Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford

everything I could do to resist the fact, it really was as simple as that.
    When Helena had finally gone home, Mum came in, and tried to put her arm around me. She couldn’t—perhaps because I was grown up now, no longer a child.
    “That’s the way it is,” I told her.
    For once, she had nothing to say.
    “It doesn’t need to be,” I told her. “If we could just…pull ourselves together. I’m only a couple of shades paler than I was before, for God’s sake! I don’t even have to wear the hat and sunglasses indoors. It’s next to nothing. I’m not Frankenstein’s fucking monster.”
    “Of course not,” she said, not bothering to complain about my intemperate language. “You’re the same person you were before. She doesn’t deserve you. You’ll find someone else. That nurse liked you, I think.”
    There was no need whatsoever to ask which nurse, and no earthly point in pointing out that Pearl had shown no evidence of any such liking.
    “I think she’s in love with Dr. Hazelhurst,” I said.
    “What makes you think that?” Mum asked, warily.
    “All nurses fall in love with doctors,” I said. “If soap operas teach us nothing else, they teach us that. And she calls him Andy. He’s not in love with her, of course. He’ll break her heart. Doctors always break nurses’ hearts. If soap operas teach us nothing else, they teach us that. The fact that she’s a zombie and he’s not is irrelevant, in this instance.”
    “Well if that’s the case,” Mum said, probably not in the least deceived as to what we were really talking about, “he doesn’t deserve her, and she’ll find someone else.”
    “A Pearl before swine,” I muttered, pointlessly. I didn’t smile. Nor did Mum.
    Kirsten arrived home then, but I couldn’t bear to talk to her. I never even saw Dad that evening. I needed to be alone with my burning, brooding, tragically unrequited love.
    It was still burning and brooding the next morning, but I no longer needed to be alone, and certainly not with Mum, even though she was still off work.
    “I’m going to the Center at the old Sally Ann,” I told her, when breakfast as out of the way. “Got to introduce myself, find out what’s what.”
    “I’ll drive you,” she said.
    “Don’t be silly—it’s only a few hundred yards. I’ve got to make a start on facing up to the world, facing up to reality. I need to show my face—let the neighbors get used to it. I need to walk.”
    “You only got out of hospital yesterday,” she protested. “You died , Nicky. I don’t care how well you feel—you died .”
    I knew that, but I could understand why she felt obliged to emphasize the point.
    “I know, Mum,” I said, quietly. “But I’m up and about again now. I have to make new beginning. I need to start making some new friends...because it wouldn’t be fait to put too much pressure on the old ones, would it?”
    “I’m your mother,” she said, although I hadn’t actually accused her of anything. “I still love you, as much as I ever did. I always will.”
    “I know, Mum,” I told her, “but I still need to go to the Center, and I’d really like to walk. I’m a Knight of the Living Dead now: I have to undergo my trials by ordeal, or I’ll never get to touch the Holy Grail, let alone drink lemonade out of it.”
    She didn’t smile—but she didn’t shed a tear either.
    “Be careful,” she said.
    “I will,” I promised—and I was.
    Actually, there wasn’t any real need to be careful. I didn’t see a single rottweiler taking his ED member out for a walk, and most of the non-white faces I passed in the street, including the “white” ones, simply looked the other way, with a kind of feigned negligence that seemed oddly polite, in its fashion. There were exceptions, though—mostly people I met before I got to the end of the street, who had known me when I lived at home, before I went away to university. They knew who I was, in spite of my changed appearance, and