Pontypool Changes Everything

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?”

Greg opens the trunk and lifts out the camera case. His hand hovers over a plastic gas container. He touches the handle, lifting an oily film onto his fingertips. He slides his thumb across the ends of his fingers. He feels sound between the surfaces. Sound? He leaves the trunk open, just in case, and hauls the equipment around the car, placing it in the tall grass that grows along a ditch where Grant is standing, still looking through the binoculars, his mouth hanging open. He looks out briefly to locate Greg and the camera. He speaks in a whisper.

“OK. OK. Let’s keep our voices down. Those suckers are alive out there. I don’t know how safe we are. These are predators. Hmmm. I’ve never seen…Jesus… let’s… uh… let’s get back in the car.”

Grant reaches behind and flips open the car door. He lowers himself, slowly, still looking through the binoculars. He lifts his legs, carefully, one at a time, up off the shoulder of the road.

“Put the… uh… equipment in the back seat and get in the car, Greg. I don’t wanna do anything stupid.”