It was a different scene from when we were on the expressway the day before. Just yesterday, there were masses of people making the exodus south, cars and lorries used as temporary shelters and groups of families and strangers trekking along, winding their way through the maze of abandoned vehicles. This time there were no people walking south or camping out. All that was left were abandoned vehicles and the rare charred rare corpse sprawled intermittently on the tarmac. As we drove along I noticed all the abandoned cars had been painted with a large red X, which meant they had been searched and found devoid of infected. Occasionally there would be a car or lorry that had been torched and would still be smoldering, glittering white bones and skull resting in the seats in the upright position.
Jamie was snoring softly against my shoulder as I observed the emptiness.
I couldn’t believe everyone had already gone south. There were millions upon millions of Malaysians on the peninsula. Either the paratroopers were efficiently keeping the stragglers off the roadway or they were holed up in their homes, fearing the unknown and hoping to wait out the emergency.
I saw Katek leaning up to Zahrin, presumably getting instructions as he then climbed down off his bench seat and started rummaging through a compartment underneath the windscreen next to the doors. He pulled out a cardboard box, ripped open the top and took out cups of char siew flavored ramen noodles. But he was no steward in the most gracious sense of the word. Instead of walking down the aisle and handing out the noodles to the team members, he whistled to get everyone’s attention and began lobbing the cups of noodles over the seats to each of us. I caught mine as it hurdled towards my head and then caught Jamie’s who was watching but making no effort to grab it as it flew through the air.
I was starving. We hadn’t eaten anything since the ‘room service’ about nine hours earlier. The cups of ramen were in nifty little containers that only required water and had their own heat source. I popped the tops on our noodles and squeezed water from my suit bladder nozzle hanging from my neck. Then I pulled the string on the side of the cups and the pyro-chemical concoction enclosed in the bottom of the cups heated up and the water started to boil. I held the cups with my gloves, waiting the necessary three minutes before handing Jamie her noodles. There were tiny folding forks stuck to the side that were quite practical for the quick meal.
There was another whistle and I almost spilled my noodles when I tried to catch a box of green tea whizzing towards my head from our little waiter. The drink box ricocheted off my hand and onto the floor at my feet. I had better luck with Jamie’s drink box as it hit my arm and bounced onto her lap.
They silently ate their noodles and an occasional slurp could be heard here and there.
Beyond the expressway there was nothing but the darkness of a midnight jungle. Soon we’d be cresting a long incline and our view would change to the sprawling outlying regions of rundown buildings and crumbling homes surrounding Kuala Lumpur.
After Jamie and I finished our noodles, Norris came by and asked us if we were doing okay. It was a nice gesture and I’m sure it came from an honest place of chivalry bred into him from a childhood in the American west. He even took our empty containers and threw them in the bin behind Zahrin’s chair.
As he was returning to his seat, I asked him for the time as I was concerned that we were closing in on the dawn, “Four twenty,” he whispered and gave me the peace sign.
At the crawling pace of thirty or so kilometers an hour, I estimated that we’d make it to the city in about two hours. That left about a half an hour before sunrise to find the compound and get behind its walls to safety.
We passed WHO patrols every two to three kilometers. Each patrol consisted of two soldiers with submachine guns and one with a flame thrower. Occasionally, we would spot a trio on the road ahead by a burst of flames as they torched a car or infected who’d become entangled in the fence. Curiously, these patrols dropped off sharply as we got closer to the outskirts of the capital.
Zahrin was rambling on and on to Katek in Malay, boasting about what he knew about the outbreak. I leaned forward to listen in. I tried to follow along as best I could, recalling the times as a child when my mother and grandmother would have long gossip sessions in the kitchen over a cup of teh tarik. I would hide in the cupboard listening carefully with my eyes closed, swept away by stories of infidelity and geriatric illness, “… then three days ago they decided on a ‘containment only’ policy when it came to large populations of infected. They’re not even trying to stop the spread of the virus within the hot zone anymore. The bastards are letting everyone inside the quarantine zone fend for themselves while the virus burns out. If you think about it, the life cycle of the virus in humans is only equal to the time it takes to infect and then for the poor bastard to die of dehydration or heat stroke which is what, three days? Four? They figure the virus will burn out in a matter of a week or two then they can help our government pick up the pieces. That is with strings attached, I’m sure. Once you get these colonials inside your borders, they really dig in deep. I tell you it’s a dirty business.
I bet once we get off this expressway, we’ll see neither hide nor hair of these so-called elite paratroopers outside of their barbed wire.
Bunch of wussies, I say.”
He continued, “Once you get the hang of avoiding the infected, it becomes second nature. You see them, speed up your pace and get out of their way, piece of cake. Jamal and I were up by Port Klang rounding up some Berjalan penyakit for the Malacca shoot and there were like hundreds of them wandering around in the streets moaning and carrying on. We simply pulled up the lorry, set down the ramp and made a bunch of noise by banging on the side panels. We only needed a dozen or so, but we attracted something like eighty of those creeps! It was a bit of a delicate operation though, separating the more ‘photogenic’ of the bunch from the plain lookers, but we managed to find the ones with the right stuff and loaded them onto the lorry using a rope as a sort of zombie lasso. It was actually quite fun! Then for kicks, as we sped off, Jamal tossed a grenade into the remaining crowd. Man, they blew sky high! It was all colorful too, red, green and yellow goop flying through the air. I had to pull over I was laughing so hard! Nearly pissed my pants!
Anyway, that was a couple hours before WHO officially announced their ‘invasion’. But we already knew they were inside the country. We saw hundreds of’em parachuting from way up high all along the E2, landing safely behind this here security lane that our military had already set up. Bunch of no good, lazy, mother ...” He stopped and stared at me angrily in the rear view mirror at my eavesdropping, “Do you mind?”
I leaned back and feigned sleep.
The rest of the shuttle passengers quieted down and tried to get a bit of shut eye before getting to our next dangerous destination. I couldn’t sleep, but kept my head down because I didn’t want any more dirty looks from Zahrin. Katek sprawled out on the front bench seat and started snoring away, looking as comfortable as a normal sized person on a queen sized bed. I glanced over at Norris. He’d unzipped his bio-suit and stripped down to his waist. His white and hairy bared chest glistened in the darkness and I could tell he was suffering from the heat. I barely noticed the twenty-nine degree Celsius temperature in the bus, having been raised in the equatorially humid blanket of constant moist and thick air. Coming from an area of the world of virtually zero humidity and long cold winters, Norris was one of those Ang Mohs who’d never get used to the constant mugginess of the tropics. His sweaty bald head bobbed up and down against his neck as he tried to sleep sitting up. I felt a bit sorry for someone so out of his element.
After about another hour of cruising along in the night, the bus crested a long incline and we were now overlooking the flatland of a huge valley choked with apartment buildings and dirty hovels. But ‘overlooking’ was a bit of an exaggeration considering there was nothing to see out the windows but pitch black and the occasional five alarm fire in the distance. The expressway was on a raised berme that slithered its way above the suburban sprawl that was a black void on this moonless night. I recalled the news reports back in the restaurant at the Gunang Ledang Rendezvous Retreat saying that the virus was only in the northern states and Kuala Lumpur was unaffected.
What a difference two days of spreading IHS contagion can make on a populated area.
I knew that this area of Greater Kuala Lumpur was called, ‘Klang Valley’ and had over seven million residents. But where were they? It was mathematically impossible that everyone was able to evacuate safely. If they weren’t traveling south, if they were still in the valley, where could they be hiding?
I leaned over a sleeping Jamie to press up close to the window, I used the night vision on the camera again, trying to focus my eyes on the buildings and streets below as we zigzagged along around more and more abandoned vehicles. There was nothing but emptiness and darkened buildings. The entire Klang Valley had lost all electrical power, but even more bizarre was the lack of cars on the streets. From what I saw, it looked like an abandoned megatropolis.
That is until we got closer to one of those massive fires that were burning through entire city blocks. This particular blaze was consuming a shopping center and a few low-rise buildings. The fire must have been at its peak because the buildings were fully engulfed in flames. The expressway was about a kilometer away from the flames but I swear I could feel the heat radiating on my cheek.
The flames gave off a dancing orange light, illuminating the surrounding streets and shop houses and what I saw in that flickering light was unbelievable. I picked up the camera again, turned off the night vision, zoomed in on the streets and pressed record. I rubbed my eyes and took a long look to make sure I wasn’t imagining what I saw. There were thousands of infected circling the fire. Neigh tens of thousands standing there in the glow, just far enough from the flames to avoid incineration staring into the fire. If you didn’t know any better, they could have been hordes of normal people. They looked normal enough from our passing vehicle in their ordinary clothes. It was the closeness and how they were bunched together, fifty or sixty bodies thick that gave them away as no longer human. They were squeezed together like an ecstatic concert audience pressing towards the stage anticipating their favorite band as a roadie did a sound check repeating, “One, two, one, two, testing, testing.”
“Moths to a flame,” I whispered, which was truly the most accurate metaphor to describe the scene.
The stark reality and extent of the cities outbreak became readily apparent as we got further into the valley. As we drove along, the expressway and wherever the steep rise of the thoroughfare became passable on foot there would be hundreds of infected caught up in the razor wire barrier thrashing their arms and legs around with the slow motion speed of someone in deep space, and hundreds more just hanging on the fence who had finally got cut up enough to bleed out. To compound the surreal nature of the drive, the remaining WHO paratroopers guarding the off-ramps that were more likely to be overrun by mobs of Berjalan penyakit, had shot out the overhead halogens within a hundred meters of their posts and planted hundreds of land mines on the ramps, making them as impassable to the wandering infected as possible.
So the drive became a flashing carnival spook house ride. There was about a minute of light from the overhead lamps full of squirming zombies tearing themselves to pieces on the fence and then ten seconds of complete darkness near the off-ramps and paratroopers, the occasional flash boom of ordinance exploding nearby when another zombie happened to take an unlucky steep, out of control fires burning in the distance and an acrid, near overpowering smell of burning rubber, chemicals and flesh.
Needless to say, everyone was awake during that final part of our journey to the city center. The teams had gathered into the last two rows of the shuttle bus and we were all facing inward and down, huddled together, gripping our shotguns and cattle prods tightly, waiting for the bus to come to a crashing halt against an abandoned car or errant piece of lorry. Zahrin and Katek stayed up front. They were the true heroes of the night. Driving and navigating through that hellish landscape.
It was that final stretch into Kuala Lumpur when I finally shed the last of my nonchalant, hip, disassociated attitude towards the viral outbreak. Ever since the first report of a zombie attack, there was a great deal of humor and detachment towards the outbreak. The worldwide audience was guilty of it. I suppose the horror of something in the world that can hijack and control your every action, that included ultra gross-out cannibalism and an inevitable premature death was too much for my psyche before now. I needed to joke and act as if it were an easy matter to escape the infected … to get away … to be safe.
I mean look at us fools on this bus.
We were drawn into a damned reality TV show with the promise of fame and fortune, ignoring the severity of disease, illness and murder, not even foreseeing the danger we were putting ourselves in.
And yes, I said murder, because that’s what killing the diseased amounted to.
As if the infected hadn’t been human, caring for their families, working their insignificant jobs and living out their mundane lives mere days earlier. And here we were filming a reality television show, trying to profit off of their pain. All of us on that shuttle bus, in the entire production for that matter, were tainted. And if there was a heaven and hell, we were damned for our avarice and willful ignorance.
Not that I was any less culpable. Jamie and I had the opportunity to turn back at the hotel and head south with Sheldon and the crew. But I’d licked my lips and felt my pulse quicken at the now guaranteed money hundred thousand we could get if we made it to that checkpoint by tomorrow night.