Zombies Don't Cry Read Free

invented by the living as an excuse for depriving the afterliving of the property, social status and human rights they’d enjoyed in life. As with the weeping thing, I hadn’t really cared much one way or another, and the script I was obliged to follow on behalf of the Ombudsman’s Office wouldn’t have allowed me to express any sympathy if I’d felt any.
    Now, I cared. Now, I wanted an expression of sympathy, whether it was in Nurse Pearl’s professional script or her sarcastic nature or not. It probably was in the script, but Nurse Pearl was presumably something of a natural rebel.
    “It doesn’t matter what you feel right now,” she assured me, brutally. “You’ll get the hang of being different soon enough. The people you knew and loved will help you with that, if not much else.”
    It wasn’t her embittered tone that struck me so much as her use of the past tense; People I knew and loved .
    But I still love them , I thought. Mum, Dad, Kirsten…Helena . Surely they’ll still love me, zombie or not. They aren’t bigots.
    What I said aloud, warily, was: “What do you mean, not much else? ”
    “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not supposed to do that—not according to the retraining manual. Just because we’ve got pink eyes, though, it doesn’t mean we have to rose-tint the world. I’ve seen your family, mind—your mother, your father, your sister. They’ve all put in their stints of duty while you were in the post-mortem coma. They seem nice. Maybe they’ll let you down gently, if at all.”
    “Yours didn’t?” I asked. It wasn’t the first question that sprang to mind, but it seemed the most polite.
    “Well,” she said, “I did kill myself. They were bound to take it personally, I guess.”
    “But you’re okay now?” I asked, solicitously. “You’re not about to do it again?”
    “Technically,” she told me, “I can’t. I’m already dead, so I can’t kill myself. Nobody’s contrived to put a word in the dictionary, as yet, for what zombies do instead, in spite of the…incidents. None of the improvised suggestions has caught on to the extent of becoming common parlance.”
    I didn’t needed to ask what the “…incidents” were. Whatever zombies did instead of “killing” themselves had been featured on Resurrection Ward too. I was beginning to regret not having been a more assiduous viewer; I had a feeling that I might have need of every last drop of the show’s educational value, even if it was set in a place that didn’t really exist, at least in the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
    “What about Helena?” I said. “You’ve seen her too, I assume.”
    Nurse Pearl hesitated.
    “She’s my girl-friend,” I said, emphasizing the present tense ever so slightly.
    “I’ve seen her,” the zombie nurse admitted.
    “She has visited—while I was…pupating.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the jargon, but I was fairly sure that the afterliving liked to refer to the post-mortem coma as “pupation,” thus implying, if only in jest, that their new status was analogous to that of a butterfly, whose previous existence had been merely larval.
    “Yes,” said Nurse Pearl. “She did visit.” Past tense again.
    “And she’ll be back, as soon as she hears that I’m awake,” I said. “When’s visiting time?”
    “The doctors haven’t given the go-ahead yet,” she told me. “The Burkers will probably want to do a few more tests—and then there’s the psych evaluation. Tomorrow, maybe.”
    “Burkers?” I queried, having misheard it as burkas .
    “Bad joke,” she said. “Burkers as in Burke and Hare. Resurrection Men. Popular slang two hundred years ago, now back in fashion, in certain circles, with the irony reversed. Who says the afterliving have no sense of humor, eh?”
    I didn’t laugh. “How long will the tests take?” I asked.
    “A couple of hours, maybe—longer if your nerves and muscles aren’t playing ball. Same with the psych evaluation—an hour or so if