“There,” Jamie pointed up ahead, “it’s the exit sign.” She was visibly relieved that this part of the race would soon be over.
But it wasn’t nearly finished.
The four Cera sedans zoomed down the ramp and onto a two-lane national forest dirt road. The road was tight and traffic in and out was sporadic, but obstructive all the same. We couldn’t seem to catch up to Norris and Quaid who were swinging their car wildly, passing cars on the left and then the right side of the road.
I refused to put our lives at risk any longer.
I slowed down and let the trailing rally cars pass us and chase the Ang Mohs.
“Look,” I reasoned, “we’re ahead of two other teams, and if the rumors are accurate, this is a physical challenge. Derrik and Lydia are heavy smokers and Ahmed is too fat to be much of threat if cardio fitness is required,” I tried to justify the shift in my driving attitude to Jamie, but mainly to the camera as I knew people would be watching in weeks to come wondering what happened to my nerve. “Those teams have no chance against us. Besides, I repeated, there are still two teams behind us and it’s the last team that will be eliminated. It won’t be us.”
“It’s fine. There’s the resort,” she pointed to a break in the tropical forestry to a large parking lot and hotel. “When we stop, leave everything in the car, we’ll try to rush the others.”
Chapter 4
I found the entry gate and shot up the narrow one-lane road, blowing by a security checkpoint whose guard was leaning out the window with his arm extended waving us through and into the near empty parking lot. I pulled up right next to the CARS Rally marker flag near entrance of the resort hotel. We jumped out and ran up the disabled ramp and onto the timbered floors of the hotel lobby. The lobby was an open style of architecture common to East Asia with a large timbre roof and thick pillars of wood for support. There were no walls to the structure. There was no need as the weather in the area was consistently balmy with brief drenching rainstorms but little wind throughout the year. We ran across the lobby and stopped near the sparsely populated hotel café to get our bearings. I looked inside and saw a few patrons sitting within, gathered near an old box-style television mounted on a rack from the ceiling. They were watching a news channel with footage of what looked to be a half dozen or so Berjalan penyakit roaming an anonymous Malaysian backcountry road.
“Jamie, look at that,” I was drawn to the images on the screen across the room but Jamie had her attention elsewhere. She was all about avoiding elimination.
“That exit there,” She grabbed my shirt sleeve and pulled me towards a back stairwell in the rear. I followed behind her to the rear exit to the deck of a long Olympic-sized swimming pool. Just after the pool, there was a large section of asphalt with faded helipad markings painted on the ground. Gemma was standing in the centre of the helipad. Six cameras were filming the area at all angles, including a one aimed by a cameraman up above on the roof the hotel.
There was no sign of the Ang Mohs or the Ah Beng-Ah Lian team. Although, I did see a flash of Ted and Ahmed as they disappeared ahead, running up an uneven stone staircase behind the helipad.
Gemma motioned us forward, an envelope in her hand. She was saying something into the camera about the next event, but my adrenaline was pumping and my focus was only on the contents of the envelope. I snatched the envelope out of her fist.
I ripped the message out, handed the envelope to Jamie to hold towards our cameraman, and still ignoring annoying Gemma who wouldn’t shut up, I began to read over her babbling, “Climb the thousand stone steps to the top, choose a team member to rappel down the forty-five degree waterfall and return to the helipad to check in. Better be quick. The last team to check in will be eliminated. “
Spots danced in front of my eyes. The stress of the day was mounting and draining all my reserves.
Jamie and I didn’t even think of maximizing the camera time with Gemma. We both turned towards the stone steps ascending into the forest and sprinted towards them as fast as we could.
The stairs were uneven and very difficult to climb at any sort of steady pace. About four hundred steps up the hillside, we jumped around Ahmed and Ted. Ahmed was way too out of shape to climb the stairs quickly and was puking on the stone steps, making it difficult to get by them without tracking vomit on our neat little trainers. When we were a ways above them we slowed down to let Felix catch up, his camera doing its best to keep us in its bouncy frame.
Once Felix was close and had steadied the camcorder a bit, I high-fived Jamie for the whole world to see. We were golden at that point. Unless one of us seriously screwed up, there was no way we’d be eliminated today.
When we arrived at the top platform, Quaid was already rappelling down the waterfall through rather tame waters that looked more like a river on a slant that the resort was selling as a ‘waterfall’.
What I found shocking was the behavior of Derrik and Lydia. We were smack in the middle of the first day’s final competition and they were sitting on a bench taking a smoke break! The two of them were huffing away at their death sticks, alternating puffs with long draughts of air, trying to catch their breath and get their nicotine fix at the same time.
“So disgusting,” I crinkled my nose and waved at the cloud of acrid smoke settling in a haze above the platform. Jamie nodded and pinched her nostrils together to make them aware we disapproved. Neither of us was winded from the climb. But we took a short breather beside the waterfall for Felix to get the optimal photographic effect of nature and our beauty combined.
One of the resort activities staff waived me forward to the edge of the waterfall where four ropes were tied and dangling into the water. Since Jamie raced the go-karts, it was my turn to do this challenge. I strapped on the climbing apparatus and a reddish orange helmet that looked as if it belonged to a ‘special needs’ individual and, hand over hand, I made my way down the waterfall. The water was fast and kept splashing into my nostrils and mouth but it wasn’t too cold and even a bit refreshing after that stair climb.
There was a bit of moss on the smooth rock under my feet, making my descent quite slippery and I could feel as I inched my way along that there were fissures in the stone surface that would make it easy to twist or even sprain an ankle if you were careless. Quaid found a fissure the hard way. He was trying to make his descent look effortless for the camera, smiling and hopping down the waterfall like a seasoned spelunker when his foot wedged into a narrow crevice. He cried out in pain as his ankle twisted sharply, but lucky for him it didn’t snap. Not one of his best moments. He stood there immobile, his face pale and contorting in full view of the camera from the sudden wrenching pain, his breath taken from him.
This is my chance to overtake him, I thought. However, Quaid had a fiercely competitive streak and was more concerned with making it to the checkpoint first than his ankle, even though making it first made no difference to the outcome of the competition. I guessed he just wanted to set a precedent on the first day. Norris was yelling through the roar of the waterfall from the platform below, taunting his teammate, “The little girl’s going to beat you, Quaid! Faster! She’s catching up!”
Quaid gritted his teeth and continued at an uncontrolled pace down the falls. I stopped trying to pass him, letting him move ahead so I wouldn’t have to participate in a stupid and dangerous one-on-one race in the waterfall. Soon both of us were soaked but now practically had a secured position in the day’s final event. We unhooked our harnesses when we reached solid ground on a platform mounted where the slant they called a waterfall leveled off into a river. Norris and Jamie helped us out of our climbing gear by our partners.
“That was exhilarating aye, Lass?” Quaid asked me as I unclipped my helmet and shook out my hair.
“It was okay,” was all I had for him. The truth was, I sort of liked the two of them but still felt intimidated all the same.
Quaid and Norris turned and ran ahead of us down the stairs. It was quite obvious from the limp that Quaid had twisted his ankle pretty hard. I mentioned to Jamie that it may be a game changer later in the race and she wholeheartedly agreed.
With that limp, we easily passed the boys, who tried to block us from running around them. Felix gave the other cameraman the raspberries as he ran by.
Near the bottom of the stone staircase we ran by Meng and Esther who were charging up the path, quads and biceps bulging but out of breath and panting. “Bodybuilders don’t focus enough of their training on cardio,” Quaid, who was also a fitness fanatic, told us later.
Jamie grabbed me and, holding hands like lovers, together we ran out of the forest leaping onto the large X on the ground in front of Gemma and the huge and dazzling red Cera Banner covered in the latest Cera models that had been erected for this end scene.
A small crowd of resort staff and production crew had gathered around the helipad. There were hoots, whistling and clapping as we made a final, planned and synchronized rabbit hop onto center of the X in front of Gemma.
“Congratulations Team 5, you are the first team at the checkpoint and are safe from today’s elimination!”
I hugged Jamie and then we bear hugged Gemma together, “Thank you, thank you!”
“So Jamie and Lydia tell us, how did you manage to beat all of the other teams on the first day of Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown?” Gemma inquired into the microphone for the imaginary audience.
“Well Gemma, it was a matter of perseverance, physical fitness and being super excellent rally drivers,” Jamie replied, “But this is just the beginning, we’ll show Singapore that there is nothing as powerful as Girly Girl Power!”
We’d decided before the production began to make the ‘high-five’ our signature move, along with little hugs and kisses here and there. So we jumped up in the air and gave each other a high-five just as we’d rehearsed the day before.
“Cut,” Sheldon called out, sounding a bit bored at our performance and approached us. He put his arms around our shoulders and walked us toward the hotel, in effect forcing off the set to make room for the other teams to arrive. “Great job, girls. Now please hurry off so the rest of the teams can check in. You can wait in the café for the rest of them. Tucker and Yvonne haven’t arrived at the resort yet. If you see them pull in, please zip your lips and make yourselves scarce. We don’t want to give anything away.” As we walked, he talked in Jamie’s direction and when he was finished, he winked at her and gave her a wolfish smile. I was used to men hitting on Jamie and ignoring me. We were both young and attractive, but Jamie had a pull on men that they couldn’t seem to resist.
Rather than going to the restaurant straight away though, we went into the girl’s locker room near the swimming pool to freshen up. All of our clothes and toiletries were stowed in the boot of our rally car, so without our own product, we helped ourselves to the little soaps and bottles of shampoo meant for hotel guests tucked away under the counter beside the pool showers.
I stripped off my sticky clothes that were covered in perspiration and river water and stepped into a shower stall. Jamie followed suit and showered in the stall next to mine.
After the shower, we did our best to make our soiled clothes look presentable; knowing that we’d have to do team interviews later in the evening and would need to continue to wear the day’s clothes for film consistency.
The lobby restaurant was empty save for a tired waitress and a scrawny cook sitting on a table near the kitchen eating mee goreng. We sat down at the table nearest the television. Both of us were starving from media withdrawal having been deprived of all our (known) mobile devices since earlier in the day.
The television was muted, but it wasn’t difficult to make out what was happening on the news program. And from what we could see, while we were running around filming an inconsequential reality show, the country around us seemed to be teetering on the verge of anarchy.
Singapore had sealed its border with Malaysia about two hours after we’d passed through causing travelling Singaporeans trying to return home to stampede, scrambling over each other and trampling many, only to be stopped in their tracks at the iron gates by heavily armed border guards. The closure couldn’t have come at a worse time. The traffic at the border was already clogging up the roadways with people trying to flee the country before the rumored quarantine. Now there was a major pile-up of vehicles on the causeway bridge to Singapore, where, after the border was sealed, Malays and Singaporeans trapped on the bridge had attempted to reverse their vehicles and return to Malaysia. It would take weeks before the last of the cars would be cleared from the bridge.
Below the pictures of border mayhem, the words at the bottom of the screen foretold fear and panic. According to the news ticker, the virus had spread at a faster rate than had ever been recorded. Infected were surfacing and shuffling around in regions of Malaysia that were thought free from contagion. WHO’s theoretical models of how the infection spreads had to be scrapped as new reports came in from sparsely populated regions of Malaysia where people were succumbing to the fever. There were unconfirmed and wholly untrue rumors that the virus may now be airborne, causing widespread panic in Kuala Lumpur. People in the capital city were rushing markets and shops, hoarding food supplies and water, locking themselves in their high rise condos and government subsidized flats as more and more Berjalan penyakit were found wandering through the streets and shopping centers of the sprawling city.
And there was more bad news for the country. Only a few hours earlier, in an emergency session the United Nation Security Council had voted to overrule the Malaysian government’s refusal to allow WHO inside their borders. In real time, helmet cams showed thousands of WHO elite IHS field team paratroopers being deployed from aircraft carriers across the Northern Peninsula. Further north of Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian states of Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu were now under international martial law and sealed tight under quarantine. There were reports of rioting and violence at the Thai-Malaysian border. All roads into the states were closed and their borders were closed tight. There was a shoot-to-kill order issued by WHO for anyone caught exiting the quarantine zone without authorization.