Pontypool Changes Everything полностью

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.”

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.