Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“Greg! Greg! Come on! Get out of there! Greg!”

The Higher Power feels a little slighted in being ignored. I shouldn’t have to try so hard. He lowers his head and sighs before straightening his back and arms. He steps into the alley and swaggers for courage as he walks to its dark end.

Greg is standing pinned against the wall, facing the back of the dumpster. The Higher Power is prepared to be forceful. To launch him toward the street by his collar. He reaches out, holding two fingers over Greg’s shoulder, and he looks over his back. He blinks once at what he sees, freezes for a second and then bolts up the alley and turns the corner at full tilt.

A face is a marvellous thing for those who possess it. It is really the only thing that distinguishes us. Not quite enough to recommend us, just a trickster feature of our anatomy that makes everyone appear famous. But still, the face is beautiful. A sensitive sign of obscure integration. And every once in a while that integration is challenged.

Like now, behind the dumpster. A man is lying back against the garbage bags piled there. His face is mask-like sad, with worried eyes and eyebrows angled in an anxious incline. His mouth is pursed in a whistle, sucking saliva noisily as if through a straw. In fact, he has been sucking through straws. He has made straws out of the left cheek and upper lip of a woman who is lying across him, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, protected gently from falling loose on its broken neck. The flesh of her face is raised in turrets, sucked into bloody spouts that are white and new at their tips. Like infant mouths, blind and despairing, they open and close on her frail, dying exhalations. When the man looks up, registering Greg with tiny flecks of light across his black eyes, he gathers the straws in his hand and folds them over, sealing the woman’s mouth. She bucks once, kicking an old coat at her feet, and dies.

Julie pulls the hair offher brother’s face. Jimmy squirms a little trying to get comfortable against her thigh. Julie reaches around his front and puts her hand on the glass he holds while he moves around on the floor between her splayed knees. She squeezes her eyes while he puts a little too much weight on an elbow that is pushing just below her hip. Once settled, Julie removes her hand from the glass and Jimmy slurps hard once, clearing the purple ice of colour. They have been sitting on this floor in a tiny clubhouse in the backyard, built by their father, for three days. Their unusually warm spring break had been restricted to the activities of penitentiary inmates seventy-two hours ago when a gang had invaded the Wheelers’ cottage. And on this day their parents had joined Jimmy in his silence, making Julie feel isolated by her willingness to talk. She exercised this willingness by telling Jimmy stories that lasted six or seven hours.

While she speaks Jimmy listens; but he also watches. He watches for germs squishing at the corners of her mouth, or viral clouds near her cheeks. He doesn’t exactly know what he’s looking for, except he thinks with certainty that at some level these tiny invaders must wear pointy leather shoes. White pumps. They’ll have dozens of fat, scrambly legs encased in thick white nylons. He keeps his fingers caged around the straw that he seals tightly with his lips.

Julie is thinking about where she left off. The story is about the Wheelers in the afterlife. Over the course of many hours they have been the rulers of the world. They are the first married superheroes, driving through space in a flying monster truck. They have been reincarnated as fish, teachers, metal detectors and horseflies.

Most recently Julie has, out of boredom, brought them back to Earth as giants who enact a terrible revenge on the living.

“Mrs. Wheeler’s huge head is as big as a truck and her arms are like trees. She stamps on the ground, squashing people. She holds them under her giant shoes, leaning against their heads until they pop like those plastic bubbles of air used in packing crates. She finds this addictive and heads toward the city centre, growing agitated because the population is finite. She finds a main intersection and, grabbing handfuls of waiting commuters, begins to snap open their tiny craniums with her thumb. She moans small satisfactions to herself. Mr. Wheeler, whose hands are as big as horses, is trying to dig the biggest hole in the world. Each scoop of dirt that he drags out of the earth could fill ten dump trucks, and when he tosses them over his shoulder they pass in the sky over people’s heads like giant black clouds. After a full day of digging, Mr. Wheeler is standing in a hole that reaches up to his chest. Around him are tall, tall mountains. Since his day is about a thousand of our years long, people have moved from the dangerous cities away from the maniac head squeezer and have begun to live in caves in the side of the mountain. As night approaches, Mrs. Wheeler returns from the city, wiping her jammy fingers on the front of her dress. She crouches down against the mountain to help her husband out of his hole. In the process they cause a landslide that kills all the people. They decide that it’s time to get some dinner and they wander off. They find a country near the equator that is composed entirely of ruffage and they start grabbing giant handfuls and stuffing their mouths. The salad contains tiny stalks that get caught between their teeth, and they discover that if they clench them hundreds of monkeys, frantic to escape, push the trapped food free. They smile at each other, their lips streaming a dark green juice that carries the bodies of squiggling monkeys off their chins.”

Julie looks up. A car is approaching the cottage. She stretches her neck so that she can see above the windowsill to where the road appears between the trees. The car is going very fast and it sprays stones as it brakes dramatically at the foot of her parents’ driveway. Julie slips out from under Jim. He drops his elbows against the wood floor. Unable to speak, he rolls his glass angrily across to the wall.

“Shhh. There’s somebody coming to see Mom and Dad. Come on.”

Julie grabs her brother’s hand and they sneak out of the clubhouse. Jim resists her. He’s frightened of his parents, more than usual.

He thinks that they’re sick, and he’s right.

The children crouch behind a large green wheel of hose that hangs on the side of the cottage. They hear a door open and a man emerges. Very serious. Mud on his clothes. Is that mud? Julie pushes her brother down and she covers his back with crossed forearms. Listen. She hears an animal, a bird maybe. Something crying across the lake. No. Not across the lake. Nearer. Julie turns her head, her face an inch from the side of the cottage. From in there?

The sound becomes shrill. Louder. It is in there. Julie drags her brother into the bushes across the path. The front door opens and Julie can hear a man yelling. Pursued. She keeps her eyes trained on a small patch of the front yard that she can see through the leaves. The man running. Mom. Dad. After him. She leaps from the bushes to the edge of the cottage. Mom and Dad are chasing him into the lake. The man dives in from the shore and Mom and Dad fall on each other, howling. Slapping each other. Biting each other.

Mom has a piece of Dad’s cheek between her teeth, and when he turns from the lake she doesn’t let go. Suddenly they stop. They see me. Dad punches Mom under the chin, knocking her teeth from his face. She trips her tongue under the piece of flesh and snaps her mouth forward, catching and swallowing in one movement. With his eyes steadily on Julie her father pushes his wife to the ground and steps toward her. His cheek has a hole where her mom bit him. His eyes are huge and black. Mom springs from the ground, knocking his limp arm out of her way as she breaks into screaming flight. Julie grabs Jim by the arm and they run down a path that goes behind the clubhouse. Where is that tree? Where? Here. She pushes Jim up first on a ladder of tilting sticks nailed to the trunk, and she follows him, trying to force the rungs out with her heel as she climbs.