Read Zombies Don't Cry for Free Online Page B

when she couldn’t.
    “Have you seen Helena?” I asked her, when she’d wiped her eyes. “I was expecting her to come, as soon as she could.”
    “Not recently,” she said.
    “Maybe the hospital hasn’t notified her that I’m conscious, because she’s not a relative. Could you give her a ring, just to make sure that she knows?”
    “Okay,” she said, unenthusiastically. She didn’t reach for her phone.
    I had to let her off the hook—she was my sister. “She has been to see me,” I told her. “Nurse Pearl said so—but you can leave it until later to phone her, if you want.”
    “I will,” she promised—and hesitated before adding: “It might not be a good idea to hope for too much in that direction, Nicky.”
    “Hope doesn’t come into it,” I told her. “Everybody knows that true love lasts forever.”
    “Till death us do part,” she quoted, quietly, as if slyly laying a trump on my ace in a game of Knockout Whist.
    “This is the twenty-first century,” I reminded her. “Death no longer parts.” It was a weak reply, though. Death voided marriages as well as other kinds of contracts, even in the eyes of the church, let alone engagements and not-quite-engagements. According to the web, the number of marriages severed by death that had been voluntarily remade after rebirth was tiny—which didn’t bode well for engagements, not-quite-engagements and simply being madly in love, even though there were no actual statistics available.
    “I really need to talk to her,” I added. “That’s all.”
    “Sure,” said Kirsten, in a way that suggested that she was anything but sure, about Helena or anything else.
    “I still feel the same about her as I did before,” I persisted, “Just as I feel the same way about you.” I didn’t suppose for a moment that my darling little sister was in doubt about that, but I thought it was worth emphasizing.
    “Helena might not be able to feel the same way about you,” she countered, reluctantly, as if she felt that she’d been forced into saying it for me because I couldn’t bear to say it for myself.
    “Are you ?” I asked. It felt as though it slipped out, but I couldn’t hep wondering whether that was what I’d being dying to ask all along, without being able to admit it to myself. “Is Dad? Is Mum?”
    “That’s not fair, Nicky,” she replied, with deadly accuracy.
    “Should I take that as a no, then?” I demanded, compounding the unfairness.
    She started crying again, and this time didn’t try to wipe her eyes. “I’m on your side,” she told me, resentfully. “I’ll always be on your side. We all will.”
    I didn’t doubt it for a moment. Even so, it didn’t answer the question, did it?

CHAPTER FOUR
    It’s a commonplace of sociology that the self is a social product. It’s all very well for Rabbie Burns to remark that, if we could only see ourselves as others see us, it would free us from many a blunder and foolish notion; the sad fact is that the ability we have to insulate ourselves from the gaze of others by means of the armor of delusion is strictly limited. By and large, we have little alternative but to see ourselves as others see us, and little opportunity to take any grievances that may arise to any Ombudsman capable of winning us a reappraisal.
    Or, to put it simply—even though it really isn’t as simple as that—if people see you as a zombie, you really don’t have much alternative to being what they believe a zombie to be.
    You can resist, of course. You can make your stand—be a valiant Knight of the Living Dead, as the hoariest pun in today’s world puts it—but that makes you into Don Quixote, not Sir Lancelot, in the eyes of others. As soon as you start tilting, you realize that those bloody windmills really are giants, and that your chances of bringing any of them down are pretty damn slim.
    You shouldn’t get bitter about it, though. Every living person who condescends to speak to you will tell you