The Last Server

by H. J. Pang

  There was nothing a twenty-man militia could do against a war party of two hundred. And parangs and hunting rifles were no match to armaments that would put any police department to shame. The village of Shumai was razed and pillaged, and those who weren’t killed in the raid were led away in ropes and chains. Greg knew then the fight was lost. He would have fled, but he had a family to take care of. They would wait for their chance to escape.

  That chance was lost when they were led into the mines of Teluk Ramunia. Deep in the tunnels, the only way out was death. Greg was the only one known to escape alive.

  BENEATH THE NATION

  NOBODY LIKED USING the MRT system. With its overcrowding, constant breakdowns, and the repetitive announcements via PA system, it served only to remind commuters what they were missing above ground. Greg had thought he was done with all that after The Storm, but some things always came back to haunt him. He threw the beam of his torch around. The glare of the light reflected back by the plastic-lined wall almost blinded him. Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of dripping water. Walking down the dim entranceways, old billboards long out of date still remained on the walls. One of them showcased happy children holding packets of some obscure brand of juice Greg hadn’t had the foresight to try. Now he never would. Some of them had been smashed in by scavengers looking for fuses and light fittings. A picture of an unpopular local artiste had been scrawled on, though he wasn’t sure whether it had been vandalised before or after The Storm.

  But then, some things never changed. Four ticketing machines, previously faced with impatient queues of people, now stood forlornly at the far wall, unused and unwanted. The glitter of coins and one-way tickets lined the floor before them, useless now. Made of plated steel, the newer coins weren’t even worth the price of scrap. Making his way past the smashed-in control booth, Greg stepped his way carefully down the escalator leading to the train platforms, his boots giving out a clunk every step of the way.

  A rustle to the left side of the platform caused him to turn quickly, the beam of his light flickering across the glass of the doors. Probably rats. Greg stepped over to a map of the train network and peered at it, wiping off the dust with a gloved hand.

  He knew he couldn’t completely trust what Uncle Ong had said after his cover was blown, but he didn’t doubt that the 418 HQ was at Fusionopolis. After all, he’d heard it straight from the most reliable of sources. All that remained was how he was going to get there.

  Greg was now on the Thomson-East Coast Line, so he could walk along the stations and transfer to the Circle Line at Caldecott, and take the route to one-north station, which lay directly under Fusionopolis. This was barring any cave-ins along the way, of course. From his own experience, nothing ever went according to plan. Alternatively, he could transfer one station away at Woodlands station, then go along the North East Line to Jurong East Interchange … no, that wouldn’t work. The majority of that line was above-ground, and likely to have crumbled since The Storm. And anyway, it defeated the purpose of him trying to travel underground in the first place. The topside could be far more dangerous than he knew, and he wouldn’t accomplish his quest if he were to be hit by random sniper fire. A pointless end to a most difficult task.

  And so that left only one route. Hopefully, he would be there before day’s end. “You want go where, sia?”

  Greg almost jumped out of his skin, but his clothes must have kept it in place. The weak beam of his flashlight jerked erratically as he fumbled in search of the voice’s source. A dark-skinned figure sat with his back against a nearby pillar. Because of the debris obscuring the guy, Greg hadn’t noticed him. Despite being covered with dust and grime like everyone else he had met, the speaker was dressed in what looked like a tattered red shirt and black pants, and Greg would be damned if that wasn’t the old uniform of an SMRT service officer, complete with name tag. Next to the guy was a couple of empty snack packets and plastic bottles.

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded Greg, composing himself quickly, gripping hard on his unsheathed parang. Twice he had been caught with his guard down, and the hard thumps of his heart reminded him not to do that again. Damn, that guy could have had a knife in his back in that time he took to examine the map. “And what are you doing here?”

  The guy frowned, shading his eyes from the beam. “Can don’t shine light. Very bright leh …”

  Greg reached out his free hand and lifted the man by his front, slamming him against the wall. The bang echoed across the whole station, and the beam of the light shone nearer into the vagrant’s eyes. He wriggled weakly, but it was of little use. He was much lighter than Greg had expected; malnutrition was a far too common problem in the wasteland.

  “I ask a fucking question, you give a fucking answer!” yelled Greg. He was past caring if there was anyone else nearby. “Are you 418? Tell me now!”

  The man blinked several times. Wondering if the guy was a retard, or just plain stalling, Greg turned and flung him hard across the platform, where he skidded upon the shards of concrete. Greg stepped after him with his parang raised.

  “418? No, but the people upstairs are,” said the man, pointing upwards with a confused expression. “Why you don’t like 418? Ya, I know they laugh at me, but they also give me food and water. Sometimes even a bit of nasi lemak.” He got up, brushing his shirt out with his hands.

  “My name Muthu. I MRT station manager.”

  “Don’t be stupid. The MRT system was destroyed six years ago, along with everything else,” growled Greg. “Stop wasting my time, dumbshit. Why are you here?”

  “MRT not dead. Just asleep. Waiting for the time to wake up,” sang Muthu. “So I wait here for passengers, make sure they wait behind the yellow line. Move in, bags downs, shuffle to the door! And when they’re done …”

  Unbelievable. The world after The Storm was a brutal place. And yet, retards still found a way to survive after all that. Ignoring the Bag Down Benny ditty Muthu was now singing, Greg found a piece of rebar and pried one of the platform doors open. He lowered himself slowly onto the tracks, where darkness and musty air enveloped him. The chattering of the imbecile followed after, a haunting tune that raised the hair on his arms.

  The tunnels of the mines were dark. And from the very minute the prisoners from the war party’s raid had arrived, the pecking order of the mine’s hierarchy was established.

  The mine foreman, a man Greg remembered only as Towkay, had walked before the snivelling prisoners, twirling a revolver in his hands. Stripped down to the waist, his tattoos extended all the way to his eyes. Holding his pants up was a chain that clinked with every step.

  “I am called Towkay, and this whole place is my house!” Towkay had announced. He needed no loudspeaker. “And in my house, we have rules! Rule number one is we don’t allow weakness!” And right before everyone, he shot a skinny prisoner in front of him. Everyone jerked back, and tried scrambling away, only to be shoved back by the guards.

  “Rule number two, you work or die!” This time, he fired at another victim, a limping man. Greg had fought to stay calm as his children and wife cried. He couldn’t tell them to be quiet, or Towkay might turn his attention to him.

  “And rule number three, you listen to us!” Towkay finished his speech by pointing the gun at the group. “Does anyone else need to be shot?”

  Everybody had then been forced into different lines. What-ever remained of their old selves were confiscated, including their clothes. Greg later saw one of the guards wearing his shirt and jeans. They were issued a random assortment of shoes, smock, pants and belt. They rarely fitted, and Greg was lucky enough to swap his with another man. An unwitting prisoner tried to tell the issuing guard his shoes didn’t fit, only to be smashed with the butt of a rifle. They were herded deep into the tunnels of the mine, where the darkness swallowed them. None of them, except a rare few, ever saw daylight again.

  The ramblings of the lunatic followed Greg for some time as he walked through the gloo
my tunnels, and he counted himself lucky that no one was around to hear it. The last thing he needed were a couple of rogues tracking him down. After The Storm, no one hesitated to kill for even a gulp of water.

  Walking towards the dark hole that was the MRT tunnel fringed with the fading light from his torch, he could hear the occasional clanks and thuds from far away, and already he could feel a quiet eeriness creeping over him. An old MRT wreck stood in his way ahead, its emergency door open on the tracks. This was one of the newer automated trains. Climbing through the exit, it was all he could do to walk through the passageway of metal and glass, the narrow expanse of space pressing against him. The terror of the mine’s confines came back to him, and Greg tried to look forward.

  Remarkably, much of the train tunnels and trains were still in almost pre-Storm condition. Being underground must have helped, with the electromagnetic fields having passed through the surface structures instead. The MRT stations would thus have made good homes for people, if it weren’t for the fact that the triads would sooner enslave people than live up to their purported principles. But these trains were practically bare of any human habitation. Sure, there weren’t any belongings around, but that could always have been a result of looting. The raised gate Greg himself entered from said that much. He plodded on through the train, and fell back onto the tracks. The other stations along this line were otherwise insignificant, and he passed them by without incident. He would have stopped to raid the stations for anything of use, but he had to make good time while it was still daylight. By the time he got to Caldecott, Greg could feel the long-familiar pull on his stomach. He checked the clock he had taken. It was now 3:26pm. He hadn’t eaten since before dawn, when he managed to steal the goreng pisang from a 418 checkpoint. Just a few more stations, then he’ll stop for a bite. He had to make these rations last till tomorrow, at least. Greg knew he had to reach Fusionopolis before day’s end. Otherwise, the discovery of his handiwork at the checkpoint would potentially alert 418 HQ, making it harder to get into.

  The newer interchange stations on the Circle and Thomson-East Coast Lines had cavernous hallways between the transiting lines, and Caldecott was no exception. Greg had likened them to the underground military bunker he had been in just eight years back while inspecting stored ammo. Here, the chaos of The Storm was more apparent. Someone had driven a van through the escalator entrance of an MRT station, crashing it through the hallway. The van now lay forlornly in the hallway, a bare skeleton at the wheel. Short of being a last-ditch attempt to get into the station, the burned-out headlights and interior suggested the van was one of the few on the road when the geomagnetic storm occurred. The driver must have careened off the road as his electronic control system failed, only to find his vehicle crashing through the entrance to the underground MRT station. Long since collapsed by a mix of factors, the debris of the station entrance barely let in any light and air, and Greg started sweltering from the heat. With The Storm taking place in the wee hours of the morning, there weren’t supposed to be any passengers in the train lines. But the numerous discarded food and drink containers suggested that it had been used as a shelter at some point. Greg entered the control room with its dusty charts and controls, and found a bunch of keys. They probably only worked for this station, but some of them had to be master-keyed, meaning they would work on multiple doors. He found the direction of the track that would lead towards one-north station and walked through the dim hallways, back to the platforms that would take him to his destination.

  Greg remembered a time not so long ago. It had been December, two months before The Storm. Lee Ping had wanted to take the kids to a toy fair at Suntec City. With the weekend ERP, and so little parking lots, he’d decided not to drive. Jin and Mei made a big hoo-ha over not wanting to stand during the train journey. But that was how so many people got to work and school each day, and Greg wanted to teach them the lesson that not everyone was fortunate enough to have a car to be driven in.

  Strangely enough, the two kids enjoyed it. The twins had looked in amazement at the giant fans at Tampines station and noticed how much cleaner and shinier things looked on the Circle Line. Mei especially liked the glittering metal sculptures at Promenade station. She declared that she wanted to be an artist some day. The automated train system on the Circle Line had made Jin talk all day about wanting to be a programmer.

  Greg stopped in his tracks. Jin.

  Jin was the only last shred of his family that remained. The twins were due to start primary school a month later. Greg could still remember one of the questions Jin had asked him two days after the toy fair.

  “Pa, will I learn how computers work in school?” Unlike most kids, he didn’t play any of the Android or Apple application games. Rather, he always explored the source code in the settings, and once reformatted his mother’s phone by accident. Were it not for Greg, she would have killed him.

  “It’s not just in school that you learn things, son,” Greg had told him, as he worked through several army technical manuals on small arms. “Every time you seek to find out more, you’re always learning new things. It is only through never stopping that you truly understand how everything in the world works.”

  “Okay, Pa. Can I read whatever you’re reading?”

  “You can’t. Only army personnel are allowed to.”

  “Aww.”

  “When you join the army one day, then perhaps I’ll let you read them.”

  Jin and Mei had started school, only to have it cut short. On 15 February, The Storm happened. Some called it The Switchoff, on account of the near-total loss of electronic technology. Yet others called it The Second Fall of Singapore, referencing the very same day Singapore fell during World War II. But to Greg, it had resulted in the loss of his own world. His family. His home. All because the bloody triads saw fit to oppress everyone, using their violence and guns and damned ideology as an excuse for it. And now he had to make this damned journey, just because some triad admin couldn’t leave his family the hell alone, just to do some sick shit Greg knew nothing about.

  Greg yelled in frustration, kicking at the steel-framed glass door to the platform. The double- layered glass cracked slightly, but otherwise held, and the web of cracks across Greg’s reflection only served to infuriate him. He roared, delivering a spinning back kick to the glass, and only then did it shatter, the clatter of glass resounding across the platform.

  A howl came in the distance, and Greg stumbled, almost falling over in shock. The echo lingered across the vast expenses of the station as his eyes darted left and right. What the hell was that?

  He cursed, peering carefully out from the gap in the platform. All he could see was the darkness of the tunnel ahead. A rumble came from ahead, followed by the sound of shuffling. Greg waited for a while, and it was only when his neck ached before he advanced, parang out before him. Something told him he should turn back, and get away from this madness, but the alternative held no appeal for him. There was no way out at Caldecott, and who’s to say he wouldn’t get shot at once he was out in the open? At the very least, he could deal with any wild animals with his parang. He was starting to wish he hadn’t wasted a bullet on Uncle Ong, but for all his affableness, that guy deserved to die like the rest of the triad scum. Creeping forward in the dark tunnel, Greg turned off his torch. He crept closer and closer to the next station, praying that he would not find what he thought the sound was from.

  For a long time since the MRT network was built and repeatedly expanded upon, people believed that certain stretches of the MRT were haunted. Stories were abound about ghostly sightings in the dead of night, and they mostly centred around the stations which had been built on former gravesites. But there were also stories about ghostly sightings elsewhere, and phantom trains appearing at ungodly hours. Even in the 21st century, belief in the paranormal was a staple of Singaporean culture. There was even a whole book series on it, along with several knockoffs. Greg himself had read the books when he was a kid, and co
nsidered much of it creative fabrication. But no retelling of paranormal tales, no matter how gruesomely told, could have prepared Greg for this.

  Right behind the glass doors to Botanical Gardens station, Greg could see several figures crawling on all fours, snuffling and letting out growls. Around them were piles of what looked like fruit peels, leaves and parts of trees. Interspersed among the plant matter, however, were the unmistakable shape of bones. A femur could be mistaken for a stick, but there was no mistaking the characteristic prongs of a human ribcage, and the three gaping holes of a skull. The stench emitting from the station of rotting fruit, flesh and excrement assailed Greg, but what truly got his attention were those figures shuffling about the platform.

  They were people, but no longer people, if it came down to it. They were unmistakably human, still donning the rags of their former clothes. But their skin was of an unwashed pallor, with nails that had grown long and encrusted in the grime of the past few years. But it was their faces—taut muscles contorted in constant snarl, with eyes dilated beyond recognition—that showed they had lost all trace of their former selves. One of them bumped into another, and the other snarled, the two of them tumbling in a whirling, spitting mass of fury. Several of them gathered around and hissed, not unlike a pack of beasts.

  Greg felt sick. He didn’t know what these creatures were, but surely his nightmare couldn’t get any worse. Feral humans were something one saw only in the movies of old, not in real life. He scrabbled towards the direction of the next station, and stumbled, pushing himself back up with his hands. His feet scrabbled against the gravel of the sleepers, and that was when the problem started.

  One of the ferals turned quickly at the sound, spitting and hissing. Padding towards the glass door of the station, he slammed his hands up against the glass doors of the station, his gaze locking into Greg’s. Dressed in the tatters of a transit security guard’s uniform, the feral’s skin was covered with filth. Two jaws of cracked, yellow teeth showed as he snarled, breath misting the glass.