Zombies Don't Cry (11 page)

“Your Dad’s right, though,” Mum put in. “You can’t go to the Center today, Nicky. It’s a good job you can do your training program on your own computer.”

“I don’t want to miss rockmobility,” I said, frostily. “The afterliving have to keep fit—we have to look after ourselves.”

“That’s not the point, and you know it,” Dad told me, sternly. “You shouldn’t go. You need to stay out of this, if you possibly can. If there’s nothing to it, it’ll blow over. If not…well, either way, the sensible thing to do is stay home until it’s sorted.” He wasn’t trying to forbid me, though, because he knew he no longer had that authority—not because I was twenty-seven years old, but because I was dead. That was a shame, in a way, because it meant I had to match reason with reason…and that was difficult, because there as a sense which he was right. The sensible thing to do
was
to stay out of it, until it was sorted.

“I’m going to the Center,” I said, flatly. “Everybody will.”

“But you don’t have to,” Mum protested.

“Of course he does,” Kirsten put in. I met her eyes, and gave her a grateful nod.

Dad was all reason now, though. “I can see why you might think that,” he said, “if you’re convinced that there really isn’t a conspiracy, and that these people really are your friends—but how much do you know about them, really? How do you know what that nurse might be doing? Have you read what this Claridge woman writes? If the excerpt they’ve quoted here is correct….”

“It’s probably taken out of context, Dad,” I said, wanting to short-circuit the possibility of his reading it aloud. “And yes—I have read what she writes. I’m the one who corrects her punctuation. I’m in this up to my neck.”

“You didn’t think to suggest that she might tone it down a bit?” Dad said, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

“No,” I lied. “The afterliving are entitled to philosophize just like everyone else, and the right to publish their conclusions, anonymously or otherwise.”

“And you’re a zombie now,” he said, following through. “After two lousy weeks, you’re a zombie, and nothing else. All your loyalties have been recalculated, all your lines redrawn.”

“That’s not fair, Dad,” Kirsten said—but he already knew that. The unfairness was deliberate. He was making a point. Everybody has the right to philosophize, and to make their conclusions known.

“If you were the ones under threat,” I said, including all three of them in the pronoun, “no matter where the threat was coming from, I wouldn’t step out of the door. You’re not. Pearl is.”

“I thought you were still in love with Helena?” Mum queried.

“I am,” I told her. “There’s nothing between me and Pearl—or between me and Marjorie, for that matter. We all made that perfectly clear before Marjorie and I walked Pearl back to the accommodation block last night. I don’t doubt that we were seen, even though Pearl’s living stalker had taken the night off. As I said, I’m in it up to my neck. The CCTV pictures have probably been pinned up on an incident-board by now. But there’s nothing to it except malicious rumor and paranoia, and the police must know that. The investigation is just a matter of following obligatory procedure. If they try to contact me here, tell them where I am.”

I stood up again.

“You haven’t finished your breakfast,” Mum said—but it was a token protest, and not entirely accurate. I’d just about cleaned out the egg-shell, and I picked up the last piece of toast to take with me.

I was glad to get out of the house, though—at least until I started walking along the street. Even if it hadn’t been for the new scandal, I’d already done enough to make that half-mile walk an exhibition-piece. Even before the incident with the exorcist, I’d been conscious of the fact that people were looking at me as I passed by, but until I’d lost my rag I’d been able to tell myself that it was just my own paranoia, and that the feeling would wear off. That option wasn’t open any more, and the knowledge that everyone in the neighborhood had read the same combination of real and imaginary “news” as Dad multiplied my anxiety by a factor of ten.

Most people, though, still looked away rather than meet my eye, even if the immediate neighbors no longer wanted to say hello. Only a minority stared—and only a small minority bothered to aim their phones at me as I walked past. One or two of them did follow me, filming all the while, but that was only because they thought that there was a remote possibility that something might happen, not because they were convinced that something would.

“This is a storm in a teacup,” I told himself, subvocalizing the words. “The background is that zombies have already become so familiar that nobody really gives them a second glance any more, especially in a town like Reading, which is as conspicuously multicultural as any town in England, except Slough, Leicester and Bradford.”

It was no good. I didn’t even bother chiding myself for my lack of trust. I just made every possible effort to hold my ominous consciousness in check, while I took the journey to the Center one step at a time.

Nobody even shouted at me, let alone spat or shot at me. Whatever the people watching me were thinking—and the words “smoke,” “without” and “fire” inevitably came to mind—they kept it to themselves. The ones who were fortunate enough to have jobs had to get to work, and even the ones who didn’t had places to go, just as I had. Even the ones who followed me hastened away when I reached the Center.

I couldn’t help looking up at the sandstone lintel, which still retained its memory of William Booth’s heroic institution, even though the ever-dwindling organization he’d founded had abandoned it to the care of the Borough Council at least forty years before.

Could General Booth ever have imagined, I wondered, that some tiny fraction of his legacy would one day become a refuge for the kindred of Lazarus? If so, would he too have considered us demons, or would his pragmatic non-conformism have taken a Christian view even of the risen dead?

Either way, there seemed to be a measure of irony in my crossing the threshold.

Alcohol has exactly the same effect on an afterliving body as it does on a living one. That’s not at all surprising, given that the physiology of afterlife is so similar to the physiology of life. What is surprising is, though, that is that zombies, by and large, don’t get drunk. They can and they could, but they don’t. Even zombies who were alcoholics in life tend to become very moderate drinkers once they’ve been resurrected. Rumor has it that similar generalizations apply to heavy smokers and heroin addicts, although the sample sizes are currently too small to be statistically significant.

The consensus seems to be that the difference is a matter of personality. The afterliving, it’s generally agreed, are much less prone to have addictive personalities of any sort than the living. Those who drink find it a lot easier to stop drinking before the effects of alcohol begin to impair their judgment, and the same applies to other pleasant-but-potentially-harmful experiences. Zombies who were clinically obese in life—again, not a vast sample, but not negligible either—start off their afterlives still obese, but almost all of them lose weight progressively, until they reach the supposedly normal height-to-weight ratio. Like those who carry the legacy of aging through into their afterlives, they never recover the vigor typical of young athletes, but they don’t usually retain the full extent of the burdens they bore in life.

Scientifically-minded commentators, not unnaturally, try to subsume the typical patterns of alcohol use and abuse in afterlife to the more general debate about the appetites of the afterliving. Just as certain other kinds of cravings are weakened, the argument goes, the craving for alcohol is weakened too. With respect to ex-addicts, the hypothesis often expands to embrace the case that all the changes of appetite associated with afterlife derive from alterations in the endogenous morphine and other neurotransmitter-damping systems: in brief, the allegation is that zombies don’t suffer from withdrawal symptoms, at least to the same extent as the living. That’s a hypothesis to which I’m not unsympathetic, although I’m withholding my final judgement until Andy Hazelhurst and his peers have collected more hard evidence.

The most popular theory among the unscientifically-minded—which inevitably owes its popularity to its supposed aesthetic propriety rather that to any scientific proof—is that death is an essentially sobering and salutary experience: that once a person has died, the individual in question find it difficult to be reckless with the stuff of afterlife. That one is, of course, poppycock.

For one thing—and one’s enough to kill the hypothesis—nobody actually remembers dying. Even the afterliving who undergo radical transformations of personality because of the extensive repair-work required by their brains—which presumably includes most of the heavy drinkers and other chronic self-abusers—don’t wake up with any sense of no longer being alive, or of having had their lives suspended. It’s only the living who sometimes wake up from surgical interventions to report out-of-body experiences and visions of being drawn toward some kind of uncanny light.

Personally, I’m convinced that, whatever the physiological detail might be, afterlife sobriety really is intrinsic to the zombie condition. What’s more, I’m inclined, once again, to come right out and say that if that makes us, on average, better people than the living, then that’s just the way it is. It’s not only our privilege but our responsibility.

What I mean by that is that it’s up to us to set an example to our weaker brethren—and if we have to take over the world to do it, then we should. It’s our moral entitlement, and our moral duty. We have to do it peacefully, though, while strictly observing the principle of informed consent—not just because that’s the diplomatic way to proceed, but because that’s the kind of sober, scientifically-minded people we are.

Or, at least, the kind of people we ought to aspire to be.

* * * * * * *

The hall was already crowded when I went in, and already noisy.

Pearl was complaining bitterly that her suspension from work had effectively painted a target on her back, and that the hospital accommodation block was no longer a safe place or her to be. She seemed more angry than scared, but she was probably just displacing her fear into her anger.

Marjorie was apologizing to all and sundry for having retained all the reckless habits she’d acquired during long service with Greenpeace. She seemed genuinely sorry, although I doubt that anyone believed that regret was going to make her change her behaviour.

Stan was telling off Jim Peel yet again, instructing him in a typically forceful manner as to the necessity of meekness and careful diplomacy in all circumstances. He might have been more convincing if he hadn’t been as tense as a coiled spring himself. The contrast between his invariable black T-shirt and his pale but artificially-colored arms put me in mind of a collie with an ornamental collar-and-tag.

Andy Hazelhurst, who had obviously found the time to come along after all, in spite of Pearl’s assurance that he wouldn’t be able to, was assuring Methuselah that he would do everything humanly possible to lay the absurd turbulence to rest, in his capacity as a rising star of the Royal Berks Burkers.

The local police officer—who was actually a volunteer “community support officer”—was assuring everyone that a patrol car would make regular passes to ensure that no ugly crowds would be allowed to build up on our doorstep, and that any call for help emanating from the Center would be given top priority…but that CID would be sending a team round as soon as they had completed the preliminary briefing, in order to interview every last one of us.

I headed for Pearl, who seemed to be the person most in need of visible support. “You’re an idiot, Nicky,” was her expectable greeting. “
You
could have stayed at home. You’ve only been a zombie for a fortnight, damn it.”

“Once a zombie, always a zombie,” I told her. “Loyalties recalculated, lines redrawn.”

“It’ll all blow over,” she assured me.

“Storm in a teacup,” I replied.

Marjorie tried to buttonhole me then, presumably in order to personalize the latest round of her apologies, but Stan Blake grabbed me first, and drew me to one side.

“Look, Son,” he said, “I think I’m going to need your help tonight. You’re the youngest one here, and, apart from me, the fittest—Jim included. Tempers are going to flare, inside and out, especially when the paparazzi get out of bed. It’s not going to be easy to keep a lid on, but we just have to get through today. Tomorrow, it will all be a lot easier, and by the beginning of next week, it’ll all be forgotten, but today…can I rely on you to help me if anything kicks off?”

“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. “Are you going ahead with rockmobility?”

“Absolutely, if CID give us time. The discipline of planned movement is essential in circumstances like these. There’s nothing better to create a mood of solidarity.”

“Maybe not,” I conceded, “but just for once, if you can bear to do it, it might be a good idea to leave
Highway to Hell
and
Street-Fighting Man
out of the repertoire. Given that you have to stick to the classics, because your technics are way out of date, try
Two Tribes
and
Jumping Jack Flash
instead.”

He slapped me on the back. “Good lad,” he said. “I knew your heart was in the right place.” I think he was complimenting my feigned taste in prehistoric music.

Marjorie managed to capture me then. “I’m sorry, Nicky,” she said. “They’ll have pictures of the three of us walking back to the Berks, and pictures of you walking me back home afterwards. If anyone takes the wrong implication….”

“They’ll know that we parted company on the doorstep of the hostel,” I said. “I think your reputation for chastity is safe—I didn’t even give you a goodnight kiss.”

She didn’t laugh, although she nodded to acknowledge the joke. “I should be so lucky,” she said. “But just in case anyone should come through that door today waving a Kalashnikov, make sure you hit the ground fast—and stay down, whatever happens.”

“It’s not going to happen,” I assured her. “Even if we only get a handful of authentic paparazzi camping on our doorstep, there’ll be dozens of locals with phones at the ready. No self-respecting hit-man would dream of exposing himself to so many avid cameras. You’re safer today than you were yesterday.”

“Look after yourself,” she said. “I mean it.”

“I know you do,” I assured her. “I’ve only been a newreborn for a fortnight, but I’m beginning to realize what a hot property this body is. You can see how hard it is for Pearl to suppress her raging lust, and I’m grateful to you for making the effort yourself.”

She punched me on the shoulder then, but she still didn’t laugh. I think she was probably grateful for the fact that zombies can’t cry.

The paparazzi started arriving at nine o’clock; ours wasn’t the kind of scandal that could get them out of bed at the crack of dawn after a hard night’s celebrity-stalking. Andy Hazelhurst had already made himself scarce. By the time the CID team arrived at ten-thirty, causing rockmobility to be suspended while Stan and I were still going strong, there were a dozen suspicious characters lurking in the vicinity with their fancy digital cameras at the ready, but they were sticking to the rules and not giving anyone any hassle—least of all the CID officers.

The police had rules of their own to observe; while the CID were inside the Center they posted a uniformed officer on the door—a real officer, not a Mickey Mouse volunteer—to make absolutely certain that nothing unpleasant would happen while they were there to witness it. Their jobs were complicated enough already. The community support officer set off to patrol the community supportively, following a script that required her presence to be polite and unobtrusive.

The plain-clothed policemen were exceedingly polite when they broke up the rockmobility session—while Stan, teeth-gritted, was listening to his obsolete apparatus blast out
Walking on Sunshine
—and they were relentlessly efficient in organizing timetables for the individual interviews, which were to be conducted by three officers strategically placed in different corners of the hall.

I was one of the first in line, although I had no clue as to the logic of the selective procedure.

“Don’t rush it, Mate,” Stan whispered in my ear, when was called forward. “The longer they’re here, the better.” I took proud note of the fact that I had been promoted from “Son” to “Mate,” after a mere fortnight of casual acquaintance. I put it down to my proven rockmobility endurance.

My interviewer was a D.C. Niles: a young man only a year or two younger than me, with ambition practically oozing out of his pores. I didn’t need to worry about spinning it out; he was obviously determined to give me an exceedingly thorough grilling, if only for form’s sake.

I explained that, despite the short length of our acquaintance, I felt that I knew Pearl and Marjorie very well, and had every confidence in their probity, that we had only been in one another’s company the previous evening because we were trying to help one another out, and that the very idea of afterliving individuals formulating conspiracies in order to increase the rate of their recruitment for the living was beyond ludicrous. I was certain that he believed me, and that he was probably grateful to have the case so eloquently made for the benefit of his tape.

The interviews with Pearl, Marjorie and Stan, which were held simultaneously, took a lot longer; indeed, they dragged on for hours, although I don’t think that the dragging was due to any heroic efforts on their part.

“This is daft,” Jim Peel muttered, as the rest of us huddled in the fourth corner of the room drinking our umpteenth coffee of the day. “They’re not really questioning them about whatever stupid story they got from their anonymous tipster—they’re gathering intelligence on the community. The only reason you got away so quickly is that you’ve only been here a fortnight. They won’t be able to pin this on us, obviously, but that won’t deter them from keeping a close eye on us, waiting for us to slip up.”

“It’ll be a long wait, then, won’t it?” I said. “Time is on our side. The only way is up.”

“When you’ve been dead as long as I have, Nicky,” he told me, sourly, “you won’t be so bloody optimistic. The more progress we make, the more resentment will build up against us. If we dodge the explosion this time, it’ll only make it more violent when it finally comes.”

“If you were prepared to switch rules,” I suggested, “we’d be able to put together a soccer team considerably sooner than a rugby union side—even if we have to start off playing five-a-side. If we had an entire team of our own, we might find it easier to get games.”

He didn’t tell me off for changing the subject. “Built for the scrum, me,” he said, mournfully. “Not exactly nimble, even if I have dropped a couple of stone since Stan started me dancing.”

“You can be our central defender, then,” I told him. “Stan will play, if we ask him nicely, so we only need two more. Mike can probably be drafted, at least as a stopgap, and the season doesn’t start for another two months, so….”

“They won’t let us into the league, you know.”

“I’m not so sure,” I told him. “They might be glad to sign us up. Nobody’s going to object to playing against us, unless and until we start winning. We just have to take it easy until we’ve been fully accepted, and then we can really show them what we’re made of.”

He managed a wry smile at that. “All we really need,” he said, “is for the Chelsea team bus to crash on the M4 on the way back from a pre-season friendly—except, of course, that you and I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting a game once we had some real players in the ranks.”

“The problem with jokes like that,” I said, sadly, “is that not only are they not funny, which is forgivable, but that anyone overhearing you, especially today, might get the wrong idea—which isn’t.”

“I know,” he said, mournfully. “It’s a bugger, isn’t it. Can’t remember the last time I had a good laugh.” He seemed to be feeling better than he had been when the conversation started, though.