“Anyway, today’s events are less physically challenging and more mentally stressful than anything. Well, maybe they’re a bit physically challenging, you’ll see soon enough. Both of you will be participating in the events but will have separate duties. Quaid, Meng, Jamie and Lydia, you’re the more aggressive partner of your teams and we’re going to play up that aggressiveness. You’ll be designated as Team A. ‘A’ for aggression. Team B will be the rest of you acting as passives. Your main role will be during the cooking school segment in the second part of this event,” he said with a haunting, creepy laugh. “Let’s get this thing started.”
We followed him into the barn.
Unbeknownst to us, this segment of the show was being webcast to a live audience as a preview of Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown. We were also unaware that during the last two days while we were in Malaysia, Tua Kee Media’s English, Hindi and Chinese channels had been inundated with commercials for our television show and this special live preview. The advertising blitz had been effective. The server’s traffic recorded over six hundred thousand devices streaming the show live from Singapore alone.
Sheldon sidled out of the way leaving us in the doorway, spotlights flipped on, blinding us to the rest of the questionable activities inside the barn.
The interior of the barn was dimly lit by bare bulbs on long cords swinging from the rafters in the breeze of well positioned fans. The effect of the moving light made haunting shadows dance across the barn, obscuring what I could barely make out to be a partition of chicken wire running through the center of the barn that housed a couple hundred tropical ground squirrels running around on the sawdust covered floor of the gargantuan cage.
There was a camera crew prepped and awaiting our entrance.
“Ladies and gentlemen the teams have arrived!” Gemma announced somewhere inside through a scratchy overhead speaker, used for its cinematic sound effect.
Members of the crew rushed us through the gap in the large barn doors, making a point to give us zero time to prepare and orient ourselves to the scene that was being filmed in glorious HD clarity. It was pretty easy to see that they were intentionally trying to put us in a confused and reactionary state for this portion of the show and it was working, I was taken completely off guard by what was happening.
A mob of hired actors in those same red Cera hazmat suits and retro-masks we’d worn in Chinatown came up and grabbed Team B members, the passives you remember which included me, and they literally seized us by our arms and shoulders and dragged us toward a pile of grimy strait-jackets lying on a square wooden table and they continued to manhandle us into the restraints. They stuck red fetish-style rubber ball gags into our mouths and tied them behind our heads with leather ties. Boy was I relieved that I’d applied that lip balm earlier. The ball gag was rather large for my mouth and the lip balm worked well as a lubricant when those jerks forced it into my mouth. Then we were strapped, standing erect, onto two-wheeled trolleys which were rolled over to the back wall and lined up side-by-side facing the squirrel cage.
Team A stood there, squinting, trying to make out what was going on. But the scene was occurring so quickly and with those spotlights intentionally being flashed in their eyes it was difficult for them to see what was happening to us.
After they were finished with us, the assistants in hazmat suits marched up to Quaid, Jamie, Meng and Lydia, clomping their black boots on the wooden floor. They forced Team A into translucent plastic butcher aprons, clamped protective visors over their faces, pushed thick black rubber gloves over their hands up to their elbows then shoved butterfly nets with long poles into their hands.
Through the grainy speaker Gemma began shouting instructions at them, “Attention, Team A! Take a net and capture one of those vile creatures whose species has been spreading infection throughout Asia. A warning! The last team member to capture one will be in danger of elimination! And it won’t hurt your place if you happen to kill some of them along the way!” Gemma’s tone was harsh and threatening as Sheldon instructed. He wanted to give the previewing audience a scandalous dose of what the CARS reality show in zombie country will be about when it aired Monday nights before the news at nine-thirty.
Cameras from multiple angles were rolling, capturing the event.
The show had definitely taken a turn away from your standard reality TV show fare veering off, in my opinion, into the direction of sensational zombie cliché, sadism and mild insanity.
Someone began playing a bass drum over the speaker that sounded like the drums of war.
“Go! Catch your prey! Your teammates are hungry!” Gemma shouted through the tinny loudspeaker over the boom, boom, boom of the drum.
One of the assistants opened the cage door and Team A was pushed through into the swirl of sixty or so squirrels who were flinging around the room in terror at the lights, drum beat and these monsters with their nets. Sensing the danger they were in, most of the squirrels scurried to the back of the barn away from the team members and began to dig at the baseboards, hunting for an exit by means of burrowing a hole in the floorboards or a crack in the barn’s wooden frame big enough to squeeze through.
Meng was the first to capture a squirrel. He ran up and stomped at the squirrels until he finally trapped one underneath his boot by its tail. The furry rodent made a high pitched squeal in pain. He then reached down and picked it up by its neck and shoved it into his net. The assistants led him out of the cage. The rest of the squirrels went into a frenzy of jumping, leaping and running in panicked circles.
While there were worse scenes of horror filmed in reality shows, the frenetic rush of this scene compounded by the boom of the drums and squeals of terrorized squirrels really gave this one an edge of suspense. Web viewers leaned closer to their screens, those with 3D leaning back to dodge squirrels flying towards them out of their flat screen televisions and mobile devices.
I watched as Jamie tried to club one of the critters that had climbed up the chicken wire with the handle of her net. She got lucky and struck it on its noggin, knocking it unconscious. It stuck there with its little claws holding onto the wire and she scooped it off and into her net, raising her hand to be let outside. I tried to give her an encouraging grunt through the gag and retched a bit, the gag doing what it was intended to do, gag me.
Watching Quaid try to capture one of the squirrels was actually quite hilarious. He swung his net like a golf club into the mass of squirrels squirming against the wall. Squirrels were flying through the air as they were scooped up into his net, but they were smart little critters and instead of getting trapped, they grabbed onto the sides of the netting and leapt out. He almost clubbed Lydia in the back of her head when she accidentally dropped her net and decided to crawl around on the sawdust trying to grab squirrels with her gloved hands, but they were too fast for her and squeezed out of her grip.
Neither Quaid nor Lydia could capture a squirrel and kept getting in each other’s way.
Lydia was becoming hysterical at the thought of coming in last at this event. I could hear her cursing up a storm as she futilely grabbed at those cuddly yet nimble bodies.
It took about ten minutes until each of them had one of the squirrels squirming in their nets. Fortunately for both of their teams, they’d captured their squirrels at exactly the same time.
“Great job, Teams,” Gemma’s disembodied voice crackled through the loudspeaker as the boom of the drum faded away, “Now, hand over your squirrels so that we can test them once more for contagion before they are humanely euthanized. And, yes, as you may have guessed, your team member will be eating your catch for lunch after you’ve prepared it in the CARS cooking event, ‘A Squirrel a Day Keeps Zombie Fever Away’ featuring the great Makan King Julian Ng!”
We could hear an applause track through the crackling speaker overhead.
With cameras still rolling, Team A were stripped of their aprons and gloves, sprayed down with a disinfectant, scrubbed with brushes on long poles by the retro-masked crew and rinsed with a fire hose. They yelled in protest as the force of the water and rough bristles of the brushes nearly took off their skin along with sawdust and squirrel fur.
Once they were finished with the power wash, we heard Sheldon yell, “Cut!” and the live feed went to black. Everyone cheered at the completion of the event and patted Sheldon on the back. The production crew reported that the preview audience had grown from that initial six hundred thousand viewers to over five million streaming all over the world and everyone cheered some more.
I expected the crew to free us from our S&M-like restraints, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, members of the crew wheeled us outside and propped us up next to the four stainless steel tables at the cooking scene set facing the stage and the huge green screen.
It was nearing one o’clock but the heat wasn’t as bad as when we arrived as the wind had shifted and there was a mild coastal breeze. With the gentle wind coming off the water of the Straits of Malacca, Port Dickson was less humid than Singapore and I could feel the cool air though the back straps of the strait-jacket and the bars of the dolly were cold against my bare legs.
The tables were lined side-by-side. I could hear Norris hollering through his mouth gag to my right, something about how he’s going to sue the show and didn’t sign up to be tortured.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Jamie standing beside me and looking a bit peeved. I didn’t know what else to do so I winked and nodded. She had, along with the others in Team A, changed into chef’s uniforms complete with ridiculously puffy chef hats with CARS plastered on the front in bright red letters. Her mascara had run and her hair was soaked from the drenching by fire hose, but I figured it was better than being filmed with matted sawdust and squirrel fur in her lovely brown hair. She still looked beautiful to me.
I took a closer look at the cooking utensils on the wooden chopping block. The knife set consisted of a 12-inch chef’s knife, a yo-deba double edged blade used for chopping bones and cutting through joints and a 16-inch curved scimitar for cutting large cuts of raw meat into cutlets.
On the stainless steel table there were six small bowls holding your typical Asian seasonings of salt, MSG, chili powder, ginger root, soy sauce and oyster sauce wrapped in cellophane. Completing the ensemble was an oversized dinner plate with a fork and knife on a flowery placemat. There was also a sausage grinder attached to the side of the table.
If this was a cooking segment, where are the ovens and cookers?
There was a lot of commotion around the raised stage in front of our tables. Sheldon kept waving his arms frantically in the air. But in due course, the production team cleared the set and climbed into an RV with a gargantuan satellite dish on its roof and thick black cables stretching out from underneath it to the green screen.
Suddenly, the screen began to flicker.
Wow,
I thought,
Sheldon must have got some serious funding for this part of the show.
That was no ordinary green screen. It was the Xayatron 5000GS that not only acted as a green screen when filmed but also doubled as a monitor when set up with a sister 5000GS in another location. Confused? Don’t be, it’s simply a teleconferencing screen with amazing special effects qualities. In any event, with the screen turned on, I was now staring at an open field somewhere on Tua Kee Media’s property in Singapore filled with hundreds of spectators obediently sitting on the grass of a rising slope in a large semi-circle. The effect of the screen was seamless. It was as if the live Singapore audience was here in Port Dickson, crowded together in the field in front of me. Conversely, the audience was viewing us safely in Singapore as if it were a live event unfolding in front of them. They were clapping those maddeningly noisy stick clappers together and holding up homemade posters covered in handwritten slogans and glitter announcing their support for their favorite teams.
Oh my, how embarrassing! I could see my mother, father and sisters, as well as Jamie’s family sitting in front. They were holding signs that read, ‘Gurl Power!’ ‘We love you, Jamie and Abigail!’ ‘We’re counting on you!’ ‘$$$$’ and ‘You can do it!’
Next to our family, there were a dozen or so bodybuilders cheering in unified support for Meng and Esther. Beside the bodybuilders were a bunch of spiky haired, surly thirty-something men shouting, “Ly-D-ya! Ly-D-ya!” and ignoring Derrik. And finishing off the front row and loudest of all, were a group of Ang Mohs, probably fellow teachers and work colleagues, shouting and hooting for Norris and Quaid. Behind the team’s friends and relatives were a couple hundred Cera motor heads, zombie fans and curious netizens who’d queued all week for the opportunity to sit in on the show.
Little did we know, the CARS television commercials, billboards, bus and MRT ads, web teasers and real time (but actually heavily edited) clips were creating a snowball effect unlike anything that had ever been shot before by Tua Kee Media. In the last three days, Singapore had ‘caught’ zombie fever from our reality show and it was spreading throughout the rest of the world via the web. Sheldon was well aware of the viral explosion, which was why he had fired Kip. He wasn’t going to share the fame as producer of possibly the biggest media event of all time with an assistant who’d become increasingly critical of his so-called glorification of the IHS outbreak. He knew his hard work was paying off in spades and he felt like he was king of the world.
The crowd began to cheer louder as Julian Ng ran down the center aisle of the Singapore audience to the stage. Shouts of “We love you, Makan King!” could be heard from housewife groupies in the audience who had fallen in love with his dreamy eyes and artful finesse with the spatula.
To make every movement look like one shot, Gemma also ran up onto the stage and green screen from our side to meet him. She was wearing nothing but a fur bikini and beach sandals. Her attire was Sheldon’s idea. He was less concerned with his conservative Singapore audience and playing up to the global audience. Everyone knows that a pretty woman in a bikini sells.