Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  After five weeks the embryo looks like an ear, or a deflated crab claw, or an oyster. The world presses its face against the meat of the uterine wall, blinking its eyes, surprised that the embryo is in the process of looking like anything at all. This cognitive reality, that it always appears as something else, will dog the little omelette all its life.

  At a party in the suburbs a teenage boy lifts his lips from a flaming bong, and when the smoke clears he pulls back a blond bang from his eyes and says: “The stages of a fetus are exactly the same as the stages of evolution. First it’s, like, a single cell, right? Like an amoeba. Then it’s a fish, then an amphibian. Then it, like, crawls up onto the land and grows little prehistoric kangaroo legs. And then its tail disappears and it’s like a tiny monkey.” He seals off the glass pipe again and draws in loudly through bubbling water. The girl is amazed by this.

  During the fifth month the fetus is listening. It shudders happily in an enclosed world fed by maternal blood. In Julie’s case the maternal blood has a high concentration of protein. From human flesh: the chewy muscles of zombies that she has ambushed near her front door.

  The boy exhales a dripping cloud of smoke across the girl’s chest: “No way, man, if, like, a brother and sister conceive a baby, then it’s usually weak and can’t fight off childhood diseases and, it’s like the worst for the species. So it’s, uh, like part of our genetic make-up that we don’t have sex with our siblings.” The girl reaches for the bong. “Yeah, not without a condom anyway.”

  Jimmy lifts a pelvic bone to his face and lines up his eyes in the hollow scoops that form a natural mask. Two wide blades of dry bone curve over his head like a tall decorative helmet. He wiggles his tongue lewdly and crosses his eyes. Julie laughs and flicks wet raspberry from the rim of a bowl in her lap onto her brother. He slaps the berry as it strikes his chest and he squeezes the juice through his fingers. He gives out a birdlike cry of anguish. She admires his handsome face as he pretends to die, still holding the tall mask to his closed eyes.

  While the girl sucks deeply, filling the glass tube with thick white smoke, the boy pushes down on his crotch with the heel of his hand: “And it’s also bad to eat people. Because, well, you know, aside from being sick and everything, it weakens us if we do it, ‘cause it crushes the immune system. And anyway, it’s genetic that we don’t, ‘cause if we could we would’ve long ago when we were starving through the winter. And the only survivor would be some fat pig, and we would have died off that first year!” The girl feels a light-headed swirl of connection leading her to some conclusion or other.

  After the first snowfall the pregnant couple stay inside most of the time. They conserve their energy and focus on the coming of their child. This is also the beginning of a season-long food shortage. Besides a scarcity of fruits and vegetables, fewer zombies come wandering near their home. So they mete out carefully the food that they do have, carefully rationing out the zombie flesh.

  As his sister becomes less mobile Jimmy begins to forage out in the newly fallen snow for easily visible and trackable wildlife. An abundance of rabbits crisscross their property, and Jimmy spends hours falling in the snow behind them, throwing rocks at them, and spraining his ankles in their doorways. He returns late in the morning to Julie, empty handed and surly. As the weeks progress and they begin to hate the sight of each other, Jimmy pretends he’s going hunting and sits out of view at the picnic table, shivering in the cold just to keep away from his sister’s icy glare. Julie sits at the stove, wearing a zombie’s trenchcoat, craving another human being, anyone who speaks, who isn’t mute and stupid.

  They survive the winter this way, occasionally patching together an understanding that their mutual hostility is born of their hard life together. On some winter nights, in the deep silence of the deep snow that surrounds them, they hold each other and accept each other with hands that stroke kindly, remembering. The spring will bring them back. The spring will bring new life.

  And it does. With the first thaw Jimmy manages to kill his first rabbit. He stands in the doorway swinging it proudly by the ears as Julie applauds with her tired arms. He reaches for a knife above the bench to skin their dinner. Julie feels a strange clench yank at her body from below.

  Every version of the birth of a child is always lacking something. Neither a satisfactory miracle nor a base torment, childbirth is only one of the thousands of aggressive events that never actually occur in people’s lives. It is enough of something, however, to put everyone on alert. And Julie and Jimmy are no exception.

  Julie is sitting on the zombie trenchcoat that stretches open across the floor. As the coat soaks up the fluid that has crashed out from between her legs, Jimmy frantically lights candles along the dirty edge of the freezer. He crouches down at a distance in front of her and, having no instruction as to any role he might play in the birth, he assumes a position natural to the expectation that an object under pressure will need to be caught, maybe in mid-flight. Julie is receiving more primal instruction, and she follows each muscular cue with a howling face.

  The top of the baby’s head appears and Jimmy falls backward off his haunches. The baby flies to the floor, as if shot from a gun. She lies still in a broken case of transparent veins. Jimmy sits up, looks over his sister’s body, looking for her face, but her head is thrown back and turned toward the wall.

  Suddenly the baby springs to its feet and runs toward Jimmy. She turns on her umbilical cord and slams her back into his chest. Julie looks up in horror to see her baby daughter facing her. The baby snatches the cable in her tiny hand and twists it into her mouth. With tough gums on soft flesh, she clamps down, crunching the cells. Jimmy jerks back from his daughter. She runs toward the door and with a tug on the cord she snaps her mother’s hips off the ground, breaking the bond. In the doorway she makes a threatening star shape with her arms and legs, and darts her eyes back and forth from parent to parent. She screams — “Fuck you!” — emptying the contents of her lungs down her front before disappearing.

  Julie and Jimmy remain on the floor, their eyes uncomprehending and their mouths flung open. Julie attempts to rise first, but she can only slide onto her knees before falling over. She waves frantically at Jimmy, who stands, trying to overcome his fear of his daughter. He is terrified of her. He is scared for his life. Julie falls toward him and swipes at his hip, sending him running to the door.

  Outside the shack a pile of wood is stacked waist high on one side of the door; on the other there is a cage of ribs. Jimmy turns the corner. Sitting at the picnic table are the three complete skeletons that he assembled for company. Now that spring has thawed away their snow-sculpted features Jimmy no longer recognizes them and jumps back. He runs in the other direction, looking for a daughter who has run away from home. He takes off in a circle around the shack, frightening a large raven that claps at him before swooping over to the picnic table, where it attempts to land on a fragile black collar bone. The raven crashes through wet ribs, clattering the brittle cage off the table and into the melting snow, releasing a sweet gas through the air. Jimmy clutches the front of his mouth and gags. His sister appears, leaning on a stick and trailing a long red rope on the ground behind her.

  About one hundred metres south of where they stand staring at each other are two men in hunting caps. They’re crouched down in a path that leads up to a picnic area from deep in the woods.

  “What the hell was that? What the Jesus was that?”

  The larger hunter looks out from under a red flannel visor. He swallows and winces for his partner to be quiet. He whispers.

  “Mother of God! I don’t know. Some kind of little freak baby! Some kind of little fuckin’ zombie spawn. I swear to fuckin’ God!”

  His partner shivers and, with a hand resting on his friend’s shoulder, whispers into his ear.

  “Are you telling me that those zombie bastards are breeding? Out here?”

  The large man draws a rifle off his thighs and brings it up his side.


  “Oh yes, that’s exactly what I’m sayin’. They’re hidin’ out up here making a race of killer fuckin’ rat babies.”

  The smaller man tosses his breached weapon closed with a fitted clunk.

  “That thing was doin’ ninety up the path for crissakes. What the hell? Are they super-zombies or what?”

  “If that little SOB ever grows up.Jesus. I think we got a goddamn Sasquatch situation here.”

  “Shhh. There’s something up ahead. Get ready.”

  The larger hunter rises to stand and brings the rifle up to his shoulder. He squints down the sites, pointing the gun at the direction from where he can hear something coming towards them. A head and shoulders appear to the left of the path ahead and he squeezes the trigger.

  The figure is struck in the chest. It falls backward, collapsing in the bush. The two men move forward and discover the body flat on its back, already dead. They continue toward the clearing and when the raven lifts off the table with a vertebra stuck in its talon the smaller man erases it from the air with a shotgun blast. Before the flurry of black feathers falls to the ground he fires his cannon again, this time hurtling a young girl’s body back into the walls of a shack.

  The two men listen to the echoes of the gunshots that travel outward. When the silence returns and the first fresh smell of gunpowder burns off the air, they turn to each other and, dropping their rifles, embrace in a tight hug, grateful to God to be alive.

  At a distance of nearly a kilometre the baby continues to race west through the underbrush, hopping over logs on her powerful little legs and swinging off lower branches on strong, pliant limbs. She is making her way to Lake Scugog, where she will dive to the bottom with frog-like kicks to snatch the body of Les Reardon’s baby.

  These two babies, made strong by the circumstances of their birth, will live together on the frigid bottom, near the lake’s frozen bowel, blind as sea bats and icy as eels, in a tingling rage that will last forever.

  23

  The Worst Winter Ever

  The Bruce Peninsula is an astonishing garden. Wildlife that has fled north from the cities is squeezed cheek by jowl on its pristine shores. The dazzling peregrine falcon, great loping herons, and hummingbirds meet in mid-air. Rattlesnakes, spiky hogs, and tiny alligators wrestle for egg-laying territory on remote Sauble Beach. There are even llama that can be ridden for a price. A lone bison roams like a shaggy mountain, dragging its dread-locked chin through cow shit. And off the tip of the Bruce is an island famous for its tall, attic-shaped rock towers rising up out of the shallows. This is Flower Pot Island.

  At dawn, when the sun buries the lake in fire, the “flower pots” cast their shadows up onto the flat white shore. This shadow is where night hides, shifting its position, cautiously opposing the sun, remaining sharp and wicked. This shape is identical to the shape of Ontario. Go there, you’ll see. The pots hide a little bit of night behind them as they face the sun. They look at each other throughout the morning and communicate in a sentinel’s code: we know exactly where they are from here.

  In the cities there are greater confusions. As fall approaches several things are contributing to a late-autumn military mania. The disappearance of Toronto’s most popular anchorperson, Grant Mazzy; the undeniable presence of cannibals much further south than anyone had wanted to accept. Although a plethora of laws exist that might deal with a new breed of violent crime that is highly contagious, and in spite of the horrific acts being committed by Ontarians everywhere, none, not a single person, can be held accountable.

  There are no arrests. No convictions.

  On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. And by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario’s own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.

  Besides an armed and helmeted military, the only other active organization is the hugely augmented social services, now responsible for the welfare of every living person. Among the ranks of the army any personnel who stammers, struggles for the right words, or otherwise exhibits any difficulty communicating is instantly quarantined. The only words spoken aloud in Ontario through the winter are militarese, punctuated with a sharply barked “Sir!”

  The alleys of the city and the forests of the north ring with the shaking chains of constant automatic weapon fire as every one of the many thousand disoriented is gunned down.

  American helicopters dangle in the sky like a Chinese New Year, strafing the fields and farmlands.

  Small Zodiacs buzz across remote lakes coordinating a sweep with armed troops firing their way through the woods on cross-country skis.

  In front of Big Town TV a crowd of thirty-eight people, their heads bobbing to a New York dance diva, are cut to ribbons.

  A man with his hands clasped behind his neck kneels in a barn in Pontypool. One of two men standing behind him steps forward and fires a handgun through the back of his head.

  At the top of Main Street in Bolton, three zombies climb up through an open manhole together and get stuck. A man on a bicycle swerves out from behind a parked car and tumbles over them. The zombies hold him in the air with their strong jaws until a truck hits them, knocking the man thirty metres down the road, where he lies bleeding to death through three bit-sized holes.

  A helicopter swings out of a cloud and slams into the Royal Bank tower.

  A runaway train hurls through the wilderness along the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It tumbles sideways across White River, pulling the tallest thermometer in the world behind it as it disappears up the million paths that lead to Ontario’s train-eating wolves.

  A baby in Niagara Falls tips forward in its highchair, swinging a rope of saliva from its bottom lip. The suspended drool is teeming with influenza; but before the infant can slurp it back up, the baby is pulled headlong down a flight of stairs.

  A grandmother in Oshawa lays the last of twenty pictures, depicting her twenty-three grandchildren, on a coffee table. The twenty-first grandchild twists the woman’s head backward and bites down on her forehead, blinding her with blood.

  A tiny fish-hook is dropped into the lettuce at a salad bar by a madman and swallowed by a dieting accountant.

  A child in Bobcageon tosses a full can of beans at a bear cub, causing it to bark out in pain. The mother bear lifts the child by her leg and breaks her head open against a tree.

  A public poll is taken about the confidence people have in Emergency Task Forces; however, most of the respondents are zombies, and half of the pollsters are killed on front porches.

  A rubber bullet fired at a school bus on Highway 6 bounces off an aluminum window frame back across a field through a kitchen window, hitting the Frappé button on a blender. A sleeping man falls off the couch.

  A woman in Mississauga stands in front of her mirror kneading her breasts while a man urinates loudly in the toilet beside her. He glances over, and his growing erection interrupts the stream of urine, and he sprays the roll of bathroom tissue. He leans forward to flush the toilet and surreptitiously rotates the roll.

  A stripper in the process of performing an illegal lap dance in a bar on Yonge Street is disoriented. She stops and puts her finger across the patron’s lips and says, “I’ll be right back.” She wanders out among the crates and towels on the floor and stands palming the full cheeks of her buttocks. The entire room has her attention: she fails to notice and says, “Hello? Hello?” In the corner a zombie, who has quietly murdered a dancer in the dark, hisses, “Hello … hello.”

  A man with a bright-grey beard and rust-brown toupee kisses his walleyed daughter. The thirty-six-year-old woman licks him once quickly under his tongue and pulls back. She brushes her bangs with a saluting hand. Her
father wants to guarantee that they are not just anybody. He says to her, as they cross a busy Saturday-afternoon intersection in Collingwood, “All I need to do is touch you with one finger and I’m electrified.”

  A woman in Wawa lays six chicken breasts in a shallow pan and covers them with mushroom soup. She slides the pan onto the rack and closes the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. Two children sit on the couch in the other room. No one is happy. A man is coming down the stairs. An invisible trail of salmonella bacteria grows in strange places. On the back of a chair leg. On a fly’s wing. Strong inside the anti-bacterial dishwashing fluid.

  A family is cross-country skiing out on the snowfields of Caledon. They stop and look to the north. They see four people in brightly coloured parkas climbing down a cliff face. One falls and lands with a bone-breaking snap on a large boulder. The family topple off their skis in an attempt to run toward the fallen climber. By the time they are standing again, on skis directed toward the cliff, the three remaining climbers have reached the ground. They run at the skiers with wild eyes and bloody ski masks.

  A gathering of farmers, assembled in protest on the lawn of Queen’s Park, is blown to bits from the front steps.

  A businessman at King and Yonge reaches for his pager and is fired upon. Eighteen hollow-point bullets perforate him, and he falls in pieces.

  Three teenagers prying open a garage door down an alley at Landsdowne and Bloor are surprised from behind by two men with baseball bats who club them to their knees.

  At the edge of Grenadier pond sixteen people lying beside fishing lines are stabbed by as many knives and rolled into the water.

  A theatre in the woods, back up in the trees of High Park, is a coordinating centre for military personnel. Volunteers in T-shirts are ordered to stack weapons and then kneel beside them. They are shot in anger by officers with handguns.

  In the Sky Dome three women are ambushed by gunfire from beneath a van. They topple over on feetless legs and are dragged between tires and strangled.