Our cameraman separated from the group and came sidling toward us, his camera already rolling, recording our actions. In a flash of fame-driven excitement, I grabbed our envelope and tore it open, handing the clue to Jamie and holding the envelope with its logo just below my tastefully exposed cleavage.
Jamie began shouting out the clue erratically and almost incoherently, “Make your way to Lot 687, Jalan Kota Masai, Johor Bahru to the first Cera event. The order of arrival determines your starting position in the pit stop competition. Time is of the essence.”
We’d been anticipating this moment for weeks.
We knew that in order to get premium camera time in the first few shows, we’d need to be daring and a bit sexy. So, just as planned, Jamie and I looked at each other with big doe eyes and hugged each other tight. The other teams were already in their cars, but we wanted to make the most of this opening scene. “Are you ready,” I whispered loud enough for the boom microphone sticking out of the HD camcorder to overhear. “Yes, let’s kick some butt!” Jamie yelled, slapping my behind as she turned and ran toward our car.
We slammed the doors and the cameraman climbed into the backseat, momentarily setting the camera on pause.
I asked him his name as he buckled in. He looked at me, then after glancing back at Sheldon and the crew to see if anyone was paying attention, smiled and said, “Felix.” By the excited grin on his face, I could tell he was thrilled at the thought of spending the week filming two photogenic beauties.
Jamie and I had agreed when we were cast in the racing show that I was going to be navigator for the first part of the journey. I had a map of Johor in my hands but with the tangled maze of roads in the city, most of them named Jalan something or other, and the lack of an index made it next to impossible to find the right street. “Take J1 north until we hit an exit towards the center of Johor. I don’t have any idea where Jalan Kota Masai is, but I’m sure we can find a taxi driver closer to downtown and we’ll ask him for directions.”
Jamie did her best to pull out of the parking lot with dramatic flair for the stationary cameras positioned on each corner of the exit, filming the rally cars as they drove away.
Jamie was a ruthlessly fast and aggressive driver, a real surprise to the rest of the teams considering her innocent demeanor. We hit one hundred kilometers per hour and quickly passed Rally Car 3, the bodybuilder team. Esther was driving and Meng had a map pressed against half their windshield.
Several of the teams were heading north on the J1 ahead of us, continuing the caravan style from the morning. Typical Singapore group mentality, I thought. But Rally Car 4, Quaid and Norris, was taking a different route, already on a fly-over exiting the J1, believing as I also intuitively guessed that north was the wrong direction.
“Take the exit!” I shouted at Jamie pointing at the fly-over.
She veered across the four lane highway, nearly sending a group of mopeds into a lorry overloaded with leaning stacks of white plastic resin chairs. We flew up the exit in the direction of the Ang Mohs. By the time we crossed the fly-over, Rally Car 4 had disappeared onto one of the serpentine side streets ahead.
“Continue straight until we reach Jalan Yahya Awal, this map says it’s a large street that will take us close to the city centre and shopping district.”
Jamie pushed the rally car around some idling cars at a stop light, driving up on a partially raised sidewalk, bystanders leaping out of the way for their lives. Our car flew along the road, literally taking flight as it bounded off large humps and sags in the poorly maintained road. I hit my head on the ceiling twice before I could secure my seat belt. Felix was filming it all, trying not to voice out his terror whenever the rally car lost the road then smacked back down to the ground. Sparks flew from the front bumper as we hit the first of many large cracks in the asphalt. I made it a point to scream out occasionally for the camera but I wasn’t scared, I had every confidence in my Jamie’s motoring skills.
“There!” I pointed to the road ahead, “Turn left.”
“Gotcha.” Jamie jerked the wheel, the car careening across the large intersection and back south again towards the humungous pink shopping centre.
The traffic lights ahead turned in our favor and I breathed a sigh of relief and knew fortune was on our side. There was no stopping us until we found our taxi stand. After about two minutes of swerving and zooming, the rally car skidded to a stop outside City Square shopping centre. There were five taxis sitting idle and empty next to the taxi stand. The drivers were squatting on a small bamboo platform underneath shade trees, having what looked to be a meal of fried banana, roti canai and coffee. The two of us jumped out of the car and ran toward the taxi drivers, Felix on our heels.
“Adakah anda fasih berbahasa Inggeris?”
Do you speak English?
I asked the group of men in Malay.
One of the drivers raised a hand.
“Bolehkah Anda Membantu Saya?”
Can you help me?
While Jamie and I had some Indonesian roots and were forced to learn Bahasa as our Mother Tongue in primary and secondary school, which is primarily the same language as Malay, but neither of us retained much and those two sentences were about the extent of my bilingualism.
“You want teksi what?” the taxi driver asked.
“We go fast Jalan Kota Masai, so how?” Jamie continued for me, her Manglish (a Malay-English mash-up) was much better than mine.
“I take, you follow, $20 ringgit.” He said, sliding down from the platform and standing before us, wiping grease from the fried bananas onto his threadbare trousers.
“Go, Go, Go!” I yelled to Jamie frantically craning my head, looking back along the street we’d come in search of any sign of the other competitors. We didn’t want the other teams to discover our plan and follow suit or take advantage of our ingenuity and trail us to the event.
We ran back to our car, doors slamming, and the teksi pulled out in front of us.
The teksi was an ancient Proton that looked as if it someone had welded two cars together at the midpoint, a real piece of crap on wheels. We waited as blue smoke spewed from its tail pipe and over our windscreen. The teksi picked up speed to around forty kilometers per hour. Jamie gripped the wheel, the whites of her knuckles bright against her caramel skin.
Felix had his lens pointed right in my face. If there was too much silence, all of this action would be left out of the show. I had to say something, “This cabby better know the way or we’re sunk before we’ve even begun to sail.” It was a bit cliché, but I knew only little sound bites of conversation and action were all that would be spliced into the one hour shows. I had to make the best of it. Besides, it was better than going, ‘Uh, uh, go’ or something lame during what could be a suspenseful sequence of shots showcasing the dynamics between the two of girly girls.
We hadn’t seen any of the other cars since exiting J1. More than likely they had tried to avoid the city streets and stay on the much faster expressways. Most of them had smuggled in maps, so they were probably nearing the pit stop soon.
We continued to follow the teksi in and out of small side streets and alleyways. Jamie began to worry that we were lost. While I tried to remain positive, I was beginning to suspect the same thing.
We came along a long stretch of road construction. It looked as if they were burying an irrigation ditch alongside the pavement. Traffic had slowed to a crawl as people craned their necks to see what was causing the slow down ahead. I rolled down the window to take a look for myself, dust from the construction sticking to my sweaty forehead. Felix did the same, poking the camera out of the back window to expertly capture both the traffic snarl caused by the commotion on the shoulder of the road ahead and my facial reactions all within the frame.
There were a half dozen or so road workers, some with shovels and others with large picks standing in a huddle off the side of the road. From what I could see none of the workers seemed interested in road construction. They were grouped together in a semi-circle next to the large irrigation trench staring at something on the ground mere centimeters away from the line of cars inching by. I didn’t understand why road workers in their dirt encrusted orange jumpsuits standing in a semi-circle could cause a traffic jam until I saw a pale, filthy, bare arm of what could only be a very fat man slowly raise up and out of the ditch into the air, fingers clawing into the sky.
One of the workers lifted his shovel and began pounding its flat surface into what I assumed was the head of the fat man just below my sightline. Now both arms were raised high into the air trembling in reverberations from the body convulsing on the ground. The other road workers stood there and silently watched as their co-worker put the man out of his misery.
As our rally car pulled up next to the group, I could hear the wet, sloppy sound, again and again as the shovel continued to pound the man’s head, a greenish goopy jam, the color of infection, now coating the shovel head.
The arms jerked twice more and sunk back down out of view.
Our car was nearly on top of the men in orange jump suits. Some dust from the construction got into Jamie’s nose and she sneezed and jerked the wheel slightly to the right accidentally bumping the closest worker with our side mirror. You should have seen the surprised look on his face. He stumbled, almost regained his balance and then grabbed onto one of his colleagues to avoid falling into the ditch. But to no avail. Like dominoes, the group of construction workers lost their footing as each one of them clutched onto the nearest co-worker for support and fell into a pile in the ditch, right on top of the bloated man’s carcass. I heard more sloppy sounds, like water balloons popping on shag carpet. Then I heard curses and yelps as the men leapt back out of the hole, arms, knees, chests and some faces covered in the greenish-yellow gloop. The look in their eyes screamed of terror.
As we continued on, I looked back, Felix’s camera still on my face and the panicked men scrambling out of the trench, trying to clean off the vile puss covering their uniforms, hands and faces.
“Berjalan penyakit,” Felix the cameraman whispered quietly in Malay, a grim look of concern on his face.
This was a very strange occurrence and very bothersome to me. By all reports, there was only infection in the northern states. The virus wasn’t supposed to have spread this far south so close to the Malaysia-Singapore border. I cringed as I recalled the construction workers climbing out of the ditch, covered in that oozing slime. The warnings by WHO were clear, the main cause of human-to-human infection weren’t tropical ground squirrels or biting Berjalan penyakit, but simple contact with an infected’s bodily fluids.
“Hey! Get your head in the game, I can’t lose that teksi!” Jamie slapped my leg pointing ahead.
She was right. We were in a race for a million dollars. We couldn’t afford to lose focus now.
I saw our teksi escort slowing ahead.
“The teksi’s turning left onto that dirt road. Wait, I think I see a street sign. There!” I pointed to the piece of darkened wood attached to a thin pole with four or five loops of thin wire sitting about three feet off the ground and bent to the left by a negligent tire. Someone had spray painted ‘JLN K MASAI’ in white on its face. The teksi driver parked on the road shoulder, his hand dangling out the window. As we drove by, I slapped the $20 ringgit into his fist and gave him a big thumbs up and a smile as we accelerated by, the camera, of course, capturing the transaction.
Jamie slammed the gas pedal pointing the car toward a flat one-storey rusted steel structure with a race track in the distance about a half kilometer up the slowly rising unpaved road. As we got closer, we could see four other rally cars already parked out front. We turned into the gravel parking lot through the chain linked gate and passed a camera mounted on a large crane swiveling around tracking our entrance by remote control. Jamie jammed the wheel hard left and ripped up on the emergency brake. Rally Car 5 drifted about ten meters, kicking up a plume of dust as it came to a stop next to the line of rally cars.
We were currently in fifth place.
Chapter 3
JAMIE and I got out of our car, cameraman close behind, and ran towards the red CARS flag where Gemma was standing next to the large opening in the chain link fence. I got to her first and she handed me a motorcycle helmet, “Congratulation you’re in fifth place and you’ll be in fifth position for the start of the go-kart race. Abigail, you’ll be the driver and Jamie, you can cheer her on with the other spectators in the bleachers.”
The race track looked disused and abandoned. I peeped through the chain link fence at the mini-race track for mini-cars, with its figure eights and hairpin turns covered in lumpy asphalt and faded red and white striped side markers. There were tire barriers stacked along the sharpest of the turns as a safety precaution, however, most of the stacks had been knocked over by previous impacts from go-kart accidents and no one had bothered to stack them again. There was even a wrecked go-kart still stuck in one of the barriers on the second hair-pin turn, making the track that much more dangerous. On the whole, I’d say the place looked extremely unsafe.
I turned to the bleachers. The wooden structure may have been bleachers at one time a few decades earlier, but these days you’d be lucky not to suffer a broken bone from the sudden snapping of the rickety splintered boards or tetanus causing scrapes from the rusty nails jutting randomly or even a large chunky wood splinter in your butt cheek if you tried to sit down. The bleachers sat exposed to the tropical sun on a square patch of gravel that was salted twice yearly, as was the race track and parking lot, making the ground unsuitable for the creeping jungle vine that surrounded the entire complex and parking lot with its choking death grip, biding its time and awaiting the day when the humans permanently abandoned the location so that it could be fully consumed and returned to the rainforest.