Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

Greg feels a now familiar twitch of shame scurry into his heart. It dims the light around Grant’s face.

“We are living in strange times, I guess. A lot of people are going to die before this is over. Steve thinks it’s modern art. Ha. I think it’s evolution. Anyway, we’ll kill them. We always do.”

Greg suddenly wonders if he has less than a month to live. Maybe even a week. A minute.

“I wanna go for a drive, Greg. Out to the country. Check out some of this stuff firsthand.”

“Now?”

Grant reaches over and slaps Greg’s face playfully.

“Yeah, right now, sport.”

The virus that thrives in the brackish pools fed by its own leaking is becoming hot. Until now they have been rubbing each other’s tummy in the words that Greg uses, happy to wait and play in the limited give and take he so rarely opens up onto other people. As Greg lowers himself into the passenger seat, the viruses gather in all the things he might say next, braiding the wheels and filling their cheeks with venom. The car pulls out of the parking lot, and a lone figure, dressed entirely in black, wanders among the empty vehicles. He bends to examine the interior of a Saab. Throwing his hands up into the air when Grant screeches his wheels at the exit, the figure slams a fist into his palm.

The woods around Lake Scugog are a dense, spinach green. The people who drive past its pseudo island on Number Seven look leisurely at its peculiar shoreline. Scugog is different, unlike most lakes in the region. Angrier, maybe. Self-illuminating.

The green that pulls the highway down is interior to black, a green that has yet to distinguish itself as a colour. A nightmare of green. People who drive through its suction are often bored, tired of scenery; and they say, in order to squeeze excitement out of the last leg of their trip, “I bet if you walked in there you’d never come back.” The driver never looks, but nods in agreement, swallowing a backwash of rejected coffee, disappointed that a good argument couldn’t be made. And, finally thrilled by the bristle of invisible hostility, he or she surprises the passenger by speeding up across the bridge. The passenger’s comments aren’t entirely banal. Lake Scugog is different.

Lakes in Ontario were formed by glaciers. They were fed like babies by englacial streams, and when they grew old, shuffling permeable and impermeable stones in their stomachs, soon unable to crush the animals that were invading them, they became what they are today: blue.

Scugog, however, is a mirror. Sometime on or about the date you were born, Scugog was a lowland field, teeming with scabby foxes and country mice. Then one day an artesian well was uncorked, or maybe a ditch was diverted, and the land was drowned. The foxes lay on their backs kicking little paws into the water that covered them. Their scabs flattened into scales and their sun-bit ears shot underwater sparks as they became gills. Soon the fox-fish began to hunt eel and rat-fish.

The surface of the water, like a playing card turned face down, became indistinguishable from other lakes: it too became blue. Beneath this surface, a surface nearly vertical if the passenger were to look closely, there are monsters. Not werewolves or vampires — not the kinds of monsters designed to frighten people — but things monstrous because they live too long. Sunk up to their eyeballs in fish parts, they twist in the dark, lining the shores with a gasket of white vomit.

And around this lake, now, a growing herd of zombies is passing through the underbrush. Cutting across their path in the permanent night are two children who have found each other.

Julie leads her brother by the hand. He stumbles behind her, mute and traumatized. His feet leave the ground as he is pulled along by his stronger sister. They fall farther and farther into forest, stretching out under its slip covers, to where night is held close to the ground, underneath trees, never leaving. Soon boulders begin to glow, caught by an afternoon moon hanging beneath the lowest bower of a distant tree that peeks through a slice ahead of them. Stars hang in funnels from branches, no longer up there, but down here. Julie brushes her shoulder against these wedding veils as she passes, diving into the bottom. She slips her arms into the sleeves of rivers and draws her breath from precisely where Ontario loses its consciousness. When they stop, out of breath, the stars and moons have settled on their skin like pyjamas. They sit apart, hanging their heads between their knees, panting and sniffing at the wetness on their faces.

“I’m hungry.”

Jimmy looks up at his sister. Her eyes are racked with grief. She wipes them with the backs of both her hands. There are a thousand ways to start crying and her face is wiggling to suppress them all.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy, but I am. I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”

Jimmy lifts a small stone with the toes of his shoes. It turns sideways under the pressure and falls soundlessly onto moss.

“I think maybe you should start talking soon, Jimmy. I’m gonna go crazy.”

Jimmy finds the stone with his heel and depresses it into the soft ground. Julie reaches over and lays her hand on the back of his neck. Jimmy shuffles toward her, curling against her chest and in her protecting arms.

“It’s OK, little man. It’s OK. We’re gonna have to be alone now, I think. We will have to look after each other. I think it’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Julie drops her hand and slips off her brother’s shoe. She cradles the bare foot in her hand, lightly pumping it with her fingers.

“Nothing new, right?”

Jimmy nods slowly, rubbing the top of his head under his sister’s chin.

Except they aren’t exactly alone. Thirty feet south of where they sit a zombie that has been lost in the woods for almost a week is lying face down on a long bed of ferns. It is still breathing, though barely. When Julie and Jimmy fall asleep in each other’s arms, this creature uses up its last tiny breath and passes, imperceptibly, from living thing to dead thing.

The next morning the children stir under the same night sky that they had fallen asleep under. They begin to silently make their way to Pontypool. Around noon they sit on the black sponge of a fallen tree, and they both begin to cry with hunger.

“What can we eat? What? Leaves? Stones?”

Julie scoops out a spoonful of wood from the log. She turns her finger on her knee, leaving a lump of pulp there. It leaks a cold drool down her leg.

“I don’t know. I’ll eat anything. Anything.”

Jimmy stands up and walks over to where a diffuse shaft of light has penetrated from above, lifting an area at the base of a large birch tree. He crouches at the edge of the lighted patch of tiny shoots and reaches across it. He touches something hidden on the far side. Julie watches his hand disappear. She waits to see what he has, expecting a little snake or a plump slug. Either way she has decided to bite off a piece of whatever he retrieves. He’s only making the decision that she’s putting off. Julie imagines the frantic muscle of a living thing push against the roof of her mouth.

“What is it?”

Jimmy goes down on his knees in order to reach with both arms. He pulls them back, hiding what he has in pregnant, praying hands.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

Jimmy looks back at his sister and smiles. Then he looks down at his hands and lifts his eyebrows.

“What? Jimmy, what have you got?”

His hands open and the light falls between them.

“Raspberries! Are those raspberries?”