Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“What if you’re ordered to dispose of me after I’m milked dry?”

“I gave my word to keep you alive.”

“Over your daughter’s life?”

John pauses in calculation, all the while checking his rear-view mirror and veering evasively. “I’ll work something out, Landon. I promise.”

“Oh, hell,” Landon exclaims wretchedly. “That’s what she said too!”

A sudden jolt yanks his head backwards, and with it comes a crash of metal and plastic. He strains over his shoulder just in time to catch a tailing vehicle drive headlong into their bumper. The impact briefly sends the rear of their car skidding.

They are ascending a highway ramp. From the pitched roofs of waterfront condominiums on the right and the luminous blue observation wheel on the left Landon knows they are now travelling west along the East Coast highway. Another bump sends the car swerving dangerously close to the rushing barriers on the left. They smell burning rubber.

“What the fu—” Landon whips back front. “Why didn’t you see that?”

“Watching it the whole time,” says John. “It’s been tailing us since we left.”

Landon braces his arms against the dashboard. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Didn’t want to frighten you.”

John is leaning so far forwards that his chin is almost touching the steering wheel. The tailing vehicle—a large pick-up truck— accelerates and pulls abreast, and Landon finds Hannah in its driver seat, her predatory gaze bearing down on them.

The truck suddenly swings left and ploughs into their side, sending the side-view mirror spinning off into the night. The right wheel protests in a scream of grinding metal.

“Hold on to something.” John swings his car right and brings it hard into the truck. Hannah counters the move by turning into John and equalising the force of the impact.

John wrestles the steering but fails to keep the car in the lane as another jarring impact sends it into the side barriers. Metal grinds concrete and sparks fly beautifully. Another jolt shatters the window and John cowers at the shower of crystalline chips. “You get the point now?” he snarls at Landon, his expression now livid and ferociously leonine, like a rabid vampire. “This her way of working something out?”

“Just shut up and drive!”

Hannah pulls the truck farther apart to gain momentum, and bears it down on their car so hard that the impact tilts John’s car and leaves it limping momentarily on two wheels before falling back on its suspension. Once more the truck peels away and swings round for another collision. John turns the wheel this way and that to counteract the centrifugal forces. But this time the impact drives the car up the barrier and crushes its left corner. The steering becomes sluggish as blow has cripples the right wheel.

“Roll down your window!” John instructs and leans hard into his seat.

“What for?”

“Just do it, you idiot!”

For the third time Hannah banks away, even farther this time.

The traffic around them has lightened and an empty lane now separates them. In the abundance of manoeuvring space the truck begins its approach, turning so sharply it faces John’s car in an almost headlong position.

John abandons the steering, hugs his head and ducks towards Landon, forcibly pressing him down sideways into his seat. The truck’s one functioning headlight floods the interior of the car, and the next instant everything explodes in a terrific din. The side of the car caves in upon impact. Vision blurs and jaws rattle.

The jolt alone would have snapped their necks if they weren’t lying across their seats. Arthur feel the crush of the bonnet as it strikes the low concrete barrier. Grey dust billows through the shattered windscreen and fills his nostrils. A nauseating sensation of weightlessness comes after, and the wrecked car sails through the air and plummets towards the Marina channel.

TANGLIN BARRACKS NESTLED in the tropical fauna of Mount Harriet. Trails of yellow dirt ran between clusters of thistles and led up to white oblong blocks huddling in the shade of overhanging roofs. Between them coconut palms rustled in a warm, dry breeze. Hedges of bougainvillea garlanded tiny lawns furnished with wicker chairs and tables. Everything exuded a lovely, bucolic charm.

The westering sun shone at an angle. It was almost five in the afternoon. At this hour officers usually occupied the lawns, reclining on long chairs after tiffin. This afternoon however, the lawns were empty.

The pyramidal roof of the Drill Hall loomed near; a row of columns, thin as matchsticks, lined its perimeter. Anton was driving his mule towards it and towing a cart laden with cigarettes: Army Clubs, Kenilworths, Black Cats, Smith’s Glasgow Mixtures. Anything the Tommies loved. Anton knew the regular supplies to the barracks had been disrupted by the Lunar New Year festivities and the Tommies needed their fags as if the Great War depended on it. He threw his voice above the shrill of insects, lyrically declaiming the brands of cigarettes in hope of invoking some business.

But the compound did not respond.

He went a little farther, peddling the brands in an oratorical chant and passing one silent block after another. He was approaching the detention barracks that supposedly held German internees—mostly sailors from a German cruiser which had been put out of action earlier by an Australian warship. And there at last, he found a soldier perched on the edge of a platform at a guard post.

He leapt from the cart, took two cases of Kenilworth cigarettes and went over, only to present them to a face mutilated by a ghastly bullet wound. The bullet had obliquely entered the right temple and come out through the spot where his nose would’ve been. Dollops of brain matter fell from it and onto the dead soldier’s crotch.

Anton didn’t scream. He just stood gawking at the grisly sight. When he mustered sufficient courage to advance another hundred yards towards the cricket ground he found two more dead soldiers at another guard post. On the portico steps of a nearby stilted bungalow he discovered the mangled body of a man, presumably a drill instructor by his uniform, his back and nape riddled with the raw, almond-shaped wounds of bayonets.

In a staff office of the detention barracks, papers fluttered under a whirring electric desk fan and coffee had gone stale in their tin mugs. An officer laid face-down on his bullet-splintered desk with his head shot open. By the cricket ground itself, Anton surveyed a field stippled with corpses still in their white exercise attire.

Terror finally stole its way into him. He struck the mule hard on its hind and sent it kicking and braying down the dusty track. He whipped the wretched creature mercilessly until it brought him to a wider avenue of jambu trees and angsanas. The discovery of a small crowd ahead brought relief and restored equanimity, and Anton slowed the mule.

There was a gharry with its wheels wedged in a roadside ditch, its side stippled with bullet holes. Pulling abreast of it, Anton saw that in it were the corpses of a European man and a lady festering in the afternoon heat. The lady’s skin was a ghastly grey; her white muslin blouse matted in dark old blood. There were five more corpses laid out in a row just beside the gharry. Anton saw that one of them had a large, bald head that shone like a pearl in the daylight.

The small crowd of townsfolk converged upon the scene and two Malay constables moved in to deter looting. They stood between the gharry and the crowd and rested their fists on their hips, as if undecided on what to do with the corpses.

Anton drove up to them. “Apa berlaku sini?”

One of them, a handsome smooth-faced young man with a light moustache, replied rather proficiently in English. “Sepoys. They went amok and start shooting all the ang mohs they see, young or old also shoot. Sangat terok lah . I heard they even shoot their CO.”