by Tony Burgess
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 torn 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?”
<
br /> 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.
17
DEALEY PLAZA BUMS
A hurricane is visible as a spiralling structure of cirrus clouds. Torn from the far corners of the sky and gathered, these clouds ravel like cotton candy around a paper cone. The eye of the hurricane, famously calm, looks down the cone, its view descending and dry, onto a farmer’s field. Four cows and a calf gnaw at the ground in this pasture and near them a light has found its way under sea-fed walls, illuminating the animals from below. The pupil above them, darkened in a child’s pink fist, dilates to absorb this tiny remote light. It locks perfectly, developing an image of the circular patch. Five figures are visible, standing across from each other on the points of a pentagram. They are held here, less by the geometric pattern visible to the eye than by a series of physical arguments that have suspended them at equal distances from each other. A combination of these arguments acts as an attracting hub and they stand, in a quiet rage, facing this hub, unable to move or speak. The strongest zombie, a tall blond man in jean overalls, takes advantage of a momentary imbalance caused by an interfering calf and leaps growling on the upper body of a teenage girl to his left. Their argument began sometime earlier, when she bit down, weeping, against the back of his armpit. Now she is under him, shaking her sharp teeth up into his throat. He throws his head back to howl and releases a glaze of blood onto her face. The other zombies, spinning off their points on the pentagram, collapse toward the battling couple and fall. They strike back angrily, with swinging fists, at the invisible world that sucks at them. The zombies stop in a pile and lie still. The blood escaping from the large man they’ve fallen on wicks up through their clothing, darkening the flannel. The calf flees in quick light hops until it encounters the eye-wall, which rotates at one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. The young animal is driven under the descending hurricane. It scores a circle in the ground before being tossed off a boulder into a chaotic cross-current trip, up into the corner of the eye. The eye blinks on the irritant long enough to clear the sky, and the calf falls from a height of nine miles through a perfectly clear blue afternoon. It lands, like a drop of wax, splashing at three o’clock in the circle its body had previously tore open.
Grant pulls the car over beside the field near Pontypool. He reaches into the back seat, sliding an open briefcase onto the floor. He fishes a pair of binoculars out from between two sacks full of fresh corn.
“Right over there. Holy Christ! Those are goddamn cannibals! I can’t believe it.”
Grant reaches down and pops open the trunk from the dash.
“Get the equipment out of the trunk, Greg. Let’s shoot some of this stuff.”
Grant opens the car door without removing the binoculars from his eyes. They bump against the door frame as he rises from his seat.
“I don’t know, buddy. This just might freak me out. Look at those bastards. Real-life wackos. Zombies. Killers. I’m a bit freaked out. Hey! Where’s the camera?”
Greg walks around the car, scanning the farmer’s field. He can see four cows in a far corner. And about halfway back from them, near an overgrown pile of collected stones, there’s a dark shape. He can’t quite make it out. Then he sees what is clearly an arm lift up and fall against the side of the mound.
“Woo-hoo! Holy shit! Those suckers are alive! Greg! Greg! Did you see that?”
Greg opens the trunk and lifts out the camera case. His hand hovers over a plastic gas container. He touches the handle, lifting an oily film onto his fingertips. He slides his thumb across the ends of his fingers. He feels sound between the surfaces. Sound? He leaves the trunk open, just in case, and hauls the equipment around the car, placing it in the tall grass that grows along a ditch where Grant is standing, still looking through the binoculars, his mouth hanging open. He looks out briefly to locate Greg and the camera. He speaks in a whisper.
“OK. OK. Let’s keep our voices down. Those suckers are alive out there. I don’t know how safe we are. These are predators. Hmmm. I’ve never seen … Jesus … let’s … uh … let’s get back in the car.”
Grant reaches behind and flips open the car door. He lowers himself, slowly, still looking through the binoculars. He lifts his legs, carefully, one at a time, up off the shoulder of the road.
“Put the … uh … equipment in the back seat and get in the car, Greg. I don’t wanna do anything stupid.”
Greg follows the order, running his hands uncertainly across the surfaces of things before he moves them. He walks to the back of the car. The trunk is open and he looks at it, feeling a momentary confusion at the fact that he can’t open it. Open it. When it’s open. It’s open for him to open it. He lays his hand on the trunk. The weight brings it down. Greg looks self-consciously through the rear window and closes the lid. When it clicks he has to pull his hand off with force. He feels the effort as a kind of pain. He has the powerful sensation that he has had to do this, to lift his hand from the closed trunk, in contradiction to some obvious sign. As he walks up the passenger side of the car his face flushes. He feels that he has acted perversely. He pictures, as narrowly as possible, the series of actions that will return him to the passenger seat.
“I don’t get it. These freaks aren’t doing anything. What the hell are they doing?”
Grant reaches down to a panel beside him and flips a switch that locks all the doors with four simultaneous plunks.
“Maybe they’re playing dead. I can see you, you bastards. I know you’re not dead. So, c’mon, let’s see some action. Do something. Maybe it’s a trap.”
Greg looks up across the road and squints his eyes. He’s afraid. He feels the need to comprehend something complex. Anything. He tries to picture a car on the highway. Its four tires. They rotate. The weight of the car bearing down. The weight that doesn’t stop it. Of course, it doesn’t stop. The wind rises up over the windshield. The air pressure above the hood of the car is higher than at its sides. Greg feels a rush of relief. Something is coming back to him. He tries to picture the driver. An easy one. Someone he knew in high school. Dead now. Heart failure. I’m remembering him.
“Maybe we should’ve brought a gun. Damn! Look at these fools. These sacks of shit are harmless. What the hell are they doing? Havin’ a siesta?”
Greg’s relief is short lived. He feels his heart rate speed up with questions: What was that? What’s happening to me? I may not be able to even ask these things in five minutes, what the hell do I do? His heart begins to bang in his throat. This is the disease. I’m finally getting sick. Do I tell Grant?
“Awright, Christ, let’s move on. Maybe we can find some zombies with a little more life, eh?”
The car starts and eases up a hill, slowing and stopping at the top. Grant hands Greg the binoculars.
“Here, buddy, you keep an eye out with these. Let me know if you see anything.”
Greg takes the binoculars and rolls down his window. He raises the binoculars to his face and holds his breath. A light orange fuzz hovers in two connected egg shapes. In the left egg shape a tilting oblong of white floats in the orange. He moves so that both egg shapes share the oblong and he adjusts the focus. A tiny pattern of red diamonds rises sharply and disappears into a field of tall corn. The oblong is a house, back off the road at the edge of a heavy forest. A dog — a German shepherd — is jumping and barking, straining against a tether. Beside it is a fuel drum mounted on a concrete platform. On the small lawn, at the front of the house, are four silhouetted figures. They all have pipes stuck in their mouths. Wisemen? Dwarfs?
The view through the binoculars is cool. The lemon-coloured leaves on the undersides of branches are crisp. The sky is fixe
d through the trees in an ice-blue lattice. A refrigerator. Greg shivers.
Greg turns the wheel between his eyes and loses the field. It blurs and he lowers the binoculars.
“Hey, you know where we are?”
Greg’s left arm is swollen from the sun and he tries to brush the heat off with a cool palm.
“Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya. This is Pontypool comin’ up.”
Grant lowers his forehead toward the windshield. “There is something in Pontypool that I can show you. I shouldn’t, but I’m gonna anyway.”
“Uh, what is it?”
“What is it? What is it? OK, I’m gonna show you one of the little hiding spots that puts a shape to every fuckin’ thing you know. What do you think of that?”
Greg lifts the binoculars again and his vision sprays across the road. The white sky drives its tines through the hood of the car.
“I gotta remind you of one thing first, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
Grant pulls the car over beside an overgrown road that disappears down a dark green throat in the woods.
“You are already an accomplice to a major crime. Do you know what I mean?”
Greg hears himself respond from somewhere other than his mouth, somewhere other than his head. His left shoulder knots.
“OK. OK. I just want to point that out, because that’s your licence to see what I’m gonna show ya. Got it?”
Greg feels the whisks of a broom shaking at his insides. The disease is emptying me out; is that what’s happening?
“OK. I’m gonna rock your world now, little buddy.”