Pontypool Changes Everything полностью

Mendez piles the organs back into the torn pocket of the man’s abdomen and lays a clipboard against him. He writes the name and age of the man. Death by smoke inhalation. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something’s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Something gentle, Mendez thinks, something in this place.

“Well, I have to put you back in the fire, but why don’t you carry that little space with you, eh? You tell the flames to burn carefully around it.”

Mendez rolls the table on its wheels down through the valley, bouncing it across the wrists and knuckles that cripple out along the banks. The bodies that have been processed are deposited in the girls’ change room, where a team binds them into groups of six. From there they are transported to an incinerating facility in Pickering. Three teenage girls, in blue gym shorts and slack training bras, pull the body of Les Reardon loose from the slivers that hold him to the gurney. They lower him, face down, onto a plastic sheet. Les shares the sheet with the leather tents of two dead cows. Mendez attempts to back the empty table through the door. One of the girls steps off the sheet, wipes red gruel from her hands onto her gym shorts, and holds the door for the doctor.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are a terrible team. Thank you.”

As he turns a corner around the southern mountain, Mendez notices a dark ledge of scorched heads and shoulders. He parks the gurney beneath the discoloured bodies and steps up onto a back that supports his weight. With a pinching grip that breaks through the blackened skin around the back of a woman’s neck, Mendez attempts to pull the body down. The head tumbles out of its spot, surprising Mendez as it bounces to the ground.

“There are people in bits up here! Blown to pieces! What have we been missing in all this?”

Mendez climbs down and lifts the head onto his table.

“This is that exploding rascal’s fire, I bet.”

He turns the head over and examines a piece of burnt wood imbedded in the skull.

“A very loud bomb of some kind went off quite near you, didn’t it?”

Mendez looks up at the spot where the head fell loose. A dark sink of charred bodies. It covers an area halfway up the mountain like the shadow of a cloud.

“Oh dear, a bomb blew up the lot of you.”

This tarred spot of Ontario represents the tiny population of a compound on Scugog Island who had lived out their final days in a highly specialized struggle. They might be conventionally referred to as a type of suicide cult, and they lived as characters crossed somewhere between the Factory of Andy Warhol and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. They had isolated themselves from the rest of the province, behind tall white walls, on top of which swung a battalion of surveying cameras. Within these walls they abandoned depth-of-self as a spiritual corruption and built of themselves a shiny, reflective surface. It was on this gleaming surface, hard to picture in the sweltering heat, that they polished themselves into a supreme medium of contact. The only thing preventing them from achieving unity with the greeting that they were becoming was the fact that they continued to live.

They grew anxious to put their lives behind them, to heave the snake of longing off, to blink clear in a phatic collective, with arms stretched out flat across flat friends in a flat place. The leader, perhaps the flattest of them all, introduced them to the speed of touch, the superiority of skin over skeleton, and taught them to express love by brushing the hair on each other’s arms. The day was fast approaching, skating backwards from the future on a mirror, when they would twin themselves in a “hello” that the universe had been preparing for itself since the beginning. They decided that the best way to achieve this would be through a giant explosion. This day, flat as it was becoming, was pushed ahead by the speed bumps of the tricky weeks preceding it. These speed bumps were caused by another unrelated drama that crept up to, and under the walls of, the compound. This is what the doctor has yet to discover.

Mendez places the glistening blue-black head on the floor to mark the spot. He wants to return here later, to put a story together out of the burnt pieces of people.

“Stay here, little acorn. I’ll take care of you and your friends today, I promise.”

He turns another foot of the mountain and parks the table back in the space where he had found Les Reardon. Mendez has grown tired of recording broken necks, and inspired by the discovery of new causes of death he scans the mound for anyone else who might have died with an intact spinal column.

“Hello, hello, hello! You! Up there. Something new.”