Zombie Fever: Outbreak Read Online Free PDF Page A

Eg-car because the truck was really too big for me to handle. I had to pull the seat as far forward as possible and still my toes were barely touching the pedals.
    The SUV chugged down the ramp and I fell into formation behind the caravan of Cera cars. Jamie was eight vehicles ahead. We pulled out onto the street and into Singapore rush hour traffic.
    I was a bit miffed considering how ill-timed this commencement seemed to be. We could have waited another hour and left the dealership past peak hours, avoiding the crawling stop-and-go traffic that plagues Singapore’s streets in the morning.
    But apparently Sheldon was in a hurry to get over the border. Unbeknownst to us, he had received a call from a friend working at the Singapore Immigration Checkpoint that morning. The friend whispered conspiratorially that Singapore was going to close the border with Malaysia later in the day as a precautionary measure to ensure the infection wouldn’t spread into our glorious nation state.
    Sheldon had to stick to the production budget submitted to his Tua Kee Media superiors. If the crew and teams couldn’t get across the border that day, Tua Kee Media would cancel his show blaming cost overruns and maybe even fire him for delaying the production. The studio was very cutthroat in that way. Meng told us at one of the photo shoots that that’s how Sheldon got the job of head producer for the reality television department when his predecessor lost control of costs on one of his shows. Supposedly, the filming of a ‘fat camp’ weight loss show had to be put on hold when one of the severely overweight contestants died of heat stroke while running an obstacle course chasing down a pandan cake tied atop a radio controlled car in the midday equatorial sun. There was a payout of thirty thousand dollars for the death of the contestant. The producer was blamed, then fired and Sheldon was hired to take over. Setting the pace for his career at Tua Kee Media, he frugally wrapped up the program under what remained of the show’s budget.
    The caravan snaked along the CTE expressway north towards the TPE expressway then onto the SLE expressway to the Woodlands checkpoint. Singapore’s complex system of streets and expressways were designed to make every corner of the small nation-state more accessible, so more roads had been built than if it were designed on a grid. Because of this, the distance from the Cera dealership to the border may be less than twenty kilometers as the crow flies but takes a nearly an hour to drive, even while heading in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic.
    But Singapore is like that; the perception of time and space somehow seems different here and a lot of that time and space is consumed during the in-betweens of getting from A to B.
    We moved into the far left lane of cars at the border crossing to await passport inspection, first from the Singaporean side and then the Malaysian side.
    I set the radio to scan to kill time. Singaporean radio stations of various languages and dialects flitted by in five second intervals, from Hindi dance music and Cantonese opera to wannabe English-speaking morning zoo types and the monotone of twenty-four hour local news. Reflecting the interests of the population, the news stations were focused on daily routines and events within Singapore. If there was a story that didn’t affect Singapore directly, then it wasn’t necessary to carry on about it when there were more immediate events happening, like a lorry accident on the PIE or an announcement of an en-bloc sale of an iconic but aging condominium estate in Tanjong Pagar. IHS was barely mentioned. As the stations automatically rotated around the dial, Malay channels would occasionally break through. I could speak some Malay thanks to my mother, but not enough to follow the quick pace of their speech. However, I did make out the term ‘Berjalan penyakit’ on a Malay news station repeated several times in highly agitated