Zombies Don't Cry (5 page)

“A Pearl before swine,” I muttered, pointlessly. I didn’t smile. Nor did Mum.

Kirsten arrived home then, but I couldn’t bear to talk to her. I never even saw Dad that evening. I needed to be alone with my burning, brooding, tragically unrequited love.

It was still burning and brooding the next morning, but I no longer needed to be alone, and certainly not with Mum, even though she was still off work.

“I’m going to the Center at the old Sally Ann,” I told her, when breakfast as out of the way. “Got to introduce myself, find out what’s what.”

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

“Don’t be silly—it’s only a few hundred yards. I’ve got to make a start on facing up to the world, facing up to reality. I need to show my face—let the neighbors get used to it. I need to walk.”

“You only got out of hospital yesterday,” she protested. “You
died
, Nicky. I don’t care how well you feel—you
died
.”

I knew that, but I could understand why she felt obliged to emphasize the point.

“I know, Mum,” I said, quietly. “But I’m up and about again now. I have to make new beginning. I need to start making some new friends...because it wouldn’t be fait to put too much pressure on the old ones, would it?”

“I’m your mother,” she said, although I hadn’t actually accused her of anything. “I still love you, as much as I ever did. I always will.”

“I know, Mum,” I told her, “but I still need to go to the Center, and I’d really like to walk. I’m a Knight of the Living Dead now: I have to undergo my trials by ordeal, or I’ll never get to touch the Holy Grail, let alone drink lemonade out of it.”

She didn’t smile—but she didn’t shed a tear either.

“Be careful,” she said.

“I will,” I promised—and I was.

Actually, there wasn’t any real need to be careful. I didn’t see a single rottweiler taking his ED member out for a walk, and most of the non-white faces I passed in the street, including the “white” ones, simply looked the other way, with a kind of feigned negligence that seemed oddly polite, in its fashion. There were exceptions, though—mostly people I met before I got to the end of the street, who had known me when I lived at home, before I went away to university. They knew who I was, in spite of my changed appearance, and some of them made a point of saying hello, or at least nodding. I was grateful for that.

Once I’d turned the corner, though, it was different. I’d been sent to Coventry. I almost regretted the fact that no one even made a sign of the cross with his index-fingers, let alone hurled holy water at me and shouted in Latin, or do whatever Muslims do when they’re attempting to repel evil djinn.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I started to make new friends even before I reached the double-doors of the old Salvation Army Hall, catching up and falling into step with two members of the afterliving—one a middle-aged female and one an old man—who were headed in the same direction, coming from the direction of the old Bail Hostel in South Street. It was obvious, even from behind, what they were, because of the broad-brimmed hats.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Nick Rosewell.”

They paused, and peered at me through their dark glasses.

“But your friends call you Nicky,” the woman said. “Pearl told us to expect you. I’m Marjorie, and this is Martin—but
his
friends call him Methuselah.”

I could see why. Marjorie looked as if she’d died in her late forties, but Martin-alias-Methuselah must have been at least seventy when he’d passed over.
Poor old sod,
I thought
. Condemned to look seventy-five forever. It’s like that old saw about your features getting stuck if the wind happens to change while you’re pulling a face.

“
Everybody
calls me Methuselah,” the old man added. “I don’t mind in the least—it gives me something to aim for.”

“Aim for?” I queried, although I really shouldn’t have been caught on the hop.

“
And Methuselah lived an hundred and eighty and seven years
,” he quoted, sententiously, “
and begat Lamech
…except that I’m not so sure about begetting Lamech. I’ll settle for the years.”

“Right,” I said. “I can see that I’m going to feel at home at the Center. Are you members of what Dr. Hazelhurst referred to as the
lunatic fringe?
”

“Not me,” said Methuselah. “Marjorie is—although it’s slightly cheeky of you to ask.”

“I can see that you’re going to be a veritable treasure,” Marjorie assured me. “We don’t have many young people, and it’s no bad thing to be cheekier than Jim. He’s a nice chap, but I must admit that I find his constant pessimism annoying. We’ll all
love
you.” She didn’t specify exactly who she meant by
all
.

“That’s nice,” I said, “but I’ve already got a girl-friend.” I just slipped out. It wasn’t
exactly
a lie. After all, I was still in love.

“Well then, I’ll have my work cut out, won’t I?” Marjorie said. “I’ve never minded a bit of competition, though. And I always get my man.” She smiled—and the smile, although it was a trifle hollow, made her look rather attractive. She might have been slightly intimidating in life, but the paleness of afterlife had softened her strong features a little, and she had a good figure, robust but shapely.

“She’s teasing,” Methuselah supplied, helpfully. “She means the bit about not being intimidated by competition, though—that’s why Andy makes patronizing remarks about the lunatic fringe. She was famous you know, in life, and she’s gradually fighting her way back to the top.”

Marjorie seemed a trifle ambivalent about that revelation, but she took it in good part. “You won’t have heard of me,” she said. “Marjorie Claridge. I was….”

“A mouthpiece for Greenpeace,” I put, swiftly. “My sister’s a keen member. She’ll be tickled pink to know that I’ve met you—I don’t think she has any idea that you’re in Reading.”

“I post anonymously these days,” Marjorie said, “and keep my address secret. Not that I like lying low…it’s just that my old friends, grateful as they are for my continued support…well, it’s complicated.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I understand,” I said, thinking, in my naivety, that I did.

We had reached the steps of the Hall already. The words SALVATION ARMY were still engraved in the sandstone lintel above the sturdy double door. There wasn’t even a piece of paper pinned to the batten to inform passers-by or new members that it was now an Afterlife Center.

“Have you met Stan yet?” Methuselah asked, as climbed the four steps leading up to the doors.

“No,” I said. “Pearl mentioned him, though. He runs the place, right?”

“He thinks he does” Marjorie murmured, as we opened one of the battens of the double door and slipped through. “And we humor him, poor lamb.”

She was joking, of course. Stan came to meet me as soon as he realized that he had a newcomer to add to his flock. A lamb he was not, and not just because he must have been at least sixty when he died. He was an alpha ram from top to toe. He wasn’t that much taller than me—no more than five-eleven, I estimated—but he was very solidly build and looked very tough indeed, in spite of his albinism. He had a shaven head and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. He was wearing track-suit bottoms and a black T-shirt, which exposed numerous tattoos on both upper arms.
Dragons two, roses three,
I though, quoting it to myself like a football score.

Aloud, all I said was: “Pleased to meet you—I’m Nick Rosewell.”

“And your friends call you Nicky,” he said, putting the seal on my fate. “Pearl told us to expect you. I’m Stanley Blake—Stan to my friends. We’ll be starting rockmobility in a quarter of an hour or so, but there’s time for Methuselah to show you round first, if he doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Methuselah said. “I don’t have to do retraining programs, like the younger folk, so I have more free time,” he added, by way of explanation. “Not that I still get my pension, of course—I’m on minimal dole, just like everyone else.”

“There’s not much to see, I’m afraid,” Stan resumed, “except for the workstations…you can use them for your retraining courses, if you want…although I gather that you’ve got a home to go to.”

“I’m staying with my parents for now,” I confirmed, although I really wanted to ask him what “rockmobility” might be. “I’ve got a workstation there—it used to be in my flat but…well, you understand.”

“Sure,” said Stan. “Don’t worry—you’ll be at home here too. You look pretty fit, for a newreborn—sportsman?”

“Just Sunday Morning football in Palmer Park—soccer, that is. I hear you’ve got a rugby player.”

“Jim Peel,” Stan confirmed, looking round but obviously not spotting the prop forward in question. “Did some weights myself, a long time ago, a little boxing—no good with my feet though…not for kicking, anyway.”

“Much better at tripping the light fantastic, no doubt?” I quipped.

He grinned wryly. “You’ve been talking to Pearl,” he said, seemingly jumping to an erroneous conclusion. “Don’t take her sarcasm too seriously. She can be sharp, but her heart’s in absolutely the right place.”

“Never doubted it,” I assured him, with perfect candor.

Stan excused himself then, handing me back to Methuselah. Marjorie Claridge had already slipped away, apparently having spotted a vacant workstation.

As Stan had said, there wasn’t a lot to see. The Hall itself was moderately large—about thirty meters by twenty-five, but it was a trifle bare, apart from the mezzanine where the workstations had been installed. There was a small kitchenette, with a serving-hatch, but it didn’t have much in it except for a sink, a couple of cupboards, a coffee-maker and a microwave oven. There was also a store-room, off the corridor that led to the back door, but we didn’t go in to inspect it.

“Stan sleeps in there, although he isn’t supposed to, according to the Council regs,” Methuselah explained. “There’s a second bunk, in case of emergencies, but the Hostel’s only a couple of hundred yards away, so it doesn’t get used much. Most of the gang live there, although Jim stays with his parents, like you, and those who have jobs mostly have their own places…not Pearl though; she lives in the accommodation-block at the Berks—what they used to call a “nurses’ home” in my young days, although that’s not politically correct now that junior doctors use it too. And this is Stan’s blaster.”

Stan’s “blaster”—an old fashioned audio unit with twin speakers nearly as tall as me, was the only substantial item of furniture on the floor of the hall, except for a handful of tatty armchairs and two trestle-tables, each with half a dozen folding chairs presently laid flat on top of them.

“Rockmobility,” Methuselah said, as if that explained everything. Obviously, he thought Pearl had told me as much about the Center as she’d apparently told the people in the Center about me. Lowering his voice, he added: “We’ll spread the chairs out later, when Stan’s done his thing—make the place more comfortable. Have to humor him, though, as Marjorie says.”

“He thinks he runs the place,” I observed, flippantly. “Poor lamb.”

I’d lied to my mother in the heat of the moment; I
was
Frankenstein’s monster. I had been brought back from the dead. End of story.

I hadn’t been stitched together from spare parts of other people’s bodies, but I’d been stitched together from the debris of my own. I had died. My heart had stopped; brain activity had faded to undetectability. Consciousness—the soul, in the only meaningful sense of the word—had fled its mortal envelope, leaving nothing but a husk. Then I had been reanimated: brought back, if not to life, at least to a condition resembling life, and to a condition seemingly identical to consciousness. Frankenstein’s monster to a T.

According to the pope himself, I no longer had a soul—the one I’d had was now “with God”. Mind you, it wasn’t that long ago since once of the jolly old soul’s predecessors had ruled that human clones couldn’t possibly have souls, thus condemning half of every pair of identical twins to soullessness. None of them had minded; why should I?

In any case, the real point is that even Frankenstein’s monster had only become a monster because other people rejected him, refusing to consider him one of their own. Had he not been rejected, even by his creator—a poor excuse for a modern Prometheus
he
was—the Adam of the Resurrected might have been good and kind, mild and generous, loving and caring. Just like me.

I
was
Frankenstein’s monster, but there was no need at all to be ashamed of the fact—and I wasn’t.

Except, of course that it wasn’t as simple as that.

There was, after all, a sense in which I
hadn’t
been dead—not entirely, at any rate. When the heart has ceased to beat and the brain to thrill with electricity, and consciousness has fled, life still remains in individual cells within individual tissues—and every one of those cells carries the entire genetic complement of the human being of which it is, or was, a part. In principle, every one of those cells might, by means of clever biotech wizardry, be reduced to pre-blastular innocence, to become not merely a totipotent stem cell but a substitute ovum, merely requiring a tiny electrical impulse to spark its redevelopment.

Today’s Burkers don’t cut it as fine as that. They work on a more lavish scale, They take, not one, but a thousand still-living cells from a body whose
person
—soul, if you like—is dead, restore their innocence, enhance their potency, and then send them back into the not-quite-completely-dead body like a vast invading army. There they collaborate with other still-living cells, reanimating the only-just-dead and cannibalizing the irredeemably-dead, all in the interests of restoring general life and general consciousness to the whole body, restarting the heart-beat, reactivating the thrill of the neurons and, in consequence, resurrecting the person, and maybe renewing the soul.

In a sense, therefore, the dead are not being
brought back
to life at all; it’s merely the life that still remained within them, helpless and fugitive, that has been rescued, redeemed and set free again. The processs isn’t a death followed by an afterlife at all, but a mere temporary diminution of life, followed by its reignition: medicine, not magic; heroic measures, not miracle-working.

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.”