Zombies Don't Cry Read Online Free Page A

before you woke up. You won’t need another for several days—maybe a week.”
    “Thanks,” I said, absent-mindedly. “Could you possibly let Helena in to see me before tomorrow, if she comes, or are you absolutely committed to following doctor’s orders?”
    “Absolutely committed,” she told me.
    It didn’t seem to be an appropriate time for making jokes about the legendary slavishness of zombies, so I didn’t attempt one.
    “Do you know how many other people were killed in the bomb blast that took me out?” I asked, after a slight pause.
    “Seven,” she told me. “Thirty-four injured, not counting trivial cuts and bruises. The worst one ever in Reading, and the worst ever credited to England’s Defenders, although there’ve been higher casualty-counts in Slough and London, courtesy of jihadists. I was on duty when the victims began to come in—I don’t usually work A and E, but it was all hands on deck that day. It caused some problems for the patients already in care, but mercifully not enough to generate a morality-blip. The last thing you need after an incident like that is to trigger an automatic inquiry.”
    “And how many of the seven were zombifiable?” I asked, not having much interest in the intricacies of Hospital Trust computer monitoring.
    “Five attempts were made, but you were the only one who pulled through. The burns on your head, torso and arms were superficial—it was a single piece of flying glass that actually killed you, slicing cleanly through your heart and lung. The people who caught the nails that were packed around the plastic explosive weren’t so lucky—their wounds were far messier.”
    “Lucky,” I repeated, with no particular inflection.
    “Very,” she insisted.
    Obviously she wasn’t about to license any suspicion that being reincarnated as a zombie might be considered less than lucky. How could she? She’d thought being alive was so unlucky that she’d killed herself.
    Maybe some day, I thought, being a zombie would seem the preferable option to all the living, and no one would even hang around long enough to breed, thus bringing the human story to a terminus of sorts. Zombies could enjoy sex— Resurrection Ward was very clear about that—but thus far, there was no known case of any female zombie falling pregnant. Nobody was yet prepared to declare it absolutely impossible, but nobody was yet prepared to rule it possible either.
    I took the safer route in the discussion of luck. “Taking a piece of flying glass full in the chest has to be reckoned pretty unlucky, in my book,” I observed. “One of those freaks of chance that make truth stranger than fiction. Being within the blast-radius of a suicide bomb in Berkshire was pretty unlucky, too, given that the newsblips keep telling us that we’re still more likely to get struck by lightning, let alone drown in the bath. Where did the psychopathic idiot blow himself up, exactly? I’ve been thinking hard, but the last thing I can remember is going to the library in my lunch break to restock my e-reader.”
    “The ground floor of the Oracle, near the entrance to TK Maxx.”
    “I must have been taking a short cut back to the office. Why there? It’s not exactly ghetto territory.”
    “I don’t think he was trying to target the immigrant population as such, or even protesting specifically about demographic change in Reading. He was just making a point.”
    “The point in question being that the self-appointed defenders of mythical England are just as crazy as the self-appointed defenders of the mythical Prophet—that if Islam can produce suicide bombers by the score, the Bulldog Breed can’t be found wanting in the fatal fanaticism department. At least there’s no possible question of resurrecting suicide bombers…is there?”
    “Not really,” she admitted. “Even the ones who go off too soon and don’t do much damage to others generally succeed in blowing their own brains to smithereens, so the