Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

One week ago the plague of cannibals in Ontario stopped moving. The population that had been crouched in a corner, under the shadow of hands dripping off the walls, with their own arms held protectively over their heads, had been holding their breaths. One week ago the zombies sat down quietly, the spirit of revenge, of murder, slipping from them. As the population exhaled it felt the silly relief of survival. We began to clean our parks and fields of the dead and the near dead. Slowly the province became less self-absorbed.

We discovered that while we were fleeing from vampires a giant in Texas began tossing babies like footballs from a bridge, breaking their little bodies open against the pebbles of a dried riverbed.

The receding hairline of the land continued its steady progress while we were gone and the little black glasses perched on the world’s nose lost some of their effectiveness. If we can accept our recent history, then we can now take a place among the slow cells that muddy the thought of the world.

Dr. John Mendez has been called to the Campbellcroft Secondary School. A makeshift morgue has been set up in the gymnasium, and the doctor is part of a team sent in to organize the dead. Over four thousand bodies have been hastily piled in this refrigerator. Steam climbs out of the limbs and wiggles, like white worms, across cliffs of dead people. The mist becomes dew on the upper lips of faces that are turned toward the steel rafters.

A plywood table sits in a narrow valley, and on it a body is being opened by Dr. Mendez.

“Well, my sleepy little man, this is a famous nap you’re having now, isn’t it?”

Mendez glides four fingers under the flat upper lobe of the lung he’s laid against Les Reardon’s side. He depresses his thumb through the tiled pink of the tissue, squeezing out a black bubble from within.

“Oh dear, these last few breaths didn’t help matters much, did they?”

Mendez lifts the edge of the body, accidentally pushing the lung from the table. He squeezes his hips against the edge, but the organ slips through and swings under the plywood, suspended like a pendulum. The weight of the lung tugs where it’s attached inside the chest cavity and the heart springs up onto the corpse.

“Little monkeys! Come on, get back up here!”

Mendez rests the chain of organs between the arm and the chest.

“Well, you rascal, before I let you go about exploding all over the place I have something to tell you.”

Mendez drags a thumbnail through a burnt crust that covers the shoulders.

“Now listen carefully: I think you must have had an awful fire at your back. And as you were opening your mouth to warn me, the air crawled in and blistered you on the inside.”

Mendez piles the organs back into the torn pocket of the man’s abdomen and lays a clipboard against him. He writes the name and age of the man. Death by smoke inhalation. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something’s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Something gentle, Mendez thinks, something in this place.

“Well, I have to put you back in the fire, but why don’t you carry that little space with you, eh? You tell the flames to burn carefully around it.”

Mendez rolls the table on its wheels down through the valley, bouncing it across the wrists and knuckles that cripple out along the banks. The bodies that have been processed are deposited in the girls’ change room, where a team binds them into groups of six. From there they are transported to an incinerating facility in Pickering. Three teenage girls, in blue gym shorts and slack training bras, pull the body of Les Reardon loose from the slivers that hold him to the gurney. They lower him, face down, onto a plastic sheet. Les shares the sheet with the leather tents of two dead cows. Mendez attempts to back the empty table through the door. One of the girls steps off the sheet, wipes red gruel from her hands onto her gym shorts, and holds the door for the doctor.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are a terrible team. Thank you.”

As he turns a corner around the southern mountain, Mendez notices a dark ledge of scorched heads and shoulders. He parks the gurney beneath the discoloured bodies and steps up onto a back that supports his weight. With a pinching grip that breaks through the blackened skin around the back of a woman’s neck, Mendez attempts to pull the body down. The head tumbles out of its spot, surprising Mendez as it bounces to the ground.

“There are people in bits up here! Blown to pieces! What have we been missing in all this?”

Mendez climbs down and lifts the head onto his table.

“This is that exploding rascal’s fire, I bet.”

He turns the head over and examines a piece of burnt wood embedded in the skull.

“A very loud bomb of some kind went off quite near you, didn’t it?”

Mendez looks up at the spot where the head fell loose. A dark sink of charred bodies. It covers an area halfway up the mountain like the shadow of a cloud.

“Oh dear, a bomb blew up the lot of you.”

This tarred spot of Ontario represents the tiny population of a compound on Scugog Island who had lived out their final days in a highly specialized struggle. They might be conventionally referred to as a type of suicide cult, and they lived as characters crossed somewhere between the Factory of Andy Warhol and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. They had isolated themselves from the rest of the province, behind tall white walls, on top of which swung a battalion of surveying cameras. Within these walls they abandoned depth-of-self as a spiritual corruption and built of themselves a shiny, reflective surface. It was on this gleaming surface, hard to picture in the sweltering heat, that they polished themselves into a supreme medium of contact. The only thing preventing them from achieving unity with the greeting that they were becoming was the fact that they continued to live.

They grew anxious to put their lives behind them, to heave the snake of longing off, to blink clear in a phatic collective, with arms stretched out flat across flat friends in a flat place. The leader, perhaps the flattest of them all, introduced them to the speed of touch, the superiority of skin over skeleton, and taught them to express love by brushing the hair on each other’s arms. The day was fast approaching, skating backwards from the future on a mirror, when they would twin themselves in a “hello” that the universe had been preparing for itself since the beginning. They decided that the best way to achieve this would be through a giant explosion. This day, flat as it was becoming, was pushed ahead by the speed bumps of the tricky weeks preceding it. These speed bumps were caused by another unrelated drama that crept up to, and under the walls of, the compound. This is what the doctor has yet to discover.

Mendez places the glistening blue-black head on the floor to mark the spot. He wants to return here later, to put a story together out of the burnt pieces of people.

“Stay here, little acorn. I’ll take care of you and your friends today, I promise.”

He turns another foot of the mountain and parks the table back in the space where he had found Les Reardon. Mendez has grown tired of recording broken necks, and inspired by the discovery of new causes of death he scans the mound for anyone else who might have died with an intact spinal column.

“Hello, hello, hello! You! Up there. Something new.”

Mendez climbs up to another area of darkened skin. He reaches it quickly with his hill-climbing limbs and slaps a hand on the top of a head. He rotates the head to test the neck and, finding it unbroken, works the body loose like a child’s tooth from baby-pink gums. It surfs down the slope across a runningboard of sloppy necks. Mendez bounds down the hill after it, jumping off hard chests and rigid thighs, losing his footing in the bend of an old man’s back, nearly falling.