“
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.
Part I
Unbridled Reality Television Enthusiasm
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.