Pontypool Changes Everything (14 page)

Mendez sits in his car, waiting for the girls. He watches a military vehicle being loaded with corpses in the teachers’ parking lot.

“My heavens, suspicious behaviour looks so pointless today. Go ahead,little army,hide your dirty deeds! You’ll hold the world together with your secrets, I’m sure.”

Mendez notices that the muddy bodies being put in the long van have all been shot in the head. He recognizes the body of a woman being swung like a sack. She is tossed high up into the back of the vehicle.

“That hits hard. Oh dear, why did they shoot poor Ellen Peterson?”

The rear doors of the car open and close on the three girls who have piled together in the back.

“I have to have a moment here, ladies. You can join me. The body of our lovely reeve is now in transit to a final resting place.”

The three girls lean forward and look over the arm Mendez has slung from the passenger headrest. Two of the girls watch the men, with guns hanging across their backs, as they leap up into the cab of the truck. The truck rambles out of the light that’s mounted behind the backboard of a basketball hoop, and it fades into where the light is diminishing under the road dust.

The third girl is staring with horror at the long hairs on Mendez’s arm. She will have a nightmare tonight about these wild grey wires and the soft wrinkled pad of skin that droops off the elbow into the dark of the back seat. Mendez pulls his arm down and puts the car in gear. He rolls his face quickly into a raised shoulder to clear his eyes of tears.

“Well, ladies, let’s go home.”

Yeah, they’re dead all right
—
they’re all messed up.

— Sheriff, in
Night of the Living Dead

In the beginning was a virus.

Its shape towered over all other early life.

The earliest carnivore, this virus slurped at the rim over which every animated thing first appeared. It recombined bitten elemental life in its cheek, releasing it back into the atmosphere in stringy vomit. These were the little dishes it invented for itself to make dinner more interesting, and life, thus interrupted, became the virus’s menu, little bio-copy houses, walking self-perpetuating delivery services,
DNA
was born. Living things were doomed to repeat their second step throughout eternity, into waiting mouths, never to know what direction they were actually spilling towards, condemned to contemplate forever, to nearly recall, the absolute independence that a third step would have brought.

The virus farmed the organisms into complexity, playing in this system like Disney World, reddening and pinking and bluing and dulling everything. The organisms evolved to the point where they comprehended themselves as copy machines, and almost instantly ecosystems began to dry up. The virus, fearful of this hostile extension — mechanical reproduction —jumped from the imperilled species into the imperious one. First, it adapted itself to life inside computer memory. In the year 1996 the virus finally came home.

The virus had hid silently for decades up in the roofs
of adjectives, its little paws growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there; then, sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior workings of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the paradigms, jamming selection with pointed double fangs. A terrible squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across horizontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Radical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a fortune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the ground.

The plague first manifests itself in the infected person as a type of
déjà vu,
with an accompanying aphasia. Everything that happened presented itself as already happened. This infinitely complicated things. For as soon as the person adjusted, understanding that this sensation was merely a symptom of the plague, his or her understanding slipped backward into the already happened. Each realization had to be doubled against itself into becoming understood next: an impossible therapy to maintain. The present tense was a slippery slope to anyone in remission. The “now” became a deepening lesion, and from it rose the smell of this new sickness.

The disease developed in terrifying stages. First, the patient panicked and then sat stunned, silent, in a kind of exile. The person would eventually slip into a depression and exhibit ghastly physical symptoms. Typically the tongue would hang out, becoming dry and swollen, stiffening against the chin. This usually marked the end of the person’s exile from the living.

The advanced stages of the disease involved, astonishingly, revenge. This revenge was not the type we might recognize; it was not tied to an emotion or a desire, but to the
other:
a symptom of the disease. The disease is commonly referred to as Acquired Meta-structural Pediculosis. Or,
AMPS
.

The patients at this advanced stage turn into violent zombies. Cannibals. They knock people to the ground and bite away at their mouths. They devour skin and flesh, throat and tongue. Finally both the
AMPS
victim and the
AMPS
victim’s victim are destroyed by a single violent whip of the head that breaks their necks.

A carnival barker with a blond moustache wicked up either side of his nose is drawn in a panel by a cartoonist, beside a tall open mouth. Smoke curls up over the mouth’s giant upper lip. Greg closes this page, the last one, and he checks the cover price before sliding it behind the next comic on the shelf that’s part of this series.

Their heads sway above their shoulders on Queen Street.

One of the first signs of viral presence is an addiction to Big Town
TV
. The station repeats itself, quotes itself, touches itself in a way that is somehow comforting to the early victims who cling outside the building tonight. This spectacle used to be reserved for those evenings when Electric Sex Party was broadcast live; now the crowds only appear when the program is rerun the following evening. Greg is standing somewhat apart from the crowd. He tested positive for the disease earlier this week, and though he’s asymptomatic he’s come to observe the people he will soon be forced to join. The crowd is not a dance crowd. They do not dance. They merely stand, watching the monitors, occasionally slumping, smiling weakly. Some have lain down to sleep on the sidewalk. Greg looks at the purple neon band reflected up in a black puddle between his legs. He follows this clean light as it pulls itself out of the water and embroiders a brilliant shadow between the stones in the asphalt. Greg twists at the front of his Monster Magnet T-shirt and whispers, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”

Greg looks up at a vendor and spits towards him. The vendor picks up a sausage from the grill with a blackened fork and wags it at Greg, wiggling his tongue lecherously. Greg waits patiently, and sure enough his
Higher Power, dressed entirely in black, emerges from a donut shop. He strolls out into the traffic holding his chin, sharing with Greg the difficulty of saying anything at this point.

Behind the white glass panels that make up the edifice of Big Town
TV
, Grant Mazzy is scratching the top of his head, releasing a white dusting of dandruff that showers onto his pants. He presses his palms against his thighs and, pulling them aside, admires the glittery effect. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a technician strolling breezily through the open concept.

“Hey Bob.”

“It’s Carl.”

“Yeah, sorry Carl. Anyway, when the hell are those production people gonna be done with the closed coupling thing, whatever it is?”

Closed coupling is an idea developed by Big Town
TV
to accommodate its
AMPS
viewer. The closed coupling involves a tight repetition, a delay sample that they believe would conform to the rhythm that
AMPS
consume information. It is a woefully unscientific instrument, utterly useless to the
AMPS
victim, whose chaotic process wildly outmanoeuvres this primitive compensation. The technology does attract viewers, however, who are exhilarated by the idea.

A Max Headroom who cannot be cancelled.

Grant Mazzy catches his own face in a monitor and moves his chin quickly. When he is satisfied that he is “now,” he stares squarely at his handsome face, frankly assessing his own good looks. His own best critic, Grant judges his appearance harshly. He never solicits a better
angle from his image: he expects every angle to be good enough. The technician checks his watch and widens his eyes above the clipboard he holds.

“Five minutes, Grant, then we’re rolling live again.”

“You know, this place gives me the creeps. Everything reminds me of that damn virus and those fuckin’ zombies outside. I don’t know. Where do they go? I mean, when they get worse, where do they go? These ones aren’t that far gone you know.”

“I don’t know, Grant, they say that some really sick ones are making appearances up north. Like gangs of them in North Bay, places like that.”

“I just hope that somebody’s monitoring this situation. I’m not sensing a lot of organized thinking around this problem. Oh, wait, my prompter’s up. Here I go. Shut up. Get lost. Shoo.”

Grant takes one last look at himself in a monitor and then makes his professional gotta-take-a-shit face into the camera.

“The Ontario government has shifted its position on handling the growing cases of
AMPS
. After losing track of several victims who are in the final violent stages of the disease, and after reports of people disappearing, the government has decided to implement new, tighter methods of regulating the progress of the disease. People with
AMPS
are registered upon diagnosis and are required by law to report to a designated physician weekly. Emergency facilities are now being prepared for those victims who pass into the dangerous later stages. The government has made failure to comply an imprisonable offence. Meanwhile, some northern
communities are showing signs of panic and there are instances of people taking matters into their own hands. Officials would like to send the clear message that this is not only dangerous and illegal, but also, now, unnecessary.”

When the broadcast goes to another feed, Grant looks down at the monitor and watches his mouth blur backwards.

Or forwards. He can’t tell.

Julie is worried about her younger brother and she puts her arm around him in the darkness. They are sitting at the end of a short dock.

“Jimmy, I’m here you know. Mom and Dad aren’t really worried, they just love this shit. It’s like a war or something. They like to take it seriously, at least while it’s happening. Just ignore them.”

Jimmy had stopped speaking three days ago, believing that silence was the only sure way to prevent the disease.
If you don’t use words, it can’t get into them, right?
But he was worried about his father, who argued with the
TV
, who yelled at appliances and then screamed at his mom. Jimmy watched with horror, seeing this vivid viral highway shooting through the air and slinging infection into his father’s wild mouth. Jimmy sinks the front of his sneaker into the lake. Cold water is sucked inside the shoe when he separates his toes. Julie cocks her ears towards the cottage. She can hear shouting. It’s her mother. The cottage door slams and she shifts uncomfortably, hoping that no one finds them.

“Remember last summer when we saw that musky grab the duckling?”

Jimmy shrugs and lowers his other toe into the water.

“I’m just glad muskies don’t fly!” A June bug clings like a heavy clasp to Julie’s bangs. “Aah! They do! They do! What’s that?”

“Ahhh! Jimmy, can you see it? What is it? Is it a musky? Oh God!”

Jimmy reaches up between his sister’s frantic limbs and plucks the beetle from her hair. He holds it for a second, until its wings clatter against his palm, then releases it. The June bug veers up into the moonlight, flitting through the silver before plunging down into darkness and plopping heavily onto the water’s surface. Jimmy lowers his head, scanning the blackness.

“Let’s see if a fish grabs it. I bet one does.”

Jimmy raises his toes as a fish gulps through the water. Julie mouths “wow” and slaps her brother’s back. The sound of her father’s voice makes her pull the back of Jimmy’s shirt.

“You kids get back up here. Your mother’s worried about you.”

The father weighs a rock in his hand and calculates the intensity of a toss that could knock his son into the water. He mutters under his breath as he drops the rock and turns up the path.

“Little fag.”

At a nearby cottage the Wheelers are in bed reading. They are turned away from each other, hanging books out into the light of their respective lamps. Mr. Wheeler’s head is bobbing into the pillow and for the second it is lowered he manages a single full snore. Mrs. Wheeler notices this, and she closes her book and shimmies her back up the wall, watching him.

“Honey. Honey, I think we should go to sleep now. Don’t you? I think you’ll sleep tonight, dear. Look at you, you can’t even hold your head up.”

Three people are standing in the dark at the base of the stairs leading up to the bedroom. They are silent; that is, they don’t speak. But they jab each other. They’re standing, exchanging sharp punches. Cruel little punches, meant to hurt. More than that, they begin to stab their fingers into each other’s face, until a finger reaches an eye and one goes down on his knees. And when he does, his enucleated eye slipping through his fingers onto the floor, the woman begins strangling him while the other man reaches under, grabs his face, and begins to stretch the skin until it gives way and its contents burst onto the floor. The man falls, wagging his face on the floor, sliding the rubble of his lost features, like eggs broken through a grocery bag, back onto his head. The woman kicks the man’s neck and, after grinding it flat beneath her heel, howls out between her clicking teeth. She can’t even feel the quick, hard blows to her ribs.