Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  The mother tries to make a word with the torn skin of her mouth and falls to her knees. She lowers her head in her hands and little sobs pump in the broken pipes of her neck. Julie looks down at the matted leaves clinging to the back of her mother’s bathrobe. She feels a sudden compulsion to reach out.

  “Mom? Mom? What’s going on, Mom?”

  The sound of her voice, the identification of this savage creature as mother, opens a flood of pain. Julie suddenly feels a panic of responsibility. She leans her brother against the branch and hovers her foot down to a rung. She scrambles to where she can begin lowering herself. One leg. Another. A hiss. A hand snatches her ankle.

  “Mom?”

  She feels something hot and wet slide across the soul of her foot.

  “Mom!”

  Teeth biting. Not biting. Teething.

  “Jimmy!”

  A form falls past her. Jimmy drops from the branch onto his mother’s head. Julie springs off the ladder to the ground and lands in a confusion of bodies. Jimmy is sitting on his mother’s chest and, with his eyes closed, he slaps wildly at her face. The woman drags her dark angel wings through the leaves, frantically touching the ground beneath her.

  Julie drives in the stake. It rides a groove of tongue and drips to a point through the base of Mom’s skull. Like a canoe gliding onto sand it rests in the fresh opening behind her, followed by a wake of lake blood. The woman shudders softly under her children and closes her perspiring body with an invisible sheen of pearls. Dead.

  The woods around Lake Scugog are not a jungle. Dragons do not stalk deer up and down black hillsides. Siberian tigers do not sulk over the torn body of a villager. There are no monsoons, no undiscovered species of spider, no diamond mines. There is a snake, however, hanging, quite contrary to its known behavior, high in the top of a tree. This snake, a common garter snake about twenty-six inches long, has coiled the length of its body around the thin, bending tip of a Birch. The snake holds its strong neck and powerful jaws out away from the tree. Its tongue oscillates in the sun like a skipping rope. At a dizzy distance of fifty-five feet below is the body of a woman nailed to the ground through her mouth. Beside her is her husband: still alive, though insensible. His only movement is in his hands. They repeat a broken tap at the ground beneath him. A ceaseless investigation that will go on for days. The snake, whose eyesight is poor, cannot see these minute twitches; its tongue, however, touches a picture so complex that something closer to the future than the present shimmers on its fork. Two children run into the woods along separate tapered paths and, when the tongue slips back to refresh itself against the cool bones of the snake’s mouth, they disappear.

  15

  Contact

  Greg can see Grant at his desk. Steve and his girlfriend are standing on either side of him. To Greg they look like a family. Grant flips the tip of a pen at the girl. She looks across to Steve, who shrugs. She looks back and nods seriously. Grant writes in a pad, tears off the sheet, and hands it to Steve without taking his eyes off the girl. Steve folds the paper and tucks it in his shirt pocket. He reaches across and takes his girlfriend’s hand. She exhales visibly and follows Steve around Grant’s desk. They walk directly toward Greg. Greg jumps. I’ve been watching you. Uh oh. Steve doesn’t look up as he passes. His girlfriend looks directly at Greg. He can see fear in her clapped-open eyes. She passes him and he thinks: Those eyes have seen something. Something horrible? No. No, those eyes are hiding something. Greg turns, and she has hesitated at the office door. Hiding something she wants to show me. What? Why me? Greg feels his skin lift in scales around his neck. She hasn’t told anybody yet. She’s sick. Like me. Like the guy in the alley.

  “Greg?”

  Greg jumps a second time. Grant is touching his elbow, drawing him through the brightly lit office to his desk.

  “You alright there, buddy?”

  Greg is momentarily confused by the word buddy. He senses the fraudulence first, then something a little deeper, something true.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m OK.”

  Grant sits Greg down and leans against the edge of an adjacent desk.

  “OK. OK. Good. I’ve got a lot of things for us to cover over the next couple of days. But I gotta ask you something first.”

  Greg touches his forehead. I’m sweating. He drops his hand without wiping it off. He nods quickly to Grant, feeling a tiny bead race along his jaw.

  “OK. I wanna know, Greg, if anything that’s happened here since you started is, uh, freaking you out.”

  Greg responds “No,” rapidly, twice, more to the idea of being freaked out than anything else.

  “Good. Good. OK. Before we go on do you have anything you want to ask me?”

  Greg feels a light ice cover his perspiring face as an air-conditioned draft passes over him. Question. He suddenly remembers that he does have a question.

  “Yeah. Are you gay?”

  Grant coughs into a fist and looks away before answering.

  “Gay? Uh, you mean because of yesterday?”

  Greg feels a curl bounce off his cheek as he nods. He leaves it there to appear innocent, adorable.

  “Well, no. I’m not. In fact, I think I’m the only straight person in this newsroom.”

  Greg looks at a tall blonde woman striding across to the desk of a familiar sportscaster who is busy clipping a microphone to his lapel.

  Grant glides down into his chair and huddles under a desk lamp.

  “In fact, I think fuckin’ a fella is sometimes about the most heterosexual thing a young man can do.”

  Grant smiles and raises his eyebrows, surprised and impressed by what he’s just said.

  “Right?”

  Greg shrugs agreeably.

  “Eh? Really, I think so.”

  “I guess.”

  “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Oh yes, I think so.”

  Grant waves his hand, closing the discussion. He flicks on a tiny television beside his pencil holder. He twists a noisy dial, stopping occasionally, until turning the set off. He raps the top of the television.

  “This is the bullshit we’re facing, Greg. The whole goddamn province turning into fuckin’ cannibals. Oh boy.”

  Greg feels a now familiar twitch of shame scurry into his heart. It dims the light around Grant’s face.

  “We are living in strange times, I guess. A lot of people are going to die before this is over. Steve thinks it’s modern art. Ha. I think it’s evolution. Anyway, we’ll kill them. We always do.”

  Greg suddenly wonders if he has less than a month to live. Maybe even a week. A minute.

  “I wanna go for a drive, Greg. Out to the country. Check out some of this stuff firsthand.”

  “Now?”

  Grant reaches over and slaps Greg’s face playfully.

  “Yeah, right now, sport.”

  The virus that thrives in the brackish pools fed by its own leaking is becoming hot. Until now they have been rubbing each other’s tummy in the words that Greg uses, happy to wait and play in the limited give and take he so rarely opens up onto other people. As Greg lowers himself into the passenger seat, the viruses gather in all the things he might say next, braiding the wheels and filling their cheeks with venom. The car pulls out of the parking lot, and a lone figure, dressed entirely in black, wanders among the empty vehicles. He bends to examine the interior of a Saab. Throwing his hands up into the air when Grant screeches his wheels at the exit, the figure slams a fist into his palm.

  16

  Blue

  The woods around Lake Scugog are a dense, spinach green. The people who drive past its pseudo island on Number Seven look leisurely at its peculiar shoreline. Scugog is different, unlike most lakes in the region. Angrier, maybe. Self-illuminating.

  The green that pulls the highway down is interior to black, a green that has yet to distinguish itself as a colour. A nightmare of green. People who drive through its suction are often bored, tired of scenery; and they say,
in order to squeeze excitement out of the last leg of their trip, “I bet if you walked in there you’d never come back.” The driver never looks, but nods in agreement, swallowing a backwash of rejected coffee, disappointed that a good argument couldn’t be made. And, finally thrilled by the bristle of invisible hostility, he or she surprises the passenger by speeding up across the bridge. The passenger’s comments aren’t entirely banal. Lake Scugog is different.

  Lakes in Ontario were formed by glaciers. They were fed like babies by englacial streams, and when they grew old, shuffling permeable and impermeable stones in their stomachs, soon unable to crush the animals that were invading them, they became what they are today: blue.

  Scugog, however, is a mirror. Sometime on or about the date you were born, Scugog was a lowland field, teeming with scabby foxes and country mice. Then one day an artesian well was uncorked, or maybe a ditch was diverted, and the land was drowned. The foxes lay on their backs kicking little paws into the water that covered them. Their scabs flattened into scales and their sun-bit ears shot underwater sparks as they became gills. Soon the fox-fish began to hunt eel and rat-fish.

  The surface of the water, like a playing card turned face down, became indistinguishable from other lakes: it too became blue. Beneath this surface, a surface nearly vertical if the passenger were to look closely, there are monsters. Not werewolves or vampires — not the kinds of monsters designed to frighten people — but things monstrous because they live too long. Sunk up to their eyeballs in fish parts, they twist in the dark, lining the shores with a gasket of white vomit.

  And around this lake, now, a growing herd of zombies is passing through the underbrush. Cutting across their path in the permanent night are two children who have found each other.

  Julie leads her brother by the hand. He stumbles behind her, mute and traumatized. His feet leave the ground as he is pulled along by his stronger sister. They fall farther and farther into forest, stretching out under its slip covers, to where night is held close to the ground, underneath trees, never leaving. Soon boulders begin to glow, caught by an afternoon moon hanging beneath the lowest bower of a distant tree that peeks through a slice ahead of them. Stars hang in funnels from branches, no longer up there, but down here. Julie brushes her shoulder against these wedding veils as she passes, diving into the bottom. She slips her arms into the sleeves of rivers and draws her breath from precisely where Ontario loses its consciousness. When they stop, out of breath, the stars and moons have settled on their skin like pyjamas. They sit apart, hanging their heads between their knees, panting and sniffing at the wetness on their faces.

  “I’m hungry.”

  Jimmy looks up at his sister. Her eyes are racked with grief. She wipes them with the backs of both her hands. There are a thousand ways to start crying and her face is wiggling to suppress them all.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy, but I am. I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”

  Jimmy lifts a small stone with the toes of his shoes. It turns sideways under the pressure and falls soundlessly onto moss.

  “I think maybe you should start talking soon, Jimmy. I’m gonna go crazy.”

  Jimmy finds the stone with his heel and depresses it into the soft ground. Julie reaches over and lays her hand on the back of his neck. Jimmy shuffles toward her, curling against her chest and in her protecting arms.

  “It’s OK, little man. It’s OK. We’re gonna have to be alone now, I think. We will have to look after each other. I think it’s what we’re supposed to do.”

  Julie drops her hand and slips off her brother’s shoe. She cradles the bare foot in her hand, lightly pumping it with her fingers.

  “Nothing new, right?”

  Jimmy nods slowly, rubbing the top of his head under his sister’s chin.

  Except they aren’t exactly alone. Thirty feet south of where they sit a zombie that has been lost in the woods for almost a week is lying face down on a long bed of ferns. It is still breathing, though barely. When Julie and Jimmy fall asleep in each other’s arms, this creature uses up its last tiny breath and passes, imperceptibly, from living thing to dead thing.

  The next morning the children stir under the same night sky that they had fallen asleep under. They begin to silently make their way to Pontypool. Around noon they sit on the black sponge of a fallen tree, and they both begin to cry with hunger.

  “What can we eat? What? Leaves? Stones?”

  Julie scoops out a spoonful of wood from the log. She turns her finger on her knee, leaving a lump of pulp there. It leaks a cold drool down her leg.

  “I don’t know. I’ll eat anything. Anything.”

  Jimmy stands up and walks over to where a diffuse shaft of light has penetrated from above, lifting an area at the base of a large birch tree. He crouches at the edge of the lighted patch of tiny shoots and reaches across it. He touches something hidden on the far side. Julie watches his hand disappear. She waits to see what he has, expecting a little snake or a plump slug. Either way she has decided to bite off a piece of whatever he retrieves. He’s only making the decision that she’s putting off. Julie imagines the frantic muscle of a living thing push against the roof of her mouth.

  “What is it?”

  Jimmy goes down on his knees in order to reach with both arms. He pulls them back, hiding what he has in pregnant, praying hands.

  “What is it, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy looks back at his sister and smiles. Then he looks down at his hands and lifts his eyebrows.

  “What? Jimmy, what have you got?”

  His hands open and the light falls between them.

  “Raspberries! Are those raspberries?”

  Julie leaps to her feet and joins her brother. She picks a raspberry out of his palm and squishes the cold fruit against her teeth. A bright sugar buzzes to life in her mouth. She bites down, cracking the tiny pits. Jimmy reaches across and bends a large bush into the light. The bush is heavily jewelled with clusters of fat red berries. Julie looks at her brother with wide eyes as he pops his handful into his open mouth. Within an hour they have devoured a good portion of the bush, and with digging, adventurous fingers they uncover a patch of tiny onions. They crunch the bulbs, dyeing the cells pink, before lustily swallowing a raspberry-onion stew.

  “We can live here, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy is lying on his back. His lips are swollen, in reaction to the onion, and slicked bright crimson from crushed berries. Julie looks over, past the shoots of poison ivy that ring her face.

  “Maybe not here, exactly. I’m thirsty now. We have to find water.”

  Jimmy rolls over onto his stomach. He feels a jolt in the base of his abdomen. He curls his toes and closes his eyes until it passes.

  “Jimmy? We need water. Let’s go find some.”

  Julie sits up and, patting her brother’s backside, stands. Jimmy finds his shoe and lets his sister brush him off while he ties the laces. She lifts him up with her powerful arm. They step away from the little hole of light on the ground, back down into the stars and moons, along a path lined with black sand. Julie keeps an arm across her face, dividing branches with her elbow. She leads Jimmy; he keeps his face down behind her, in the protection of his sister’s back.

  Forty metres ahead of them, moving in the same direction, at exactly the same pace, are three cannibals. They are lost, and their diet, the tongues and teeth of living people, is somewhat more limited than the children’s. They are facing a rather depressing destiny. In their weakened condition the zombies have long given up the conversations that have consisted mainly of hooking fingers into vulnerable flesh. They lope along quietly, recoiling in irritation at anything that touches them. As night falls, too far above to be noticed, one of them collapses on his face. The other two, sad women with heavy masks, part ways, heading off in different directions. They do this not so much because they have lost a third but out of a failure to notice the loss of that person.

  Julie spots him first. His back, lying low up ahead. Initially she thinks it’s tor
n paper. Then as they get closer a hand flips up in the green dust at the man’s side. Julie squeezes her brother’s forearm, stopping him behind her. They stand frozen, watching the body. After a few minutes the other hand performs the same flip, sending a twig up onto his white shirt. Then stillness. Julie steps closer, leaving her brother behind. She studies the back to see if it rises, if it’s breathing. Perfectly still. She turns and, covering her mouth, whispers, “I think it’s dying. I think it may be dead.”

  She waves her hand backward, indicating to Jimmy that he should walk past in a wide circle. Jimmy is craning his neck up and around, trying to get a view beyond where his sister stands.

  “Now! Go!”

  Jimmy steps backward and, without losing sight of his sister, moves ahead of her through the forest. Julie steps closer. The body isn’t breathing. It doesn’t appear to be. Julie stoops to a knee and reaches down blindly to find a stone. She lobs the pebble into the air and it hits the zombie on the head, rapping his skull like a drum.Julie grabs her mouth and turns to run. She stops. The man must be dead.

  “Wait there, Jimmy! I’m coming! Wait there!”

  Julie runs as fast as she can. She leaps directly through a young maple tree growing a metre away from the still hand of the body. She catches up with Jimmy and holds him, panting heavily, out of breath. Jimmy reaches up and lays his closed fists against her back.

  “OK. It’s OK. Let’s just keep going, OK?”

  Jimmy pushes harder against her back, tightening his fists until they really hurt.

  Suddenly a sharp roar from behind sends them squealing through the prickly forest.

  When they’ve gone, the zombie, who has sat up, dies; his hands have fallen like birds at the sides of his feet.