Zombies Don't Cry Read Free Page B

Defenders were trying to defend their mythical England against—that the reason the Resurrection Men had elected to make zombies whiter than white was to make even easier to discriminate against people of color. Some people seemed genuinely to believe that the greatest biotech miracle of the twenty-first century had been cooked up, in its entirety, simply to give existing “white” people an opportunity to claim that that people of color had no right to complain about discrimination, since people devoid of color had it even worse than they did. That belief, of course, didn’t stop them complaining that the Resurrection Men were also discriminating against them by favoring “white” people for resurrection—in spite of the fact that devout Muslims and Afro-Anglicans were the loudest advocates of the thesis that the afterliving were actually demons sent to plague the living by Satan or Iblis, and that God-fearing people should never sign consent forms licensing the use of resurrection technology on their loved ones.
    I’d been cynical enough, even as a living person, to think that all of those arguments, except the most blatantly paradoxical and hypocritical, might have a seed of truth within them. I had, however, been quite content to take refuge in the standard script supplied for my use by the Ombudsman’s Office, which required me to point out that there were other physiological distinctions between the living and the afterliving that science had yet to explain, and that none of those were the kind of device that might have been planned for the purposes of stigmatization, so that the albinism of the afterliving was almost certainly an accident of physiological happenstance rather than any kind of cunning conspiracy.
    I still believed that when I woke up to the afterlife myself, partly because it still seemed convincing, and partly because I didn’t want to think that the Royal Berks Burkers were anything but angels of mercy, who, having regrettably failed to save my life, had done the next best thing.
    * * * * * * *
    By the time I got a chance to have another chat with Nurse Pearl, the first afternoon of my afterlife was wearing on and I was already bored out of my skull. The other patients in the ward were beginning to take notice of me, though—at least, the guy who put his stiffened index-fingers together in the shape of a cross when I tried to get out of bed condescended to notice me.
    He made the same sign of the cross whenever Pearl strayed too close to his bed, although she always left it to the other nurses on the ward actually to attend to his needs. Evidently, patients were allowed to exercise their rights of choice in matters of care, if not in the matter of who got the next bed.
    I assumed that the patient with the busy index-fingers wasn’t really trying to ward off demons, and that the gesture was more joke than insult. He was probably bored out of his skull too, and desperate for any distraction he could improvise. If I’d been able to do it, I’d have gone over to his bed, wiggled my fingers at him and moaned “woo-oo-oo” just to play my allotted part in the comedy, but I was still attached to the catheter as well as the drip; standing up was pretty much out of the question, let alone walking around. I don’t suppose he’d have laughed, though, any more than he’d have expired in mortal terror.
    Nurse Pearl didn’t bother to ask me how I was feeling when she was finally able to get back to me, but she had the grace not to make a show of being bored while she answered questions she must have been asked a dozen times before. It was her job to answer them, as best she could, but it was also her responsibility as one afterliving individual to another, and she took that seriously.
    “Just give me a few tips,” I said, trying not to sound as if I were pleading. “The things to watch out for that only fellow zombies know…you know what I mean.”
    “Not really,” she lied, perhaps