Free Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford Page A

to volunteer without knowing what I’m volunteering for. Any experimental sample you want to include me in, you’ll have to explain exactly what it is you’re doing and why—and to hell with double blinds and the placebo effect.”
    “No problem Nicky,” he assured me, blithely. “I’ll take that as a yes, then. In principle.”
    “As Stan says,” I told him, “we don’t know what we’re capable of yet, so we have to do our damnedest to find out, and hope that we’re only on a Highway to Hell in an ironic sense—so yes, I’ll help, provided that I know what I’m helping with.”
    “Great,” he said. “Pearl said I could count on you—she’s a good judge.”
    “You’re just saying that because she’s in love with you.” It just slipped out—but it didn’t seem out of place in the bantering context.
    He frowned: “Who told you that?” he asked, sharply.
    “Nobody,” I said. “I guessed. I watch Resurrection Ward .”
    “Well, don’t,” he said, meaning don’t guess rather than don’t watch Resurrection Ward . “And don’t say anything like that to Pearl, even in jest. She won’t think it’s funny.”
    “Okay,” I agreed, meekly.
    “She’ll probably be in later, when her shift finishes.”
    “I’m sure she’ll be heartbroken to have missed rockmobility,” I said, trying to restore the balance of banter.
    He condescended to smile. “It may be bizarre,” he said, “but it does work. To be honest, Blake’s doing a great job—if my tracking measurements show little else, as yet, they confirm that. Some of the people here really are in need of rehab, and he’s getting the job done, without any equipment whatsoever. He’s a good man.”
    “Never doubted it,” I said.
    Nurse Pearl did turn up later, in the early evening. By then, I’d discovered that her surname was Barleigh, suggesting that her parents had either been possessed of a wry sense of humor or none at all—probably the latter, given that they seemed to have taken such offense at her suicide that they’d virtually disowned her. Like Stan, she was regarded as more like a member of staff than an inmate—as the Center’s medical practitioner and Andy Hazelhurst’s research assistant—although she had no official status that would have allowed her to get paid for any such responsibility. She obviously took the same view of the necessities of our new society as Stan.
    I tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she was too busy. She told me that she was glad to see me, and hoped that I was settling in, but didn’t seem to have anything else to say. I concluded that, whether she was in love with Dr. Hazelhurst or not, she certainly wasn’t going to start giving me the eye any time soon. Not that it mattered.
    By the time I went back home on that first day I felt that Marjorie and Methuselah had been right. I did seem to fit in at the Center, even though there was no one there that would have had anything obvious in common with me when we were alive, and in spite of the fact that not everyone was as open-hearted as Methuselah, Marjorie and Stan. They all had problems of their own to preoccupy them; I understood that.
    As I’d anticipated, Kirsten was both surprised and pleased when I told her that I’d met Marjorie Claridge.
    “I thought she was dead and gone!” she said. “I didn’t even know she’d been resurrected, let alone that she was in Reading. She didn’t live here before. Maybe she’s in hiding.”
    “She doesn’t seem to be,” I said. “She’d surely be using a different name if she were. She did say that she posts anonymously these days, mind. Why would she be in hiding?”
    “You do know that she was murdered?”
    I hadn’t. “Something else we have in common, then,” I remarked.
    “Something else?” Kirsten queried, sceptically. “You were never a Greenpeace member.”
    I’d only mean that we were both afterliving, and was mildly surprised that Kirsten hadn’t realized