Dragon on a Pedestal by Piers Anthony

body, and the towels could be mistaken for ragged clothing. There were so many zombies in this region near Castle Zombie that the confusion was natural. The zombie had saved them by discouraging the dragon.
    But at what cost? Irene was not exactly partial to zombies, but she did appreciate the sacrifice this one had made. If it weren’t for the zombie, Irene herself would have been crunched by the jaws of the monster. The creature had acted with courage and dispatch when all other hope was gone—and had paid the terrible price.
    She knelt to inspect the zombie. It was in a sad state—but
all
zombies were in a sad state. They were the walking undead, perpetually decaying without ever quite collapsing. Usually it took complete dismemberment to put a zombie all the way out of commission. If this one were typical, it might survive. “Are you—?” she asked, balking at the words “alive” or “dead.” Zombies, as Grundy had clarified, weren’t exactly either.
    “Hhurrtsh,” the thing replied faintly.
    “It’s still functional!” Chem said, surprised.
    “She says it hurts!” Grundy translated for the zombie.
    “Of course it hurts!” Irene snapped. Her diffidence vanished, and she grabbed a spare towel and used it to mop up the pus and saliva and juice that covered the body. “She’s just been crunched by—” Irene paused.
“She?”
    “Sure, she’s your kind,” the golem said. “Didn’t you know?”
    “No, I didn’t realize,” Irene said, taken aback. “She’s so, uh, far gone it wasn’t obvious.” But now, as she wiped the torso, she saw that it was true. There were what once had been female attributes there.
    “I hadn’t realized either,” Chem said soberly. “Naturally, there would be females of their kind as well as males. The Zombie Master can reanimate anything that once lived.”
    The zombie tried to sit up. “Hey, don’t do that!” Irene protested. “You’ve just been terribly crunched by a dragon. Your—your blood spurted out! Your bones must be broken! You’re lucky you’re—animate!”
    “Ah, you can’t kill a zombie,” Grundy said. “You can hack it to pieces, but the pieces will slowly draw together and reassemble. Magic makes a zombie function, not biology.”
    “Maybe so,” Irene said grimly. “But this one just saved our lives, and she’s not so far gone she can’t experience pain and human sensitivity. We’ve got to do something for her.”
    “I agree,” Chem said. “But what
can
be done for a zombie?’
    “Ask her, Grundy,” Irene said.
    “And ask her name,” Chem added.
    It had not occurred to Irene that a zombie would have a name. Now she chided herself for the way she had dehumanized them in her mind. Zombies were, after all, people—or had been, before dying and becoming undead.
    The golem issued a series of slushy syllables and decaying particles. The zombie responded with coughs and chokes and noises that sounded like garbage being sucked down a half-clogged sewer drainhole.
    “She says her name is Zora,” Grundy reported in due course. “She killed herself about fifteen years ago when her true love was false. Her folks took her body to the Zombie Master, and he animated her. She’s been serving him since. She would prefer to be all-the-way dead or fully alive, but neither is possible, so she just muddles along. She says it’s a living. Well, that’s not precisely it, but the term doesn’t translate well.”
    Surely it didn’t! What an awful thing it must be, Irene thought, to be forever half dead! “Yes, but how can we help her?” she demanded of the golem. “There must be something.”
    The golem interrogated Zora Zombie again. “The only thing that brings her kind closer to life is love,” he reported. “Some living man must truly love her, to counteract the evil of the one who did not. Then she would be almost human, as long as his love lasted.”
    Chem whistled. “That is a difficult thing! Nobody loves a zombie. Most men