Free Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford Page B

that, but I felt obliged to follow up. “Oh, we’re bosom buddies now,” I said. “She fancies me—but she would, wouldn’t she, given that I’m the best looking bloke there. Jim Peel’s no competition, even though he’s pretty much the same age. He was a rugby player.”
    “Marjorie Claridge fancies you ?”
    “Absolutely. Inevitable, as I say. I was fanciable before, although you probably didn’t notice, being my little sister—but now, I’m practically a rock star, and not just for lack of opposition. You should see me doing physical jerks to Highway to Hell . Enough to make any red-blooded zombie woman wet her knickers…and believe you me, there are some frustrated zombie ladies up at the old Salvation Army Hall. Afterlife is a better pepper-upper than HRT.”
    She hesitated, actually uncertain as to whether to believe me or not.
    “I’m joking,” I assured her, swiftly. “It’s me, Kirsty—wicked wit, remember.”
    She practically sighed with relief, although what she actually said was; “I knew that. I’m not an idiot.”
    It wasn’t until later, when I was in bed reviewing my day before trying to go to sleep, that it occurred to me to remember that there’s many a true word spoken in jest. No matter how fanciable I’d been, comparatively speaking, when I was alive, I really was in a situation now where I had very little opposition, and it really was the case that my apparent youth put me in a special position in the afterlife community. I’d discussed the minority issue briefly with Pearl in the hospital but hadn’t really taken its consequences aboard, partly because she was young too, and there were no other zombies on the ward for the purposes of comparison. Given the points that Stan had been making about the benefits of exercise, though, it wasn’t implausible that afterlife really might reawaken female appetites more effectively than HRT, and even conceivable that Marjorie Claridge’s flirtatiousness wasn’t entirely a matter of jest.
    I even started thinking that Marjorie didn’t look at all bad, for a late-forty-something albino, before I reminded myself, sternly, that I already had a girl-friend…or, at least, was truly and irredeemably in love.

CHAPTER SIX
    When you really think about it—as you inevitably begin to do, once you’ve been raised from the dead—the most peculiar thing about afterlife status isn’t the albinism at all, although that’s the most obvious change. The most peculiar thing is something that doesn’t change: the apparent age of the afterlifer. There’s no logic to that, in my opinion. Superstimulant stem cells ought to rejuvenate as well as reanimating. Given that they’re supposed to be restoring your body, they really ought to go all the way and do a thorough job.
    Conspiracy theorists, inevitably, argue that it’s all part of the plot, that it’s a deliberate ploy on the part of the International Brotherhood of Freeburkers and a key element of their incomprehensible plot to take over the world by becoming the ultimate Masters of Life and Afterlife. According to that line of crazy thinking, the late-dying afterliving could be restored to their physical prime, just as one would expect from an authentic elixir of life, but the Burkers don’t want that, firstly because it would make the afterliving young enough and virile enough to become a real fighting force, and secondly because it would enable them to breed. The second point, in the eyes of most conspiracy theorists, is critical. If the afterliving could have children, there really would be a possibility of them one day taking over the world and exterminating the living as a redundant nuisance. The age-freezing is thus seen as a side-effect or necessary corollary of sterilization. People who argue like that aren’t fazed by the apparent fact that afterliving individuals who died young also seem to be sterile—they just assume that the Burkers take special measures in those cases.
    If it