Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
ISBN: 9781434439406
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

I’d been warned more than once about the possibility that my appetites might change, so I was rather disappointed that they didn’t, much. On the other hand, I’d always been a meat-and-two-veg kind of person, having inherited the habit from Dad via Mum, so the two major shifts associated with conversion by anecdotal evidence—a keener appetite for meat and a marked distaste for highly-spiced food—didn’t really apply to me.

It’s possible, of course, that the former shift is all in the mind—not just the minds of zombies but those of their living observers. When you borrow a word like “zombie” from the lexicon of the folkloristic and cinematic imagination to apply to an actual but novel phenomenon, there’s bound to be a certain amount of mythical pollution. Because the zombies of modern legend were supposed to be driven by cannibalistic appetites, it was only natural that some such suspicion should fall on the actual beneficiaries of medical resurrection, if not in any serious sense, at least in jest. Nor is it surprising that the suspicion should be carefully toned down to credible proportions. The living must have been pre-inclined to look for evidence of enhanced carnivorism in the afterliving, and the afterliving must have been be pre-inclined to look for it in themselves. A rapid proliferation of supportive anecdotes was only to be expected.

The second element of allegation is, however, less expectable, especially in view of the common analogy drawn between supposed “zombie cravings” and those of pregnant women. Pregnant women are routinely said to develop cravings for highly-spiced foods, not aversions to them. It is, however, conceivable that what was involved here, in the semi-conscious processes of rumor-mongering, was a deliberate inversion. The one thing that differentiates afterliving females most conspicuously from living ones—far more conspicuously than mere paleness of complexion—is that afterliving women do not, so far as anyone can yet tell, fall pregnant. They are, in a sense, not merely a pale shadow but an antithesis of their living counterparts: hence, in pseudological terms, the inversion of their craving.

Having said all that, though, I must confess that I did become noticeably hungrier than I had been in life. If my appetite didn’t change in direction, it did in volume. Whether that had anything to do with physiological changes in my ability to process the various major food-groups, I don’t know, but I was more inclined to put it down to enthusiastic rockmobility. I’d had a reasonable amount of exercise while I was alive, at least during the football season, but the “training” we’d done for the Sunday Morning League was nowhere near as intensive as Stan’s daily workouts. The fact that I’d rapidly made it a point of pride to finish the scheduled two hours—because rather than in spite of the fact that no one else seemed able to do it—meant that I was throwing myself into it more wholeheartedly than I’d ever thrown myself into anything in life.

Mum obviously noticed my enhanced appetite, and started increasing

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