Zombies Don't Cry (9 page)

As nobody else was mentioning it, I thought it was time I did. “This is about this morning, isn’t it? It’s your way of ticking me off about making an exhibition of myself, by forcing me to be critical of public recklessness. You’re not really going to post this at all, are you?”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “You really haven’t read my earlier stuff, have you? Not that it would get flagged on your machine, of course, since it’s an anonymous. Of course I’m going to post it—and any fool who cares to misconstrue it as an incitement to murder is welcome to do so, in the interests of heating up the debate. But yes, Nicky, if you’re going pitch in with the lunatic fringe, you do need to plan what you’re going to do. Stan and Methuselah might advise you to tone it down, but all you’ll ever get from me is ‘Go for it!’ As I said, balance is for wimps, and boundaries too—but you do need to know what you’re getting into. If that’s who you are, good, but make sure you’re doing it deliberately, and not just exploding at random. Leave that to the suicide bombers.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I contented myself with pointing out a few errors in punctuation in her article, just in case she wanted to correct them.

When she returned to her workstation, leaving me alone, I wondered how her article on infant resurrection was going to argue the case in favor. I was looking forward to it already.
So what if resurrected children get stuck at the age of six, or even six months, for an indefinite period?
I ventured, hypothetically.
Wouldn’t most parents prefer that? How many parents
really
want their kids to grow up, and grow away from them, to reach the inevitable conclusion that their Mummy isn’t a cornucopia of unlimited love and that Daddy isn’t God’s right hand man. Why not give people what they
really
want: the spontaneous and wholehearted affection of their unwitting little darlings, for ever and ever?

To be fair to Marjorie, though, I had to admit that infantile resurrection was an important philosophical test case, and did need thrashing out. If it were considered immoral to use resurrection technology in certain cases—and beyond infantile resurrection there was the question of fetal resurrection—exactly where
was
it reasonable to draw the line…and if the use of resurrectionist technology were to be considered immoral in some instances, what became of the argument that anyone capable of resurrection had a moral right to its employment, as Blaise Jarndyce’s lawyers were currently arguing before the High Court?

Methuselah came to check up on me before I’d taken the silent argument any further.

“Are you all right, Son?” he asked.

“Fine,” I assured him.

“Was Marjorie telling you off?”

“Actually, no,” I said. “She was just chatting, as one amateur philosopher to another, employing the Socratic method in order to inch me a little bit closer to the age of reason.”

He might not have understood exactly what I meant, but he got the gist. “You do know that she was murdered, don’t you?” he said. “Probably because she got to be a nuisance while she was campaigning for Greenpeace.”

“I know,” I said. “My sister tipped me off, so I looked it up. Killed in a hit-and-run that wasn’t an accident. They never identified the vehicle or the driver. Conspiracy theories abound, MI5 and Big Oil being the favorite finger-pointing targets. I haven’t tried to talk to her about it, though—I’m not sure how touchy the subject is.”

“Marjorie doesn’t believe in touchy subjects. For a while, she was careful, but there was no way she was going to be kept down for long. Even so, it might be a good idea if you didn’t egg her on.”

“Me?” I said. “Egg
her
on? I’m just a newreborn. She’s not going to take any notice of me, is she?”

“Maybe not—but she does seem to like you. She seems to feel that you and she have something in common, maybe because you were murdered too.”

“And you think I might be setting her a
bad example?
You think I might be in danger of
leading her astray?
”

“All I’m saying,” Methuselah continued, patiently, “is that you need to be careful where Marjorie’s concerned. She’s vulnerable, in more ways than one.”

It was Jim Peel’s turn next. He sat down in the chair that Methuselah had vacated like a sack of coal falling off a lorry. “Okay, Mate?” he said.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Maybe you and I ought to go out some evening and throw a ball around—or even kick one, if you’re really committed to the round variety. Make a change from rockmobility, wouldn’t it? I really miss it, you know. Not that I’ve given up, but the team I used to play for have had to put me on a reserve list while they get an eligibility ruling from the Union.”

“Mine too,” I said. “What a coincidence.”

“Just between you and me,” he said, “I don’t think they’re going to get it sorted before the season starts.”

“Nor do I.”

“So,” he said, “we might have to think about some sort of arrangement of our own. I’ve talked about it to Stan, and Kevin….we might have to compromise on exactly what kind of ball we kick around, but in principle…well, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do something. Something
outside
, I mean. In the evenings, when the sun’s not so bright.”

“No reason at all,” I agreed.

When he’d gone, Stan inevitably took his place.

“Jim talking to you about outdoor games, was he?” he said.

I nodded. “He says you’re up for it,” I commented.

“He also says that his rugby club have out him on a reserve list—and he’s got at last a dozen job applications held in suspension awaiting a favourable opportunity to arise. Not the done thing to say
no
to anyone nowadays, is it?”

“Except behind their backs, of course,” I observed. “Why shouldn’t we play out, Stan? We’re old enough, aren’t we?”

“No reason at all,” he said, refusing to take offense, “if we can solve the practical problems. But you can see the practical problems, can’t you, Nicky?”

“Oh yes,” I agreed. “Can’t walk down the street without tripping over them. Got to be careful, haven’t we? Delicate skin and all that.”

“I knew you’d understand,” he said, apparently satisfied. “You’re a smart boy.”

He seemed to be trying to be generous, so it seemed only fair to reciprocate. “I could be smarter,” I admitted. “I’m working on it, with a little help from my friends.”

“Good,” he said. “Be careful out there, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, meekly.

As I’d anticipated, Mum and Dad weren’t nearly as understanding.

“What were you thinking?” Dad moaned, after watching half a dozen different versions of the clip, taken from various angles and distances, none of which had a soundtrack sufficiently blurred to obscure what I was saying.

“Well, as you can clearly see and hear, I wasn’t, really,” I admitted. “I know that I should have anticipated the possibility, and had a speech prepared, but I hadn’t and I didn’t. My bad—that’s American for
mea culpa
.”

“You just can’t help it, can you?” he replied, despairingly.

“No,” I said. “It used to be considered charming while I was alive—or, at worst, interestingly eccentric. It’s amazing what a difference dying can make. Who knew?”

“I don’t doubt that there’ll be some people watching it who have every sympathy with you,” he said, although he plainly did doubt it, “but imagine what effect it will have on the Afro-Anglican community…and any other people with religious sensibilities.”

“The jihadists will love it,” I said. “After all, I was taking the piss out of infidels. And the Catholics will love it, because I was taking the piss out of Protestants. And the Anglo-Anglicans will love it, because I was taking the piss out the jumped up sods who are trying to steal their Church from under their feet. The only people who will actually hate it are the liberals—and quite frankly, being hated by liberals is a bit like being whipped by a woolly sock full of cotton wool. It’s not that bad, Dad.”

“We’ve already had black spots through the post, you know—we didn’t want to tell you because we didn’t want to upset you.”

“Everybody gets black spots, Dad—it’s an epidemic. At the Center, we get stones through the window. It’s like everything else in life—you just have to hope that the catastrophe wall unfold slowly. My little rant at a trio of pantomime Churchmen is a very tiny drop in a very big ocean. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

“If only,” was all he said to that—but I don’t think he really meant that he wanted
me
gone tomorrow. Not consciously, at any rate.

“He’s just worried about you, Nicky,” Mum said. “We all are.”

“I know, Mum,” I said. “I’ll be careful in future—I promise.”

“Do you honestly think you can keep that promise?” Kirsten asked.

“Yes I do,” I told her. “I’m a different person now. I can keep myself in check, now that I’ve been sharply reminded of the necessity.”

“Give you a hard time at the Center, did they?” she enquired. “Letting the side down and all that?”

“Anything but,” I admitted. “Leant over backwards to be nice about it, in fact. Made it all the harder to bear—but the ones who said anything at all made it perfectly clear that it was up to me to figure out whether my act needed cleaning up, and how far to go.”

“Even Nurse Pearl?” she said. “Surely
she
was sarcastic?”

“She wasn’t there,” I admitted. “She’ll probably be in tomorrow evening, though. I expect she’ll rip into me then, if she’s in the mood.”

“It’s only because she worries about you. You’re still her patient, in her eyes.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “I don’t mind. Her heart’s in the right place, even if some of her living patients are too paranoid to notice. What do you think, Kirsty? Exactly how stupid was I, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Who am I to judge,” she replied, judiciously. “I’m just your little sister, brought up from birth in awe of your intelligence and wit. I wouldn’t dare criticize. After all, it’s not going to rebound on me, is it?”

“God, I hope not,” I said, with the utmost sincerity.

* * * * * * *

As I’d predicted to Kirsten, Pearl did come into the Center the following evening, but she was later than would normally have been expected. By the time she arrived, though, we all knew that she’d been doing a harrowing extra shift. She hadn’t phoned anyone to tell us, but we knew anyway. If I’d been worried about the possibility of her commenting on my tantrum while I made my way into the Center past all the inquisitive eyes that followed my progress, any lingering anxiety vanished soon after lunch, when the news began to come through about the pile-up at the A329M terminus.

The workstation bots flagged the incident as soon as it was reported, and the people on the mezzanine fed it down to the main floor in dribs and drabs for the rest of the afternoon. By the time Pearl made her belated arrival, we were all on tenterhooks. Since the emergency services had closed off the scene, we’d only had the parsimonious trickle of official information to go on with regard to its seriousness. We knew that she’d have at least some of the inside information, as well as impressions gained at first hand.

“Yes, it was bad,” she confirmed, “in more ways than one.”

What we already knew was that the brakes had failed on an articulated lorry approaching the roundabout at the junction of the A329M and the A4. It had ploughed straight across the roundabout after sideswiping a couple of cars on the motorway proper, hitting more vehicles as it cut through the lateral traffic on both sides. At least thirty vehicles had been involved in total, and fatalities had been reported. Pearl filled in some of the as-yet-unreleased details.

“Some school run traffic involved. Seven dead thus far, three of them kids. Only one likely to be zombifiable, although they’re attempting at least one more. It could have been worse—all the vehicles were braking except for the artic, and even that wasn’t traveling very fast, but it skittled the ones it hit, set them cannoning into others like snooker balls. Rumor’s doing the rounds that the artic’s brakes were sabotaged, but that’s just par for the course—probably nonsense.

“To make things worse, five people died on the wards while we were all busy in A and E. Nothing untoward, really, but a couple might have lasted a few days longer if they’d got immediate attention. Unfortunately, the statistical blip is enough to trigger an automatic enquiry, and you know what committees are like when they start trying to justify their own pointless existence. Some poor sod will probably end up being suspended on suspicion of possible negligence, on account of not being able to be in three places at once using five pairs of hands. Andy won’t be coming in tonight or tomorrow, but I had to get off the premises, even though I’m dog tired.”

There were commiserations all round, as she must have anticipated, but the solicitude soon began to annoy her and she began to shrug off, the gestures of solidarity—which only made the people offering them try extra hard to make their sympathy clear. When Alice’s valiant attempts to be maternal became too much, Pearl began to edge from fractiousness into open hostility. Gradually, her prickliness began to drive people away. It was late anyway, so people were beginning to disappear in twos and threes, mostly heading back to the South Street hostel.

By the time there were only half a dozen of us left in the Center, everyone but me—even Stan—was busy on the workstations, indulging their hobbies or catching up with their retraining programs. Pearl was slumped in her chair, sipping from her third cup of tea, and brooding.

“Jim’s at home tonight, I’m afraid,” I said, “but if he were here, he’d be telling you not to walk home alone, and he’d be right—it’s already getting dark.”

“My stalker didn’t follow me from the hospital tonight,” she said, wearily, “and if he was waiting here for me, he obviously had time to get bored and head back home. Anyway, you’re not going to get into my knickers, even if I am a trifle overwrought, so there’s no point in you volunteering to see me home.”

Slightly nettled by that, I fished around for an alternative topic of conversation. “Will you be writing up the day’s excitement in your diary? You’ll need to do that sort of thing now you’ve started writing your autobiography.”

“I don’t need your help with that, either,” she retorted, perhaps predictably.

“I don’t suppose you do. Nor do Methuselah and Marjorie, really—they just want to be sure that someone’s actually reading their stuff.”

She snorted derisively. “Marjorie’s not short of readers, even now. If she’s getting you to look over her stuff it’s just because she fancies you as a toy boy. If you want my advice, go for it. You could do worse. She was only forty-nine when she died, and you two have a lot in common.”

“I never got around to joining Greenpeace,” I told her, although I knew perfectly well what she meant.

“Well, maybe not as much as all that,” she admitted. “After all, you were just collateral damage—she was an actual target.”

I looked up at the mezzanine to make certain that Marjorie was fully absorbed at her station before saying: “So it’s rumored. Who do you think was behind it?”

“My money’s on Big Oil,” she replied, without any noticeable sarcasm in her tone. “The Russian Mafia branch, in all probability. She must think so too—that’s why she’s been so careful.”

“She’s getting back into the swim,” I said. “I haven’t seen her recent Greenpeace stuff, but if it’s anything like her zombie rights material….”

“I know,” she said, cutting me off. “I read it all when it’s posted. Even though it’s not signed, my bot can sieve it out. I only hope that the Russian mob aren’t doing the same.”

“You think she might still be in danger? Methuselah hinted at it, but I thought he was just being overanxious.”

“Maybe so—but if anyone ever comes through that door waving a Kalashnikov, you’d better make sure that you’re not standing next to her…unless, of course, you want to take the bullet for her, on the grounds that you’re a more likely candidate for reresurrection than she is. There’s no need, if all you’re interested in is sex. Just say the word and she’ll have her knickers off in no time.”

I decided to ignore her ongoing preoccupation with items of underwear. “The day people start coming through the door waving assault rifles,” I said, soberly, “they’ll probably be after all of us. Not that it’s likely to happen any time soon—this is Merry England, not the Wild East.”

“Grow up, Nicky,” she said. “This is multicultural Reading. If ever there was an urban powder-keg waiting for a spark…but you’re right: best not to think about it.”

“Anyway, I said, “the ED top the terror charts hereabouts, and we’re only fourth or fifth on their hate-list. They’ve already killed me once, so I’d have to be really unlucky to take a second hit, even if they did send Mum and Dad the black spot while I was in hospital.”

“Only one? I’ve had a dozen.”

“Why so many?”

“I work in a hospital. I told you the other day, remember? You have no idea how malicious patients can be, when the fear and the stress get on top of them. You’ve seen them making the sign of the cross—and we all know how bravely unintimidated you are by that sort of thing—but it’s what they get up to behind your back that can really do some damage. Multiply what’s happened to you since you woke up on the ward by a hundred, and that’s pretty much my average week. Zombie nurses are in demand, as you know…but not from a majority of the living patients, that’s for sure. Do you know how many times I’ve been called an angel of death? Not just in a poetic sense, either—some of my less appreciative patients seem to have actually managed to convince themselves that I bump people off on the sly, in order to make more zombies.”

I didn’t think it was the right time to tell her about the subject of Marjorie latest posting, so I said: “All the more reason why you shouldn’t be walking back to the accommodation-block on your own after dark. I know it’s only half a mile, but still…why not ask Marjorie and Alice? They can walk you home and then go back to South Street together, if you’re really worried about the possibility that I might make a pass at you.”

“
You
don’t worry me,” she said, in a tone that seemed to have reached an extreme of fatigue. “I’ve been raped by experts.”

That had slipped out unawares; she evidently regretted it the moment she’d said it, for more reasons than one. “Sorry,” she said, while I was still lost for words. “I didn’t mean to imply….”

“No problem,” I replied.

The question I’d left unspoken must have been obvious regardless. “Yes,” she added, still confused by her error and not knowing quite how to shut up, let alone what to say. “I suppose it was, if only indirectly.” She meant that having been raped was at least related to the reason why she’d killed herself.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “You don’t need to say anything at all. Shall I go away? I can ask Marjorie to come and talk to you, if you like—I think she’s finished at the workstation now.”

“No,” she said, to everything. After a pause to collect herself she said: “Things still all right at home, are they?”

It seemed only polite to give every encouragement to her valiant change of subject. “Fine,” I said. “I can’t get through to my girl-friend yet, but I guess she needs time to get used to the new situation. Mum and Dad are a bit edgy round me, but that’s only to be expected, and Dad’s begun to displace a little of his unease into uncomfortable discussions. Kirsty’s a brick, though—seems to have taken it completely in her stride. She takes her principles seriously, although it probably helps that she thought that I was plenty weird enough while I was alive. Can’t imagine why—the age-gap between us should have encouraged hero-worship rather than intersibling animosity.”

“I was an only child,” was Pearl’s only comment on that.

“I’m lucky, I know,” I continued, rabbiting on just for the sake of filling the awkward silence, and feeling that I was—for once—on safe ground. “I know exactly how lucky I am. Things really are going as well as can be expected, not just at home but here. I’m settling in. Everyone’s been good to me. I have a lot to be thankful for—although I haven’t
quite
got around to being grateful to England’s Defenders, for defending me so successfully.”

I knew it wasn’t going to raise a smile, but I felt obliged to put on a show of trying.

Mercifully, Marjorie had indeed, finished at the workstation, and she came down from the mezzanine to join us. I was pleased to see her, having despaired of my own ability to give Pearl the support she evidently needed but somehow couldn’t accept.