Pontypool Changes Everything

The bags of garbage held bodies, and the dogs in the street were licking the entrails of orphaned children caught in the crossfire. Next came the truly terrible morning, when Helen guessed, and he thought she was a spy. It was all so real. Even now, in the sometimes fragile, smart system of a new chemistry, Les is holding out until the day the war is acknowledged by Ontario and his wife is forced to return to him. A matter of national security. Their marriage, their son. He had become a drama teacher, and Helen left him, in the first month of her pregnancy, to live with a writer in the village of Parkdale. The post-breakdown Les asked far too many smart questions. He had begun to desire things that had never been discussed with Helen.

Les has never seen his son. He doesn’t even know his name. He’d moved to Pontypool, to work at the farm and the school, the summer before the boy was born. Les feels calm as he returns to the driver’s seat of his truck. The events of the day have guided him out of crisis, and he rolls the vehicle toward Caesarea, where he’ll telephone the OPP. He feels the safety and the sadness of this decision drop his gearshift from neutral to drive.

At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sit across from each other. Their mouths are opened and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point. Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane. This couple, unlike the Killings, will never act out the tiny story that brought them together. Instead, they are doomed to suspension, to act out a compulsion that has never been fully explained. But as Les Reardon steps up to their front door the compulsion will be given another opportunity to shock and revile.

No one answers the door, so Les pounds it harder, knocking it back under his knuckles. Les steps through the opening and immediately understands, by the choir of animal sounds coming from within, that the killer is here. How does he know? Who is this? Les steps backward outside, but too late. Two people in dressing gowns move into the hall like vampires and with surprising swiftness they stuff their hands across the frame just as Les slams the door. He looks down at the fingers he’s grinding. Wiggling zombie pawns. Sacrificed, they break and snap. The things are relentless, and as he repeatedly bangs the door on their hands they manage to stuff their arms through, up to their elbows. They will get through.

They are getting through. Les lets go of the door and tears down the driveway. The zombies grab at the flesh of his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Dozens of clumsy pincers spring him into the air. They are just below him, still pinching the ghost of his ass, but out of reach. Les has never flown before and when he notices that his feet are flailing at the tops of bushes he collapses. He waits for the shale to hit him, but it doesn’t, not until he drops through two feet of frigid water. Les looks up across a lake. The shore behind him holds the zombies at a distance of two metres. Les dunks his head below the surface. He removes his shoes and lays them side by side on the bottom of Lake Scugog. A layer of slush hangs just beneath the surface and it bites, cold, into Les’s ribs. Within seconds he feels his own death in this water. He sees a small boat down the shore at a dock and begins a mad dog paddle.

8 It’s Only to Be Expected