Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

The alleys of the city and the forests of the north ring with the shaking chains of constant automatic weapon fire as every one of the many thousand disoriented is gunned down.

American helicopters dangle in the sky like a Chinese New Year, strafing the fields and farmlands.

Small Zodiacs buzz across remote lakes coordinating a sweep with armed troops firing their way through the woods on cross-country skis.

In front of Big Town TV a crowd of thirty-eight people, their heads bobbing to a New York dance diva, are cut to ribbons.

A man with his hands clasped behind his neck kneels in a barn in Pontypool. One of two men standing behind him steps forward and fires a handgun through the back of his head.

At the top of Main Street in Bolton, three zombies climb up through an open manhole together and get stuck. A man on a bicycle swerves out from behind a parked car and tumbles over them. The zombies hold him in the air with their strong jaws until a truck hits them, knocking the man thirty metres down the road, where he lies bleeding to death through three bit-sized holes.

A helicopter swings out of a cloud and slams into the Royal Bank tower.

A runaway train hurls through the wilderness along the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It tumbles sideways across White River, pulling the tallest thermometer in the world behind it as it disappears up the million paths that lead to Ontario’s train-eating wolves.

A baby in Niagara Falls tips forward in its highchair, swinging a rope of saliva from its bottom lip. The suspended drool is teeming with influenza; but before the infant can slurp it back up, the baby is pulled headlong down a flight of stairs.

A grandmother in Oshawa lays the last of twenty pictures, depicting her twenty-three grandchildren, on a coffee table. The twenty-first grandchild twists the woman’s head backward and bites down on her forehead, blinding her with blood.

A tiny fish-hook is dropped into the lettuce at a salad bar by a madman and swallowed by a dieting accountant.

A child in Bobcageon tosses a full can of beans at a bear cub, causing it to bark out in pain. The mother bear lifts the child by her leg and breaks her head open against a tree.

A public poll is taken about the confidence people have in Emergency Task Forces; however, most of the respondents are zombies, and half of the pollsters are killed on front porches.

A rubber bullet fired at a school bus on Highway 6 bounces off an aluminum window frame back across a field through a kitchen window, hitting the Frappé button on a blender. A sleeping man falls off the couch.

A woman in Mississauga stands in front of her mirror kneading her breasts while a man urinates loudly in the toilet beside her. He glances over, and his growing erection interrupts the stream of urine, and he sprays the roll of bathroom tissue. He leans forward to flush the toilet and surreptitiously rotates the roll.

A stripper in the process of performing an illegal lap dance in a bar on Yonge Street is disoriented. She stops and puts her finger across the patron’s lips and says, “I’ll be right back.” She wanders out among the crates and towels on the floor and stands palming the full cheeks of her buttocks. The entire room has her attention: she fails to notice and says, “Hello? Hello?” In the corner a zombie, who has quietly murdered a dancer in the dark, hisses, “Hello… hello.”

A man with a bright-grey beard and rust-brown toupee kisses his walleyed daughter. The thirty-six-year-old woman licks him once quickly under his tongue and pulls back. She brushes her bangs with a saluting hand. Her father wants to guarantee that they are not just anybody. He says to her, as they cross a busy Saturday-afternoon intersection in Collingwood, “All I need to do is touch you with one finger and I’m electrified.”

A woman in Wawa lays six chicken breasts in a shallow pan and covers them with mushroom soup. She slides the pan onto the rack and closes the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. Two children sit on the couch in the other room. No one is happy. A man is coming down the stairs. An invisible trail of salmonella bacteria grows in strange places. On the back of a chair leg. On a fly’s wing. Strong inside the anti-bacterial dishwashing fluid.

A family is cross-country skiing out on the snowfields of Caledon. They stop and look to the north. They see four people in brightly coloured parkas climbing down a cliff face. One falls and lands with a bone-breaking snap on a large boulder. The family topple off their skis in an attempt to run toward the fallen climber. By the time they are standing again, on skis directed toward the cliff, the three remaining climbers have reached the ground. They run at the skiers with wild eyes and bloody ski masks.

A gathering of farmers, assembled in protest on the lawn of Queen’s Park, is blown to bits from the front steps.

A businessman at King and Yonge reaches for his pager and is fired upon. Eighteen hollow-point bullets perforate him, and he falls in pieces.

Three teenagers prying open a garage door down an alley at Landsdowne and Bloor are surprised from behind by two men with baseball bats who club them to their knees.

At the edge of Grenadier pond sixteen people lying beside fishing lines are stabbed by as many knives and rolled into the water.

A theatre in the woods, back up in the trees of High Park, is a coordinating centre for military personnel. Volunteers in T-shirts are ordered to stack weapons and then kneel beside them. They are shot in anger by officers with handguns.

In the Sky Dome three women are ambushed by gunfire from beneath a van. They topple over on feetless legs and are dragged between tires and strangled.

The entire Don Valley, deemed to be a hotbed of cannibal activity, is sprayed with a molten plastic.

The Toronto Islands, which have reported only rare cases of the disease, are carpet bombed.

In Hockley Vailey, one hundred and twenty cannibals are rounded up. Soldiers discover that if a bullet is grazed across the tops of zombie heads, they dance in seizure while squirting blood into the air. Informal contests are held to see how many zombies can be made to dance at once.

Just outside Sudbury, troops succeed in getting sixty-three zombies to die jigging. The same is attempted on the bridge over Owen Sound Harbour and it backfires. Eight soldiers are dragged to their deaths beneath the hull of the docked Chi Chi Man. Two more soldiers are killed by friendly fire as bullets ricochet at the waterline of the ship.

A helicopter descending on Ceasarea by Lake Scugog encounters over a thousand zombies in a cannibal frenzy. They have discovered an enclave of healthy citizens hiding in the post office. The helicopter circles until its panicking pilot, his face streaked purple with anger, dives his aircraft into the centre of the orgy.

A lighthouse in Gravenhurst catches fire. A nurse is hiding four elderly people in its lookout. She crosses herself and makes praying hands as the smell of burning gauze stings her nose.

In Barrie a defiant population takes to the streets to embrace their cannibal brothers and sisters. An emotion-choked voice blares from a megaphone, pleading for people to return home. The snapping of compassionate necks can be heard clicking through the town and army personnel descend with guns blazing under tear-streaked faces.

A convoy of heavily laden trucks snakes along Highway 7 toward the Elora Gorge, where bodies are dumped by the thousands from a great height into blood-oily water.

A hidden coyote population joins with packs of agitated wolves to roam through ditches snapping at hands and feet.

An arsonist in Orangeville kills his family in their sleep and slicks himself down with gasoline.

A throng of looters in Scarborough greets the new day smiling and empty-handed. They are all shot through the head.