Zombie Fever: Outbreak

by Hodges, B. M.

  Felix was motioning to Jamie to put her mask back on. He had to start shooting again.

  I leaned down next to Jamie and handed her the mask.

  “Do it for me. I need this.”

  She looked into my eyes through the lenses of my mask and perhaps for the first time saw how important it was for me to secure the shared future that I’d been dreaming of.

  She stood up, put on her mask and gave me a fierce hug.

  We ran out of the antique shop and across the street into a Chinese temple that had a Cera flag hanging from one of its lion statues. The temple was filled with the production crew trying to hide behind bamboo partitions to stay out of the scene. Gemma was sitting lotus style on a mat in the center of the main chamber pretending to meditate and acted surprised when we ran in, jumping to her feet as we approached in our red suits and black masks. Then gaining her composure and acting as if she just recognized us as team members, she said, “You can take your masks off, girls. This beautiful Buddhist temple is free from contagion and a safe harbor for zombie warriors like you,” Gemma announced, overacting as usual to the camera.

  Jamie lifted the clue from around her neck and handed it over.

  Sheldon yelled from behind a large ornate vase in the corner of the dimly lit antechamber, “Fantastic girls, now get out. We need to clear the place for the rest of the teams.”

  There were still three other teams behind us who had to complete the Chinatown events. I glanced at the clipboard in Sheldon’s hand and saw that the other teams would get clues that would lead them to different establishments on this street; one team to a mausoleum, one to a restaurant and one to a souvenir shop where they would encounter an actor dressed as a zombie and have to ‘kill’ it as we did in the antique shop. Prior to our scene in the antique store, Derrik and Lydia had ‘killed’ a zombie dentist and had already left the Chinese temple for the hotel. They were planning to announce the eliminated team during the filming of a traditional Malay dinner we were to attend together later in the evening.

  Our clothes from the Eg-car were returned to us by one of the crew and we were told to change in the next room. Then we were led to a shuttle bus that drove us to our hotel on the outskirts of the Chinatown district.

  Both Jamie and I were listless and exhausted from the day’s events. All I wanted to do was get to our room and crash out for a few hours. The crewmember who escorted us back, told us that we were to remain in our hotel room until called onto the set that was being erected in the pool area of the hotel for our traditional Malay dining vignette. He hinted that there would be someone guarding the lobby to prevent us from wandering out of the hotel. I could care less. I was too fatigued to go anywhere except to bed.

  Our hotel was of the mid-range sort, on the cheaper side but clean. There were two twin beds in our room and I fell onto the first one right as I walked in and into unconsciousness.

  Sometime later, I awoke to Jamie sitting on my bed shaking me awake. I still had my shoes and clothes on from the day and, wow, did I reek of stress sweat. As I tried to shake off the sleep and as I lay there I realized that Jamie was wearing her day’s clothes as well and, wow, she stank too.

  “Abi, you have to take a look at this,” She had her tiny handphone and was trying to show me a video playing out on the little thumbnail screen.

  “Huh? What? What time is it?” I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  “It’s nearly six. You’ve been asleep for two hours. Now here me out and don’t judge me until I’m finished with what I have to say. I snuck out of the hotel after you fell asleep to make a few phone calls. I know, I know, don’t look at me like that. I needed a sympathetic and objective ear so I called Roberto back home. I managed to slip into a café across the street undetected and was talking to him about this fake zombie nonsense we’d got ourselves into. Then I couldn’t leave because there was too much commotion outside of our hotel because the crew was shifting our rally cars from A’Famosa. As I waited for a chance to get back, I watched the rest of the teams get dropped off by the shuttle bus. Interestingly though, there was no sign of Kip, Sheldon and Gemma. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw a large lorry driving towards Chinatown that had Cera Automotive written on its side.

  Curiosity set in, so I left the café out of the side entrance, grabbed a headscarf from a shop next door as a disguise and decided to follow the lorry to see what was what.”

  She leaned over to the nightstand between our two beds and took a sip from a cup of tepid water sitting there without a doily, staining the cheap bare wood underneath.

  “Remember when Kip said we only had an hour to use Chinatown as a closed set? Well, it was two hours later and they still had the road blocks up! Only this time, they had triple the number of police manning the blockade. Sheldon was up to something in there, I knew he was. But there was no way I could get by the police, so I returned to the hotel and went to the rooftop to see what I could see,” she took another sip of the water.

  “It wasn’t difficult to spot the lorry parked at the front of Jonker Street near where we had to park those stupid eco-cars. I could make out Kip and Sheldon standing on top of one of the buildings with four cameramen manning four large cameras. There were people milling about in the street wearing Cera hazmat suits whom I hadn’t seen before, maybe they were the local crew Sheldon told us about, and they were unloading the lorry. And guess what they were unloading?”

  I was only half listening, steaming over Jamie’s recklessness.

  Did she want us to be disqualified? We could be thrown out of the race for her antics. When she was finished telling me her little story, I was going to take that tiny handphone of hers and throw it out the window.

  She was still waiting for me to say something, “Go on, guess!”

  I huffed angrily, “More cars? More cameras? What?”

  She hesitated, knowing the answer would shock me. She whispered, “Berjalan penyakit. Real live zombies.”

  Jamie sat back, satisfied by look of confusion and alarm on my face when I realized the implications of what she was saying.

  I grabbed her handphone and brought it close to my face to get a closer look at the video on the screen. The video was surprisingly sharp for such a tiny phone and from a distance of about city two blocks away. There was the lorry and six people dressed in the same Cera hazmat suits. They were unloading, no, herding about two dozen people out of a trailer with Cera Automotive clearly printed on its side. The people were a mixture of men and women, young and old, untidily dressed in dirty jeans, torn t-shirts, wrinkly grimy business suits, soiled pajamas and tatters of traditional Malay dresses. Even from the distance of the hotel, you could see their bloated arms, gaping black mouths and red eyes and the dazed shuffle of the infected.

  Two crewmen in hazmat suits climbed inside the trailer and were using brooms to push the Berjalan penyakit onto the road below. As they fell off the back of the lorry, they began to pile up on top of each other in a mass of twitching arms and legs. Once the lorry was empty, the crewmen stood back and waited until the Berjalan penyakit stood up. Like automatons they stood there in their group, not even trying to wander off. Maybe they were trying to get their bearings after the long drive.

  Jamie paused the video for a moment and said, “This part is incredible. You’re not going to believe your eyes.”

  The small crowd of Berjalan penyakit were standing there huddled close together. Two of the crewmen slipped into one of the side shops, stripped off their hazmat suits and came back out in nothing but their underwear and boots. They then proceeded to taunt the infected, yelling, hooting and, of all things, mooning them. Moaning in hunger, the infected began to shuffle toward the nearly naked men. Three other crewmen still wearing their hazmat suits stepped in between the taunters and infected and started filming the Berjalan penyakit as they crept towards the naked men. It was a slow process, but they got footage of the infected making their way along Jonker Street and then Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock. I’m
sure it looked from the camera perspective that the infected were chasing them down the street. But the infected were actually quite slow. As we watched them trying to catch the two half-naked men, it became obvious that these zombies were in a sorry state. It was sad really. “You’d have to be a moron to get bit by one of those sluggish fiends,” I muttered as I stared at the screen.

  The crewmen were professional and efficient with the entire process. When the infected arrived at each of the buildings we’d used for our fake zombie kills, the three crewmen with brooms separated one of the infected and push it gently inside.

  Jamie stopped the video.

  “You see what they’re doing? They’re going to edit this footage and splice it in with today’s events. Picture it. It will look as if these zombies chased us through Chinatown. But that’s not all. Watch this last part.”

  She started the video again.

  Jamie had the camera focused on the broken glass doors of Abdul’s Antiques where we filmed our ‘kill’. She sped up the video skipping about five minutes of nothing until there was movement. Felix was the first to step out of the shop holding his camera and a large translucent bio-containment bag with two cricket bats covered in green goo inside. He waited out on the sidewalk as two crewmen about our height and weight dressed in hazmat suits with those elephant gas masks dragged out the mangled and beaten body of the infected that was pushed inside the shop earlier. They hauled him out by his feet and slopped him onto the curb next to the street. Jamie zoomed the camera in on the body and that was when I realized they’d redressed him in the shopkeeper’s clothing.

  She sped the video forward and I witnessed three more bodies being dragged out of buildings and laid out like garbage on the curb. The last scene she filmed was the lorry truck being driven slowly along Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock where the remaining Berjalan penyakit were herded back inside and the corpses loaded in after them.

  She clicked the phone closed.

  I sat there stunned feeling my stomach drop to the floor as I realized what I’d just witnessed.

  Sheldon was altering the ‘reality’ show to make it look as if the zombie threat was much greater and that we were in a state peril and we, the teams, killed real infected people in those Chinatown shops.

  “We’re being set up. We have to tell the others,” I said.

  “Oh right and be disqualified? That’s the last thing we’re going to do,” Jamie shut the power off on the phone and slipped it into her backpack. “I’ll tell you what were going to do, we’re going to play the game and we’re going to win the million dollars and if Sheldon tries any funny business like eliminating us early for some reason, this is our leverage to stay in the game. We can expose him and this production for what it is. There’s no ‘reality’ in this reality show and they’re exploiting the contagion and the poor people infected by it. With this footage, if need be, we can bring the whole production crashing down, get him fired, embarrass Tua Kee Media and still become world famous as whistleblowers,” she kissed me on my cheek, “Now get ready for the dinner, we have to be downstairs and ready for filming in an hour.”

  ******

  We left the hotel room dressed in conservative attire, which consisted of long sleeve mauve shirts and matching trousers made from a very light silk blend and covered in traditional gold embroidery. We even had these neat little mauve slippers made from the same cut of fabric. We’d taken turns braiding each other’s hair into long single braids topped with a purple lotus flower we’d stolen from a bouquet sitting on a table in the hallway outside our room. Even fully covered as we were, the two of us exuded youthful sex appeal.

  Did I mention that I really enjoy the Malay people and their culture? I realize that through all of my ranting about IHS and the TV show that I may have failed to mention how much I appreciate socializing and taking part in traditional Malay events. Malays are an easy-going, relaxed and warm people. Having been invited to similar dining situations, it’s my opinion that these qualities really shine through in their cooking. I knew from experience that this Malay traditional dinner would be laid down on carpets on the floor. Sure enough, there was the dinner set, hammered together by the crewmen earlier in the day that consisted of one room made to look like a wooden hut on stilts with carpets and silver plates and bowls set up in a decorative fashion on the floor. The hut was built with only three walls like a movie set, the opening facing the hotel to maximize light and give the cameramen a place to set up their gear close to the electrical outlets on the walls.

  The teams were ushered into the hut and positioned around a large square piece of cloth called a ‘saprah’, which is similar to a table cloth but made for floor dining. Once all of the team members were situated around the cloth and Sheldon was happy with the overall look of the scene, Gemma was led over to sit at the head of the saprah, facing directly into the stationary cameras.

  Kip came up to the set and explained to us that this was more of a background scene to show us experiencing Malaysian culture and that, while they wouldn’t be recording conversation, it was necessary that we eat and talk to each other and make as if we were having a good time.

  “Action.”

  We oohed and awed as hired servers in traditional clothing danced into the scene, bringing all of the dishes out at the same time in gold leaf and shiny silver trays and bowls. We made idle chit-chat, and watched the display of color and motion, knowing that it didn’t matter what we said so long as we looked as though we were enthralled in the action. Even after everything that had happened, and even with the cameras and the crew staring at us intently, I was enjoying myself. It was actually quite beautiful. It was one of those moments that stick in your memory. To this day, whenever I recall the events of that reality show, the Malay dinner is one of the first events that come to mind.

  When the servers were finished with their dance, we were told we could begin eating.

  There were no utensils, of course, so we ate with our right hand as was the custom. I was sitting next to Norris who seemed pretty adept at eating with his fingers, probably because he ate a lot of food with his hands, I thought, and not because he was practiced in the tradition. Quaid, on the other hand, had a slight grimace on his face as he tried to pick up a mouthful of rice and mutton covered in some reddish gravy with his two fingers and thumb as we were all doing, slopping most of what he had in his hand down his cheek. It was not one of his most shining moments and was uploaded onto the blooper’s section of the website that night and received a viewer rating of four and half stars and half a million hits.

  Both Jamie and I sat with our legs folded to the side, which was good manners during a Malay dinner. Gemma and Lydia, however, were sitting with their legs crossed in front like the men and Lydia was vulgarly trying to angle her legs in such a way as to show off her calves for the camera. Lydia had sat by Gemma on purpose and was trying to cozy up to her, hee-hawing through mouthfuls of prawns and crab, the only things she would eat from the spread set out before us because, back in Singapore, they were the most expensive items on the menu. Derrik quietly ate and stared at Gemma’s partially exposed ample cleavage. Meng, Esther, Ted and Ahmed did what they seemed to do best, blend into the background. I told Jamie this and she laughed and laughed.

  We finished the meal and were instructed to continue sitting around the table while Gemma announced the losers of today’s events.

  The elimination was short and to the point. Gemma took a red Cera card and announced, “Ted and Ahmed, you’ve been eliminated, please go to your rooms and pack your bags. That’s it, Folks. Thank you for watching. Here are some scenes from the next episode.”

  It was no surprise to us that Ted and Ahmed were going home. Ever since the embarrassing showing at the mini go-cart track, Ted’s heart just didn’t seem in race any longer. The two of them were very cordial, smiling and joking a little more before being led off the set by two cameramen, armed tonight with revolvers. They disappeared into the lift, presumably to an aw
aiting car below to be driven back to Johor and put in lockdown in the hotel where Yvonne and Tucker were awaiting the end of the show so that they could return to Singapore.

  Chapter 6

  THE next morning, I awoke to Jamie curled up against me on my small twin bed. I sat there silently for awhile, not wanting to move, trying to draw as much pleasure from the intimacy and create a permanent imprint on my mind of her legs against mine, her peaceful breaths and the scent of her hair in the glow filtering through the cracks between the hotel’s draperies.

  After about ten minutes, she began to stir.

  I gently nudged her awake.

  She turned and smiled.

  “I was having some terrible dreams last night and needed a warm body to calm them,” She said in an adorable husky morning voice.

  We got out of bed and I turned on the TV while Jamie went into the bathroom to get ready for the day. I flipped through Malay serial dramas and cartoons dubbed in Bahasa. Near the top of the dial I found a news channel and, of course, they were talking about IHS.

  “Berjalan penyakit Berjalan penyakit Berjalan penyakit,” Blabber, blabber, blabber. It was enough to make my ears ache. From what I could gather from the video and the bits of Malay I did understand, they were saying that the contagion had now claimed at least forty thousand victims in the northern peninsula and individual cases of infection were now being reported along the east coast as far south as Desaru. Since yesterday, when it was announced that WHO paratroopers would be deployed in the country, a mass exodus of Malaysians had begun heading south towards Singapore and Indonesia. There were photos of corpses of infected who’d succumbed to exposure littering the streets of the cities and north of Kuala Lumpur. Occasionally, a camera would cut to an infected wandering aimlessly among the dead, but from what I could see, the ones that were still alive and posed any danger to the healthy were few and far between. I think the tropical weather had something to do with the quickly dwindling numbers, limiting their life span to a few short days as heat stroke or dehydration did them in. Yes, now that one there was clearly sunburned. The camera zoomed in on his face, which was bright red with blisters covering his cheeks, nose and forehead. His lips were cracked from lack of water. The cameraman panned back to get the reporter in the shot who took as step back and tumbled over a corpse in the road and began to crawl along the ground, the camera’s view shifting up into the sky then settling back on the ground towards the sunburned zombie. The noise of the reporter falling must have caught the zombie’s attention because he started lumbering towards the camera and the video was abruptly cut off.