Zombies Don't Cry (6 page)

“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 special 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.

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.

If it really were the case that the freezing of apparent age during rebirth is a deliberate contrivance—in case you’re in any doubt, it isn’t—the ban on resurrecting children would be a further side-effect of a choice, rather than a corollary of an inconvenient necessity. Experiments showed way back in the 2020s that children even babies,
could
be resurrected using SSCs, just as easily as adults—but that they would then remain existentially becalmed indefinitely. Some Burkers, of course—with the plaintive support of numerous bereaved parents—wanted such resurrections to be licensed anyway, on the grounds that future science was sure to throw up technics that would allow the Peter Pans in question to resume growing up at a later date, but Parliament had refused to do that. After all, the bereaved parent vote wasn’t very large, and the average age of MPs was way up in the fifties; they might have been in a hurry to get the legislation through, but they knew where their priorities lay.

Maybe prohibiting the resurrection of children was the right thing to do and maybe it wasn’t—it’s one of those issues that generates a lot of philosophical debate, even in pubs, let alone polite dinner parties—but the real mystery, as I said just now, is why the decision ever had to be made. Why don’t SSCs rejuvenate as well as reanimate?

If they did, of course, they’d be as much use to the living as they are to the dead—everybody would want them, and Burkers wouldn’t be Burkers but Basils, called after Basil Hallward, the artist who gifts Dorian Gray with potentially-eternal youth and beauty in Oscar Wilde’s classic moral tale.

On the other hand, one has to consider the corollaries of rejuvenation seriously. Presumably, a brain that was rejuvenated rather than merely restored, would lost much of its accumulated knowledge and wisdom; the afterliving really would be very different people, freshly reborn—and so would the living who had to go back in time rather than simply being arrested in their progress. While not exactly a can of worms, possibilities like that wouldn’t be entirely Utopian. If they offered humankind a bed of roses, it wouldn’t be without its thorns.

But still the question remains: given that there is no vast Conspiracy of Mighty Burkers, isn’t it weird that SSCs do what they do, in the way that they do it? If you ask me—not that anyone ever does, given that I only have a lousy English Lit degree and practically everybody else in the afterlife community thinks they know better than me because they’re so old and they think I’m just a pretty face—it must be to do with gene-switching. The SSCs themselves are, of course, switch-free by definition, but the residual life they’re working on, when they begin to resuscitate and mimic the cells of the individual they’re resurrecting, they’re operating on and taking their models from cells and tissues that have already reached a particular stage in the switching process: cells that already have their internal clocks set, in a way that can’t be wound back.

That, I think, is why all the reborn start from where they left off in life, in terms of their apparent antiquity. It doesn’t matter as much as you might imagine, though, because Stan Blake is absolutely right. Even Methuselahs can get fit—and they have every incentive to do so, once they’re convinced that age is no longer taking a further toll…or taking it much more slowly than before.

One corollary of that, of course, is that even Methuselahs could make an army, if they wanted to.

Mercifully, they don’t. I give you my word of honor on that. We are not a warlike kind.

* * * * * * *

By the time I’d been turning up to the Center for a week, the “physiotherapy” was getting to be the most enjoyable part of the day, so far as I was concerned. It only took me five days to become the only person in the squad who could actually last the full two hours along with Stan, and I flattered myself that I looked good doing it.

Stan was over the moon, if only because it gave him an excuse to carry on to the end himself. When I suggested to him that perhaps we might include some music that I liked along with
Highway to Hell
and
Shout at the Devil
, though, his immediate reaction was to frown.

“All in good time, Son,” he said. “You’re the new boy, remember—can’t start throwing your weight around yet.”

I decided that the
status quo
was tolerable, at least for a few weeks longer. It wasn’t as if Stan didn’t have standards. We did do
The Time Warp
, pretty much according to the instructions in the lyric, but were never called upon, even in jest, to resurrect
The Monster Mash
.

The practical advice sessions and counseling were less enjoyable, especially when the powers-that-be sent living hirelings in to do the advising. Nobody at the Center minded Andy Hazelhurst poking around, because we knew that he was just a self-seeking glory-grubber out for what he could get, and therefore had no interest at all in feeding us committee-produced bullshit, but everyone resented the script-followers who did nothing else.

I hated them even more than most, because their attitude and techniques reminded me strongly of my old job. Now that I was the one being soothed with weak encouragement and hollow pretence, I began to understand a little better how my own clients had felt about it. When I was mopping up after rockmobility on the last day of my first week, I confided to a couple of the others that I really wasn’t looking forward to that afternoon’s scheduled personal counselling session.

“You’ll get used to it,” Stan told me. “Just let it flow over you, like so much background noise. I know it’s difficult, when they’re trying to engage us all the time by asking questions, but it’ll only take a fortnight or so for you to build up a repertoire of stock answers, so you won’t have to engage your brain at all.”

“But you need to keep that smart mouth of yours under control,” Methuselah advised. “Don’t piss them off—especially the retraining salesmen. They know as well as you do that it’s all a farce, but they like to go through the motions without any fuss. Everybody benefits if it all goes smoothly. Sarcasm doesn’t help.”

I knew from long experience on the other side of the questionnaire that the Wise Old Man was right, although I couldn’t help pointing out the irony that the only person at the Center who had a real job at present was Pearl, who was just as sarcastic as me.

“Yes,” Andy Hazelhurst put in, having been eavesdropping on the conversation—it was difficult not to, given they layout of the tables and chairs—“but there’s actually a demand for zombie nurses. Your chances of getting on to that particular retraining program, with your English Lit degree, are a bit slim.”

“If you could get proper funding for your research,” I retorted, “You could pay us a wage for serving as your guinea-pigs. That way we’d all have
proper jobs
. Even Methuselah.”

“You have as much to gain from my investigations as I do, if not more,” he told us, mimicking the patience of a saint. “Every discovery I make is of immediate relevance to you, and if I’m fortunate enough to make a significant one, it will have an immediate impact on your lives. You’re volunteering in the best possible cause. You’re the true knights of the living dead.”

Nobody had laughed at that joke for years.

“What you ought to be doing,” Jim Peel told the doctor, “is working flat out to find a way to give us back our skin color and allow us to pass for living…that would really rehabilitate us.”

“”No, Jim,” Marjorie put in. “That’s not the way to go about it. We shouldn’t be trying to go into hiding, to conceal what we are. We should be trying to change social attitudes, to fight, not just for ourselves, but for justice.”

“Just like you,” Jim came back at her. “Except, of course, that you
are
in hiding, concealing who and where you are in your postings, whether you’re ranting about zombie rights or the radical green agenda. I’ll settle for the melanin.”

Andy Hazelhurst hastened to pour oil on the briefly-troubled waters, or at least to deflect attention away from the immediate dispute with a little bluster. “Actually, he said, “that
is
one of the lines I’m working on, in the lab—but that kind of biochemical exploration only requires tissue-cultures, imagination and patience. I know that it must seem to you that all the measurements I take, and the little things I ask you do or swallow, are a bit pointless, but I have to be a trifle vague about what hypotheses I’m trying to test. We have to avoid the uncertainty principle, to the extent that’s compatible with the principle of informed consent. If you know what results I’m expecting or aiming for, it’s bound to affect the likelihood of their being produced. I give you as much explanation as I can, but you’ll just have to take it on trust that I really am trying to produce results that will work to your benefit.”

“As every anthropologist knows,” Marjorie told him, mischievously “the only way to understand an alien culture is to go native. We’d be a lot more inclined to trust you if you were one of us. You’re a doctor—you must have a hundred convenient ways of killing yourself ready to hand.”

The doctor took the suggestion in good part, laughing even though it hadn’t really been a joke. “Then I’d have to retrain,” he said. “It would take at least two years to get back to where I am now, even if everything went smoothly. I can’t afford to lose two years—it’s a highly competitive field, you know.” He always weathered such petty storms with ease, keeping his eye on the distant prize.

“What I think you should be working on,” Methuselah put in, “is a way to give us dotards a bit more bodily strength and resilience. “It’s all very well for Stan to bang on and on about how even eighty-year olds can keep fit, but I’ve been doing his accursed rockmobility for four years now, and all that practice hasn’t given me the ability to do what young Nicky’s been able to do within a week—stay the distance, that is. If you want to earn my undying gratitude, Andy, give me back my twenty-seven-year-old body. I’ll try to live forever anyway, but I’d enjoy it a hell of a lot more….”

“Just give me time,” the doctor said. “I’ll do my best. Only hang on long enough, and you’ll get your reward eventually.”

“And rockmobility will help you hang on,” Stan put in, “even if you can’t stay the distance every morning.”

“Would you want your twenty-seven-year-old brain back, though?” I asked him, having already given the matter some thought. “Would you want the memories and wisdom you acquired after that age to be wiped out?”

“That wouldn’t be a necessary corollary,” Methuselah said—although I couldn’t see how he could be so sure about it. “My regenerated body obviously has a resilience that the old one lacked—adding in the appearance of youth would be a superficial thing, essentially cosmetic.”

I had to leave the group broke up then, because my counsellor had arrived, but I survived the session without any undue stress on either side. She not only left convinced that I was perfectly sane, and adapting very well to my new condition, but that she had played some small part in that success herself—thus, no doubt, making her pathetic existence seem almost worthwhile, at least until she saw her next living client.

I sought out Methuselah again to tell him that I had followed his advice. He was sitting on his own; Andy Hazelhurst had gone, Stan was in conversation with Jim Peel on the far side of the room, and Marjorie was back on the workstations, pounding out yet another article.

“It was fine,” I reported. “You and Stan are right—no point in worrying, just settle into the groove, keep my smart mouth zipped, and get it over with. I’m not looking forward to the retraining consultant on Monday, though. Whatever she wants to fix me up with, I know I’m not going to like it.”

“Same principle,” he said. “Go with the flow, and be polite. All you need is patience—you especially. You don’t need rejuvenating to get the full benefit of our afterlife.”

“Andy’s right,” I told him. “You’ll get your full reward too, in time.”

“Sure,” he answered, plainly unconvinced. “When I look your age again, I’ll give you a run for your money with young Pearl. You might have to get a move on there, mind—now you’re here to spur him on, Jim will be stepping up the pressure.”

“I’ve already got a girl-friend,” I told him.

“A living girl-friend?”

“Yes. We were practically engaged before…the bomb.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Methuselah assured me. “Living boys still chase zombie girls, because their raging hormones aren’t fussy, and they’re prone to all sorts of eccentric fetishism, but living girls won’t have anything to do with zombie boys, even to piss off their parents.”