Bellatrix rammed the door open with an iron coat stand. It wasn’t like the neighbors would hear. She was the only one left on her floor.
She knew where to look. Xin Hui had always kept tinned food in the lower right-hand kitchen cabinet. Everything in the fridge was rotten, and bugs had got into the rice. Only the tins were intact. It took Bellatrix two trips to carry them all back to her flat.
It had felt like a dream when the whole world began dying. Bellatrix had barricaded herself into her flat just outside Kuala Lumpur, watching the mobs and riots on TV. Then the plague had gone airborne. The news, while it was still on, had shown people clutching their throats. Twitching long after their hearts had stopped.
Bellatrix put Xin Hui’s tins with the rest of her hoard in the spare room. Mackerel in tomato sauce; vegetarian fo tian chiang; maybe pork luncheon meat, though she couldn’t read the traditional characters. There was very little Malay or Indian food in Bellatrix’s hoard because, as far as she knew, no Malays or Indians had lived in this condo. There had been lots of condos like that.
She hadn’t felt terribly close to her neighbors. She wasn’t local, couldn’t speak Cantonese. But at least it had been a community. Now it was gone.
Everyone had fled once the dead began to walk. Many had driven north to less populated areas of the peninsula. But the only real safety was up high, where the undead could not climb: Whenever a band of them began to mount stairs, they would inexplicably start tearing one another to pieces. From 20 floors up, Bellatrix saw them roaming the parking lots and streets. Sooner or later, she would have to go down.
The stairwell opened from her tower to the pick-up/drop-off area in the avenue in front of the building. Bellatrix stood a few steps above the bottom, out of reach of the undead. Before her, more than a hundred of them milled nearly shoulder to shoulder, swaying and shrieking.
From her window, she’d seen that a small clan of survivors had established quarters in the business hotel across the street. She had no idea how she would make it there alive. There were just too many of them.
She heard a scream. A human cry of terror.
From the gap between the hotel and the scuba gear emporium, two human survivors darted out. Both Malays. A petite woman in hijab was in the lead, looking over her shoulder, unaware that she was barreling into a gruesome death. The undead in the avenue caught her and, with petrifying squeals, began to rip into her flesh with their teeth.
The heavyset man running behind her, with a crowd of freakishly tall undead stumbling right at his heels, tried to backtrack into the alley. He was too late. The undead in the avenue lunged.
But not at him. They lunged past him, swarming over the taller undead and ripping them apart in a feeding frenzy.
The man, in shock at the sight of his companion’s death, stood untouched among the pressing horde . And Bellatrix realized something peculiar: From her vantage above the crowd, their heads were all level, nearly geometrically so: none higher, none lower. Likewise the Malay man—he and the undead around him looked exactly the same height. It took Bellatrix a moment to comprehend what she was seeing, but there was no denying it.
Then she saw Xin Hui stumble past. Or what had been Xin Hui. In life, a sprightly and vivacious woman. She and Bellatrix had often shared clothing and laughed over how they were, coincidentally, precisely the same height and dress size.
Bellatrix descended the last few steps and began to weave her way through the shuffling throng. The stench of putrefaction was intense, but the undead simply grunted and stood aside when she brushed against them. She understood now. Among these undead, she was safe.
