Zombies Don't Cry

by Brian Stableford

  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.

  When Pearl had finally been given leave to go, we hastened to rally round. Jim had a cup of coffee ready and waiting for her—which was a pity, because she only drank tea.

  “I don’t know whether to be glad or disappointed that they haven’t arrested me,” she said. “I can’t help suspecting that I might be safer in custody, until the Hospital Trust can get through its round of committee meetings and issue a press release declaring me utterly blameless. Even then….”

  “We’ve ordered in a stack of pizzas from Domino’s,” Jim told her. “You do eat pizzas, don’t you?” He was still worried about the coffee blunder, which he felt reflected badly on him, given the length of time he’d supposedly known Pearl. I gathered that she’d been keeping him at more than arm’s length.

  “We were just discussing applying to the local five-a-side league to enter a team,” I told her. “By the time the season starts for real, we’ll probably be in a position to field a decent five, with a couple of subs on hand.”

  “I don’t play football,” she said, shortly, but added: “I do eat pizza, though.”

  We ate the pizzas while watching the CID team packing up their stuff, preparing to leave. Purely by coincidence—or so I assumed—it was just coming up to five o’clock: the end of the standard working day. Stan suggested finishing off the rockmobility session that had been interrupted, but he was voted down unanimously.

  Marjorie went straight to her workstation as soon as she finished her slice of pizza, and started hammering away on the keyboard. Something told me that she wasn’t catching up on her latest retraining course. I hoped that she’d let me see what she wrote before posting it, and would take more notice of any suggestions I made than she had the last time. She wasn’t the only one busy in that way; even if I’d had the inclination to catch up with my own course-in-progress, I’d have had difficulty getting on to a machine. I didn’t doubt that the newscasters would be monitoring our traffic attentively, and could only hope that the eager typists would be extra careful with the wording of whatever they were pouring into cyberspace. If they were picking up any net-buzz, it wasn’t important enough for them to pass it on.

  When the remains of the pizzas had been tidied away and more tea and coffee drunk, there seemed to be nothing to do, for those of us not on the machines, but wait, not knowing what it was that we were waiting for.

  “Are you intending to stay here all night?” Marjorie asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you?”

  “Damn right. Not exactly going to be comfortable, though, is it? I count twenty-nine of us. There are two bunks in the storeroom, but apart from that there are only the armchairs, and only eight of those. We’ll have to sleep in sh
ifts.”

  “I wasn’t really expecting to sleep,” I said. “Stan’s right, of course—tonight is crucial. If we get through it unscathed, the heat will leak out of the situation like helium from a balloon. Tomorrow night, most of us will probably be able go home without risk. At least it’s midsummer. It won’t get dark until half past nine, and it won’t get cold at all.”

  “Most riots happen in high summer,” she informed me. “Rain and frost cool drunken ardor—but at this time of year, too many of the living start drinking early, finish late and still feel full of beans in the belated twilight.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her, pointing out of the window—whose external bars, I must confess, I was glad to contemplate for once. “No drunken mob would be able to force their way through the professional paparazzi and the amateur video cowboys—and even if most of those idiots leaning on the lamp-posts are mere gawkers, they aren’t getting drunk while they’re there, are they?”

  “They don’t look very dangerous,” she conceded, “But the mere fact that anyone’s there at all suggests that they expect something to kick off. Is that Pearl’s stalker over there on the right, under the tree?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Well, at least we can be sure that he’s harmless, even if he does seem to have kitted himself out in camouflage gear from the local Army & Navy Stores. I reckon they whole lot are a bunch of sheep, most of whom couldn’t even be bothered to put on their wolf’s clothing.”

  “You really are walking on sunshine today, aren’t you?” she observed.

  “Sure,” I said. “I got help from one of the on-line agony aunts. Always maintain an optimistic attitude, and it will make you irresistible to women. If there’s one thing lonely women hate worse than the absence of a gee-ess-oh-aitch, it’s a glass-half-empty kind of guy.”

  “Better be careful, Nicky,” she said. “You don’t want to make yourself too irresistible. A pretty boy like you could get into trouble that way.”

  “Promises, promises,” I said—and finally won a thin smile.

  By nine o’clock, the crowd still hadn’t shown the slightest sign of getting ugly. The authentic paparazzi were looking at their watches, wondering if it might be time to call it a day or go night-club haunting, but they didn’t dare make a move just in case one of the opposition ended up getting something they’d missed. Some of the idlers who’d just stopped by to see what was happening did move on, but they were always replaced. The crowd was still growing, albeit gradually.

  “Maybe we ought to take Stan’s blaster out into the street,” Marjorie suggested, “and do a rockmobility session there. It’s give them something to watch—and maybe they’d all join in, like one big happy family.” She was obviously making an effort not to be a glass-half-empty kind of gal, perhaps in the hope of impressing me.

  “Nah,” said Stan. “The more it resembles a silent vigil, the better I like it. Don’t want to whip up any excitement.”

  “They’re waiting for dusk,” Jim said, obviously not having read any good advice columns lately. “Just waiting for darkness to fall.”

  “If I went back home,” Pearl put in, “they’d probably let the rest of you alone.” Nobody even dignified that with an answer.

  Jim was right, though as it turned out. “They” really were waiting for dusk.

  We didn’t even know who “they” were until they put in their appearance, but as soon as they did, we were left in no doubt.

  We heard them before we actually saw them, and what we heard was unmistakable: the sound of marching boots.

  They were probably Doc Martens rather than genuine army boots, although the latter were feely available at the local Army & Navy, but it didn’t really matter, as long as they made the right noise.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp, they went, as the boots in Kipling’s poem should have done, although he had made the tag line boots, boots, boots—which is, when you think about it, inappropriate, because “boots” is not an onomatopoeic word.

  My heart sank as soon as I heard the tramping, but I joined the others at the window anyway, to see exactly what kind of monstrosity it was that was heading our way.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  If this story is ever to be submitted to an arbiter in the hope that it might one day see electronic print through commercial channels, I expect that the first thing a prospective editor will recommend is that I take out almost all of the introductory sections to the chapters, especially this one.

  “Nobody’s interested in what you think,” he or she will undoubtedly tell me, “especially if all you’re thinking about is trying to find explanations for things nobody cares about. Nobody’s interested in explanations. When they’re reading a story, whether it’s true or not, all people are interested in is what happens next. Telling them what you think, and trying to explain things, just gets in the way. What you need, if you’re ever going to interest people in what you’re writing, is much less thinking, no explanations at all, and lots more things happening. You have to drum it into your head until it becomes second nature: never mind the thinking, just get on with the story.

  To which my reflexive reply, ironically enough, might be reckoned unprintable by people of delicate sensibility, even in electronic ink. Rather than merely lose my rag, however, I shall try to explain.

  The fundamental point is that this is my autobiography—or a slice of it, at any rate—and it wouldn’t be authentic if it didn’t reflect the real me. It has to be true, not merely to the facts of what happened, but to my point of view.

  The simple fact is that I really do spend much of my time thinking, and much of my thinking time hunting for explanations. I can’t claim that I always find them, let alone that I always find the right ones, but the story of my life was, in essence, the story of my idle intellectual questing, and the story of my afterlife has been a straightforward extrapolation of the quests in question, minus the idleness. The things that happen, on the rare occasions when things do, are merely décor: background, not foreground.

  Maybe that makes me unusual, even among the present-day afterliving, but that doesn’t matter. Even if it doesn’t exist right now, if I’m right, my ideal audience will eventually materialize. Not that I’m only writing this for my fellow zombies, mind. I think the living can get just as much out of it as the risen dead, if only they’re prepared to make the effort.

  I’m sorry about the effort, but not that sorry. However true it might be that people who read stories are only interested in what happens next, they oughtn’t to be. When you think about it, what happens next is only the particular unlikely event that chances to fall out of the chaos of unrealized possibility, and if you hadn’t noticed, writers cheat. Million-to-one shots are meat and drink to them. Even so, the implication remains that something else could easily have happened instead, and if time could turned back so that the situation were replayed, it probably would have done. What happens next is, therefore, essentially trivial—but whatever happens, the same questions always remain, the same issues are at stake, the same processes stand in need of explanation. Whatever happens, or doesn’t, it all needs thinking about. If you don’t do it, who will? Me, obviously—but is that really enough, whether from my viewpoint or yours?

  I am prepared to apologize for interrupting the story, not just now but continually, but I would like you to think about why I’m doing it. Is it just because I’m a zombie, do you suppose? Is it just because I’m possessed of zombie sobriety, as gloriously free from what-happened-next addition as I am from all other unhealthily gluttonous appetites?

  Well, perhaps. Who am I to judge?

  It really doesn’t matter, though, at the end of the day, exactly what I am. What matters is what I aspire to be, and whether it’s something worthy of aspiration. And what matters when the story is over and done with, however it turns out, is what it makes you think about, and what explanations it invites you to look for. Or, to put it another way, what assistance it gives you, however trivial, to make up your mind
about what you should aspire to be.

  Is that pompous, or what?

  Stories are only trash, after all.

  But it doesn’t really matter what you or your inner editor might think—not to me. It’s not as if I’m alive. I’m dead, if not yet gone—and whatever people might think of them, zombies don’t cry.

  * * * * * * *

  “It’s the fucking ED,” said Stan, with a theatrical groan. “Why, oh, why, couldn’t it have been a column of Afro-Anglican exorcists, or even a pack of wailing jihadists? At least they rant before they get violent, and usually content themselves with just the ranting. The ED haven’t got the brains for ranting, unfortunately.”

  It occurred to me then that I hadn’t seen a single religious nut all day—which would have been odd, if I’d thought about it…except that this was the age of the internet, and crazy people always kept tabs on one another as well as on the sane. We hadn’t known that England’s Defenders had planned some sort of operation, but the Afro-Anglicans probably had, if only because England’s Defenders would have sent them a text warning them to stay clear or get stomped.

  Within five seconds, Stan had locked the doors. It would have been nice if he’d hauled a massive beam of wood out of his store-room, and if there had been slots riveted to the wall on either side of the door into which the beam might be slotted, but the Salvation Army had never had the need for that kind of provision and Reading Borough Council had certainly not been about to repair the omission.

  The reason that a protective beam of that sort would have been useful is that the ED’s marching stormtroopers were being assisted to keep in step, in spite of never having put in any real drill practice, by the fact that they were carrying a huge battering-ram.

  At a guess, it had actually started out its working life as a telegraph pole—it was certainly impressively long as well as worryingly stout—but no one in the Hall could doubt for an instant what the ED intended to do with it. They were not only going to break in, but to make a show out of breaking in, for the benefit of the waiting cameras.