Germaphobia Singapura
by
B.M. Hodges
Copyright 2012 B.M. Hodges
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Roy awoke to the buzz of his handphone tucked under his pillow, the alarm vibrating to half past seven in the morning. There was a dry taste in his mouth from the constant air-conditioning meant to keep the tropical Singapore heat out of his tiny rented room.
Ms. Cheung had been up early that morning crushing chili and spices in her little stone pot, the constant pounding of stone upon stone making those precious last bits of sleep somewhat chaotic.
Roy rolled out of bed and put on a pair of shorts, grabbing his shaving kit before sneaking out of his room, carefully shutting the door.
The bathroom was in the rear of the kitchen, so whenever he needed to visit the lavatory he had to face the other tenants, including Ms. Cheung, occupying the general living area.
He crept through the living room past Jilu, who was sitting on the canary yellow two-seater sofa smoking a spiff of tobacco and watching a Taiwanese variety show on the tube. Roy glanced into the open door to his right and caught of glimpse of Sylvia Tan’s slender thigh as she sat on her bed chatting to distant friends in Guangzhou from her laptop station in that tiny Singapore flat.
As Roy crept along the white tile floor, he tried to minimize his movements and keep to a straight line. As the only ‘Ang Moh’ living there, he felt as if the eyes of the other tenants were constantly on him, curious as to what he would do next. So he played the straight man, trying to keep himself as inconspicuous as possible, erasing his tracks as he crept through the dense urban wilderness.
He managed to sidle past Ms. Cheung without the irritating ritual of the morning greeting that so grated on his nerves before his first cup of coffee and quietly shut the bathroom door.
The bathroom was in the usual sparse Singapore style with a lavender sink jutting out of the wall, a mirror, a matching toilet and shower head poking out from above, all crammed into a closet-sized space. Roy stood on his tip-toes trying to limit his exposure to the slime of soap, used shower water and whatever missed the toilet that was coating the floor. The morning ritual used to be a joy back home. But here, it was near torture as he attempted to clean himself in the filth. He quickly shampooed his hair, rinsing with the shower head above the encrusted toilet and put on a slap-dash shave, forgetting to brush his teeth in his haste as he felt the contaminants surrounding him, penetrating into his tip-toes.
Roy had always had a bit of trouble shaking hands, touching doorknobs and overusing cans of bug spray. And here in Singapore with so many people living so close together, his proclivity to give in to his phobic tendencies had, shall we say, increased.
After toweling off and pulling on his shorts, he opened the bathroom door and jerked back. Ms. Cheung was standing there, not a hair’s breadth away with a big toothless grin on her craggily face.
“Good Morning, Roy!” She greeted him cheerily in her amusing accent.
He could smell her breath.
Roy didn’t mind Ms. Cheung, but he was a bit put-off when he had to make conversation with her. He taught English all day, every day, except for Sundays and when he was off work he tried to avoid tutoring freeloaders as much as possible.
“Morning, Auntie.” Roy mumbled.
He squeezed passed her and hurried to his room, dressed in his uniform of short-sleeve business shirt and knit tie and, glancing one more time at Sylvia’s perfectly smooth legs, left the flat towards the MRT station. Luckily, the station was only about ten meters away. It was the one selling point Roy had seized on when he agreed to the two-year sublease.
It was just past eight. He was in a good mood and had a few minutes to spare that morning, so the sight of the multitude rushing and cramming onto the escalators in order to make it to their desks before their bosses arrived was only mildly irritating. Sweat was beading on his forehead and dripping down his back as the thick humidity assaulted his freshly-washed body. And there was no respite from the heat as he sunk down into the depths of the station, careful to avoid touching the germ-ridden handrail. He plugged in his earphones and turned up his player. Life was so much easier here on this cramped island if you could drown out the rat-a-tat-tat of Singlish and avoid all unnecessary eye contact.
Roy topped up his MRT card and made his way through the turnstile of the litter-free station and then to the platform. He stood on the yellow arrows that showed where the door would open when the train stopped, facing the glass door and looking at his translucent reflection.
Do you know that uncomfortable feeling when someone is staring at you? At that moment, Roy felt someone furiously staring at him. Normally, the feeling doesn’t register until you’ve glanced around and locked eyes with the space invader. He quickly looked to his left at the leathery old man in his silk shirt waiting at another yellow arrow a few meters distant, convinced he was the culprit. But the old man wasn’t staring at him, he was just picking his nose, and fiercely picking his nose at that, digging and digging away with his index finger buried to the first knuckle.
Roy retched at the sight and quickly looked forward again, the imprint of the probing finger at the forefront of his mind.
He could feel the rush of stale underground air through the crack between the doors as the train arrived.
By now Singaporeans were crowding around and already a few had squeezed into the few centimeters between Roy and the door, pushing towards the closed entrances to the approaching train. The doors opened and before anyone could step off, the crowd rushed inside, Roy carried by the momentum. It was the same log-jam every morning, the pushing, the refusal to give way, pure kiasu. Eventually, the chaos subsided, all had disembarked and boarded and the train sped off.
Roy lived at the end of the purple MRT line far from the city center, so he had a good twenty-five minutes to relax and listen to the music he imported illegally through Sylvia’s computer when she was being nice to him. He grimaced at the unnecessary touching; one guy ruffled a Chinese newspaper against his back, an older Malay woman elbowed his ribs as she wrote a text message on her phone, an Indian girl poked her shopping back against his shin.
Roy shut his eyes for a few moments.
He had that feeling of someone intensely staring at him.
He cracked open his right eye and saw a little girl with red ribbons in her hair plunging her pinky into her nostril and then her mouth, back and forth, back and forth, again and again.
He clamped his eyes shut for the rest of the trip, carefully balancing like a surfer to avoid touching any handhold or railing.
The train reached his stop and he quickly walked to the small private school where he spent the majority of his time.
Roy taught three English classes for a total of a nine-hour teaching day. The morning commute was soon forgotten in the repetition of the past perfect simple and formation of conditional sentences.
That evening, on his way back to his ulu flat Roy was too exhausted to pay attention to that nagging feeling which was trying to draw his attention to a middle-aged civil servant wiping his nasal secretions on an empty seat beside him.
Roy arrived home at about half past eight and stepped into the living area with a polystyrene container of chicken rice to be smuggled into his bedroom for dinner. He found to his frustration that Ms. Chueng and the neighborhood aunties were beginning a mahjong session that was sure to last until the early hours of the morning. She had a terrible habit of gambling away the incoming rent money to those avaricious housewives who were much better players than her.
So it will be a night full of Hokkien curse words and intermittent tile shuffling, Roy thought with an exasperating sigh. He reminisced for a brief moment on his tranquil days before his life here, of university classes and waiting tables in a familiar and comfortable environment. He still had eighteen months of a two-year teaching contract left before he could return home with enough cash to again support himself on part-time work while attending graduate school.
Roy unlocked his bedroom door, stepped inside and secured the lock. His room was no cleaner than the rest of the flat, but for Roy it was spotless because it was his filth; his pile dirty clothes on the floor, his microscopic flecks of skin floating in the air, his bottles of urine stashed under the bed.
He ate his chicken rice with disposable chopsticks and afterwards tied the container up in a plastic bag with a double knot to keep out the cockroaches. He knew they were waiting, patiently lurking in the dark recesses of his room for the cover of night.
As usual, Roy quickly fell asleep and slept fitfully until the buzz of his handphone awoke him to yet another long teaching day. After the bathroom ritual, Roy left the flat for his morning commute, glancing briefly at Sylvia’s firm buttocks as she bent over to make her bed.
He was on the train, listening to music and traveling towards the city center when his attention was drawn to a pretty Chinese woman dressed in a black business suit standing beside him. She had a long ponytail with an ivory clip holding her silken hair away from her porcelain smooth skin. Roy watched her intently, aware that she probably sensed his bold stare. The train stopped and she disembarked leaving a space that was soon filled by an overweight teenager in blue jeans and red flip-flops who immediately began to scratch the back of both his nasal cavities with an index finger and forefinger, a double-barreled search for mucal gold.
Roy tried to move away but the train was too full, packed with silent and obedient employees on their way to their white collar cubicles.
He gagged as the teenager continued mining both cavities, making small hurried noises of urgency as he dug. No one in the train took notice of the spectacle, as performing bodily hygiene tasks, usually reserved for the privacy of one’s bathroom, such as nose picking or nail clipping or zit squeezing seemed to be as common on the public transport system as instant messaging and Sudoku. And while this offensive social behavior was nothing new to Roy as he had been living in Singapore for over six months, this little scene, this tiny incident was the last straw…even if he didn’t know it yet.
At his stop, Roy jumped out the door of the train and bounded up the escalator, pushing aside inconsiderate commuters blocking the right side of the moving stairs and hence impeding his ascent.
The double digits of the teen continued to dig holes into his deepest thoughts.
Roy’s teaching that day was sporadic and fraught with erroneous grammar advice. He couldn’t seem to shake the image of the index and forefinger plugged into that pimply nose. Roy knew that he couldn’t mention the incident to his colleagues as they knew of his condition and rolled their eyes whenever he pulled out his sanitizing lotion from his desk and began to furiously rub the germ-killer into his hands.
The day wound down and eventually turned into evening as Roy ended his last class with a speaking exercise involving plastic dominoes and the passive tense. By the time class was finished, he felt that he had pulled himself together and was back in top form teaching the class like the excellent teacher he believed he was. But apparently one of the overachieving rich little spoiled nerds he was teaching had a different impression. As he was about to leave the teacher’s room, Roy’s boss, the Academic Coordinator asked him to come for a private meeting in his office. According to his boss, Roy had made one too many mistakes and the informing student had threatened to withdraw from the school and take his parent’s money to enroll elsewhere, as he expected teaching perfection in return for the private school’s outrageous fees. Roy was dressed down and warned to pull it together. His boss even handed him an English grammar book to brush up on that night, a final humiliation to a long and tiring teaching day.
Roy skulked down to the MRT station, the morning’s double picker and the grammar book weighing heavily on his mind. He boarded the packed train and noticed that the pretty Chinese woman he had seen that morning was again standing beside him. He felt drawn to her and wished he had something to say, but he was too timid and unsure of himself to be so forward. He watched her out of the corner of his eye while the train stopped at each station towards the end of the purple line. She was holding one of the dangling handles above, her other hand on a strap of her oversized designer handbag. Roy saw her hand hesitantly let go of the bag’s strap and slowly rise up towards her face, her nose. Flashbacks of the double picker consumed Roy’s thoughts as he watched her index finger begin to stretch towards her delicate nostril.
He couldn’t take it.
Roy reached out and grabbed hold of the young woman’s wrist.
Perhaps it was the crazed look in his eye or that he refused to let go after she tried to pull away again and again, but the girl began to scream, “See Ang Moh molest me! See Ang Moh molest me!” at the top of her lungs.
All of the train’s passengers near Roy and the girl created a wide berth around them, none of them aggressive enough to help the girl but all watching with the attention of spectators at an Esplanade show. A Malay man whispered for help into the train’s emergency intercom system.
Finally, Roy let go and the girl was still screaming, “See Ang Moh molest me!” pushed her way through the crowd away from Roy, who was looking at his offending hand and wishing for his bottle of sanitizer.
The train arrived at the next stop.
Four armed police boarded with tasers in hand and lead him out of the station and into an armored van. Police are rarely seen in Singapore, but when they are called the response is swift and the citizens fearful.
At the police station, Roy’s prints and photo were taken, his employment pass copied and his backpack searched.
The police confiscated the English grammar book as evidence.
Justice is swift in Singapore.
He was sent before the magistrate early the next morning. Since he refused to pay the outrageous fees for a useless criminal attorney, he stood before the judge alone. The judge was a middle-aged woman in a white wig reminiscent of an English court. He could tell by the look in her eye that she was sharp and wise, which was true, she had a keen eye for justice and international affairs. Knowing that she needed to appease a public enticed by the sensational incident of an Ang Moh molester, she had to convict him and give him a stiff sentence. But since all the perpetrator had done was grab the female victim’s wrist, she knew the international press would condemn a heavy sentence for such a minor incident. Roy was convicted of insulting the modesty of a woman and sentenced to seven months in jail. However, in lieu of the sentence, the judge ordered that Roy be put on a plane that night and sent back to his own country, banished from Singapore forever.
Surprisingly, Roy felt relieved as he flew away from his isolated Singapore life and his now broken two-year teaching contract. He didn’t have enough money to start graduate school, but at least he didn’t have to read that damned English grammar book again or witness the constant public grooming which was adversely affecting his mental health.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
The plane was three-quarters of the way to Japan and soon he would be over the Pacific on his way back to the states.
Roy was drifting off to sleep when he felt that familiar sensation again, you know the one, that uncomfortable feeling when someone is intensely staring at you…
THE END.
Glossary
Ang Moh – a racial epithet that refers to Caucasians in Singapore.
Esplanade – Singapore’s premier performing arts venue.
handphone – term for mobile phone in Singapore
kiasu – a term referring to Singaporean’s ‘afraid of losing out’ mentality.
MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) – Singapore’s subway system.
Singlish – the English language as it is spoken in Singapore.
ulu – a Malay term used to denote the remoteness of a place.
About the Author
B.M. Hodges was born in Utah, U.S.A., in 1973. He studied in the United States and Singapore where he was awarded a Master's Degree in Literary Studies. He began his writing career in 2008 with the novella entitled, Buddy Action: The Atypical Life of an Everyday Rat which has been renamed in this Second Edition to Buddy the Rat. He recently published the horror novel, Zombie Fever: Malaysia Outbreak and the short story prequel Zombie Fever: Origins. He is currently living in South East Asia and working on the second installment of the Zombie Fever trilogy.
Bonus Preview of B.M. Hodges’ latest young adult horror novel:
Zombie Fever: Malaysia Outbreak
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Preview: Preface
Imagine grainy, shaky handheld footage of crowds running frantically down dim-lit streets. See the bloated carcasses lying in pools of green-tainted blood and guts with their crushed skulls and random bullet holes. Cut to hospitals overflowing with feverish patients strapped to gurneys, chairs, to each other. Can you sense the fear and panic of family members holding onto their loved ones as they struggle against their restraints, biting at the air towards healthy flesh, eyes unfocused and bloodshot as they seek to spread the virus? Listen. Can you hear the gunshots and screams resounding in the night?
This is zombie fever and the reality of the contagion isn’t pretty.
I know as I’ve seen the contagion first hand.
I’ve witnessed the devastation and carnage the disease wrecks on innocent people.
Now ask yourself if you’re the type of person who devours these sights and sounds brought to you by so-called journalists in flimsy hazmat suits with their sensational tabloid stories of the walking dead. Are you one of the millions who gets voyeuristic chills from viewing those poor lost souls shuffling around in the streets consumed by a primordial cellular hunger, destined for a death from starvation, dehydration, exposure or a bullet in the brain? Have you bought any of the merchandise? Watched the blockbuster film? Did you play the video game?
Like most people you probably answered ‘yes’ to most of these questions.
Heck, not long ago I was just like you.
I was even a willing accomplice in the exploitation of the disease and its tragic sufferers. In fact, I was one of the participants in that reality TV show that you may have watched right before the global outbreak that originated in Singapore and spread across Indonesia, Australia, then Europe, Russia and North America. You know the show I’m talking about, the one where they sent pairs of contestants in Cera cars to compete in events, racing through Malaysia during the height of the zombie outbreak. Even if you didn’t catch it, I’m confident you know what I’m talking about. It was an international phenomenon, very popular, and the precursor to the outbreak of zombie fever that spread throughout much of the world.
Although if you are one of the millions who saw and believed the events that occurred during the simulcast of the final day of the Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown, I’m here to tell you that what you witnessed was carefully and artfully manipulated to show a sequence of events and outcome that were, well, not entirely true.
Maybe I shouldn’t wreck your perception of those days’ events, but you need to know the facts. Believe me, I’ve contemplated keeping silent. After all, we’ve been practically blamed for the beginning of what some would say was the end of humanity. And who am I to try to change public opinion?
But I need to tell my story because I feel compelled to try to convince you, the world, that it was the show’s production team that was to blame for the virus escaping the quarantine zone and not, as the media have portrayed, the honest and dare I say naïve contestants who were merely vying for a million dollar potentially life-changing prize.
So with your permission, I’d like to recount that week of filming as clearly as I possibly can down to every detail that I can think of. And I’ll try to keep conjecture to a minimum and just try to tell you as factually as possible about the events that Jamie and I participated in throughout the Malaysian Peninsula and back in Singapore for the grand finale.
However before I begin, please bear with me for a moment so that I can give some background details about IHS, i.e. zombie fever, for those people who’ve been living under a rock or who simply go out of their way to ignore mainstream media.
As you well know, IHS is a viral infection that turns people into zombies.
Well, not zombies per se.
Unlike the zombies you see in the movies or read about in books, real life victims of IHS aren’t actually dead. We’ve all heard countless times from the experts parading around espousing their clinical diagnosis of the zombie plight. They say that the infected are survivors of a virus that begins with a raging fever which destroys most of the brain’s cerebral cortex. Meanwhile, the infection floods the extremities with a greenish viral soup of contagion causing a grotesque swelling the infected’s limbs, their taut skin reminiscent of overstuffed sausages. The virus then seizes control of the host and sends a never-ending loop of instruction, something along the lines of, ‘Seek out humans. Hungry, Hungry, Feed!’ Once the smoldering fever cools, the bloated near catatonic shell of the former person rises with a new lease on life. An existence, however, that is now restricted to a never-ending appetite for living human flesh.
Like SARS and H1N1, we’ve been told that IHS originated in animals but instead of pigs and birds, this time the critter culprits are tropical ground squirrels. Those experts say the virus jumped from squirrels to humans in rural Asia where tastes are more exotic and where it’s quite common to clobber those adorable creatures over their cute little heads and, after careful preparation, mix a little of its meat with rice or noodles depending on your preference.
I remember when I first heard about the first documented IHS outbreak. I was sitting around one evening with a group of friends at a nearby bubble tea café and having a great time chatting about math homework and netball. Out of the blue, the café owner rudely interrupted a rather handsome athletic young man singing karaoke to a Canto pop video. The jerk switched the feed streaming on the big screen that made up the rear wall of the café from the karaoke station to international news, leaving the hunky crooner hanging in the middle of the chorus. Then the café owner cranked up the volume, forcing us to listen to an English speaking reporter in the middle of announcing that something terrible had happened in the Guangdong province of China.
Flashing on the screen, the caption read, “ZOMBIE ATTACK!” just like that, in all caps.
The broadcaster was in the middle of his report but the gist of the story was that after a meeting of the brethren, clan members from a secret society in Guangzhou discovered that one of their own had collapsed on the floor in the rear of their clandestine conference room. At the time he was uncommunicative and had a dangerously high fever. The clansmen rushed him to the most experienced practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in the Panyu district. The acupuncturist and his hunchbacked female assistant attended to the new patient while three helpful clansmen held their colleagues thrashing limbs against the steel doctor’s table. Utilizing his expertise, the medicinal practitioner inserted a long, thin needle into a pressure point in the ailing gentleman’s thigh just above the knee intending to lower the man’s heatiness. As if under a great deal of internal pressure, a gushing fountain-like expulsion of fluid erupted from the small hole, expelling a putrid smelling greenish-yellow puss into the air and infecting all in the room save for the surgical mask wearing doctor who had erroneously inserted the needle into the taunt and swollen leg in the first place.
Within twenty-four hours, those three clansmen and the hunchbacked female assistant passed the contagion on to their close family members. Within a couple of days, it was estimated that there were over thirty-two thousand infected wandering around the Panyu district of Guangzhou, scaring residents and tourists alike with their herky-jerky shuffling advances and monotone moans of hunger.
Fearing that the contagion may spread, the Chinese military ordered the carpet bombing of the entire area, effectively eliminating the spread of the contagion along with, unfortunately, about a quarter million of their citizens who were unlucky enough to be in the hot zone.
We listened politely to the news report and then the café owner switched the screen back to the karaoke feed and we went back to our inane conversations. That may surprise you, but our response to the news wasn’t unusual in Singapore. Most Singaporeans responded in a similar unconcerned manner to the zombie outbreak, considering the news was about China and so far away from our daily affairs.
As for the rest of the world, instead of the global panic you’d expect, the response to the new disease was more akin to a morbid fascination with the footage and news stories. Maybe it was the overblown hysteria brought about by the nerfed pandemics of SARS and H1N1 that caused a kind of pandemic apathy. Then add to that the last few decades of terrorism, war, torture, economic upheaval and severe natural disasters brought about by global warming. Who knows? But instead of the alarm you’d expect, people across the globe accepted this new reality with curiosity and awe. Cable ratings of shows covering the contagion’s advance across Asia were off the charts. Internet networks crashed from millions of hits each time a new clip of some unfortunate wandering bloated soul was uploaded onto the web.
“Zombies?”
“You serious?”
“WTF?”
“Get out! Zombies are the stuff of horror movies not day-to-day life!”
“Infected people walking around trying to eat other people? What up wit dat?”
“Awesome!”
Stories of zombie sightings and outbreaks became daily news and the butt of many late-night comedian jokes. They morphed into wet market gossip between aunties here in Singapore and idle chit-chat around water coolers in high-rise corporate offices of business districts around the world.
Many of these zombie tales became reminiscent of folklore, having been absorbed into the collective consciousness. One of my favorites is the one about the supposed second IHS outbreak. I’m sure you’ve all heard this one, but it bears repeating and, I confess, I enjoy telling it as well.
About two months after that initial outbreak in Guangzhou, an aged rice farmer turned zombie shuffled and lurched his way into Tangxi village on Hetang Island in the early hours of the morning and fell into the communal well, wedging himself upside down. An auntie in need of a bucket of water for the morning washing up came upon his two bulbous legs protruding out of the well, kicking slowly in the frigid pre-dawn air. She ran to the large ancient iron-caste bell in the main square of the village and rang out for emergency assistance.
Not realizing what they were dealing with obliging villagers answered the call, went to the well and pulled the zombified farmer free. Once upright, and to the astonishment of his rescuers, the farmer promptly tried to eat one of them. Fortunately, an elder of the village had wisely brought his small black-market pistol to the village center and, after hearing the surprised screams from his neighbors at the well, stepped forward, pulled the .22-caliber revolver out from his dingy robes and pointed it in the direction of the moaning farmer. When the zombie lunged a second time for the exposed fleshy forearm of a simple but helpful young woman, he put a bullet in the farmer’s left eye, slowing and eventually stopping the unsightly gnawing motion of that blackened diseased mouth as it stretched towards the bared limbs of his rescuers.
Regrettably though, while the infected rice farmer was wedged upside down in that village well, his saliva and stomach acid had dripped down into the drinking water. Within a week, most of the villagers were either down with a debilitating fever or up and walking around with an inappropriate appetite.
The moral of the story of the zombie farmer and the well are twofold. First, kill the infected immediately by any means necessary and second, stop drinking from communal wells, you stupid peasant hicks.
I can’t decide if that story of the zombie farmer is supposed to be funny or serious. And the only shred of evidence that gives this story credence is that around the time of this second supposed outbreak, the Chinese military carpet bombed the entirety of Hetang Island, calling it a ‘routine military exercise’.
Anyway, the original Guangdong outbreak was four years ago.
Since then, isolated cases of infected and pockets of contagion have continued to crop up around Asia. There have been sporadic reports of the fever in parts of Java, Myanmar, Vietnam, North Korea, Mongolia and Malaysia.
When the true danger of the virus became clear, it was decided that rounding up zombies and subsequent disposal of the infected required an international effort. So after much debate, voting and re-voting the United Nations conferred responsibility onto the shoulders of the World Health Organization.
With full international authorization and a healthy budget, the WHO created a paramilitary branch of their organization whose main objectives were to contain and eradicate any zombie outbreak in any part of the world. And it only took about a year when, after their fourth deployment and victory against the zombie menace, the WHO’s elite IHS field team members were branded modern day heroes. These days they have their own action figures, a cartoon TV series, a blockbuster movie, arguably the most popular interactive website and a highly lucrative 3D MMORPG aptly called ‘Zombie Hunters’ with over sixteen million paying subscribers.
So if anything, the pandemic helped to bolster the entertainment industry, creating new jobs for media professionals who took advantage of the zombie trend.
At the end of the day, the problem with dealing with the so-called ‘living zombies’ is one of simple mathematics. Like an exponential formula, when a zombie makes a public appearance, it’s likely they’ve unwittingly infected several people during the fever stage. Some of them will have already gone out to dinner and shared a dessert with their partner or picked their nose prior to touching a doorknob or sneezed without covering their mouths onto fellow passengers on a commuter train. Then those people go home and hug their family members or shake hands with colleagues at a business meeting. In other words, once a zombie has been reported, more and more infected are already crackling away with the fever or beginning to drag themselves out of the dark spaces with the sole intent to infect others with their gross blackened mouths.
Whoops.
Sorry.
Was that too much info?
Jamie often tells me I’m an unwelcome fount of TMI (too much info).
I may have got a bit sidetracked with some irrelevant details.
Just let me give you just a few more tidbits and then I’ll begin my story.
Officially, the Malaysian outbreak began three months ago with an isolated case in Perak which spread to eight victims, then eighty-eight in the region. Soon after the infected appeared in their community, the Malays began calling them by a new name, the ‘Berjalan penyakit’, which loosely translated into English means the ‘walking infection’. Hushed rumors from my relatives living in Ipoh were that no one really knew the size and scope of the Malaysian outbreak and there was a common belief that Malaysian authorities were engaged in a campaign to cover up the true numbers.
This belief was compounded by the Malaysian government’s refusal to sanction WHO’s presence in their country, claiming the international organization was attempting to control the world and would assault the country’s sovereignty. And now they’ve quarantined the states in the northern part of the peninsula and have been trying to enforce a complete media blackout. But rumor has it that containment has been ineffective and, this time, the contagion may be getting out of hand.
Whew, that’s the gist of what you needed to know before I began my tale.
But who am I, you may be asking?
My name is Abigail Tan. I’m twenty years old and a proud Singaporean. My parents are Chinese but many of my ancestors are of Indonesian heritage. So I’m what you’d call ‘mixed race’ living a comfortable balance between two cultures rich in tradition and history. I have lived a quiet life with my parents in a five-room flat in Bishan near the Astrana Junction shopping center. And these days, I’m world famous. No matter where you live or which country you hail from you‘d probably recognize me if you saw me in person, thanks to the infamy brought about by Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown, CARS for short, and the subsequent brouhaha over the vaccine running through my veins.
Besides, how could you forget such a pretty face?
Now sit back and let me tell you about that week of reality television show filming and the horrific events during and afterwards that still wake me up in the dead of night screaming, shivering, drenched in terror.
Preview: Chapter 1
“Are you sure this color goes well with my complexion?” Jamie asked motioning to the freshly painted toenails on her foot that I had in my lap, an exaggerated frown on her face as she judged her partially completed pedicure.
The color of the nail polish was called ‘Feisty’.
I’d picked it out for her that morning while at working at my sales assistant job at the cosmetic boutique unoriginally named, ‘The Make Up Stop’, which was a little shop wedged between a duty-free perfume kiosk and Takoyaki octopus ball stand in the Paragon Shopping Centre’s central hall.
I thought the nail polish was a striking red color and complimented her beauty.
“It looks sexy,” I told her as I finished picking at the cuticles on her unpainted foot and began polishing her big toenail with an emery board.
It was around nine o’clock in the evening on a balmy Monday evening.
We were sitting in Jamie’s bedroom. There was a folding chair propped against her bedroom door to stop her annoying younger sisters from barging in or her nosy father who liked to peer in and quiz us on whether we were being chaste.
I loved nights alone with Jamie.
She was my best friend and I couldn’t imagine life without her. We’d been best friends since we were five years old and were often mistaken for sisters because we looked so similar. Coincidentally, both of us were mixed race, except Jamie’s more refined beauty could probably be traced to her regal great grandmother who migrated to Singapore from Northern India and, supposedly, had royal blood. Both Jamie and I had that petite cutesy look that so many Singaporean young men desired. We had a similar body type and often bought the same clothes and dressed alike.
I believed that we were soul mates.
We’d grown up in the same block in Bishan and went to the same schools together from primary through secondary. Both of us had tested into junior college, but thought we had a better plan than continuing our education. Instead we got jobs down in Orchard Road, hoping that two rich, young and handsome men from the city district would take a liking to us and sweep the two of us off our feet.
However, it was now the third year of the ‘plan’ without any real success and Jamie wanted to change tactics. She thought it would be prudent for us to start going to the nightclubs in Clarke Quay and try our luck there.
But I was afraid of that scene.
What if one of us was offered a drink by a rich, young and handsome man?
Neither of us drank alcohol.
What if we were tempted to go home with one of them?
Could we still remain chaste?
Would we turn into the Singapore Party Girls that we so despised?
As usual, Jamie ignored my negativity. In our relationship, she called the shots. So I complied. I didn’t necessarily think I was her follower, more like an ‘accompanier’. But I liked our current lifestyle and, deep down, didn’t really want to try any harder to find a ‘Rich, young and handsome man’ to marry and separate myself from her.
I was content sitting in Jamie’s bedroom painting her toenails.
That evening, I was giving her a manicure and pedicure and she promised that she would return the favor tomorrow night. Not that I was counting on it. Then for the rest of the week, her plan was to prowl those sinful nightclubs in search of our future husbands.
My dream of our future was a bit different from Jamie’s. I was still holding out hope that the two of us would become famous actors in Singapore’s local television and film industry and live together in a condo in Holland Village until we were old and grey. I even convinced Jamie to try-out and she reluctantly accompanied me on a brief auditioning tour. We auditioned for a variety of TV shows like ‘Singapore Starz’, ‘So You Think You’re a Dancer?’ and local commercials for Chicken Vittles Restaurant and Laundress Soap.
To both our surprise, we got lucky and were cast as a team in ‘Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown’. CARS, we were told, was a reality show that showcased Cera automobiles in a race across the Malaysian Peninsula complete with competitions, checkpoints, eliminations and all the other racing-style reality TV show accoutrements. They chose Jamie and me to compete, saying that with our backgrounds best represented the majority of single young females in Singapore.
Oh, and did I mention there was a million dollar prize for first place?
If we won that prize, everything would change for the two of us. With that kind of money, I fantasized about us living in a condo together forever, with two-bedrooms, a fitness center, sculptured pools and in Holland Village, of course.
We attended meetings at Tua Kee Media headquarters where we met the other rally participants and had a luncheon with the production crew. We were introduced to Sheldon, the show’s creator, director and executive producer. We filmed webisode teasers for the CARS website and posed for photo spreads that they plastered on billboards, buses and MRT cars across Singapore. We signed incomprehensible life contracts and swore to liability waivers we scarcely examined. I vaguely remember their legal department mentioning something about the IHS outbreak playing a part in the show during a meeting but, as with the rest of the contestants, we were too dazzled by the prospect of fame and the million dollar prize to listen. In hindsight, maybe we should have paid more attention.
That was two months ago.
Since then, the producers of CARS claimed the race was on hold indefinitely due to the severity of the IHS outbreak in Malaysia and that their hands were tied until they received permission to begin filming from the Malaysian government.
Yeah, right.
The rumor amongst the teams was that the filming of CARS hadn’t begun because Sheldon was taking a gamble and waiting until the zombie situation in Malaysia, hopefully, worsened. For Sheldon, the worldwide popularity of zombie fever was an opportunity to further his career, perhaps even leading to Hong Kong cinema or maybe Hollywood. Sheldon supposedly believed that the notion of a reality show filmed in the quarantine zone was so hot that it would gain literally hundreds of millions of viewers if it were heavily marketed and simulcast live on the internet.
The only sticky point was convincing us, the contestants, to sign up and literally risk our lives for a reality TV show. But Sheldon was sure that if they offered a million dollar prize and downplayed the zombie threat, potential contestants would queue up for days, waiting for their chance to audition. And you know what? He was right. Jamie and I took the bait, hook, line and sinker, that’s for sure.
I finished Jamie’s pedicure and the two of us relaxed on her daybed waiting for her nails to dry. Jamie, of course, was on her phone talking to one of her many boyfriends. I think this one was the handsome NSman she’d met in an online chat group. They were goo-gooing and gaa-gaaing at each other. I sat there silently waiting for her to finish, not very pleased that our time together was being taken over by some random dude.
My handphone buzzed in my pocket and, simultaneously, Jamie’s made a chiming sound, interrupting the love talk. We’d both received a text message at the same time. My heart began to race. Either it was a mass advertisement annoyingly sent by our service carrier or, gulp, from Sheldon.
I pulled out my phone and read the message:
“Dear CARS contestants,
Malaysia MOH says go ahead.
CARS race stars tmr.
Pls chk-in Cera Auto @ 0700. :-) ”
Jamie and I couldn’t believe it.
She ran out of the room screaming to her family at full volume, “We’re racing tomorrow! We’re racing tomorrow!” Her parents jumped from the sofa, shaking off their television stupor, thrilled about the prospect of spending Jamie’s portion of the money should the girls win.
Jamie began texting all of her boyfriends, telling them to stock up on jewelry and designer handbags, because once we were famous and wealthy it will take a lot more than Nasi Lemak down at the Kopitiam to get to second base with her again.
I, on the other hand, only had to text my employer to inform her that I wouldn’t be out for the week due to the extraordinary opportunity to be on a reality TV show. Fortunately, my manager wasn’t too upset at the short notice. Retail business was slow, as it was still a few months away from the Great Singapore Sale.
We were so excited we jumped up and down on Jamie’s bed like we used to when we were children.
We were going to be famous television stars!
Zombies were the last thing on our minds.
******
The teams had to report to the Cera dealership in Queenstown at seven o’clock in the morning. Quaid and Norris, the Ang Moh team and the only non-Singaporeans in the race, were the first to arrive. The rest of us trickled in about twenty to thirty minutes later with our usual excuses of overcrowded buses and unavailable taxis readily available if anyone inquired about our tardiness.
It was another humid Singapore morning and we were anxious get the show on the road. We were sheltered from the sun inside the Cera showroom but even so it was still hot, sticky and wet indoors. Jamie and I were trying to keep cool by sitting in front of a large grey industrial fan turned on high. The room was filled with nervous energy and while there was idle banter casually floating around between the teams, it was spoken with suspicious and calculating eyes.
Jamie and I had our hair tied up in matching braided pony-tails and wore cute little matching headbands with only a light brushing of powder and eyeliner to look fresh and young. We had on black sporty polo shirts and short little red daisy duke shorts that matched our headbands with full length black spandex stretchy pants underneath. We were instructed to play up our beauty for the show, but we wanted to play it conservative too considering our heritage and the fact that we were going to be racing through Malaysian backcountry where we wanted to be respectful of the country’s culture and traditions.
There were six paired teams chosen for the race out of thousands of auditions and we sat there waiting for the CARS host to finish rehearsing her lines. Gemma Ng was the host of the show. She was a fresh Tua Kee Media artiste, an alternative rocker-type Chinese Singaporean who began her career in entertainment as a radio host. She was tall, thin and rather cute. She had some interesting star tattoos on her arms, but as for her personality, I thought she was full of nothing but lukewarm air.
The teams were grouped among the Cera show cars in twos and fours, whispering rumors of the latest zombie news. It was so annoying to me that everyone in the room couldn’t stop talking about zombie fever. They regurgitated the information about the Malaysian outbreak that had been steadily streaming from the Singapore news channels and flooding in from all the non-traditional media outlets like the late night comedy talk shows, z-phone apps, social networks, webcasts, neighbors, work colleagues, family members and friends who knew people in Malaysia. All of these arteries of information were pumping and pulsing but mainly saying the same amid the grotesque footage, ‘we’re dealing with a disease, nothing supernatural’, ‘stay clear of infected, do not go to their aid’, ‘if bitten or if you come physical contact with a zombie, report to local authorities immediately’, ‘disease is not widespread and will be contained shortly’, ‘if in imminent danger of contact, shoot in the head to minimize fluid contamination’, etc, etc, etc.
Boring.
Seriously, I didn’t want to hear about IHS in Malaysia.
Frankly, I’d had enough of the ‘zombie’ trend. Out of sight, out of mind is what I say to the whole thing. People get cancer and heart disease all the time. Do we carry on about it like it’s the end of the world? No, we don’t. We continue to live our lives and hope for the best. It should be the same with this new disease. So what if people are catching a fever somewhere in some backwater town in Malaysia and then walk around trying to spread it to others? Does it really affect us? I mean, how much can you take of this zombie crap.
I wanted to change the subject, so I leaned over to Jamie and whispered, “Hey, have you noticed how each pair of team members is a classic Singaporean stereotype?”
She giggled and leaned in to me, knowing this is how I usually started on one of my socially satirical tirades. Jamie enjoyed it when I let my imagination run wild against the world. I could tell this time was no exception if I were to gauge her amusement by the muffled giggles escaping through the fingers of her cupped hand covering her mouth. I whispered softly in her ear.
“This is how I imagined the teams should have been introduced if the show were truthful and willing to admit its stereotyping ways.
‘Welcome to Cera’s Amazing Racing Showdown! Here are the teams vying for the million dollar prize:
Rally Car 1 is manned by Ted and Ahmed, the comical but wimpy guy team. Ted being the funnier of the two and Ahmed, obviously the overweight bumbler. Watch these two for your comic relief in the more harrowing parts of the race!
Rally Car 2’s Tucker and Yvonne are the CARS lovey-dovey, handholding couple that brings in that element of cloying PDA (public displays of affection). As you can see from the Prada handbag hanging from his arm, Tucker carries his girlfriend’s purse and from what we can ascertain through his effeminate stance, cries when he watches chick flicks, sharing a box of tissues with his girlfriend. Yvonne looks so cute and friendly in social situations but get her home and she’s a cold, demanding and calculating bitch.’” Jamie let out a loud croaking sound of laughter and everyone looked over for a moment and then went back to their zombie talk.
I continued with delicate precision, “’Rally Car 3 has the body-builder duo, Meng and Esther, the friendly weightlifting muscle heads. Meng was a gold medal winner for the Singapore Weightlifting Association and Esther can be seen in those early morning California Spa commercials pumping her guns. When alone together, they can be found proudly flexing their quads or other over-trained quivering body mass for each other’s admiration.’”
I believed I was merely joking with Jamie about how the teams should be introduced but subconsciously I was nervous and feeling rather mediocre. Putting down the other teams was my way of propping myself up.
“’Fuelled by its team’s own sense of superiority is Rally Car 4, driven and navigated by Quaid and Norris, the Ang Moh Caucasian team. Norris is American and Quaid is British, two whiter than white Caucasian men from different parts of the world with shaved heads and higher than thou attitudes. Both of them arrogant, chauvinistic, clueless about the culture they’re living in, oh and mildly xenophobic; a combination that will make for many culturally uncomfortable scenes for your amusement.
And here comes Rally Car 5’s Jamie and Abigail, the young, beautiful and innocent Singapore girls. They’re short and petite with the youthful looks of teenagers disguising their true ages of twenty and twenty-one.’” Jamie’s giggling quieted down as I described the two of us. “’Abigail and Jamie have been lifelong friends since they were five. They love each other and are closer than sisters. Jamie loves men, I mean she loves men and Abigail loves Jamie and their times together,’” She leaned into me further putting her hand in mine as I spoke, “’They don’t drink alcohol and only frequent halal restaurants. Their actions are measured and well-thought out and they will stop at nothing to win the prize.’” Jamie raised her arms victoriously into the air at this statement as though we had already won.
“’Finally, Rally Car 6 is driven by Derrik and Lydia, the Ah Beng and Ah Lian team. Ugh, what’s to say about this team, lor? If you know what an Ah Beng and Ah Lian are, then there’s no need to explain these two living caricatures. But if you don’t know, like a typical Ah Beng, Derrik is a Chinese man in his late twenties who likes to sport tight t-shirts, bleach blonde dyed hair, a dangling cigarette and a nineties sense of style. He loves driving overly-modified Japanese pocket rocket cars and, like the rest of the Ah Bengs, is crude, low class, loud and foul mouthed. Lydia, the Ah Lian, is his female counterpart, equally crude and low class with the same nineties fashion sense and penchant for chain smoking. She excels in the use of Singlish and always hangs out at dingy nightclubs.’”
We erupted into giggles.
Derrik motioned towards us and Lydia rolled her eyes.
Quaid and Norris were also watching us, whispering, no doubt about which one of us they’d like kiss first.
Sheldon signaled to the teams that the crew was ready to film the opening scene.
The teams gathered in a large unorganized cluster in front of a large CARS banner as directed carrying our duffle bags and backpacks full of clothes and supplies, all of us bunched together behind Gemma who was holding a long, steel retrolicious microphone. She had changed into a shiny, silver racing queen outfit to match and looked stunning.
And just like that, Sheldon called out, “ACTION!”
The reality show had begun.
“Good afternoon, Singapore and the world! Welcome to Cera’s Amazing Racing Showdown! I’m Gemma and I’ll be your host for this exciting million-dollar racing competition!
Behind me, you see the excited CARS teams eagerly awaiting the start of this challenging race that begins here in Singapore and then hurls like a meteor into the heart of Malaysia where the teams will compete in racing events, mind-boggling competitions and physical contests deep in the heart of the IHS quarantine zone!
Yes! You heard correctly! CARS has received special permission from Malaysian authorities to race through zombie infested lands, taking our Cera cars and their teams to the limit in this competition for one million dollars while avoiding becoming victims of the zombie plague!
There is only one simple rule that will determine the winner,” Gemma glanced back at us, careful to keep her profile steady in the shot, “After each day of the race, the team to come in last will be eliminated. So teams, speed and cunning are your friends in this no-holds-barred racing competition full of danger and frights.”As rehearsed, she looked over the teams with serious and concerned eyes, “Teams. Listen carefully. Avoid contact with any zombies you may encounter during your adventure. If you become infected with IHS, well, you know what will happen,” Gemma put her hand to her temple and pulled the trigger of an imaginary pistol. “Pew, a bullet right in your brain!”
There were cheers and laughs from the teams and crew, as rehearsed.
She turned back to the camera, “Remember viewers, you can get all the details of your favorite racers, CARS merchandise, behind-the-scenes clips and live action updates from me, Gemma, at CARSTV.com.sg.
Are you ready racers?”
“Yeah!” We shouted in unison for the benefit of an invisible audience.
“On your marks, get set, GO!” Gemma shouted into the microphone.
She jumped out of frame and the cameras turned and focused on the teams.
The race had begun.
I began to feel light headed. Worried that I would pass out from the adrenaline rush, I took several shallow breaths. I couldn’t let Jamie down. I had to be strong for her.
As a group, we rushed madly for the door, colleagues in a shared event just minutes earlier turned enemies at the word ‘Go’. Everyone was pushing and shoving as we squeezed through the showroom exit, spilling out into the parking lot where a line of six CARS rally cars decked out in racing stripes and number decals were waiting. Incidentally, while they looked like rally cars, the teams knew from our briefing at Tua Kee Media that they were simple four-cylinder stock models of the latest Cera economy sedan painted to look rough and tough. If anything could be said about Sheldon, it was that he knew when to cut financial corners for a production. It was easy enough to add the sounds of larger engines and screeching tires in post-production editing.
Jamie had agreed to drive first.
We threw our bags into the boot and I hopped into the passenger seat of Rally car 5. We pulled on our seatbelts and Jamie started the car. The rest of the teams jumped into the remaining five cars starting their engines and revving them loudly.
Preview: Chapter 2
“CUT!”
We heard the muffled voice of Sheldon yelling through a bullhorn at the entrance of the dealership barely missing decapitation from a swinging panoramic camera getting one last shot on a crane above.
Jamie shut off the car.
We got out and stood around with the rest of the teams.
Duh, this wasn’t the true start of the race. We were still in Singapore, home to some of the toughest traffic laws in the world. It would be impossible to race through the busy streets of Queenstown into downtown Singapore, north on the expressways to the causeway bridge connecting Singapore to Malaysia and across into Malaysia to where the events were planned without getting busted by the Singapore authorities monitoring the traffic cams.
“Okay, that was great guys. Please go to your assigned transport vehicles and we’ll see you at Danga Bay, the first CARS checkpoint on the other side!” Sheldon enthusiastically shouted through the obnoxious bullhorn in his hands. There were applause from the teams and production crew. Everyone felt the magic of reality TV. The feeling was a certain, undefined yet familiar kind of exhilaration of capturing an ongoing adventure where anything could happen.
Jamie climbed back into our rally car and pulled out into a caravan of CARS vehicles. I went inside the Cera showroom, then into the lift and down to the multi-storey car park where I had to pick up a vehicle that would be used later in the production and drive it across the border. We had heard about Tua Kee Media’s cost cutting measures during reality show productions prior to our auditions. And not hiring enough drivers to take all of the vehicles across the border was a fine example. The teams had to split up and drive solo each of the vehicles that would be used in the competition throughout the week, such as the all-wheel drive SUVs for off-road segments and tiny Eg-cars, an egg-shaped car that I predicted would be used for a parallel parking challenge. It was way cheaper than hiring drivers who would have to travel with the nomadic production as it journeyed across the Malaysian Peninsula.
I was driving one of the SUVs, but I should have been assigned an Eg-car because the truck was really too big for me to handle. I had to pull the seat as far forward as possible and still my toes were barely touching the pedals.
The SUV chugged down the ramp and I fell into formation behind the caravan of Cera cars. Jamie was eight vehicles ahead. We pulled out onto the street and into Singapore rush hour traffic.
I was a bit miffed considering how ill-timed this commencement seemed to be. We could have waited another hour and left the dealership past peak hours, avoiding the crawling stop-and-go traffic that plagues Singapore’s streets in the morning.
But apparently Sheldon was in a hurry to get over the border. Unbeknownst to us, he had received a call from a friend working at the Singapore Immigration Checkpoint that morning. The friend whispered conspiratorially that Singapore was going to close the border with Malaysia later in the day as a precautionary measure to ensure the infection wouldn’t spread into our glorious nation state.
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