Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

“Oh God! Oh God! Jimmy! Jimmy! Are you OK?”

Jimmy sits up, spitting between his knees. He waves his hand, Yes.

“That one is no good at all. I’m gonna get rid of it.”

Jimmy touches his sister’s leg, leaving a dash of pink zombie vomit.

“What? What do you want?”

Jimmy stands between his sister and the zombie. He points to the picnic table.

“Oh… really? You want this thing at the table?”

Jimmy smiles, a little embarrassed.

“OK, OK, but let me kill it first.”

Jimmy shakes his head vigorously.

“No? No? You want it alive?”

Jimmy nods. His eyes sparkle. A dream come true.

“OK, you little freak. Let me give you a hand. Be careful. It can probably still bite.”

The children prop the zombie up on the seat across from Jimmy’s skeleton in progress. Jimmy adjusts her broken body so that she is staring directly at the skull. Her face has been frozen in a scream with purple cheeks. Her tiny arrow of a tongue sits squatting in her open mouth, deep in her fat throat, preventing the scream from breaking out. Jimmy notices this and thinks that she might choke. He slaps her hard across the eyes. Her tongue unplugs her lungs. With a blast of breath she sprays the skull across from her with bile. Maggots in the crisp black corners of shorn tendons wriggle and turn away, vomit stinging in their mouths. A look of surprise lights up the zombie’s face when she breathes in. As she breathes out, through buzzing wet lips, she tilts her head to the side. Curious. Jimmy begins tapping the frame of the skeleton, catching the maggots that drop in an orange Tupperware bowl. He slides the half-full bowl under the table and tips it against the woman’s ragged leg.

Julie approaches the teenage zombie again. This time quickly, relying on his confusion to give her an opportunity. She strides directly up to him and whacks the blade of the hatchet through his forehead, burying it in his zombie brain. She releases the hatchet and lets the boy fall. He lies still at her feet, the weapon hanging off his head like a festive hat. Julie pushes down on his cranium with her foot, and with a yank that squawks the bone she removes the hatchet.

By the time the sun sets on their garden the children are safely indoors. They take turns bathing in the large sink, towelling each other’s little body with soft, careful bats. They slip into the light summer dresses that they have pulled carefully over the heads of dead women and scrubbed clean. Jimmy wears a short violet frock with wide straps and a tiny white pocket. Julie wears a long, black cotton dress to bed. She lies on her back while her brother traces the outline of a stranger’s hand on her belly. There is, in fact, a hand inside her, cooked and crumbling. He smiles at her. She is his one and only. She closes her eyes and feels the stranger’s hand turn over in digestive juices, fingering the tight aperture at the base of her stomach.

Through a window near the ceiling, Jimmy can see the starry sky and milky light of nightfall. He lifts his hand off Julie’s belly and slips two fingers through the strap that’s fallen down his arm and draws it up his smooth shoulder. He drops his hands on his knees and sits crouched beside his sister on the bed. He watches and listens. Quiet. A rope groans in the dark. Silence. A moth lands. A grey owl rotates its head toward the moon reflected in the window. The room is so quiet that Jimmy can hear the floor lying still in the dark. A wolf howls, across the river and far up the hill. Jimmy listens. The room swings once, turning wildly in the pitch black, and catches itself high in the bones of the small boy’s ear.

The only thing as universal as the experience of power is the experience of hunger. The empty stomach, like an orange lantern, casts light off its panels onto the dripping walls of a cave. Illuminated there are directions, instructions and recipes, carved and smudged in the stone, potato and potato habitat. The empty stomach turns its fierce light and obscure chemicals into a camera, developing maps in its juices, even going as far as to slip a photograph into the artist’s hand. At the cave entrance the painter stands, rubbing his or her tummy with the map, saying, “Hey, I know where that is.”

When Greg arches his back, his Higher Power shimmies the man’s body up tighter between the fork of his legs and squeezes tightly to secure the gain. The HP stifles the liquid in Greg’s throat with a hand cupped over his mouth. Greg’s body relaxes and the HP presses his lips in the soft hollow of his neck. Greg feels the warmth of the lips and they stimulate a sizzle of digestive juices at the bottom of his heart. The two men lie this way, like a long caduceus, on the driveway, writhing occasionally to feel more directly the consolation of each other’s body.

Greg tries to open his eyes but finds a lid pinned shut by a thumb. With his one eye, a tall blue cone that skates across a giant white planet, he observes the trees and sky above him, eager to see changes, signs of encouragement. A birch tree flies upward to his left. Its white trunk is scored with lesions where the wet rubble of its interior has burst through. Its trunk blackens further up and branches straighten into slick spears. At this height, the furthest that Greg can focus, bright green lights wrap the air around the deadly tree. Beyond, the leaves checker the sky, filling in the squares in a grid, sharing their presence evenly with ice blue. Greg can see in each distant screen, clear and livid with detail, little blue manic dramas. A blue policeman falls off a cliff, a child wiping his nose, a woman in a chair, a wrestler snaps his shoulder straps, a picture of Jesus so cold he freezes, a pimple squeezes, hair is teased, a sneeze is sneezed, a breeze leaves, the easy… eases… keezes… cheezes… breezes…

The HP lifts his lips away from Greg’s neck and breathes through his mouth. The hot breath chills a patch of saliva and makes Greg shiver. He feels the breath like steam tickling the short hairs at the base of his neck. The HP slips a finger into Greg’s mouth and the taste of salt fills it with saliva. Greg sucks the finger hard, flicking his tongue on the crease that marks the first digit. He probes the crease until he raises taste buds across the finger pad. He tries to turn his body, to find something more, but the HP tightens his grip. In this small struggle Greg feels his cock suddenly pump against his jeans, filling his crotch with hot fluid. The pleasure spreads down his legs and past him. Greg opens his mouth and pants quick breaths around the finger, cooling it so that when he closes his mouth the finger is icy.

There are seven valves articulating Greg’s digestive system and they throb and spit along the empty string that connects them. He is starving to death. But mostly he is dehydrating. The skin on his body sits up stiffly where the HP has held it. There is too much friction against the drying fibres of muscle for the skin to slide back into place. Systems of thin, grey wrinkles show where Greg’s Higher Power has tugged and prodded him, instilling peace and courage against the coming death: body insulating body.

Greg’s vision has become strange to him, the mucous membranes have retreated into dry puckers, pulling his eyeballs back deep into their sockets. The act of focusing is becoming impaired by pain and what he cannot see with his eyes is compensated for by the drying pelt of his brain. The scenes of his addiction are being played out by leather dolls in a six-inch by six-inch shooting gallery. He turns a doll over and inspects a seam. His own hair, now stiff blond, bristles out between the stitches. He replaces the doll and shrugs, “I’m dying. It’s so odd. I’m so strange.”