Zombies Don't Cry (10 page)

“I thought you ought to know that there’s some net-buzz building up, Pearl,” the older woman said, “about the accident and the hospital.”

“There’s always net-buzz,” Pearl said, tiredly.

“Did you know that the driver of the vehicle that caused the crash was a zombie?”

“No,” said Pearl, sitting up a little straighter. “He wasn’t brought into the Berks—they had to take some of the injured to Battle, and ferried a couple all the way to Abingdon General by helicopter. The paramedics probably separated him from the others on purpose, even though he was just another victim.”

Long-distance lorry-driving, I knew, was one of the few jobs to which zombies were often able to go back, largely because it was the kind of job that required minimal interaction with other people. Statistically speaking, it wasn’t all
that
surprising that the driver of the runaway artic had been a zombie—but that wouldn’t stop the kind of people who crossed their rigid forefingers at poor Pearl from trying to make something of it.

“Surely nobody’s claiming that the truck-driver caused the crash deliberately?” I said.

“Not everyone’s as careful about what they post as I am,” Marjorie told me, only a trifle sarcastically.

“But nobody’s going to believe that,” I said, not entirely confidently. “The rumor that his brakes were sabotaged is surely far more plausible.”

“In terms of the calculus of probability, you’re right,” Marjorie confirmed, “but rationality takes a back seat when net-buzz gets going. There’s the mortality blip at the hospital too. Perfectly understandable, of course, in the circumstances, but not entirely coincidental. There are people in the world capable of adding two and two and coming up with ninety-five. And it’s just possible—and this
is
coincidental—that I…well, I might not have helped.”

“Oh shit!” said Pearl. “What have you done, Marjorie?”

“It’s just that...with the aid of hindsight, you might have been right, Nicky, about some of my wording…and the timing maybe isn’t ideal. I had no idea, Pearl, honestly. I didn’t know about the accident until after I’d posted. The posting’s anonymous, of course, but…well, there are people out there who know who I am, and where I am….”

“What have you
done
, Marjorie?” Pearl repeated, icily.

“It’s really nothing to worry about,” I hastened to put in. “I was being oversensitive yesterday, Marjorie…it’s just a hypothetical argument, as you said, relating to an ongoing debate in the public arena. Nobody’s going to take the inference that you were actually affirming that the afterliving are morally entitled to go around killing the living…and
nobody
’s going to think it has anything to do with what happened today.”

“Advocating
what
?” Pearl put in, showing genuine alarm.

“It was an argument about assisted suicide, really,” Marjorie said, defensively. “It’s just that Nicky thought…and he might be right…that I might not have made that clear enough.”

Pearl swallowed hard, although she hadn’t actually taken a gulp of tea. She suppressed the alarm reaction, though, forcing herself to resume a perfect professional tranquility.

“It’s a storm in a teacup,” I affirmed. “Nothing will come of it.”

“You’re right,” Pearl agreed, with far less certainty than I would have preferred. “Nothing at all.”

“Can I walk you home anyway?” I asked. “I won’t make a pass—I promise.”

“Okay, then,” she said, only slightly unexpectedly.

“I’ll come with you,” Marjorie said. “I promise too.”

“Is your promise addressed to me, or to Nicky?” Pearl had sufficient presence of mind to quip—but none of us laughed.

This is not the place to embark on an elaborate discussion about the unfortunate corollaries of an age of instant communication, when everyone can be a newsgatherer and everyone a commentator. The topic has already been done to death—although I suppose it’s also typical of the era that it’s continually resurrected. The fact that selectorbots make it easy to string together a series of unconnected data in such a way as to synthesize an apparent pattern and add a suggestion of causality is so familiar that it’s surprising that anyone can any longer get suckered in by such frail factoid-combinations.

Unfortunately, the living brain is programmed to look for connections, because the whole basis of rational intelligence is the ability to find them. If only the mental sieve that separates the real connections from the false ones were more efficient, the living brain would be an even greater wonder than it is, and science would long ago have stamped superstition into the ground. Natural selection, alas, is mostly content to produce apparatus sufficient to help people to breed, and the burden of false connection is simply part of our genetic load.

Is it any different for the afterliving? Is the resurrected brain any better at applying the filter that separates out the intellectual wheat from the superstitious chaff? The simple answer, I suppose, is no—but in my opinion, it’s not as simple as that. I prefer to say:
not yet
.

The afterliving brain is not a product of natural selection. Nobody is naïve enough to believe that twenty-first-century Resurrection Men don’t discriminate, to a greater extent than the law demands and permits, and that makes the selection even more unnatural than it would otherwise be. Success in breeding is not an issue for the afterliving—not yet, anyhow—so the only things that matter, in determining the intellectual spectrum of the afterliving community, are who gets reborn and how long they afterlive. It’s not evident yet that the Mighty Burkers are showing a prejudice in favor of the scientifically-minded, but even if they aren’t, it
is
very evident that the unscientifically-minded are prejudiced against
them
. On average, therefore, one would expect the afterliving community—which has to be seen as a community, rather than merely a collection of individuals, because the phenomenon in question is collective as well as individual—to have better filters than the living community.

Nor is that the whole of the matter, because the filters in question aren’t fixed; they develop, and they remain capable of further development. If all else were equal, one would expect the afterliving community to develop better filters over time simply because of its members’ protracted longevity, but there are other factors in play too. I would contend, strongly, that the experience of afterlife is, in itself, conducive to persona development of that sort. Simply by virtue of being able to stand outside the living community, one gets a clearer view of its follies, and when one is very likely to suffer from the fallout of those follies, even at the trivial levels of being subjected to attempted exorcisms by errant Afro-Anglicans, one is also very likely to have one’s awareness of their absurdity sharpened.

In brief, we zombies start off, on average, smarter than the living, and everything we experience is conducive to making us progressively smarter still—and when I say
progressively
, I mean it. Not that I’m implying that the living are no longer making progress, of course—Heaven forbid!—but I am implying, in my own sweet way, that of all the progress that is being currently being made in the world, and is likely to be made in the future, if any of us have a future, a disproportionate amount of it is being and will be made by the afterliving. It’s politically incorrect to say so, of course, but what the hell. The truth will out, and the truth is that we’re not only already better than you are, and getting further ahead all the time, but that you ought to be as glad of the fact as we are.

After all, if zombies don’t save the world from the godawful mess that the living have left it in after a hundred thousand years of sole control, who will?

All we need is time, and the freedom to act.

Will we get it?

Who can tell?

* * * * * * *

By the time I got back home, it was late. Dad and Mum had already gone to bed, but Kirsten was still up, ostensibly watching TV.

“I was worried about you,” she said. “I thought something might have happened.”

“Because of the accident on the A329M?”

“No, you idiot—because of your little tirade yesterday morning. Even Christians can get violent, and it’s bound to have put you on the ED radar.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Marjorie and I walked Pearl back to the hospital, and then I walked Marjorie back to the hostel. Then I came home. We didn’t have any trouble, although I did notice a number of twitching curtains.”

“Okay—you could have rung, though.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, I suppose it could have been worse—Marjorie might have invited you in for coffee.”

“What she actually said,” I informed her, “was: ‘I was going to invite you in for coffee, but I was afraid you might deliberately misunderstand me and say that you had to get off home, so how you would like to come upstairs and do as many filthy things as you can think of to me, until I have an orgasm’.”

The look of pure horror on my little sister’s face was amusing for the first twenty seconds or so, but when it didn’t disappear it became a trifle worrying.

“Only joking,” I told her. “She did invite me in for coffee, but I said I had to get off home. I have no idea whether I was misunderstanding her or not.”

The look of horror disappeared, but all Kirsten could think of to say thereafter was: “She’s forty-nine.”

“No she isn’t,” I retorted. “If you count from her birthday, she’s fifty-two, and if you count from her rebirthday, she’s three. Mind you, if you count from my rebirthday I’m only a few weeks old, so that would make her something of a cradle-snatcher, if I wasn’t misunderstanding.”

“You’re impossible,” she said.

“I know,” I agreed, “but I don’t care.”

“And you’re not funny.”

“So I’m finding out. It’s the hardest lesson of all.”

She had recovered somewhat—enough to say: “Well, if there’s a next time, give us a ring to let us know that you’re okay, and then you can accept any invitations you get, whoever they’re from.”

“I can only love Marjorie like a sister,” I said. “I’ve already got a girl-friend.”

Her recovery had proceeded far enough to permit a smidgen of malice. “I remember her,” Kirsten said. “Nice girl. What was her name again?”

“And Marjorie’s dangerous to know as well as mad and bad,” I told her. “The Russian mob are after her, Kalashnikovs waving—so don’t tell anyone you know where she is, okay?” With that, I went to bed, feeling that I’d won the exchange at least five-two.

The next day, I knew as soon as I got up in the morning that the shit had hit the fan. Dad was still a traditionalist, if not to the extent of buying a newspaper made from processed wood-pulp, at least to the extent of having his laptop open on the breakfast table so that he could bring himself up to date with the weather forecast, the cricket scores and the closing prices on the world’s ailing stock markets. Naturally, he had bots set to bring anything newsworthy that happened within a five-mile radius to his attention.

“Do you know a woman named Marjorie Claridge?” he asked me, before I’d even taken the top of my boiled egg—causing Kirsten to look up sharply from hers.

The first thing that occurred to me was that Dad might somehow have overheard what I’d said to Kirsten the night before, so I blushed scarlet, but I collected myself almost immediately. “Yes,” I said. “She comes to the Center every day. Why?”

“And what was the name of that nurse at the hospital? The one your mother thought was
nice
?”

That got Mum’s lingering attention. She was very sensitive to implicit insults, even at seven-thirty in the morning.

“She
is
nice,” I said, more for Mum’s benefit than Pearl’s. “Her name’s Pearl Barleigh.”

“I bet is it,” Dad sneered, obviously unconvinced by the unwisdom or humorlessness of poor Pearl’s parents, even though it would surely have been unwiser still to adopt such a name as a pseudonym. “It says here that she’s under investigation.”

I knew that I wasn’t capable any longer of going pale, even when I’d just blushed scarlet, so I couldn’t be sure that anyone was able to judge my reaction, but I felt as if a cruel hand was squeezing my heart. “For what?” I said, although I wasn’t in any doubt.

“For possible involvement in the death of three patients at the Royal Berks yesterday—and a dozen more over the last couple of months.”

“It’s garbage,” I said, instantly. “It’s absolutely untrue.”

I could see immediately that it wasn’t going to wash—not with Mum and Dad, at any rate. It was one thing to take me back into their loving home, and to continue to treat me as their beloved son in spite of everything, but that was as far as their generosity went; my fate had put their attitudes to the afterliving under greater stress.

“You don’t understand,” I said—although it was hardly the most diplomatic opening. “Fear alones generates a trickle of accusations, and the hospital admin knows perfectly well that they’re rubbish—but that doesn’t stop them building up and building up, until it only takes one last straw to shatter the camel’s back. But the admin still know it’s rubbish—they might be forced to set up an investigative committee, but the committee will exonerate her, and issue a press release to say that there was absolutely no truth in the allegations.”

I knew even as I said it that, though, that it might take more than an eventual official clearance to save Pearl’s precarious career, no matter how much demand there was for zombie nurses at present, or how much valiant propaganda the BBC pumped out on
Resurrection Ward
.

“But she does know this Marjorie Claridge, doesn’t she?” Dad queried, as if that were the trump card on his side of the argument…given that there did seem to be an argument, and that he did seem to have taken a side.

“So do I, Dad—what’s that supposed to prove?”

Dad could go pale, and did, as a new thought occurred to him. “You’re not in on it too, are you?” he said. “You’ve only been a bloody zombie for a fortnight!”

“In on what?” I demanded. Because I was sitting opposite, I couldn’t see the screen of the laptop, although Mum and Kirsten were both leaning sideways to peek.

“It says that the police have been called in to investigate allegations of a conspiracy regarding yesterday’s crash on the roundabout at the entrance to the Industrial Park,” Kirsten put in, helpfully. “It doesn’t say who made the allegations, which presumably means that it was some nutter calling the shop-your-neighbor helpline.”

“But neither Pearl not Marjorie knew the driver,” I said, helplessly.

Dad could be a bit of an idiot sometimes, but he was no fool. “You mean that you’ve already
talked to them
about this?” he said. “You
knew
about it? Oh, Nicky—how could you be so
stupid
?”

“How can there be a conspiracy if there’s no fucking connection?” I replied, not realizing until the words were out that I’d shouted them, and that I was standing up, pink with outrage.

“Sit down and finish your boiled egg, Nicky,” was Mum’s contribution to the discussion—perhaps the only truly sensible one that could have been made at that point.

Kirsten had reached out to tap the keys on Dad’s machine. “It seems,” she said, “that the driver of the artic—who walked away with a few bruises, by the way—was on a retraining program with one of Marjorie’s
known associates
, who didn’t get a job at the end of it. Stanley Blake?”

I sat down, although I didn’t pick up my egg-spoon. “We’re all on retraining programs, all the bloody time,” I told her. “If one in a hundred leads to a job, it’s a near-miracle. For the final exam, I suppose, Stan presumably had to turn up to sit in an actual vehicle, but I’ll lay odds that he did ninety per cent of it sitting on the mezzanine in the Center, with one of the workstations running simulation programs. I doubt that he ever even met the guy. He’s being….” I stopped then, not sure if even Kirsten would be able to believe me if I carried on.

“So you know
him
too?” Dad said. “Jesus, Nicky, you’re going to be implicated in this. Even if you’re not part of the conspiracy, you’re going to be dragged in. Thank God you’ve only been going to the Center for a fortnight. You can’t go back. You have to contact the police, and tell them what you know.”

This time, I was careful not to stand up or shout. I even picked up my egg-spoon, in order to demonstrate my perfect composure.

“There is no conspiracy, Dad,” I said. “At least, not at the Center. If there is a conspiracy, we’re its victims, not its perpetrators. Pearl isn’t an angel of death and she isn’t being manipulated by evil zombie rights campaigners. Yesterday’s accident was an accident, unless some malicious bastard—living bastard—sabotaged the driver’s brakes because he doesn’t approve of the afterliving being allowed to drive heavy goods vehicles while there are living men on the dole. Either way, the only possible conspiracy here is the one that’s trying to stitch up Marjorie, Pearl and Stan.”

“And who would want to do that?” Dad asked, skeptically.

I didn’t dare tell him. It would have sounded way too paranoid, even to me. I excavated a spoonful of egg instead.

“The ED sent us a black spot before Nicky had even recovered consciousness,” Kirsten chipped in. “And Marjorie Claridge had enough enemies while she was alive to get her killed. If she’s still involved in green politics as well as zombie rights, they’re probably still her enemies, and they’d probably jump at any opportunity to sling mud at her—or put a bullet in her.” She’d obviously taken due note of what I’d said the night before.

“Ridiculous,” was Dad’s judgment. He was the sort of person who would never believe that the Russian Mafia was now the clandestine branch of Big Oil’s public relations department. I was still finding it difficult to swallow myself—almost as difficult as Mum’s boiled egg, although it had still had a lovely liquid yolk, and certainly wouldn’t have caused any diplomatic difficulties to a visiting curate.