The Diary of Jill Woodbine: A Novel of Love, Lies, and the Zombie Apocalypse

by Jay Smith

  He sat down in his own office chair and added, “Your brain is going to respond to what it hears in the way that it expects to hear it. The transmission just bypasses the aural processors and connects with the part of your brain that hears. Since you didn’t know her voice, you’re hearing what you think she sounds like. You’ll get used to it.”

  I closed my eyes and replayed her words. I remember them perfectly, like she laid a track recording in my head. Other voices and conversations fade or fracture in my memory, but her words remain clear as though she were repeating them at that moment even at this moment. I considered the words and asked myself how she could be dead AND psychic when she answered directly:

  “We are telepathic. We cannot see the future or divine the history of an object by touch. We can see a great past amassed in the memories of our collected selves. Human minds are a new world to explore. Through memories we understand our hosts. Through understanding, we grieve the horrors we brought upon you. Through those memories and the people whose histories we now share, we live and relive the horrors we’ve inflicted. We are the unintentional killers; condemned to relive the murders we’ve committed.”

  I let that one sink in. My eyes were closed. That way my brain could trick itself into believing it was receiving those words through my ears. Don’t ask me why. Like anything abnormal going on in the brain, the afflicted do not respond or cope rationally. It’s just important to cope.

  “You are not crazy,” Lucille added perhaps at the time and perhaps just now as I wrote it. “It is as intense for us as for you. Reaching out to hear outside minds is difficult. What we feel and experience is sometimes so powerful that it’s like a sudden scream in a quiet room; a scream that is never silenced. We prefer to speak in dreams.”

  “Dreams,” I replied. “Is that why O’Neal is sleeping? Are you speaking to him?”

  “Yes.”

  Paul explained, “The brain is in the most receptive state to receive and transmit when dreaming.”

  “O’Neal is preparing to receive us,” Lucille’s words forced my brain to accept the difference between his voice and her thoughts.

  I tried reaching out without speaking. “How do you know O’Neal is doing anything?”

  “Because,” O’Neal replied, “I’m speaking with Lucille right now.” His came as a sudden, unexpected whisper just behind my ear. I jerked my head around to look and Paul took a startled step backward.

  “Where are you, O’Neal?” I tried to reach out across whatever channel carried his voice. I had a sense that if I tried very hard I might see him in his dream. That light-headedness returned suddenly.

  “We share his thoughts with you,” explained Lucille.

  “I am fine,” O’Neal assured me in a sleepy voice that conveyed the peace I wished him in our last meeting. “You are a sweet girl. Thank you for your kindness. I wish you peace as well.”

  Did I remember him saying that or did he just say that in my head? O’Neal?

  O’Neal??

  Author’s Note: I’m getting light-headed again. Going to push on and edit later.

  They explained that part of Lucille’s blood – or the black, infected fluid still chambered in her still heart – would be injected into O’Neal and the things that make up whatever it was I was speaking with would not infect O’Neal’s body, but emulate the marrow inside his bones, consuming and replacing the cancerous cells.

  Instead of explaining in words, Paul was able to project ideas and imagery across the psychic network, showing me what I needed to help me understand. It was simplified and cartoonish the way the bad cells were gobbled up by other intelligent bad cells. But they didn’t go after O’Neal’s brain. They stopped once the good work was done.

  I asked no one in particular: “When you’re done healing, they’ll – what – leave the body?”

  “We cannot leave the body,” Lucille replied. “We must become one with it. That part of us will move on and become isolated from us, but it takes our knowledge and our instruction to find the sickness and fix it. “

  Paul looked uneasy. He kept shifting weight from one foot to another, checking the floor for holes. “What’s Paul thinking about?” I asked because I could feel him putting up walls to me. As he explained the process to be used on O’Neal, I could peer beyond the immediate thought and could see a larger, more ominous context. There was another step and Paul took pains not to linger on those elements very long and, perhaps sensing that I was looking into those ideas, shut me out completely.

  “Paul is preoccupied with convincing you to accept his plan to introduce our blood to your healthy body.”

  Lucille could have taken a shit out of her belly button and I would have been less surprised. Paul looked a little uncomfortable with the revelation and he took a moment to decide which expression to make – the one in support of the lying denial or the sheepish look and the shrug. He went with the second option, adding: “Yeah. I was going to go in a little softer on the sell, build it up…but yeah.”

  Part 2

  I said nothing. I didn’t have to. My mind was screaming. Alone in my wild imagination, Lucille and Paul had to have cut themselves off from the emotions and the panic electrifying my thoughts. I wanted to run, but the room spun so fast I couldn’t fix my attention on the direction of the door. No strength in my legs to pull me up out of the chair, I considering throwing myself onto the floor and dragging myself away in any direction away from Paul and the corpse in its tomb.

  But then…darkness fell again and I was at peace. It set in rapidly, like the moment after a bad scare. A bright world, so deliciously NORMAL and ORDINARY fell into focus around me. The nightmare of human slaughter was just a cold chill in an early morning breeze. Fleming Street! My gorgeous little tree-lined piece of suburban boring! Unremarkable, little brick Cape Cod-style houses! Perfectly square bushes planted identically in front of the same dull, big bay windows in every last beautiful cookie-cutter house from there to Fulton Avenue! Home! Excited, I turned toward the sound of The Everly Brothers on an old radio.

  I was outside dad’s garage, standing in the driveway of my home. I was there with Molly. She wore jeans and an old Led Zeppelin concert t-shirt. Her bright eyes and smile gave me comfort as I realized what we were about to do. I ran my fingers through her thick red curls before we joined hands and walked up the driveway toward the man bent over the engine of his red pick-up trick.

  I could smell the oil. The rest of the garage was a mess, as usual. I was careful not to startle him. “Daddy?”

  And there he was; a little rough around the edges with patches of thinning hair sticking up from his scalp…gray hairs like weeds in a garden. The diet he started before I left for school seemed to be helping. He was still pudgy, but the oil-stained sweatshirt he always wore in the garage seemed to be a little baggier than I remember. It was so good to see him, I almost broke my rule about hugging someone drenched in truck guts. I spoke the words I spent rehearsing the entire trip home.

  “Daddy, this is Molly. I met her on the way home from school. She’s…um,”

  He was filthy from working on the engine and his hands were greasy, but that didn’t stop Molly from offering her own when I introduced her as my girlfriend. Dad didn’t frown or even take it as a joke. He smiled warmly. He accepted Molly’s hand graciously and made her acquaintance sincerely. “Very glad to meet you, Molly. I hear you make my girl very happy. That’s the only thing I ever wanted her to be.”

  In dreams, we choose to leave out the facts. Part of our brain allows us the bliss of ignorance that permits our fantasies to exist without even the hardest of our truths coming into conflict. However, once a fantasy is fulfilled and finds its warm ‘happily ever after’… memories return. Memories like my father dying before I even graduated high school. Memories of a funeral. Memories of one of mom’s office coworkers – the one I always said hugged a little too long and close at the company picnics - suddenly comfortable napping my father’s recliner, comfortab
le telling me when and how to live my life. Memories of the old Fishin’ Truck getting towed away by its new owner just as I got off the bus from school, turning my best day ever into a revision of my personal history and the deletion of my childhood. Memories like the last words my father ever said to me. “Make sure you get the dishes done when you get home.”

  Memory began rewriting the dream when I remembered that ‘happily ever after’ was just another lie adults tell to shut you up or keep you from becoming too damn afraid to grow up.

  A sudden, cool breeze carried dead leaves across the driveway. As he had many other nights since he died, the dream of dad began to fade. He looked sad that he had to go as his flesh and clothes faded to a chalky gray. The energy and life that belonged to the fantasy disappeared into Molly’s pale, boney grip. Of course: Like my father, my fairy tale Red Molly had disappeared as well.

  Gripping his hand, Lucille now stood next to me, drawing my father’s life into her body. When all the color and life left his body, the remains turned to smoke on the breeze.

  They had followed me into my dream. Paul stepped up from our neighbor’s yard. Thankfully clothed, I still couldn’t look at him. I watched the remains of my father cross into the neighbor’s yard, rising up over their roof. I couldn’t even bring myself to weep. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Lucille answered. “You control your dreams, Jill. We step into the roles you give us.” The neighborhood no longer resembled the idyllic past. The grass stood a foot high and full of weeds. Front doors and garage decks hung open next to broken or boarded windows. It looked like every neighborhood I’d seen on the way to HG World. The ruins of Fleming Street had been abandoned. The open garage was empty and the door leading into the kitchen looked like it had been broken down. I didn’t want to see any more. The instinct of dreams told me what was rotting on the floor of the rear master bedroom.

  I rephrased my question. “Why me, specifically? Why not...?” A number of names flashed across my subconscious – David, Ellen Harris, hell…even Krantz. But I didn’t go further for fear of sounding like I was nominating them for this kind of torture.

  “You are unique. We chose you for your curiosity…your imagination. Through you we are learning great things about humanity that had eluded us. We understand the people encamped above much better through your memories and interaction. You genuinely care about the people up above. They way you’ve written of them, think and feel about even the darker souls…tells us you are at least open to a way of fixing things, even if it means a high personal cost. You know it is only a matter of time before chaos destroys them. You feel that time is coming. You are correct.”

  Lucille had changed. What she’d taken from my father had somehow restored her to life. Her skin was no longer pale and waxy, but soft and warm; her eyes an autumn brown. Still naked, she had no open tears or surgical scars in her flesh. Lucille was alive and looking at me, not through me. As the instants passed, her hair darkened, her skin toned and toasted to an early summer tan. She did not look much older than me. She had not been infected, but she was brought into HG World already dying. Like Paul, she kept those memories hidden from me with a psychic firewall. But her old life, one of boundless optimism and opportunity, broke my heart.

  Her memories of that life fell open like a scrapbook within our shared dream. Images of people, names hidden, endings represented by black holes in time, the whole of her last year looked like a censored document in three dimensions. She wasn’t sparing me those details. She had made the conscious choice to hide them from herself. My probing of those memories felt like poking real wounds. I moved my thoughts away from her as I felt my own sense of unease rising within me again.

  I looked behind her, down Fleming Street where I grew up. It looked again as I remembered it. The breeze ended and the leaves circled and spun down onto lawns and sidewalks. I felt a little more relaxed by the normal, safe vision of home.

  A thin woman, also naked, stepped up from the street and took a place behind Lucille. The women did not acknowledge one another, though I sensed each knew the other was there. I knew in the instinct of dreams that this was “Lauren,” the woman whose blood was injected into Lucille.

  Her ghost represented her as slightly older than Lucille. She looked to be in her early thirties, but the instinct of dreams told me her age was 36. She had been quite pretty with the body of a very active woman who spent more time in proximity of vending machines and quick meals than around healthy food. Unlike Lucille, her entire world was open to me. She had been a bank manager, but in the global recession, she lost her position and worked as an accountant part-time by day and a grocery store cashier at night. In life, she was totally ordinary, yet somehow remarkable and responsible.

  She doesn’t even remember being infected; just a tangle of violent images of people rushing forward, shoving her out of the way to escape a mob of eaters that had appeared. Her sense of danger and fear for her own safety were overwhelmed by one prevailing thought: Her two girls, 17 and 9. She had brought them away from their home in Indiana, Pennsylvania and joined a convoy like the one that brought me to HG World. In all that time, they never left her side, but she lost sight of them in the chaos. She never saw them again.

  In those short moments, I felt as though both women had been intimate friends all my life and the grief, once blended into the noise of a dying world, became very real for me and personal. In the dream and in my chair, I cried for them.

  Part 3

  Looking away from Lauren, I realized a group of people had appeared on the street along the sidewalk. Like Lucille and Lauren, they were naked and began forming a line behind the women. That line stretched back dozens of bodies long until I lost sight of their number in the fog of memory. I did not recognize any of them. Each appeared alive and healthy. They also appeared quite sad.

  Their attention was not on Lucille or Lauren. They all seemed to be in line for me… men and women (though mostly women I noticed), a few children as well. As I looked down the row, my mind opened to them and their stories opened as though they were old friends…old friends with sudden, horrible endings.

  They are forever connected by the circumstances of their deaths, each linked further back into time, walks of life, genders and state lines until the memories were little more than flashes of rage and hunger. These visions showed me the key to the eater’s evolution: an increasing self-awareness. Even powerless to stop their most primal instinct, it dawned on Lucille many generations of infection ago, that what they were doing was wrong… not only for the living, but for themselves. Eventually they would run out of food. Eventually, they would return to their primal, hive-like state on a dead world. At some point in their communion with the human mind and spirit, they realized that it was more important to stop the killing.

  Soon, I had to pull away. That dizzying feeling returned and escalated quickly toward panic. I had to look away and try to push myself out of sleep. I tried that mental eject button again, but I remained in my own dreamscape front yard, short of breath and surrounded by ghosts.

  Part 4

  Lucille made her plea. “My body will expire soon, Jill. Even inside our cold, sterile chamber the damage is too severe to keep this brain functioning. If we finally die, the last and greatest hope for humanity dies. The lives of past hosts will end with the silence of their memories. You could save them. We want to be honest with you. We respect your search, your loss.”

  ‘My search’ – I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it reminded me of Molly…this object of affection, this driving force that lured me into this mess. I recalled Paul commanding me out of his office. “Go! Be with Molly,” he said. I wonder if that was his way of saying “drink now for tomorrow you will die!” That secret place in my mind, where bad thoughts cannot go, seemed open to Lucille. She not only knew my father, but picked that moment to draw that memory.

  “Please know that we do not wish to kill,” Lucille assured me. “We wish to coexist. We under
stand many things through the experiences and memories of many people. We remember each violent attack and the horrifying consequences of what you see as an invasion. We wish to share this memory and reality with our kind and bring the conflict to an end."

  “By killing me?”

  Paul spoke up, finally. “No. We believe the process is at a point where it would not need to kill you in order to bond with you. It may be very, very painful and traumatic at first…but once all the pieces come together in your living cells, you would heal. In theory.”

  “Paul,” Lucille added, sensing I had not been wowed by Paul’s sales pitch. “Show her what could come of this.”

  “Close your eyes, kid.”

  “They are closed, Paul. I’m dreaming.”

  “Play along with me, would ya? It takes a lot to do this fully awake.”

  As I did and tried to open my mind, the firewall Paul had erected over his thoughts began to dissolve along with my driveway, house and neighborhood. Instead, I saw a healthy Chris O’Neal sitting up in a hospital bed somewhere in the Down Under I’d never seen. He greeted me with a healthy laugh and I understood at the same time that he had been cured. Instead of human blood, he lived with a part of Lucille inside of him, sharing none of her memories because none of his mind had been infected…rather enhanced… by the inoculation from Lucille’s body.

  From O’Neal’s body, hundreds of symbols and equations emerged and floated across the medical bay like leaves in a fall breeze, colliding and tumbling over the air toward the laboratory white board where Dr. Yukov absorbed the information through thick eyeglasses.

  From this, Dr. Yukov began to sweat new numbers and symbols, equations and statistics that congealed into patches flesh, blobs of meat and bone pieces that grew and changed shape in the air as they rode the air toward an empty examination table. These bits of organic matter began to combine and coalesce there into layers of a human form, like an organic puzzle. Shapeless masses of flesh blossomed into fully developed organs hanging from the trellis of a human skeleton. Ideas and calculations wove skin over it all until I found myself looking at my own naked body under a single hard spotlight.