Tony Burgess: Pontypool Changes Everything

And then, as she was about to enter the second month of her first pregnancy, she left him.

The first car dealerships of Brooklyn start to appear. Les scans the swooping parking lots, trimmed by drying lightbulbs and coloured flags, for zombies. A man standing at the side of the road balances two heavy plastic bags. He watches the car approach and he steps out onto the road precisely as it passes him. Les looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the man step across the centreline. Some are not zombies. He slows the car, wondering if he shouldn’t grab this opportunity to talk to an uncontaminated person. He remembers the Knockouts. Opportunity. I’m contaminated.

Brooklyn soon disappears with the same chrome mirage that brought it into view. Past Green River, the drive will begin to congest into suburban corridors — corridors that drop, like champagne dribbling from glass to glass down a pyramid, into Parkdale. Helen. Traffic lights change the relationships between cars and Les waits anxiously at each red, not looking at the vehicles beside him that have become carriers, little Trojan horses, breachable barriers.

As he descends down Dufferin Street, toward Parkdale, Les turns his hands inward around the steering wheel, sliding its grips deep into his palms. He’s braver. The miracle of his thinking is refreshed. He can distinguish between his strategies and his delusions. Negligible difference. Essential. The child in the back window of the car ahead is not a weapon of war, but he bears the mark; his parents, though, might just be slack-jawed cannibals looking for a parking lot to pull over in so that they can twist off his little blond head and share his face.

That’s possible.

Les feels the galvanizing effect of knowing the difference. The mad patterns and buzzing geometry sneaking over him are protective prisms of light, deflecting poisons, redirecting unexplained intrusions. The zombies, on the other hand, are as immediate as hornets. Les flips down the sun visor, where he had earlier stashed Helen’s address, and pulls the piece of paper from behind an elastic band. He unfolds the page across the steering wheel. Number 3, Temple Avenue. Helen and our son.

And some cocksucking writer.

At King and Dufferin Les pulls into the McDonald’s parking lot. He watches panhandlers mill around in front of the Hasty Market. A young woman steps out of Money Mart. A tall, thin man in a fat man’s suit pushes off from the golden arch he had been leaning on and walks toward the grey Datsun. Les examines the face closely. A gaunt, black face. Startled eyes. A slightly open mouth. He lifts a cigarette to his lips and fingers that are medicated scissors, broken and soft, flatten across his mouth, sloppily reinforcing the seal, which is never made. The man inhales and exhales through his teeth. Les sees a keener man in the sharp corners of his eyes, a man who has paid close attention to the way people watch him shuffle. He has taken great care that the shuffle be guided intelligently. Not a zombie.

Les leans into the passenger seat and waves his hand through the window. The panhandler begins talking anyway, making a face, “Yes, I know, but we need to talk.” And for a second, Les falls for the solicitation. The man accidentally slips, losing his target, and Les repeats the hand wave, this time cutting it short, stopping the panhandler in his tracks. Les looks up and the panhandler has already hopped up the step in front of the Money Mart. Les gets out of the car and a loud roar rumbles up his legs. He looks over his shoulder as a military truck moves along King Street and turns down Spencer Avenue. Another follows. The panhandlers don’t look. Across the street a table of cowboys with long grey hair lean over their early morning drafts and watch the small convoy. One of them, cool looking in mirror shades and white mustache, interprets the scene for his friends. Les and the man lock eyes and they share a reptile’s wink across a common lateral lid. Les feels the tiny pop of disconnection as he breaks eye contact. Not a zombie. Who will be the first?

Les’s question is answered almost immediately. A loud squawk comes from the laundromat across the street. A man’s jean jacket falls open across a red T-shirt. He kicks his white cowboy boots back into a washer as he is pushed backwards up and onto it. Another man in an undershirt wiggles with a ferret’s body onto the chest of the cowboy. He sits up, a tattooed incubus, and when he turns to look through the window Les sees a familiar face. His eyes poke out through the chipped blue “a” of “Laundry,” and his pupils, like hard clots, shake once across Les’s car. Behind the lower curve of the “a,” a bleached tongue licks the space inside a blood-rimmed wheel. Les starts the car and pulls past the laundromat. Everyone at the intersection, including the panhandlers, is watching a storefront puppet show in which men act like pit bulls. Joined at the mouth, they break each other’s necks.

As he turns the car down Spencer, Les feels each house pass. They’re being subtracted from the distance between him and Helen.

Temple Avenue.

He is unable to turn on Temple. Four large trucks surrounded by military personnel block his access. He parks the car illegally on Spencer, at a fire hydrant just before Springhurst. It’s now or never. Les goes through backyards, scaling fences until he has counted from the number 9 backwards to 3. All of the drapes are closed, and behind them no lights are lit. Les knocks on the door. Nothing. He steps back into the yard and looks at the upper windows. He calls up.

“Helen!”

Nothing. He calls louder.

“Helen!”

Over the roof where the sky lets the house pass into the front yard, four men with rifles surround two full-blown zombies. The soldiers look up, spooked by the voice calling Helen coming in over their heads. The zombies echo the voice in words they bark at the soldiers: “Helen!” “Hello!” “Help!” They are agitated by the alliteration and their barks become frenzied: “Helly!” “Hello!” “Helen!” “Hessy!” The soldiers open fire, peppering zombie torsos with firecrackers. The bullets that enter the zombies cause them to turn slightly. This changes the trajectories of the missiles, so that as they exit they fly toward the front of the house and hit several inches away from where they would have had the zombies not been there. A little plaster gnome shatters where a summer rose might have been cut down. Once free of the bullets, the zombies stand still. Les, on the other hand, jumps clear into the air. He runs for the door with his elbows out like fins on a battering ram.

At the outskirts of this scene a small observing crowd has assembled. Among them are three people in the early stages of the disease. They step back and look at each other meaningfully. They’ve been given something: “Hello. Helen. Hello.” And further back, in a house on the corner, a full-blown zombie sits at an open window howling “Helen!” across southern Parkdale.

A woman who is stepping across the railway tracks that cut through the CNE looks up and calls back through a bloodstained bubble: “Hello!”

Inside the house Les lies across a kitchen counter, frozen momentarily by the burn of hairline fractures in his elbows. He straightens them painfully, making angel wings of space in the dishes and debris that he’s sent crashing to the floor. He wiggles his nose like a witch at the thick gas of garbage. He notices a wasp’s nest of crack pipes on the kitchen table.

Helen’s a drug addict.

Les steps into the hall and cranes his head around the corner.