Pontypool Changes Everything

“Mother of God! I don’t know. Some kind of little freak baby! Some kind of little fuckin’ zombie spawn. I swear to fuckin’ God!”

His partner shivers and, with a hand resting on his friend’s shoulder, whispers into his ear.

“Are you telling me that those zombie bastards are breeding? Out here?”

The large man draws a rifle off his thighs and brings it up his side.

“Oh yes, that’s exactly what I’m sayin’. They’re hidin’ out up here making a race of killer fuckin’ rat babies.”

The smaller man tosses his breached weapon closed with a fitted clunk.

“That thing was doin’ ninety up the path for crissakes. What the hell? Are they super-zombies or what?”

“If that little SOB ever grows up.Jesus. I think we got a goddamn Sasquatch situation here.”

“Shhh. There’s something up ahead. Get ready.”

The larger hunter rises to stand and brings the rifle up to his shoulder. He squints down the sites, pointing the gun at the direction from where he can hear something coming towards them. A head and shoulders appear to the left of the path ahead and he squeezes the trigger.

The figure is struck in the chest. It falls backward, collapsing in the bush. The two men move forward and discover the body flat on its back, already dead. They continue toward the clearing and when the raven lifts off the table with a vertebra stuck in its talon the smaller man erases it from the air with a shotgun blast. Before the flurry of black feathers falls to the ground he fires his cannon again, this time hurtling a young girl’s body back into the walls of a shack.

The two men listen to the echoes of the gunshots that travel outward. When the silence returns and the first fresh smell of gunpowder burns off the air, they turn to each other and, dropping their rifles, embrace in a tight hug, grateful to God to be alive.

At a distance of nearly a kilometre the baby continues to race west through the underbrush, hopping over logs on her powerful little legs and swinging off lower branches on strong, pliant limbs. She is making her way to Lake Scugog, where she will dive to the bottom with frog-like kicks to snatch the body of Les Reardon’s baby.

These two babies, made strong by the circumstances of their birth, will live together on the frigid bottom, near the lake’s frozen bowel, blind as sea bats and icy as eels, in a tingling rage that will last forever.

23 The Worst Winter Ever

The Bruce Peninsula is an astonishing garden. Wildlife that has fled north from the cities is squeezed cheek by jowl on its pristine shores. The dazzling peregrine falcon, great loping herons, and hummingbirds meet in mid-air. Rattlesnakes, spiky hogs, and tiny alligators wrestle for egg-laying territory on remote Sauble Beach. There are even llama that can be ridden for a price. A lone bison roams like a shaggy mountain, dragging its dread-locked chin through cow shit. And off the tip of the Bruce is an island famous for its tall, attic-shaped rock towers rising up out of the shallows. This is Flower Pot Island.

At dawn, when the sun buries the lake in fire, the “flower pots” cast their shadows up onto the flat white shore. This shadow is where night hides, shifting its position, cautiously opposing the sun, remaining sharp and wicked. This shape is identical to the shape of Ontario. Go there, you’ll see. The pots hide a little bit of night behind them as they face the sun. They look at each other throughout the morning and communicate in a sentinel’s code: we know exactly where they are from here.

In the cities there are greater confusions. As fall approaches several things are contributing to a late-autumn military mania. The disappearance of Toronto’s most popular anchorperson, Grant Mazzy; the undeniable presence of cannibals much further south than anyone had wanted to accept. Although a plethora of laws exist that might deal with a new breed of violent crime that is highly contagious, and in spite of the horrific acts being committed by Ontarians everywhere, none, not a single person, can be held accountable.

There are no arrests. No convictions.

On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. And by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario’s own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.