Cellular Chapter 1

Chapter 1 – Apocalypse

The Pulse struck on October 1^st at 3:03 P.M. Without warning, without remorse and utterly without mercy, it tore through the world like a plague, throwing aside all the petty barriers that humans have been battling over since time immemorial, and brought civilization to its knees.

John Nielsen had been a cheerful nineteen-year-old, on his computer finishing up his endless schoolwork when the Pulse hit. As the clock struck 3:03, John immediately heard a series of loud, disturbing crashes below his apartment block, metal on metal, metal on asphalt. Curious and shocked (more shocked), he got up and went to his window. And for a spilt second he was juxtaposed to war-torn Iraq.

The scene could very well be directly taken from a Michael Bay action movie, with lots of explosions, flames and flying vehicles. On the road just adjacent to his apartment block, John saw a heap of automobiles stacked on top of on another like a mound of flapjacks, flimsy yet stable at the same time, ringed by a circle (or close to a circular shape) of flames ignited by sparks of leaked gasoline. The top most vehicle – a white Mercedes Benz Kompressor 2000 – tottered precariously on the peak of that artificial summit, and its driver was trying his best to escape his displaced vehicle. From his perch on the 16^th floor of his apartment block, John felt something odd about the bloodied man squirming out of his damaged car: the man’s eyes were fixated on a woman standing around ten metres away from the mountain of cars, and they never left that woman even for a second. This is a bad time to be thinking about picking up girls, John thought, he can barely pick himself up. He allowed himself a small giggle.

At this point, another car came in to join the fray. As it neared the accident area, John expected to hear the screeching of its brakes, but those did not come. Instead, what he heard were screams of agony and shouts of panic as the red Mitubishi Lancer tore into the crowd of onlookers around the hill of vehicles, mowing many of them down as if they were grass. John witnessed all of this from the relative safety of his home, and stood there gaping in shock, horror, fear. He reached out for his cell phone, just as the driver of the Mercedes Benz lunged towards the woman he had been eyeing and ripped out her throat.

Now utterly speechless, John felt the blood in his hand withdraw, letting his cell phone fall to the tiled floor. “This is Singapore!” John thought aloud, “Whatever happened to safe and secure!” Much as he wanted to divert his gaze to somewhere less frightening and gruesome, he could not. His eyes were fixed on the violence unfolding right before them, as the people below his block attacked one another in impossibly crude and painful fashions. A yellow-shirted man who would have fit into an office environment bit into the arm of a Mohawk-sporting teenager while the latter haplessly screamed for aid. A typical housewife swung her metal trolley crashing into the head of a middle-aged man carrying a birdcage, shattering cage and neck alike. All around people were running like ants from water, only to be cut down by the insane (it is the most logical way to describe their behavior at this point of time) people attacking them with near impunity. Resistance towards the seemingly mindless violence was minimal, although a motorcycle-riding Malay man was able to use his helmet as a club to drive off a few of the insane motorists and then drive off himself.

It was then John recalled someone. He raced for his cell phone.

Then he remembered he had dropped his cell phone earlier, his sleek black Samsung SGH-820D now lay in two parts, hardly of any use. John cursed. He had to contact her soon, to ascertain her safety, or her life. Then, as if she heard him, the home phone rang. He ran towards it like a bullet train and plucked up the receiver.

“Hello?” John asked anxiously.

“John! I’m so glad to have gotten through to you!” Sally Perkins screamed in a voice rife with fear and anxiety.

“Are you alright?” John inquired, “People are going crazy on the streets! I’m telling you don’t go out on the streets! You hear me?” In the background John could hear the shattering of glass and the banging of furniture, so maybe staying at home was not the safest bet either.

“It’s my brothers!” Sally screeched, seemingly oblivious to what John had just said, “Something must have fried their circuitry up there, they are acting all crazy and violent and…and…” Her sentence was left hanging in the air for several agonizing moments.

Now really worried, John shouted into the phone, “Sally! Sally! Are you OK?!” Her response came two painful seconds later, “John I think it’s the cell phones. My brothers were using them when they just went bonkers. You gotta help me John! I don’t know when they’ll bust down the door and get to me! Come quickly! I’m -”

The phone line went dead.

“Sally! Sally!” John screamed into the phone despite knowing his effort was futile. Cell phones, he thought, whatever the case he had to get to Sally’s place, and fast. He grabbed his car keys and headed out the front door, only to run into his neighbor Mr. Lee, or rather, a warped, violent version of Mr. Lee, fists clenched and drenched in a dark red liquid.

Blood.

John decided he did not intend to find out whose blood that was and how it got there. All he wanted to do now was to get to Sally, and this Chinese man was in the way.

“Er, Mr. Lee”, John tried, “You mind letting me over? I’m kinda in an emergency”. To this he got a toothy grin and a lunge towards his waist. A second late in dodging and John would have been looking at his severed torso from the ground up. Violent Mr. Lee roared, a primitive instinctual roar that reminded John of wounded lions, and charged forward to try and bisect John again, only this time John was standing in front of a wall. The Asian man’s attack, although full of force and brute strength, suffered in the strategy department, and soon Mr. Lee found his own blood staining the wall he had just ran into. Then his world turned black.

John stood rooted to the ground. Mr. Lee, his neighbor for six years, had tried to kill him. For whatever the reason, he would never know, for the man was lying in a heap on the ground before him, body twisted in a painful angle. As John’s eyes scanned the lifeless pile, he saw something that made his blood run cold.

A cell phone.

Mr. Lee’s right hand held a shiny blue Motorola Krzer, one of the more aesthically-pleasing cell phones in society’s heyday. Right now, its reflective surface was cracked in six different places, and the ear piece was dangling on a wire, snapped shut by the lid of the cell phone, which also seemed to be coming off as well. Sally was right, John thought, the cell phones must have something to do with this crazy mess.

Sally! He remembered his original course of action, and hurriedly ran down the stairs and into the carpark.

After four minutes of running and seven near-death encounters with the phone-crazies, or so he refers to them as now, he arrived panting and bloodsoaked on the bonnet of his little silver Hyundai Getz. He had been attacked by a variety of different people: a bunch of uniformed teenagers, a Malay woman complete with a baju kurung, an Indian man brandishing a tuning spanner and a Chinese construction worker who seemed to be in need of some sleep. All of them had been holding cell phones when they attacked John, and all of them had done so in the savage, primitive way that Mr. Lee had done so only a short while ago. It took all of John’s mastery and knowledge of his block’s layout to avoid and lose the phone-crazies. Even if he wanted to defend himself, he was simply no match for the brutality and savagery of the insane people. All he could do now was to run away, and get to Sally as soon as possible.

Once in the relative safety of his little car, John locked the doors and tried his door to make sure the locks were working. He did not want to be caught in a tussle with a phone-crazy with his seatbelt on and both hands on the steering wheel. He looked around him once more and inserted the key into the ignition, turned it, and changed to the driving gear. If it were a normal day, John would have waited for the engine to warm up a little before moving off. But so far the day had been pretty abnormal, how often do you see people killing each other on the streets in broad daylight in safe Singapore? Pretty strange to me, John thought as he looked at the bloodstains on his shirt, the Laundromat would have a huge job on their hands, provided that its still there when this shit blows over. Switching on his headlights, John tore out of the carpark and into a world where the obliteration of a moribund capitalist society has heralded the renaissance of a chaotic, unruly anarchy of global proportions.