Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

Greg looks up at a vendor and spits towards him. The vendor picks up a sausage from the grill with a blackened fork and wags it at Greg, wiggling his tongue lecherously. Greg waits patiently, and sure enough his Higher Power, dressed entirely in black, emerges from a donut shop. He strolls out into the traffic holding his chin, sharing with Greg the difficulty of saying anything at this point.

Behind the white glass panels that make up the edifice of Big Town TV, Grant Mazzy is scratching the top of his head, releasing a white dusting of dandruff that showers onto his pants. He presses his palms against his thighs and, pulling them aside, admires the glittery effect. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a technician strolling breezily through the open concept.

“Hey Bob.”

“It’s Carl.”

“Yeah, sorry Carl. Anyway, when the hell are those production people gonna be done with the closed coupling thing, whatever it is?”

Closed coupling is an idea developed by Big Town TV to accommodate its AMPS viewer. The closed coupling involves a tight repetition, a delay sample that they believe would conform to the rhythm that AMPS consume information. It is a woefully unscientific instrument, utterly useless to the AMPS victim, whose chaotic process wildly outmanoeuvres this primitive compensation. The technology does attract viewers, however, who are exhilarated by the idea.

A Max Headroom who cannot be cancelled.

Grant Mazzy catches his own face in a monitor and moves his chin quickly. When he is satisfied that he is “now,” he stares squarely at his handsome face, frankly assessing his own good looks. His own best critic, Grant judges his appearance harshly. He never solicits a better angle from his image: he expects every angle to be good enough. The technician checks his watch and widens his eyes above the clipboard he holds.

“Five minutes, Grant, then we’re rolling live again.”

“You know, this place gives me the creeps. Everything reminds me of that damn virus and those fuckin’ zombies outside. I don’t know. Where do they go? I mean, when they get worse, where do they go? These ones aren’t that far gone you know.”

“I don’t know, Grant, they say that some really sick ones are making appearances up north. Like gangs of them in North Bay, places like that.”

“I just hope that somebody’s monitoring this situation. I’m not sensing a lot of organized thinking around this problem. Oh, wait, my prompter’s up. Here I go. Shut up. Get lost. Shoo.”

Grant takes one last look at himself in a monitor and then makes his professional gotta-take-a-shit face into the camera.

“The Ontario government has shifted its position on handling the growing cases of AMPS. After losing track of several victims who are in the final violent stages of the disease, and after reports of people disappearing, the government has decided to implement new, tighter methods of regulating the progress of the disease. People with AMPS are registered upon diagnosis and are required by law to report to a designated physician weekly. Emergency facilities are now being prepared for those victims who pass into the dangerous later stages. The government has made failure to comply an imprisonable offence. Meanwhile, some northern communities are showing signs of panic and there are instances of people taking matters into their own hands. Officials would like to send the clear message that this is not only dangerous and illegal, but also, now, unnecessary.”

When the broadcast goes to another feed, Grant looks down at the monitor and watches his mouth blur backwards.

Or forwards. He can’t tell.

Julie is worried about her younger brother and she puts her arm around him in the darkness. They are sitting at the end of a short dock.

“Jimmy, I’m here you know. Mom and Dad aren’t really worried, they just love this shit. It’s like a war or something. They like to take it seriously, at least while it’s happening. Just ignore them.”

Jimmy had stopped speaking three days ago, believing that silence was the only sure way to prevent the disease. If you don’t use words, it can’t get into them, right? But he was worried about his father, who argued with the TV, who yelled at appliances and then screamed at his mom. Jimmy watched with horror, seeing this vivid viral highway shooting through the air and slinging infection into his father’s wild mouth. Jimmy sinks the front of his sneaker into the lake. Cold water is sucked inside the shoe when he separates his toes. Julie cocks her ears towards the cottage. She can hear shouting. It’s her mother. The cottage door slams and she shifts uncomfortably, hoping that no one finds them.

“Remember last summer when we saw that musky grab the duckling?”

Jimmy shrugs and lowers his other toe into the water.

“I’m just glad muskies don’t fly!” A June bug clings like a heavy clasp to Julie’s bangs. “Aah! They do! They do! What’s that?”

“Ahhh! Jimmy, can you see it? What is it? Is it a musky? Oh God!”

Jimmy reaches up between his sister’s frantic limbs and plucks the beetle from her hair. He holds it for a second, until its wings clatter against his palm, then releases it. The June bug veers up into the moonlight, flitting through the silver before plunging down into darkness and plopping heavily onto the water’s surface. Jimmy lowers his head, scanning the blackness.

“Let’s see if a fish grabs it. I bet one does.”

Jimmy raises his toes as a fish gulps through the water. Julie mouths “wow” and slaps her brother’s back. The sound of her father’s voice makes her pull the back of Jimmy’s shirt.

“You kids get back up here. Your mother’s worried about you.”

The father weighs a rock in his hand and calculates the intensity of a toss that could knock his son into the water. He mutters under his breath as he drops the rock and turns up the path.

“Little fag.”

At a nearby cottage the Wheelers are in bed reading. They are turned away from each other, hanging books out into the light of their respective lamps. Mr. Wheeler’s head is bobbing into the pillow and for the second it is lowered he manages a single full snore. Mrs. Wheeler notices this, and she closes her book and shimmies her back up the wall, watching him.

“Honey. Honey, I think we should go to sleep now. Don’t you? I think you’ll sleep tonight, dear. Look at you, you can’t even hold your head up.”

Three people are standing in the dark at the base of the stairs leading up to the bedroom. They are silent; that is, they don’t speak. But they jab each other. They’re standing, exchanging sharp punches. Cruel little punches, meant to hurt. More than that, they begin to stab their fingers into each other’s face, until a finger reaches an eye and one goes down on his knees. And when he does, his enucleated eye slipping through his fingers onto the floor, the woman begins strangling him while the other man reaches under, grabs his face, and begins to stretch the skin until it gives way and its contents burst onto the floor. The man falls, wagging his face on the floor, sliding the rubble of his lost features, like eggs broken through a grocery bag, back onto his head. The woman kicks the man’s neck and, after grinding it flat beneath her heel, howls out between her clicking teeth. She can’t even feel the quick, hard blows to her ribs.

Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler are sitting straight up in their bed. They have heard everything, and when the woman stops howling Mrs. Wheeler turns off her light. Mr. Wheeler glares over at her, panicked. Breathless, he says, “What… what?”

“Turn off the light, turn off the light. Get under the bed.”