Pontypool Changes Everything

Ellen doesn’t respond. Steve makes a concentrating face for a few seconds. Then, in frail voice and perfect key, he sings a song. The song is such a pretty replica of the original that it causes Ellen to look over to check that his lips are moving. He’s a bit loony, isn’t he?

“Her name was Rio, and she dances on the sand. Just like that river twisting through the dusty land.”

A stupid song. A stupid, stupid song. Ellen feels the sweep of a fish-eye lens bending the side of a sailboat. Tight, colourful shorts and leaping young men with bleached hair and tanned thighs. The boat surges up — breathtaking — and it cuts across a breaking wave. Ellen sings softly, not intruding on Steve’s note-perfect voice.

“And when she shines she really shows you all she can. Oh Rio, Rio, Rio — cross the Rio Grande.”

The song moves through her without seams or connection, and like a gentle learning curve it explains nothing while giving her the joyful experience of riding it. Steve smiles, encouraging her to sing. He closes his mouth to supply only a prompting hum. Ellen remembers that at one time the whole world seemed to love Duran Duran. And now, now, no one does. Steve drops the windows an inch, letting a warm wind pull at Ellen’s hair. Ellen turns her face and mouths the song; its lyrics are lost again in the new spring air. Cow shit. Wet trees. The first lungful of the new season is a rainbow of young gasses that thoroughly clean the world that has survived. A valley dips below the surface of the road, dragging trees down. The forest then flies back up, banking high above the car. Ellen gasps and touches her mouth. Four large white mailboxes skip by the window. Tiny red flags. Ellen has gone silent and thoughtful. For the rest of the trip Steve will continue singing snatches of songs. Girls On Film. This Is Planet Earth. Reflex. View To A Kill.

17 The Rio Grande

In the waiting room of Dr. Mendez are crammed a thousand people. This place has a capacity of maybe seventy, so over nine hundred of these people are dead, crushed beyond recognition. Their internal organs have been pushed out and across a firm terrain of shoulders. For a full hour a popcorn flurry of brains, squeezed through the open lids atop hundreds of heads, have jiggled and danced against each other in the free air above the dead. Blood has found a way to the floor and it moves around ankles. The bodies are under a pressure that binds most in the upper torso, gently curving them in an arched structure across the room. It is under the centre, where legs have been lifted, that the survivors huddle. Their chins push above the blood’s surface and the tops of their heads drive up into the soles of stiff feet, trying to bend them at the ankle. They gasp desperately in these tiny pockets of red air.

Dr. Mendez is seated at his desk, across which is stretched a body. He has decided to perform an unscheduled autopsy. So many strange deaths. Nothing to lose. Maybe a quick answer will show itself.

All of the body cavities have been opened and then hastily folded shut. Mendez lifts a corner of cheek back into position with his pen. The structure of the room behind him groans, the studs are returning to ninety-degree relationships. The waiting room is emptying.

All over the floor I imagine.

Dr. Mendez is right. As the crammed bodies redistribute their contents, under pressure, to fill the upper and lower parts of the space, the waiting room is returning to its shape. The living few are drowning and will not survive.

An epidemic of broken necks.

As he says this to himself Mendez knows that in two million years another species will unearth the skeletons of human beings. And then they will begin a great pastime. What broke all their necks? Did they build their ceilings too low? Did kick-boxing aliens once visit this planet? Did a meteor fall from the sky and whip around the globe at shoulder height? Mendez stands and approaches his file cabinet. He thinks: Well this is when the good physician should off himself, overwhelmed and thrust suddenly into such a medieval role. But no, instead he counts the bodies on his floor — six. The best is probably yet to come.