational qualifications,” I told him. “I might only have a degree in English Lit, but I’m not stupid enough to volunteer without knowing what I’m volunteering for. Any experimental sample you want to include me in, you’ll have to explain exactly what it is you’re doing and why—and to hell with double blinds and the placebo effect.”

  “No problem Nicky,” he assured me, blithely. “I’ll take that as a yes, then. In principle.”

  “As Stan says,” I told him, “we don’t know what we’re capable of yet, so we have to do our damnedest to find out, and hope that we’re only on a Highway to Hell in an ironic sense—so yes, I’ll help, provided that I know what I’m helping with.”

  “Great,” he said. “Pearl said I could count on you—she’s a good judge.”

  “You’re just saying that because she’s in love with you.” It just slipped out—but it didn’t seem out of place in the bantering context.

  He frowned: “Who told you that?” he asked, sharply.

  “Nobody,” I said. “I guessed. I watch Resurrection Ward.”

  “Well, don’t,” he said, meaning don’t guess rather than don’t watch Resurrection Ward. “And don’t say anything like that to Pearl, even in jest. She won’t think it’s funny.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, meekly.

  “She’ll probably be in later, when her shift finishes.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be heartbroken to have missed rockmobility,” I said, trying to restore the balance of banter.

  He condescended to smile. “It may be bizarre,” he said, “but it does work. To be honest, Blake’s doing a great job—if my tracking measurements show little else, as yet, they confirm that. Some of the people here really are in need of rehab, and he’s getting the job done, without any equipment whatsoever. He’s a good man.”

  “Never doubted it,” I said.

  Nurse Pearl did turn up later, in the early evening. By then, I’d discovered that her surname was Barleigh, suggesting that her parents had either been possessed of a wry sense of humor or none at all—probably the latter, given that they seemed to have taken such offense at her suicide that they’d virtually disowned her. Like Stan, she was regarded as more like a member of staff than an inmate—as the Center’s medical practitioner and Andy Hazelhurst’s research assistant—although she had no official status that would have allowed her to get paid for any such responsibility. She obviously took the same view of the necessities of our new society as Stan.

  I tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she was too busy. She told me that she was glad to see me, and hoped that I was settling in, but didn’t seem to have anything else to say. I concluded that, whether she was in love with Dr. Hazelhurst or not, she certainly wasn’t going to start giving me the eye any time soon. Not that it mattered.

  By the time I went back home on that first day I felt that Marjorie and Methuselah had been right. I did seem to fit in at the Center, even though there was no one there that would have had anything obvious in common with me when we were alive, and in spite of the fact that not everyone was as open-hearted as Methuselah, Marjorie and Stan. They all had problems of their own to preoccupy them; I understood that.

  As I’d anticipated, Kirsten was both surprised and pleased when I told her that I’d met Marjorie Claridge.

  “I thought she was dead and gone!” she said. “I didn’t even know she’d been resurrected, let alone that she was in Reading. She didn’t live here before. Maybe she’s in hiding.”

  “She doesn’t seem to be,” I said. “She’d surely be using a different name if she were. She did say that she posts anonymously these days, mind. Why would she be in hiding?”

  “You do know that she was murdered?”

  I hadn’t. “Something else we have in common, then,” I remarked.

  “Something else?” Kirsten queried, sceptically. “You were never a Greenpeace member.”

  I’d only mean that we were both afterliving, and was mildly surprised that Kirsten hadn’t realized that, but I felt obliged to follow up. “Oh, we’re bosom buddies now,” I said. “She fancies me—but she would, wouldn’t she, given that I’m the best looking bloke there. Jim Peel’s no competition, even though he’s pretty much the same age. He was a rugby player.”

  “Marjorie Claridge fancies you?”

  “Absolutely. Inevitable, as I say. I was fanciable before, although you probably didn’t notice, being my little sister—but now, I’m practically a rock star, and not just for lack of opposition. You should see me doing physical jerks to Highway to Hell. Enough to make any red-blooded zombie woman wet her knickers…and believe you me, there are some frustrated zombie ladies up at the old Salvation Army Hall. Afterlife is a better pepper-upper than HRT.”

  She hesitated, actually uncertain as to whether to believe me or not.

  “I’m joking,” I assured her, swiftly. “It’s me, Kirsty—wicked wit, remember.”

  She practically sighed with relief, although what she actually said was; “I knew that. I’m not an idiot.”

  It wasn’t until later, when I was in bed reviewing my day before trying to go to sleep, that it occurred to me to remember that there’s many a true word spoken in jest. No matter how fanciable I’d been, comparatively speaking, when I was alive, I really was in a situation now where I had very little opposition, and it really was the case that my apparent youth put me in a sp
ecial position in the afterlife community. I’d discussed the minority issue briefly with Pearl in the hospital but hadn’t really taken its consequences aboard, partly because she was young too, and there were no other zombies on the ward for the purposes of comparison. Given the points that Stan had been making about the benefits of exercise, though, it wasn’t implausible that afterlife really might reawaken female appetites more effectively than HRT, and even conceivable that Marjorie Claridge’s flirtatiousness wasn’t entirely a matter of jest.

  I even started thinking that Marjorie didn’t look at all bad, for a late-forty-something albino, before I reminded myself, sternly, that I already had a girl-friend…or, at least, was truly and irredeemably in love.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When you really think about it—as you inevitably begin to do, once you’ve been raised from the dead—the most peculiar thing about afterlife status isn’t the albinism at all, although that’s the most obvious change. The most peculiar thing is something that doesn’t change: the apparent age of the afterlifer. There’s no logic to that, in my opinion. Superstimulant stem cells ought to rejuvenate as well as reanimating. Given that they’re supposed to be restoring your body, they really ought to go all the way and do a thorough job.

  Conspiracy theorists, inevitably, argue that it’s all part of the plot, that it’s a deliberate ploy on the part of the International Brotherhood of Freeburkers and a key element of their incomprehensible plot to take over the world by becoming the ultimate Masters of Life and Afterlife. According to that line of crazy thinking, the late-dying afterliving could be restored to their physical prime, just as one would expect from an authentic elixir of life, but the Burkers don’t want that, firstly because it would make the afterliving young enough and virile enough to become a real fighting force, and secondly because it would enable them to breed. The second point, in the eyes of most conspiracy theorists, is critical. If the afterliving could have children, there really would be a possibility of them one day taking over the world and exterminating the living as a redundant nuisance. The age-freezing is thus seen as a side-effect or necessary corollary of sterilization. People who argue like that aren’t fazed by the apparent fact that afterliving individuals who died young also seem to be sterile—they just assume that the Burkers take special measures in those cases.