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

by Jay Smith

  Molly was smiling.

  She was smiling at me. In fact, she was about to break into a laugh and so quickly covered her smile in a shaky palm. Hank’s face went all wrinkly. It squeezed together so tight I thought it might wring the grease out of his pores. But he said nothing for a moment tilting his head to look at the two of us like a woodchuck sizing up two predators. Then he checked his watch and growled at Molly: “42 minutes.”

  I didn’t watch Hank storm off. I was morbidly captivated by Molly’s withering smile and souring expression. With that one reminder, I was back with that scared, twitchy woman again. For a moment, I saw a light in Molly’s eyes and she looked younger, softer. It felt good to have made her feel better - if only for a second - by standing up to a bully. To be honest, I don’t have much pull with Harris and none at all with Jeb. Jeb would just as soon let Hank use me like a gym sock as not. I probably screwed up their little secret plan because Hank would be on his way over to Stack 39 right away to move his ill-gotten booty somewhere else.

  But I hadn’t lied about anything. Hank walks a thin line with the constables and even with corrupt, sick managers like Jack. And they are just waiting for him to stumble or tilt the residents of HG World against them. Someday, someone will end up dead and Hank will be the one holding the pill bottle. On that day: gods help us.

  But it was worth all that to stand up to a piece of sentient garbage like Hank. I was still very angry and told Molly, “You don’t have to do this. We can go to the Mayor, to the constables.” I didn’t realize my hand was on hers until she pulled away from me.

  Molly stood up and invited me to follow her. I decided that if I was to get answers or help her, I’d have to because she was going to leave the Mayor’s porch with or without me. I followed her silently out through Dogwood Apartments and through an empty stretch of shelving where the sanitation supplies had been before they were consolidated by the Management.

  I followed her behind an empty constable’s station near the old Hardware section and to the shadowy recess leading to the customer Rest Rooms. They had been locked up permanently once the showers and outdoor compost toilets were operational. Molly slid her hands under her sweatshirt where I heard a quick metal ZIP and a jingle of keys. A second later, the ladies’ room door was unlocked and she was pulling me inside, into the dark.

  She held onto my arm and told me to stay close. It was strange, but exciting, too. I trusted her to show me something that might let me help, so I embraced that total darkness for a moment and focused on the soft, warm touch of her hand moving from my forearm, up to my shoulder. Her grip tightened suddenly as she tugged and twisted around until I heard a soft CLICK and the room lit up in the soft glow of a camping lantern.

  With the lamp lit, Molly turned the tumbler lock on the inside of the door and kicked a folded carpet swatch across the gap between the door and the tile floor. She moved her hand from my shoulder and put a finger up to her lips as she led me around a tile wall and into the Ladies’ room. I expected the smell of sewer and signs of construction, but in the dim light it seemed cleaner than my dorm showers at school.

  I spoke low and soft to ask why we were there. Molly answered by pulling off her oversized sweatshirt to reveal… the top of a sequined leotard. In the lamplight it took on a rich burgundy color with sparkly bits in a pattern up across the bust.

  Molly put the lantern down on a nearby sink and turned on a second sitting atop a soap dispenser. The row of mirrors along the wall helped spread the lamplight around. Molly kicked off her shoes and unclasped the fanny pack she’d been wearing and put it on the sink as well. Finally, she slipped off the leggings to reveal cheap white cotton tights.

  I have to admit, that ridiculous sweatshirt hid quite a lot of awesome. Molly is thin (no surprise), but had well defined arms and legs and a very flat stomach. The body and costume shouted “college gymnast .” She stood in front of me waiting for me to say something, ask something…and I stood there stuck in this groove between my shock of wondering WHY she was dressed like that and that selfish, little tingle in the uh…back of my head that said, “Woof.” Over the years, I’ve trained myself not to show my attraction to other women, particularly women I didn’t know. But free of Hank and that ugly shirt, she held herself confidently, gracefully. Maybe my reaction was obvious, but it was not unwelcome because she seemed to enjoy standing there, letting me just…look. That was a very nice place to be, head-wise.

  As the seconds of silence stretched out, I felt a little like this was turning into a little bit of Seven Minutes in Heaven with a bi-curious sorority girl. Then the reality of why she was showing me her unusual undergarments hit me in the gut:

  It was Jack’s deal. Molly cast a glance down under the sink to a box of boots half-hidden in the shadow. Not boots… ice skates. When she saw that realization in my face, she raised an eyebrow and curled her lip in an adorable “Can ya believe it?” kind of expression, rolled her eyes and then turned to the mirror. She pulled a few items of makeup out of her pack. As she considered what to do about her face, I stepped up behind her and asked “Why?”

  There are things that people need in this place that go beyond the chemical. Beyond the physical. And I wish I could say it stopped at the spiritual, but I’m not sure the corporate leadership have authorized or invented an acceptable opiate for the sheep.

  Perhaps one day The Mayor will descend from the office with some cryptic rules etched into planks of polished marble and tell us all how it’s going to be. But until then, we all have to make due with our own personal Jesus or Mooby or polish the pipe of the Great Sub-genius J R Bob Dobbs to earn our little insights into whatever the FUCK it is we did to turn God back into the merciless, blood-thirsty monsters who had no trouble wiping out the entire fucking planet because some people decided it would be fun to thank a cow for their daily meal. Here, there’s none of that End of Days bullshit panic return to the faith. Here, faith is something you have to buy or trade for through filth like Hank the Pimp.

  Wow. How’s that for an epic digression?

  Molly just wanted her Bible back. I just didn’t understand it at first.

  See, when we all came into this place, we had to check our belongings at the gate. It had to do with cataloging ALL of our resources for future reference, to control contraband and prohibited substances…all the good things people say to justify organized theft of private property. I didn’t have much because I left most of my things either in the car I abandoned or in the bus that was overrun. I was able to get my laptop bag and cell phone back within a day or so and they didn’t even ask me to give them the passwords.

  People like Molly came to HG World with all sorts of personal items, things that connected them to the world before and, in turn, people they left behind. Most of the things that were “checked” were returned. But some items were not properly cataloged or labeled, particularly in the last few arrivals when the eaters were mobbing the gates. All those items are still somewhere awaiting a slow, meticulous attempt to reunite them with their owners.

  When Molly said she was going to sit through the groping and probing and sliming for a book, I begged Molly to just go to The Mayor and see if he could speed things up. It’s a BIBLE. Who wouldn’t want someone to get back their Good Book?

  But Molly said she tried. When Jack claimed it wasn’t in the lost and found, she tried the new library that opened up next to the new classroom. She asked Ruby for access to the Lost and Found to look herself, but for some reason Ruby danced around the issue until Jack told her ‘no’. She stalked The Mayor for two weeks, 10 hours at a time after trying to get Jenny Jo to put her on his schedule but never seemed to be able to catch him.

  Jack’s bet was that Molly’s desire for that book was powerful enough that she would submit to his own. But there was no guarantee he knew where the book was, that Hank was delivering a square deal. Certainly if Hank didn’t deliver, his reputation would suffer in the one area that isn’t already covered in chaw-spit,
grease and failure.

  Molly put away her makeup, zipped the bag closed, turned around and presented herself to me. “You look like a clown” I said, wanting to use a more pejorative term to describe her. She looked disappointed and a little sad. Immediately, I felt horrible for saying it. Really…she was pretty. She was stupid and crazy and maybe suicidal, but she was committed. She picked up the shoebox with the skates inside and I noticed she had three shrink-wrapped cartons of generic cigarettes on the floor just behind the box.

  Fine, I decided. In for a penny, in for a buck ninty-nine. “Let me find it for you,” I almost begged. “I know the Constables. They’ll help me. They HATE Jack.” But Molly reassured me my generous – and totally random – gesture would never work. She outlined a series of events that made it clear to me that this event had been engineered from the very first moment Jack laid eyes on her. When she sat down with Jack for her intake interview and talked about her skills, he didn’t even bother hiding his intentions. His elevator eyes were no doubt intended as a blessing or an anointment of her physical gifts. Men don’t seem… check that: SOME men don’t seem to understand that liking our soft curvy bits is fine, but not required. Who we are and what we dress like are not an open invitation to get all touchy and rapey. And while we have no control over what they think about in their darkest, most passionate grip and grunts, they should keep those dreams and proposals to themselves, thanks much.

  Even after, he tried a soft touch with easy job assignments, coming around to her barracks and offering to show her cottages in the Garden Section, and inviting her to dinner up in the manager’s offices. With each rejection, Jack put in play a series of obstacles. He knew she wanted her property back, so he released it slowly. A small bag of toiletries here, a book there… a dead cell phone and clothes in a plastic bag… eventually all he had left to keep her attention was…her Bible. She was dumb about explaining its personal and sentimental value and Jack jumped on the opportunity to send his flunky Hank out to broker the deal.

  Why did you come to me, Red Molly? Why did you ask me back to your secret dressing room if you were just going to go through with this sick joke of a deal anyway? Why should I care what happens to you if you’re too stupid or stubborn to let that…book…go? Why give Hank and Jack power over you like that? And why make me witness it? I’ve seen enough people destroyed by stupid mistakes or just bad luck to see someone throw themselves to the monsters like this. And why, when you saw me hurting for you – bitter and outraged over something some dumb stranger was about to do despite the most basic common sense – did you step up to me and take me in your arms? Why did you press yourself against me and breathe against my neck? How did you know I’d say ‘yes’ when you whispered that you needed me to be there when you returned? Did I say ‘yes’ because I knew it meant you’d kiss me? And since I gave you that small piece of myself, revealed that one secret to you that until recently I’d hidden from myself; why do I suddenly feel sick that Jack would even touch you, much less have you to himself. You left me with so many questions, vanishing into the shadows around the corner and slipping out the door, skate box under your arm. I didn’t even notice you handed me a key until it slipped from my fingers and rang against the tile floor.

  Christ, girl. I don’t know who’s dumber: you for doing this or me for giving a Greek god-damn about you.

  I carried her smell of powder and hairspray back to Birch Section, thinking about the last few words she spoke. In the fog of this scary, blissful feeling and the memory of her light, graceful fingers gliding across the back of my neck I lost the words exactly, but Molly promised to show me why that book was so important to her, tell me her story…be my friend.

  I ran into Ellen somewhere along the way. She had a weird smile on her face that caught my attention. “Your lipstick is, uh, smeared.” I don’t know if it was the amused kind or knowing kind of smile, but I didn’t care. I wore my own smeared smile all the way back to my cot in Birch, where I wrote all this down and started looking for David to get his advice on some things.

  Diary update. It’s been about two days since I last saw Molly. I just found a brown paper bag on my cot in Birch Section. This was about a half-hour after seeing Hank haunting the steps up to the manager’s office. He gave me the kind of overconfident sneering smile you’d see from a cartoon bad guy. I considered asking him if he’d seen Molly. Regina and Krantz had not -- Regina is her work counselor and Krantz…well, as I said, Krantz and I have the same taste in women. -- I just opened the bag. Inside was a torn - and soiled – shimmery red leotard and a pair of shredded, discolored tights. I’d been to Molly’s secret place twice since I last wrote of her and there was no sign she’d been there. I rushed there again, bag in hand, but nothing had changed… even the cartons of smokes remained untouched under the sinks. I checked each stall in case she was curled up and hiding from me. I lit up all of the lanterns and removed the outfit from the bag. It was torn in some places – cut in others, like an initial incision had to be made before someone could rip open the garment like in some horrible romance novel. Around some of the straight cuts I found dark stains – small, certainly not life-threatening amounts of blood, but the stretched stitching in the shoulder and bright red spots on the white cotton tights meant she struggled.

  Oh Hank. Oh Jack. What have you done with my Red Molly? And when I find her, what are you going to offer me in trade to let you live to see another artificial sunrise?

  CHAPTER TWELVE – A BRIEF REPORT TO MAKE ME LOOK BUSY

  There are about two dozen children here in HG World, all between the ages of three and 16. About half of them are orphans. The adults who look after the ones without parents include some who lost their own children on the outside or exist in that horrible purgatory of being separated from them, not knowing one way or another. Some chose to help other children because they're praying the same is being done for their own. Some just do it because it's in their nature. There’s no official screening process, but it’s worked out okay so far because there is a real sense of family when it comes to the kids. I’m not much north of what they consider a child in this place, but even I tend to be lumped in for special treatment from time to time. The Harris family will ask me to dinner, check in on me…maybe that’s just from our shared experience on the bus, but it’s nonetheless appreciated. Taking responsibility for a child here is a whole different thing. It's not easy and never a joyful thing, but it's necessary and practical in this new world. The trickiest thing is balancing hope with a healthy dose of reality about things and making sure there’s time enough to play, but not too much that the children are allowed to drift back or away and think about the things that will be waiting for them in their dreams.

  There are no babies. The last pregnant woman here in the shelter died of pneumonia shortly after she arrived. She was six months pregnant, had a 106 degree fever when they brought her of the bus. She went into isolation and no one ever saw her again. No one has gotten pregnant that I know of. If they have, they’ve kept it a secret. It’s not like people aren’t practicing. Sex is the fourth most popular distraction in this place behind football, gardening and petty theft.

  I bring this up as I sit in what passes for a classroom here in the great society we’ve built inside HG World. Sitting inside four walls covered in drywall and paint, soft lighting in a drop ceiling, desks and chairs in a circle around a pile of mats and pillows, I almost feel like I could walk out the big oak door and onto the playground, or step out into a tile hallway and the chemical smell of pine. Every detail of the construction of this room was designed like everything else in HG World – to remove us from the reality that lives just on the other side of the walls.

  The children have made this their museum of innocence. All signs of their fear and grief have been removed and I look around to see pictures of sunny days and rainbows. Moms and Dads in stick figure hold hands with their children on green grass. The usual Halloween decorations you’d expect to see this time of year
are a little too macabre, so there’s a lot of orange and black, but images of the fall harvest. There’s not a skeleton in sight. No green witches. Not even a black cat. In the back, under the painted banners reminding us of our three “R”s, there’s a menagerie of clay animals on little wooden display blocks. The theme is “If I had a pet .” One boy wrote of a fat lion with a head like a strawberry and stubby legs, “I would have a Lion who would sit at the foot of my bed and keep me safe.” The word “Always” is wedged in between “and” and “keep .”

  One thing I did not mention about my visit to the roof – something I went back up later to confirm – is that there are no animals out there. Certainly we know that the wildlife of the forest is out there. But there are no stray dogs or cats outside. Just eaters. I didn’t see birds in the sky, either. No buzzards, no carrion… no birdsong to accompany the sound of wind through the trees. I guess I’ve been so busy collecting the linear passage of events, observing the wonder of actually being outside, it took me a while to get around to the bigger question: Why? We’ve stopped asking that question because the noise and the urgency of everything is so overwhelming that we have learned to simply respond, act and then retreat to somewhere dark and quiet when our bodies tell us it is time to recharge…not rest; recharge for the next cycle of maze runs here in the maze.