Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

Julie leaps to her feet and joins her brother. She picks a raspberry out of his palm and squishes the cold fruit against her teeth. A bright sugar buzzes to life in her mouth. She bites down, cracking the tiny pits. Jimmy reaches across and bends a large bush into the light. The bush is heavily jewelled with clusters of fat red berries. Julie looks at her brother with wide eyes as he pops his handful into his open mouth. Within an hour they have devoured a good portion of the bush, and with digging, adventurous fingers they uncover a patch of tiny onions. They crunch the bulbs, dyeing the cells pink, before lustily swallowing a raspberry-onion stew.

“We can live here, Jimmy.”

Jimmy is lying on his back. His lips are swollen, in reaction to the onion, and slicked bright crimson from crushed berries. Julie looks over, past the shoots of poison ivy that ring her face.

“Maybe not here, exactly. I’m thirsty now. We have to find water.”

Jimmy rolls over onto his stomach. He feels a jolt in the base of his abdomen. He curls his toes and closes his eyes until it passes.

“Jimmy? We need water. Let’s go find some.”

Julie sits up and, patting her brother’s backside, stands. Jimmy finds his shoe and lets his sister brush him off while he ties the laces. She lifts him up with her powerful arm. They step away from the little hole of light on the ground, back down into the stars and moons, along a path lined with black sand. Julie keeps an arm across her face, dividing branches with her elbow. She leads Jimmy; he keeps his face down behind her, in the protection of his sister’s back.

Forty metres ahead of them, moving in the same direction, at exactly the same pace, are three cannibals. They are lost, and their diet, the tongues and teeth of living people, is somewhat more limited than the children’s. They are facing a rather depressing destiny. In their weakened condition the zombies have long given up the conversations that have consisted mainly of hooking fingers into vulnerable flesh. They lope along quietly, recoiling in irritation at anything that touches them. As night falls, too far above to be noticed, one of them collapses on his face. The other two, sad women with heavy masks, part ways, heading off in different directions. They do this not so much because they have lost a third but out of a failure to notice the loss of that person.

Julie spots him first. His back, lying low up ahead. Initially she thinks it’s torn paper. Then as they get closer a hand flips up in the green dust at the man’s side. Julie squeezes her brother’s forearm, stopping him behind her. They stand frozen, watching the body. After a few minutes the other hand performs the same flip, sending a twig up onto his white shirt. Then stillness. Julie steps closer, leaving her brother behind. She studies the back to see if it rises, if it’s breathing. Perfectly still. She turns and, covering her mouth, whispers, “I think it’s dying. I think it may be dead.”

She waves her hand backward, indicating to Jimmy that he should walk past in a wide circle. Jimmy is craning his neck up and around, trying to get a view beyond where his sister stands.

“Now! Go!”

Jimmy steps backward and, without losing sight of his sister, moves ahead of her through the forest. Julie steps closer. The body isn’t breathing. It doesn’t appear to be. Julie stoops to a knee and reaches down blindly to find a stone. She lobs the pebble into the air and it hits the zombie on the head, rapping his skull like a drum. Julie grabs her mouth and turns to run. She stops. The man must be dead.

“Wait there, Jimmy! I’m coming! Wait there!”

Julie runs as fast as she can. She leaps directly through a young maple tree growing a metre away from the still hand of the body. She catches up with Jimmy and holds him, panting heavily, out of breath. Jimmy reaches up and lays his closed fists against her back.

“OK. It’s OK. Let’s just keep going, OK?”

Jimmy pushes harder against her back, tightening his fists until they really hurt.

Suddenly a sharp roar from behind sends them squealing through the prickly forest.

When they’ve gone, the zombie, who has sat up, dies; his hands have fallen like birds at the sides of his feet.

A hurricane is visible as a spiralling structure of cirrus clouds. Torn from the far corners of the sky and gathered, these clouds ravel like cotton candy around a paper cone. The eye of the hurricane, famously calm, looks down the cone, its view descending and dry, onto a farmer’s field. Four cows and a calf gnaw at the ground in this pasture and near them a light has found its way under sea-fed walls, illuminating the animals from below. The pupil above them, darkened in a child’s pink fist, dilates to absorb this tiny remote light. It locks perfectly, developing an image of the circular patch. Five figures are visible, standing across from each other on the points of a pentagram. They are held here, less by the geometric pattern visible to the eye than by a series of physical arguments that have suspended them at equal distances from each other. A combination of these arguments acts as an attracting hub and they stand, in a quiet rage, facing this hub, unable to move or speak. The strongest zombie, a tall blond man in jean overalls, takes advantage of a momentary imbalance caused by an interfering calf and leaps growling on the upper body of a teenage girl to his left. Their argument began sometime earlier, when she bit down, weeping, against the back of his armpit. Now she is under him, shaking her sharp teeth up into his throat. He throws his head back to howl and releases a glaze of blood onto her face. The other zombies, spinning off their points on the pentagram, collapse toward the battling couple and fall. They strike back angrily, with swinging fists, at the invisible world that sucks at them. The zombies stop in a pile and lie still. The blood escaping from the large man they’ve fallen on wicks up through their clothing, darkening the flannel. The calf flees in quick light hops until it encounters the eye-wall, which rotates at one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. The young animal is driven under the descending hurricane. It scores a circle in the ground before being tossed off a boulder into a chaotic cross-current trip, up into the corner of the eye. The eye blinks on the irritant long enough to clear the sky, and the calf falls from a height of nine miles through a perfectly clear blue afternoon. It lands, like a drop of wax, splashing at three o’clock in the circle its body had previously tore open.

Grant pulls the car over beside the field near Pontypool. He reaches into the back seat, sliding an open briefcase onto the floor. He fishes a pair of binoculars out from between two sacks full of fresh corn.

“Right over there. Holy Christ! Those are goddamn cannibals! I can’t believe it.”

Grant reaches down and pops open the trunk from the dash.

“Get the equipment out of the trunk, Greg. Let’s shoot some of this stuff.”

Grant opens the car door without removing the binoculars from his eyes. They bump against the door frame as he rises from his seat.

“I don’t know, buddy. This just might freak me out. Look at those bastards. Real-life wackos. Zombies. Killers. I’m a bit freaked out. Hey! Where’s the camera?”

Greg walks around the car, scanning the farmer’s field. He can see four cows in a far corner. And about halfway back from them, near an overgrown pile of collected stones, there’s a dark shape. He can’t quite make it out. Then he sees what is clearly an arm lift up and fall against the side of the mound.

“Woo-hoo! Holy shit! Those suckers are alive! Greg! Greg! Did you see that?”