Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  Soon the bottom of the freezer is lined with heavy oblong objects neatly bundled in newspaper. Each bundle is clearly labelled in felt-tip marker: shoulder, calf, upper arm, lower back, tongue. In the days that follow, the children lay out elaborate meals on the picnic table in the evening shade of a birch tree behind their home.

  At night they go to sleep on the floor as husband and wife, rocking their tiny hips together in sexual intercourse. During the third week of their residence a tiny sperm cell turns on a fatal dime, throws open the front door of a very modern egg, and strolls down the hall where his wife is busy mixing martinis. They kiss and tug at each other’s clothes until they, too, are fucking like happy children.

  19

  Death

  Greg is certain he’s going insane. He is sitting at the picnic table waiting for Grant, who went around the back of the shack some time ago, to return. His thinking has become deformed in repetition and crude rhymes. He notices his thoughts tear off in directions he cannot control. So he doesn’t control them, including himself instead in an audience that has crammed the stands overlooking a racetrack. Greg allows others to watch the progress of monsters toward the finish line. He discovers that he can survive in this crowd: anonymous, wordless, and undetected. He flicks a seedling from the table and it spins in the air on helicopter wings that carry it to the edge of the fresh graves beside the shack.

  I am never going to become an adult. A film running backwards streaks its tail around the track. I don’t even think there is such a thing. I don’t think there are any adults anyway. I might as well be dead. Greg hears his name being called out from behind. He turns toward the road that leads away.

  His Higher Power is standing in the half-light. His clothes, usually so crisp and black, are white with dust. His face is streaked with sweat and his hair is hanging in white tips across his forehead. He raises his hands and gestures for Greg to come to him. Greg pushes up from the table and sees a tear fall from his face and drop into wood. It is quickly absorbed, darkening the dry pores only briefly. I don’t want to die.

  “I know.”

  The Higher Power is sitting in the middle of the path and Greg is lying with his head in his arms. Dust from the Higher Power’s palm clings to Greg’s cheek and a single tear is held by it.

  “You are going to die, Greg. You’re disintegrating. And soon you won’t exist.”

  The Higher Power smiles and wipes his wet hand on Greg’s shirt. Greg looks down and pulls the fabric from his chest to look at the smear. He releases the shirt, sighing, and holds his hand over the wrist that rests across his neck.

  “And I’m going to stay with you. Right here. We’ll wait here until you die. OK?”

  Greg looks down to where the shade ends and the sun blazes down on the picnic table. A white moth leaps up from the grass and curves between the seat and the tabletop, disappearing momentarily before reappearing on the other side, where it drops again, almost heavy, into the lawn.

  “OK.”

  They sit in silence and watch a girl walking through the forest on the far side of the shack. She drops down occasionally, pulling at something in the ground. The Higher Power points to her, and Greg looks up to him, smiling.

  The Higher Power squeezes Greg’s hand and it collapses limply.

  20

  Nearly Well Again

  The new summer sky is beginning to screw its harder caps of white down onto the forest. Jimmy is sitting at the picnic table looking down, cross-eyed, at the breath he exhales. Julie is tying a knot in a thick rope that lies across her knee. She stands, leaning against a tree, with one leg raised on a wide stump. Julie has devised a way of catching zombies. She lays a noose in the grass at the base of a tree and slings the rope up, across a branch and down along the tops of short shrubs. She stands with her brother as bait in the doorway. She has listened to the zombies at night, wandering lost, falling on branches and splashing through the stream. She has listened carefully to the quick, skipping syllables of their cry. She imitates this in the doorway with one hand around the rope and the other hand tightly around her brother’s wrist. Usually, within an hour, the children can hear the zombie approaching noisily, frantically, its cry now a panicky series of squeaks. If it steps into the circle, Julie and Jimmy run with the rope to the back of the shed, hurling with all their weight. They can feel the flying limbs of the creature in the jumps of the taut rope. They pull, battling to keep its balance foiled, until the zombie gives up. In that moment the children give a final tug, yanking its leg tight to the trunk of the tree. The cannibal is safely trapped, shaking its shoulders against the ground.

  If the zombie doesn’t step into the circle, perhaps surprising the children by bursting around the corner of the shack, Julie drops the rope and slams the door. The children wait inside, taking dangerous peeks outside, until the zombie, skulking and unable to leave, eventually steps into the trap.

  Once it’s safely incapacitated, the children leap through the door and disable the zombie with hatchet whacks to its shins and stunning blows to its head. The rope is secured to its ankle and it’s given a length to move with at the base of the tree. Living, a zombie can be kept for weeks like this, until its meat is needed. There are four zombies tied to trees at edges of the surrounding forest. One of them should be harvested this morning. Julie is trying to figure out which it will be.

  The zombie nearest her is a short, plump woman of about fifty years. She is wearing a pale-blue cotton dress, speckled with tiny yellow flowers. Her hair is dyed yellow and gathers, like a stiff nest, around a black matte above her temple. Her legs are thick and dirty. She is sitting on the ankle of a flat, dead foot. The foot had throbbed and burnt painfully at the end of her battered leg, so she ground it under her buttocks. Her shinbone has broken through the skin. She holds it firmly in her fist. She holds her leg still. The only pain now comes from a bright band of infection advancing up her thigh, a tingling light that marks the living flesh from the dead. She notices Julie watching her and lowers her head to scowl. The effort makes her throw up in her lap. Julie looks away. Not for dinner.

  The next zombie is in better shape. A little more appetizing. A teenage boy. A tiny, fresh body. He had been easy to pull up the tree. There is very little damage and he appears to have recovered. He stands on both legs, alert, with hands slapping at his flat white stomach. When Julie approaches he throws himself onto his back and jerks around the ground in a seizure. Maybe a little too lively. Julie stops just beyond his reach. The teenage zombie stops bouncing. He looks up at her. His face is twisted in the affectation of the deranged, and he makes a pleading flinch with his eyebrows.

  “Jimmy, can you give me a hand here for a second?”

  Jimmy is crouching beside the picnic table around the corner of the shack. He’s balancing a brown-and-white rib cage with the top of his head, onto the black stump of spine. He is tying the joint frantically with binder twine. He moves his head forward carefully, until the ribs rest against the table edge. He brushes his hand across glossy maggot heads that poke out of the back of the cadaver. A complete human being.

  He runs around the corner, drops to a crouch, and slides his hands in the grass to clean them.

  “Look out!”

  Jimmy has crouched within the circle of the first zombie, the woman Julie had just passed by. The zombie springs like a crab from the sand. She folds her arms around Jimmy’s upper body.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy!”

  Julie skids into the gravel and picks up the hatchet leaning against the wall. The woman has pinned Jimmy to the ground under her. Her twisted leg flaps once against her back, spinning her foot away. It smacks loudly against the shack. Julie raises the hatchet over the back of the grunting disc that’s trying to devour her brother. She brings her weapon down, cleaving, halving the spine between the shoulders. The zombie’s limbs stop moving, but, against Jimmy’s clasped hands, its head continues sliding and shaking. He punches upward, knocking the zombie off him.

 
“Oh God! Oh God! Jimmy! Jimmy! Are you OK?”

  Jimmy sits up, spitting between his knees. He waves his hand, Yes.

  “That one is no good at all. I’m gonna get rid of it.”

  Jimmy touches his sister’s leg, leaving a dash of pink zombie vomit.

  “What? What do you want?”

  Jimmy stands between his sister and the zombie. He points to the picnic table.

  “Oh … really? You want this thing at the table?”

  Jimmy smiles, a little embarrassed.

  “OK, OK, but let me kill it first.”

  Jimmy shakes his head vigorously.

  “No? No? You want it alive?”

  Jimmy nods. His eyes sparkle. A dream come true.

  “OK, you little freak. Let me give you a hand. Be careful. It can probably still bite.”

  The children prop the zombie up on the seat across from Jimmy’s skeleton in progress. Jimmy adjusts her broken body so that she is staring directly at the skull. Her face has been frozen in a scream with purple cheeks. Her tiny arrow of a tongue sits squatting in her open mouth, deep in her fat throat, preventing the scream from breaking out. Jimmy notices this and thinks that she might choke. He slaps her hard across the eyes. Her tongue unplugs her lungs. With a blast of breath she sprays the skull across from her with bile. Maggots in the crisp black corners of shorn tendons wriggle and turn away, vomit stinging in their mouths. A look of surprise lights up the zombie’s face when she breathes in. As she breathes out, through buzzing wet lips, she tilts her head to the side. Curious. Jimmy begins tapping the frame of the skeleton, catching the maggots that drop in an orange Tupperware bowl. He slides the half-full bowl under the table and tips it against the woman’s ragged leg.

  Julie approaches the teenage zombie again. This time quickly, relying on his confusion to give her an opportunity. She strides directly up to him and whacks the blade of the hatchet through his forehead, burying it in his zombie brain. She releases the hatchet and lets the boy fall. He lies still at her feet, the weapon hanging off his head like a festive hat. Julie pushes down on his cranium with her foot, and with a yank that squawks the bone she removes the hatchet.

  By the time the sun sets on their garden the children are safely indoors. They take turns bathing in the large sink, towelling each other’s little body with soft, careful bats. They slip into the light summer dresses that they have pulled carefully over the heads of dead women and scrubbed clean. Jimmy wears a short violet frock with wide straps and a tiny white pocket. Julie wears a long, black cotton dress to bed. She lies on her back while her brother traces the outline of a stranger’s hand on her belly. There is, in fact, a hand inside her, cooked and crumbling. He smiles at her. She is his one and only. She closes her eyes and feels the stranger’s hand turn over in digestive juices, fingering the tight aperture at the base of her stomach.

  Through a window near the ceiling, Jimmy can see the starry sky and milky light of nightfall. He lifts his hand off Julie’s belly and slips two fingers through the strap that’s fallen down his arm and draws it up his smooth shoulder. He drops his hands on his knees and sits crouched beside his sister on the bed. He watches and listens. Quiet. A rope groans in the dark. Silence. A moth lands. A grey owl rotates its head toward the moon reflected in the window. The room is so quiet that Jimmy can hear the floor lying still in the dark. A wolf howls, across the river and far up the hill. Jimmy listens. The room swings once, turning wildly in the pitch black, and catches itself high in the bones of the small boy’s ear.

  21

  Damn Winter

  The only thing as universal as the experience of power is the experience of hunger. The empty stomach, like an orange lantern, casts light off its panels onto the dripping walls of a cave. Illuminated there are directions, instructions and recipes, carved and smudged in the stone, potato and potato habitat. The empty stomach turns its fierce light and obscure chemicals into a camera, developing maps in its juices, even going as far as to slip a photograph into the artist’s hand. At the cave entrance the painter stands, rubbing his or her tummy with the map, saying, “Hey, I know where that is.”

  When Greg arches his back, his Higher Power shimmies the man’s body up tighter between the fork of his legs and squeezes tightly to secure the gain. The HP stifles the liquid in Greg’s throat with a hand cupped over his mouth. Greg’s body relaxes and the HP presses his lips in the soft hollow of his neck. Greg feels the warmth of the lips and they stimulate a sizzle of digestive juices at the bottom of his heart. The two men lie this way, like a long caduceus, on the driveway, writhing occasionally to feel more directly the consolation of each other’s body.

  Greg tries to open his eyes but finds a lid pinned shut by a thumb. With his one eye, a tall blue cone that skates across a giant white planet, he observes the trees and sky above him, eager to see changes, signs of encouragement. A birch tree flies upward to his left. Its white trunk is scored with lesions where the wet rubble of its interior has burst through. Its trunk blackens further up and branches straighten into slick spears. At this height, the furthest that Greg can focus, bright green lights wrap the air around the deadly tree. Beyond, the leaves checker the sky, filling in the squares in a grid, sharing their presence evenly with ice blue. Greg can see in each distant screen, clear and livid with detail, little blue manic dramas. A blue policeman falls off a cliff, a child wiping his nose, a woman in a chair, a wrestler snaps his shoulder straps, a picture of Jesus so cold he freezes, a pimple squeezes, hair is teased, a sneeze is sneezed, a breeze leaves, the easy … eases … keezes … cheezes … breezes …

  The HP lifts his lips away from Greg’s neck and breathes through his mouth. The hot breath chills a patch of saliva and makes Greg shiver. He feels the breath like steam tickling the short hairs at the base of his neck. The HP slips a finger into Greg’s mouth and the taste of salt fills it with saliva. Greg sucks the finger hard, flicking his tongue on the crease that marks the first digit. He probes the crease until he raises taste buds across the finger pad. He tries to turn his body, to find something more, but the HP tightens his grip. In this small struggle Greg feels his cock suddenly pump against his jeans, filling his crotch with hot fluid. The pleasure spreads down his legs and past him. Greg opens his mouth and pants quick breaths around the finger, cooling it so that when he closes his mouth the finger is icy.

  There are seven valves articulating Greg’s digestive system and they throb and spit along the empty string that connects them. He is starving to death. But mostly he is dehydrating. The skin on his body sits up stiffly where the HP has held it. There is too much friction against the drying fibres of muscle for the skin to slide back into place. Systems of thin, grey wrinkles show where Greg’s Higher Power has tugged and prodded him, instilling peace and courage against the coming death: body insulating body.

  Greg’s vision has become strange to him, the mucous membranes have retreated into dry puckers, pulling his eyeballs back deep into their sockets. The act of focusing is becoming impaired by pain and what he cannot see with his eyes is compensated for by the drying pelt of his brain. The scenes of his addiction are being played out by leather dolls in a six-inch by six-inch shooting gallery. He turns a doll over and inspects a seam. His own hair, now stiff blond, bristles out between the stitches. He replaces the doll and shrugs, “I’m dying. It’s so odd. I’m so strange.”

  Time is passing quickly, frosting its boots in the night. In the morning an icy dew stings its cracked lips. At a height of four hundred feet, three turkey vultures hang off an immense updraft and float downward in a wide circle.

  Over the next few days the two men lie in the gravel and weeds. They hold each other, and occasionally one of them has episodes of anguish that cause him to twist in the arms of the other. The episodes subside under the soothing hands and calm whispers of the Higher Power.

  In time Greg does die. His Higher Power kneels at his side and crosses the teenager’s arms, lifting the hair from his young, pale face. He s
tands and looks down at the body that is ruined and vacant and he mouths a short prayer. He walks away from the body without looking back and climbs, in clothes now filthy and tattered, toward the highway. At the side of the road he puts out his thumb. He expects a chariot to descend from a cloud to pick him up. He’s surprised when an old red pick-up truck turns the corner and comes to a dusty stop on the shoulder just ahead of him.

  22

  Winter

  It isn’t possible to grow tired of a stream. A stream is a permanently exciting medium. Stones jiggle in its bed and roots laugh at its edges. The sun shoots Popsicles at a stream. The clouds lay soft, damp towels on its banks. And animals return from the stream shivering with a hundred rainbows weaving in their wet fur.

  And the fish.

  The fish are different. The fish are always different. In this stream the fish were introduced as minnows through the mouths of metal tubes that dipped below the surface. As adults they return to the precise place of their birth to spawn. They battle like charioteers through the cold water, peeling back their pretty bodies, grimacing with the effort so that their faces look like bullets. And when they arrive home they impale themselves on the sharp metal tips of pipes. By the hundreds they drive their bodies straight onto these stakes, packing the hollow with the bruised flesh of their throats and the frozen bridges of their noses. Throughout the summer aggressive water beetles curve over the openings in military anger. They extract the fibres of meat with barbed toes, feeding it up into their little nightmare faces. The following spring a glistening black chain mail lines the stream, darkening the bottom, where exhausted trout climb along, blind and proud.

  By the fall Julie’s belly has begun to bell outward and Jimmy’s body is springing in frog-like leaps over one pubic hurdle after another. By November his hand is huge and he splays it over Julie’s swollen abdomen, marvelling at its strength.