a scribble. short scribble.

JOHOR BAHRU. MALAYSIA.

[ He takes a long drag off his cigarette and looks blearily at the signboard tagged with pictures and pre-war maps.]

Wayne : It’s a lack of effort from the country to control the outbreak at the very start that caused this to happen. Look at things over the causeway. The issues over there are long dead and it’s thriving again. Not this shit piece of land that is called a country though.

But the government did despatch troops to the southern states to restore order.

Did they? All we could see was the trucks coming in to pick up their own people and simply shooting and picking the rest who was just trying to get away too. We were left on our bloody own, the towns and the city was left to the rot while they took their own people to the northern states . And we ain’t like the west, we don’t have the guns. We don’t have the mindset of people who would rise to defend their own homes at the first sign of trouble. Just a pack of refugees struggling to get themselves into the north or down south across the sea. All gunned down at the border though, none of them stood a chance.

[ Angrily takes another drag and unpins some photos from the signboard. The pictures show masses and masses of bodies piled on roads. One clearly shows a women holding a child to her bosom. Both showed signs of gunshot wounds.]

Just look at them. Our own government and they did this to us. This is not a bloody commie state, no this is a fucking democratic country. Bloody fucking cunts. All the way up the country, struggling through the roads and the jungle just to be gunned down at the gates of the so – called safety zones. Little wonder the country doesn’t want them back.

But Singapore did put down the refugees at the bridges too.

I know. They even blew up the bridges on the fifth day after the outbreak too. Self centered bastards. All for their own necks and none more for the rest. You can see how bad things got here. Barely this first week and we were cut off from help and support all around. Just the milling hordes streaming down from the north and the cold sea on our back. All of us lost relatives, loved ones to the plague. My family was in the first makeshift forts along the Skudai section of the North – South highway. They never stood a chance when the hordes first appear. We thought it would be secure.

[ He slowly leaned back against the chair and kept quiet for a while. His fingers shivered for a while before brushing away a tear against his cheek.]

I still remember the screams of the women and children at the forts when we got there. They never stood a chance. The image is still there, the sea of bodies and the burning forts. How could we have been so careless? How could we. What are we to build back on if the future is dead?

Just ashes. All ashes now.