Zombies Don't Cry Read Online Free Page B

question of moral entitlement doesn’t arise there. The Jarndyce case was adjourned again while you were comatose, though. No one’s entirely sure which way it will go.”
    Blaise Jarndyce was a paedophilic serial killer dying in Broadmoor of liver and pancreatic cancer. According to the newsblips, he was a goner—but once the tumors had been cleaned out of his dead body, he might be a candidate for resurrection, and the fact that zombies sometimes developed personalities totally different from those they’d had in life was likely to work in his favor. The case had already dragged on more than somewhat, and looked likely to run to run to epic lengths if stopgap measures were put in place when the evil sod actually kicked the bucket. No one knew how long a person might be able remain suspended in a post-mortem coma, neither dead nor afteralive.
    “The stupid thing is,” I said, “that the ED didn’t have any reason to hate me before, given that I was born white, but now that, thanks to them, I’m whiter than white, they will hate me, because they don’t like Olde English zombies any more than they like Englishmen of Jamaican or Pakistani descent. Ironic, eh?”
    “Ironic,” she confirmed, humourlessly. “I have to go now. I have other patients to attend to.”
    “Be thankful you’ve got a job,” I said. “All the zombies I ever met were unemployed, and bitter about it. It wasn’t a representative sample, mind—I worked for the OO.” The past tense slipped out without my noticing it.
    “There’s actually a demand for zombie nurses,” she told me. “ Resurrection Ward has made sure of that, at least. I was unemployed before , but I was accepted for fast-track retraining with no trouble at all, and taken on at the Berks as soon as I finished. Ironic, eh?”
    She turned to go, not waiting for the echo, but there was still one more question I needed to ask.
    “It is okay, isn’t it, for us to call ourselves and one another zombies ? But not for them .” The them slipped out too. I suppose I should have congratulated myself for the speed of my adaptation.
    “It really doesn’t matter,” she told me. “We are what we are, and we have to find out what that is before we can get used to it. It doesn’t matter what standards of political correctness the living invent, or how conscientiously or otherwise they observe them. Whether they call us zombies or the afterliving , we are what we are.”
    I wondered, briefly, how the other living patients in the ward—apart from the guy with the symbolically-inclined index-fingers—might be reacting secretly to being nursed by a zombie, but I figured that they would mostly be well aware that they ought to be grateful for any care at all. I wasn’t so sure about the living who had been numbered among my own former clients, many of whom had been ED sympathizers or people the ED wanted rid of. In either case, they might well have felt a trifle uncomfortable at having their appeals against the perceived injustice fielded by a victim of collateral damage to an ED suicide-bomb.
    That wasn’t an irrelevant consideration, so far as I was concerned, even though my contract of employment had been voided by my death. In theory, there was nothing to stop me reapplying for my old job—or, of course, from taking the matter to the Ombudsman’s Office if I were rejected, on the grounds of unfair discrimination. After all, I knew the drill as well as anyone.
    I wasn’t left alone with my thoughts for very long, though. As Pearl had said, the doctors still had tests to do, and they were used to working unsocial hours.

CHAPTER THREE
    The question most frequently asked about the afterliving is whether zombies still suffer from angst , and, if so, how their angst differs from the angst of the living. Well, not really—only joking. In an ideal world, though—meaning one in which people took existentialist philosophy as seriously as it deserves to be taken—that would probably be