Zombies Don't Cry Read Free Page A

you get the answers right…no limit if you screw it up.”
    I’d seen psych evaluations for the risen dead on Resurrection Ward too, and had run the gauntlet of those designed for the living on more than one occasion. I had no fear of them. I’d never felt saner in my life…although, even as I formulated that thought, I realized that it was the kind of observation that might be open to misinterpretation, given my present circumstances.
    “Can I have my phone?” I asked. “Or was it a casualty of the bomb-blast?”
    “Even if it hadn’t been, you wouldn’t have been able to use it,” she said. Her voice was back in neutral.
    “Can I borrow a laptop, then? I need to do some research on the web.” Actually, I wanted to check my email. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but I figured that it must really be piled up.
    “Not yet,” she said.
    And then—just like that—she was called away, to attend to the needs of a living patient.
    I looked around again. Nobody was looking in my direction. Suddenly, as the only person on the ward who was—as yet—in the ranks of the afterliving, I felt very much alone.

CHAPTER TWO
    I suppose that I had had more forewarning of what it might be like to join the ranks of the afterliving than anyone else in Reading, except for medical professionals, even if I hadn’t taken full advantage of the forewarning in question. As a case-worker in the Ombudsman’s Office, I had seen far more of the afterliving when I was alive than most living individuals, and had certainly had far more one-to-one conversations with them than even medical professionals generally contrived, or bothered, to have. It’s not difficult to conceive a sense of grievance when you’re a zombie, and the OO is the dustbin of English desperation, where appeals against injustice go to die, never to rise again. I’d been very well aware of the absurdity of the whole bureaucratic process even before I died myself—to the extent that I knew there would be no point going to the OO as a zombie client.
    Having worked for the OO, I already knew how vanishingly unlikely it was that I’d get my old job back, however unfair that unlikelihood might be. Parliament had been quick to license resurrection as a medical procedure, for reasons of political expediency, but it was being vey slow indeed—for similar reasons of political expediency—to follow up its instant creation of a new category of citizens with the corollary legislation that would give them the same rights as everyone else.
    To put it bluntly, it wasn’t illegal, in 2042, to discriminate against the dead, even if they were just as capable of doing their old jobs as they had been when they were alive. Given that unemployment among the living was running at almost twenty-five per cent, even in Reading, it wasn’t entirely surprising that unemployment among the afterliving should be running at more than ninety per cent.
    The law will catch up with our formal entitlements in the end, I suppose—though maybe not in a standard lifetime. Justice is another matter; if I were a cynic—and I never met a zombie who wasn’t—I’d probably argue that there never had been any and never would be. Thanks to the wonders of biotech, unicorns and flying pigs are even more commonplace nowadays than zombies, but justice? That really is incredible.
    I’d been told more than once while on duty in the offices of the OO, by zombies who were taking the art of grievance to a new level, that the reason zombies can’t manufacture melanin, and are therefore albinos, is that the Resurrection Men planned it that way, as a deliberate biotech plot intended to mark them out and prevent them from passing for the living, thus making it far easier for everyone else to discriminate against them.
    I’d also been told more than once, by Englishmen of Pakistani or Jamaican or Somali or Turkish or Indonesian or Nepalese descent—all the other people, in fact, that England’s so-called