Pontypool Changes Everything

The new summer sky is beginning to screw its harder caps of white down onto the forest. Jimmy is sitting at the picnic table looking down, cross-eyed, at the breath he exhales. Julie is tying a knot in a thick rope that lies across her knee. She stands, leaning against a tree, with one leg raised on a wide stump. Julie has devised a way of catching zombies. She lays a noose in the grass at the base of a tree and slings the rope up, across a branch and down along the tops of short shrubs. She stands with her brother as bait in the doorway. She has listened to the zombies at night, wandering lost, falling on branches and splashing through the stream. She has listened carefully to the quick, skipping syllables of their cry. She imitates this in the doorway with one hand around the rope and the other hand tightly around her brother’s wrist. Usually, within an hour, the children can hear the zombie approaching noisily, frantically, its cry now a panicky series of squeaks. If it steps into the circle, Julie and Jimmy run with the rope to the back of the shed, hurling with all their weight. They can feel the flying limbs of the creature in the jumps of the taut rope. They pull, battling to keep its balance foiled, until the zombie gives up. In that moment the children give a final tug, yanking its leg tight to the trunk of the tree. The cannibal is safely trapped, shaking its shoulders against the ground.

If the zombie doesn’t step into the circle, perhaps surprising the children by bursting around the corner of the shack, Julie drops the rope and slams the door. The children wait inside, taking dangerous peeks outside, until the zombie, skulking and unable to leave, eventually steps into the trap.

Once it’s safely incapacitated, the children leap through the door and disable the zombie with hatchet whacks to its shins and stunning blows to its head. The rope is secured to its ankle and it’s given a length to move with at the base of the tree. Living, a zombie can be kept for weeks like this, until its meat is needed. There are four zombies tied to trees at edges of the surrounding forest. One of them should be harvested this morning. Julie is trying to figure out which it will be.

The zombie nearest her is a short, plump woman of about fifty years. She is wearing a pale-blue cotton dress, speckled with tiny yellow flowers. Her hair is dyed yellow and gathers, like a stiff nest, around a black matte above her temple. Her legs are thick and dirty. She is sitting on the ankle of a flat, dead foot. The foot had throbbed and burnt painfully at the end of her battered leg, so she ground it under her buttocks. Her shinbone has broken through the skin. She holds it firmly in her fist. She holds her leg still. The only pain now comes from a bright band of infection advancing up her thigh, a tingling light that marks the living flesh from the dead. She notices Julie watching her and lowers her head to scowl. The effort makes her throw up in her lap. Julie looks away. Not for dinner.

The next zombie is in better shape. A little more appetizing. A teenage boy. A tiny, fresh body. He had been easy to pull up the tree. There is very little damage and he appears to have recovered. He stands on both legs, alert, with hands slapping at his flat white stomach. When Julie approaches he throws himself onto his back and jerks around the ground in a seizure. Maybe a little too lively. Julie stops just beyond his reach. The teenage zombie stops bouncing. He looks up at her. His face is twisted in the affectation of the deranged, and he makes a pleading flinch with his eyebrows.

“Jimmy, can you give me a hand here for a second?”

Jimmy is crouching beside the picnic table around the corner of the shack. He’s balancing a brown-and-white rib cage with the top of his head, onto the black stump of spine. He is tying the joint frantically with binder twine. He moves his head forward carefully, until the ribs rest against the table edge. He brushes his hand across glossy maggot heads that poke out of the back of the cadaver. A complete human being.

He runs around the corner, drops to a crouch, and slides his hands in the grass to clean them.

“Look out!”

Jimmy has crouched within the circle of the first zombie, the woman Julie had just passed by. The zombie springs like a crab from the sand. She folds her arms around Jimmy’s upper body.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!”

Julie skids into the gravel and picks up the hatchet leaning against the wall. The woman has pinned Jimmy to the ground under her. Her twisted leg flaps once against her back, spinning her foot away. It smacks loudly against the shack. Julie raises the hatchet over the back of the grunting disc that’s trying to devour her brother. She brings her weapon down, cleaving, halving the spine between the shoulders. The zombie’s limbs stop moving, but, against Jimmy’s clasped hands, its head continues sliding and shaking. He punches upward, knocking the zombie off him.