Zombies Don't Cry Read Online Free PDF Page B

home with the lunatic fringe at the Mount Pleasant Center. At any rate, we’d better see what we can do about getting you back on your feet a.s.a.p.” And with that, he was off.
    Nurse Pearl didn’t get the promised laptop to me until just before lights out on day two, with strict instructions not to disturb the other patients with the glow of the screen or any sound-effects. By then, I was too tired to throw myself wholeheartedly into assiduous research. I didn’t want to comb the web for information on the side-effects of zombification and the availability of local support services. I wanted to see Helena. Mum too, and Kirsten, and even Dad—but mostly Helena.
    After lights out, I couldn’t sleep, even though I’d meekly taken my prescribed sedative like a good boy.
    It seemed a trifle unfair, somehow, that zombies needed sleep. Surely, I thought, that ought to have been an affliction of life, a larval matter…like weeping. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether my zombie dreams would be the same as the dreams of the living me, and whether the afterliving forgot their dreams just as easily as the living.
    Everything was up for reappraisal; even phenomena that seemed the same, at first, might turn out in the fullness of time to be subtly different. I tried to convince myself that it was a really exciting prospect, but I was too tired.
    Eventually, though, I did go to sleep—and if I dreamed, I forgot what I had dreamed as soon as I was awake.
    I passed the following morning’s psych evaluation with flying colors. It wasn’t that much different from the others I’d undergone recently, by virtue of being certified as a civil service employee fit for face-to-face contact with members of the public. The trick is not to pretend to be absolutely normal, but to show tolerant awareness of one’s own eccentricities, and to suppress one’s natural inclination to make jokes. Like everyone else, I knew all about the trick questions designed to surprise latent schizophrenia or lurking Asperger’s, and ducked them with ease.
    I didn’t feel guilty about cheating; arguably, there’s no better proof of sanity than the ability to fake it. What is sanity, after all, but competent performance in the drama of life? Or afterlife.
    Once they’d had the ludicrously-delayed go-ahead, Mum and Dad came in together; inevitably, Mum started off doing most of the talking. She was every bit as wary as Dad, though—entirely understandably, given that I no longer looked like my old self, and that they too must have been poring over assorted websites for hours on end, reading horror stories about personality changes in the afterliving, and the awful prescience of Frankenstein .
    “It’s okay,” I assured them, when the fussing had died away to an acceptable level—which didn’t take long. “I died young, but not so young that my brain hadn’t fully developed. I was complete, as a person, but still relatively fresh. There’s no reason why the stem cells should have reconfigured my neural pathways to any significant extent—unlike my face, apparently. Who would have thought that faces were so malleable? Just think of it as fancy plastic surgery. How’s Kirsty taking it.”
    “Quite well, all things considered,” Mum assured me. “She’s at work just now, but she’ll pop in on her way home.”
    “And Helena?”
    “I don’t know. We haven’t really seen much of Helena—our paths don’t cross outside the hospital corridors. Your Gran and Uncle Bill sent their good wishes.”
    “Thank them for me,” I said, absent-mindedly. “I expect I’ll be out before the weekend—the hospital will want the bed. I’ll have to come back to you initially, if that’s okay, but I’ll try not to out-stay my welcome. I’ll get in touch with my landlord as soon as I can—I can’t do it from here without a phone or email. I know my lease has been voided, technically, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t re-let the flat to me,