Zombies Don't Cry

by Brian Stableford

  Anyway, you can get away with anything in a movie, as long as it’s violent and you keep up the narrative flow. Fencing matches are always okay—even fencing matches between a villain armed with a samurai sword and a hero with a brass candlestick. Never mind the thinking, and forget the explanations, just get on with the bloody story….

  In a movie, you have to do a lot with the few words you have, especially the title. My movie will, inevitably, be called Night of the Living—not just because it’s about a horde of stupid malevolent drunks trying to break into a besieged building at night in order to slaughter a hapless flock of innocents who only want to get on with their afterlives in peace, but because the whole of the action will be symbolic. Because, you see, that microcosmic scene really will capture the very essence of world’s inevitable fate: of the impending night of the living, and the dawn of the risen dead. The whole point of the scene is that, even though the living far outnumber the afterliving, and are far nastier, the afterliving are going to withstand their assault. They’re going to pull through. They’re going to survive.

  And simply by surviving, they’re planting a symbolic signpost to the future. The future, that signpost says—not in so many words, because this is a movie, and you can’t interrupt the action just to make people think, but tacitly—is ours. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but one day, we’ll be running the show.

  We’ll be running the show because we deserve to run it, and because, after all, somebody has to, and we couldn’t possibly make a worse job of it than the living, even if we are only human.

  That’s what the movie is all about, you see. It’s about arguing, however ludicrous it might seem in terms of the calculus of probability, that the candlestick really is mightier than the sword, because it’s capable, given a candle, of bearing light, and isn’t just a dedicated device designed to slice and dice human flesh.

  The movie is about the insistence that everything will work out in the end, that Utopia is not only conceivable, but achievable, if only the right million-to-one shot falls out of the chaos of possibility. That’s a lot easier to contrive, of course, if you have a single scriptwriter with his heart in the right place than a committee of the whole world, but we mustn’t forget that, living and afterliving alike, we really do have the power to remake our world. We’re the ones who do things, the ones that make things happen.

  It could be a great movie.

  It won’t be anything much like the original book, of course, because the original book is an autobiography, and has to be true to afterlife, but movies never are.

  * * * * * * *

  The gun that Goliath pulled out was only a small gun—it had to be, in order to have fitted into his pocket, but it was still a gun, and it rewrote the script for the entire melodrama within the twinkling of an eye.

  For one thing, it licensed the police to scramble a helicopter and an Armed Response Vehicle, without having to be called and asked—but that wasn’t really relevant to Stan and me, because we knew full well that whatever was going to happen now was going to play out a lot faster than the measured power-ballet that the cops were choreographing, and a lot faster than anyone had intended or hoped.

  Stan actually began to say: “There’s no need…,” but he didn’t even have time to finish the futile sentence.

  “Traitor!” spat the man with the eagle tattoo, who presumably didn’t know that the first half of his chosen motto was Dulce et Decorum Est. There wasn’t an atom of sweetness or decorousness about him—and he didn’t look as if he had the slightest intention of dying for his fatherland.

  But he didn’t shoot right away. However bad he was at improvisation, he knew that this was still supposed to be a play, still a publicity stunt, still a parade of apparent strength and resolution, for the benefit of the cameras. He knew that it wasn’t supposed to turn into a massacre. He knew that there was no need…but now that his inner scriptwriter had lost the plot, his instincts were running riot.

  Anything could happen.

  The words to Highway to Hell faded away, leaving silence. It’s not a very long song.

  Stan decided to change tack. He was a much better improviser than Goliath. “Go ahead, then, Brother,” he said, calmly and quietly. “Shoot me. I’m already dead. The only person you can hurt is yourself.”

  It was, I suppose, an obvious gambit. Too obvious, perhaps.

  Pearl suddenly shoved her way past Jim Peel—improbable as that sounds—and stood out in the open, about fifteen feet behind us.

  “Stan isn’t the one you want,” she said. “I’m your angel of death. Let these two alone and I’ll go with you. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done already.”

  I assumed that she was just playing for time, and that her inner scriptwriter was simply desperate. Remarkably, though, it provoked a riposte that actually scored a point for us.

  “You might think you’ve been raped before, Honey,” the monster said—even the ED research their targets on the internet—“but you ain’t felt nothing yet.”

  It was probably the most stupid thing he could possibly have said, precisely because it reflected his true feelings and his true identity. I’d already cast him as a monster, of course, be the whole point of his being there, and the whole point of his entire pathetic existence, from his own viewpoint, was to pose as one of England’s Defenders. Threatening to rape a damsel in distress—even a zombie damsel in distress—made him the Dragon, not St. George, Goliath, not David, a shambling, ghoulish wreck of a human being, not a hero.

  As soon as he’d said it, he realized that it had been a silly mistake. Everybody watches TV, even if they favor shows that are much more violent and slightly more melodramatic than Resurrection Ward, and don’t have their hearts in the right place.

  Still improvising, the giant rotated his right arm through thirty degrees or so, and dropped it by a few inches, so that the gun was pointing straight at my forehead.

  “I can blow his fucking brains out,” he observed, with uncomfortable accuracy. “He won’t be coming back from the dead again then, will he? None of you will, if we do the job right.” Personally, I thought, was a low blow. It was also an invitation to his three flying buttresses to draw their own guns—which they did.

  Now, I thought, things have really turned ugly. Now, it really is going to be a massacre. It is the Alamo, after all.

  All Stan had to come back with, unfortunately, was: “Leave the boy out of it. He has nothing to do with this.”

  “He walked the zombie nurse home last night,” the well-informed ED thug remarked, “and that green bitch Claridge too.”

  It suddenly occurred to me, belatedly, that Mum and Dad would be watching the show—and Kirsten too. I figured that I owed it to the at least to put in a line of my own. They wouldn’t have wanted me to look like the kind of idiot who got stick with a non-speaking role. If I was going down, I had to go down as Davy Crockett, not an extra.

  “I have everything to do with this,” I said looking Goliath straight in the eye. “And I have you to thank for that, don’t I? I was in the Oracle when your idiot bomber blew himself to bloody shreds. Obviously, you didn’t do that personally, but I’m sure you’d be glad to accept your share of the responsibility. I presume that it was some other expert rapist who drove poor Pearl to suicide, but you’ve just boasted about your willingness to do the same, and worse, so the fact that we’re here, and all that we are, really is your doing, isn’t it? Congratulations on a world well made.”

  I was just playing for time. I wasn’t trying particularly hard to make him look bad, and I wasn’t really trying to goad him…well, maybe just a little bit. I still couldn’t quite believe that he was going to blow my brains while he was live on broadcast news. If he’d been that kind of martyr, I figured, it would have been him in the Oracle with a semtex vest and a battery-powered detonator.

  As things turned out, though, I never got to find out whether or not he would have shot me, because we were i
nterrupted.

  The doormen, even though there were three of them, turned out to be absolute crap at their job, perhaps because their attention was focused exclusively on the riot police. Not that it’s easy to be brave and purposeful if someone is waving a Kalashnikov in your face—especially someone who looks plenty crazy enough to use it.

  Actually, I can barely tell a Kalashnikov from a blunderbuss. Maybe it was an Armalite, or some brand of gun that I’d never even heard of. All I know for sure is that the weapon that was being waved—and I do mean waved—by the crazy person who came in through the broken doorway, the entire crowd outside having hurriedly made way for him, was some kind of rifle.

  The crazy person in question was about five foot three and slightly-built. He wasn’t a day over nineteen. It was Pearl’s stalker, Timmy. He hadn’t made himself scarce at all when the ED turned up. He’d gone to fetch his gun from wherever he’d parked his silly little car.

  I was flabbergasted to discover that he had a gun. So was Goliath.

  I couldn’t imagine for a moment that he actually meant to fire it, or that he could possibly hit what he was aiming at if he did. Neither could Goliath.

  Anybody can be wrong.

  “Leave her alone!” Timmy said—or, rather, screeched. “Just get the hell out of here and leave her alone.”

  “Take that gun off him before he hurts himself,” the man with the eagle tattoo said to one of his evil henchmen.

  The henchman in question stepped forward, without an instant’s hesitation.

  Suddenly, the rifle wasn’t waving any longer, Suddenly, it was perfectly steady, braced against Timmy’s shoulder. Suddenly, the henchman’s right knee exploded, and he collapsed like a ton of bricks, dropping his own pathetic handgun.

  It’s surprising how quickly you can change your mind, under the right stimulus. I never even considered the possibility that the shot had gone wild. I knew that Timmy had hit exactly what he had been aiming for. And I knew, when he swung the barrel round to point it at Goliath, who was still in the process of turning round to face the new monster-slayer on the block, that if he fired again, Timmy would hit exactly what he was aiming at. He was only ten feet away, and I had the advantage of having heard Pearl reveal that his beloved mother was a member of the “County Set.” Although that didn’t necessarily mean that Timmy’s Dad was heavily into hunting and shooting, it certainly didn’t imply that he wasn’t. And what self-respecting member of the Berkshire Hunt wouldn’t have taught his little boy to shoot, especially if the kid was a bit of a runt?

  The monster with the eagle tattoo, of course, had the disadvantage of not having heard that. Unlike me, he wasn’t sure that Timmy’s first shot hadn’t gone astray. He presumably knew the law—most people who carry guns know at least a little of it—and was well aware that if he shot Timmy now, he’d be able to plead self-defence. Perhaps he took that as a licence to kill. At any rate, he aimed his own pathetic little popgun at Timmy’s weedy chest.

  That particular law, however, cuts both ways. Timmy could have blown Goliath’s brains out then, and gotten away with it. He didn’t. Instead, he altered his stance ever so slightly and shot Goliath in the knee, exactly as he had done to the henchman.

  Goliath went down like a second ton of bricks, but he didn’t let go of his gun. He wasn’t dead, and he was too big and stupid even to lose consciousness—and he still had hold of his gun.

  By this time, the monster’s other two evil henchmen were exercising their own stupidity by wondering whether might be a good time to use their own weapons. It wasn’t, but only one of them had presence of mind enough to figure that out, check the gesture, drop his weapon and raise his arms above his head instead.

  The other had no presence of mind at all, and entirely the wrong instincts. As soon as he raised the hand clutching the pistol, as if to aim, Timmy shot him in the knee too.

  I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be a grouse on his father’s favorite Highland moor, or a crow on the family farm.

  In the street behind the rapt audience I saw a police Armed Response Vehicle pull up in the street. Armored men with rifles of their own started to pile out. It must have been lurking close at hand, just in case. The one thought in my mind was: For God’s sake don’t shoot Timmy—not until he’s finished, at least.

  But Timmy had finished, absurd as that seemed. As if in super-slo-mo, I watched the stricken monster with the eagle tattoo raise his own pistol, aiming straight at Timmy’s valiant heart.

  I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Timmy still had time to bring the rifle round again, take expert aim, and blow the monster’s stupid brains out for him.

  But that wasn’t what Timmy did. He didn’t even shoot out the other knee.

  Instead, he raised his own arms in the air, as if mimicking the evil henchman’s gesture of surrender. For a split second, I actually thought that his was a gesture of surrender too—and so, in all probability, did the man with the eagle tattoo.

  Goliath fired anyway. He had nothing on his mind now but vengeance. He wasn’t thinking about destroying brains any longer, though; he just fired at the biggest part of what wasn’t all that big a target.

  It was a fine shot, in the circumstances, although it was never going to win England’s Defenders any points in what was now one of the greatest PR cock-ups of the twenty-first century.

  Timmy the Martyr, hastening to his Resurrection and his mystical union with his beloved Pearl, took the bullet full in the chest. It knocked him backwards like a rag doll. Blood fountained from his torn arteries.

  Goliath was already pulling the gun around, knowing now that that any self-defence plea he might have copped before had gone right out of the window. He wasn’t trying bring it to bear on me, the poor innocent bystander, but on Stanley Blake the traitor—who might, I suppose, have taken action himself, but might equally well have realized that Timmy had just set the bar for looking good that little bit higher, and figured that he could take a bullet in the chest as well as any living poseur.

  It didn’t matter. I couldn’t have hit a barn door with a rifle-shot to save my afterlife, but I knew how to volley a soccer ball. I kicked the hand that was holding Goliath’s gun harder than I’d ever kicked a football in an entire career of Sunday mornings.

  Maybe the monster could have held on, but the effort would probably have snapped his trigger-finger, and the shot released in consequence could have gone anywhere—except for Stan’s phoenix-tattooed torso. In fact, the crippled thug let go, and his pathetic little popgun soared high over Timmy’s stricken body and into the eager crowd still packed into the gaping doorway.

  Then I leapt over the moaning, spitting, bleeding monstrosity and reached Timmy with what felt like a single bound, although it must have been at least three strides. I left Stan way behind—without Highway to Hell to inspire him, the poor lamb was quite at a loss, although the phoenix on his chest still looked magnificent, and its symbolic value hadn’t diminished in the slightest.

  Timmy wasn’t quite dead yet, but there was nothing to be done that could possibly have prolonged his life for more than a few seconds more. He was trying to say something. It was probably just Pearl’s name, but he might have had something more elaborate prepared.

  I had to speak for him—there was no one else in position, although Pearl was coming as fast as she could. I really wished that I’d had the opportunity to prepare something, but I had to go with the flow and let my instincts take over. There was no time for thinking, let alone for explanations. It just happened.

  It was probably the hammiest line I could possibly have come up with, but it wasn’t inappropriate, in the circumstances. I just looked up into all the phones and cameras that were jostling for position in the doorway, completely blocking the path of the armed police, then nodded down at Timmy’s dead but hopefully resurrectable body, and said: “That is a True Briton, and a true Knight of the Living Dead. In a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll be throwing him one hell of a part
y.”

  Then the police broke through and started pouring in like a great blue cataract. There was nothing left for them to do but pick up the pieces, but I expect that’s the way they like it.

  While Pearl knelt down beside Timmy, to make sure that he was still fit for a long and prosperous afterlife, I turned back to the fallen monster, and gave him a great big beaming smile.

  “Don’t worry, my darling boy,” I said to him. “She’ll probably be your nurse too, once she’s off suspension. You’ll get the very best of her attention—she’s an authentic angel of mercy. The last thing she’ll want is to let you die.”

  I didn’t get a laugh, though. That’s the only downside to afterlife: everybody around you loses their sense of humor.

  EPILOGUE

  As soon as I had a spare moment, I did my duty and phoned home, while standing in a pool of blood that wasn’t mine. There must have been quite a scramble to get to the landline receiver, and Dad’s hard to defeat when he wants to say “I told you so,” but it was only fair that Kirsten beat him to it. What Dad wanted to remind me that he’d told me was that I should have stayed at home instead of going into the Center, but Kirsten had been right to back me up when I said that I had to.

  “Hi, Kirsty,” I said. “Just phoning to let you know that I’m okay.”

  “We know,” she said. “We’ve been watching TV.”

  “How did I come across, on a scale of one to ten? In terms of heroism, I mean.”

  “In terms of heroism, maybe four; in terms of stupidity, at least eight.” She always had been a harsh marker. No man is a hero to his little sister, no matter how hard he tries.

  “Well,” I said, “I survived.”

  There was no polite answer to that. “When I said you had to be there,” she told me, “I didn’t mean that you had to be in the middle of it. I didn’t mean that you had to stick your head in the lion’s mouth.”