Last Man Standing (Book 1): Hunger

Last Man Standing: Hunger

by

Keith Taylor

Copyright © 2016 by Keith Taylor
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Printing, 2016

The following is a rough draft of an article of mine that appeared in the October 2017 issue of Time Magazine, recovered from an old USB stick I found stuck to a chewed piece of gum in the lining of my jacket.

This was the last thing I was ever paid to write, and my first article in an international magazine. The final printed version - with the cursing removed and a couple of paragraphs switched around - is still out there somewhere, but it's probably not worth sifting through the ruins of America to find it.

Last Man Standing

Thomas Freeman

"There's another thing they don't show in the movies," Paul chuckles bitterly, playing with the moist, half peeled label on his sweating bottle of Singha. "The bathroom arrangements. I spent three weeks stuck in that damned apartment, and by the end I was about ready to throw myself off the balcony just to escape the smell."

I wrinkle my nose and nod sympathetically. Even now you can't go anywhere in Thailand without experiencing the intensely
human
odor of five million refugees and not nearly enough bathrooms. The air is unfused with the hot, cloying stink of excrement, and in the camps the gutters run blue with the residue of countless leaking chemical toilets.

"Reminded me of the time we spent a month dog-sitting for Zaya in Ulaanbaatar. You remember back then? What was it, January 2013? Minus forty degrees outside, and as soon as the dog took a shit on the balcony it froze solid." The carefully peeled label tears in half between his fingers and he rips it angrily from the bottle, his face locked in a violent scowl.

Paul's pent up frustration is palpable, quite intimidating, and entirely out of character. Those who know him (full disclosure: I've known Paul socially for a little more than five years) would invariably describe him as a gentle giant, his actions always measured and his voice usually soft, as if to compensate for the implicit threat of his hulking frame. The man in front of me looks as if he's struggling to resist the urge to punch someone. This is not the Paul McQueen I thought I knew.

"Couldn't get rid of it with a paint scraper, it was so frozen," He tears the paper to scraps as he speaks, in a way that makes me wonder if he's even conscious he's doing it. I look down at his fingers and notice the nails are bitten down to the quick, with traces of blood at the edges where he's nervously gnawed at them. "When that first warm morning arrived a month of shit defrosted like a bowl of ice cream. The smell was so bad Ogi had to move in with her sister for a week."

I nod again, urging him on. "And you had the heat, of course. Must have been even worse." I pull a sour face, almost gagging at the thought.

"
Jesus
, the heat. April in Bangkok. Hottest month of the year, and no air-con once the power went out. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been staying in one of the big new tower blocks with a little breeze, but our place was..." He shakes his head. "Well, you remember our old place at Sutti Mansion, right? $250 a month, and nothing in front of the balcony but the wall of the building next door. We used to have to run the fan 24/7 just to keep it below 100 degrees. I guess it wasn't the smartest thing to do, with the benefit of hindsight, shitting in the only place with a hint of fresh air. Still, you live and learn... well, some of us do."

He drains his beer and waves the empty bottle in the direction of the waitress, barely noticing it catch the lip of the glass bowl of bar snacks, sending nuts and glittering shards crashing to the tile floor. The pretty bar girl quickly scurries along with dustpan and brush, and Paul stares covetously at my drink as she sweeps unnoticed beneath his feet.

"Mind if I...?" He picks up my bottle before waiting for an answer, draining the lukewarm beer in one pull.

"Please, go on. Tell me how it started." I shoot an apologetic glance at the waitress, but she doesn't look up from the broken glass. I get the impression she's become accustomed to Paul's drunken behavior over the past month.

"Well, I'm sure you know what the Thais tell you, about the Iranians smuggling in some sort of chemical weapons? I take it you haven't come all this way to hear the fairytale, right? All this shit came a couple of months after some inept Iranian fuckers accidentally blew themselves to pieces up in Ekamai, so the Arabs made good scapegoats when it all went to shit. No, that bullshit story may play back in the States, but I was there. I saw how it started, and since I'm the only one who saw it start and made out alive I'm... well, I'm uniquely qualified. I'm done lying about it."

"You mean it wasn't a chemical attack?" I'm on the edge of my seat. Paul was cagey and evasive in the emails we exchanged over the last few weeks, usually sent late at night after he'd returned home from the bar. He implied that there was something amiss with the popular narrative, but this is the first time he's gone on record with a claim that the Iranians may not have been responsible.

"No, I'm not saying it wasn't chemical," he continues, shaking his head. "I'm just saying it didn't happen like they said. There sure as shit wasn't a fleet of trucks spraying down the streets with toxins and blasting readings of the Koran like a fucking ice cream van tune. I was there when the first of them turned, and I know it started in one place: Sala fucking Daeng. All the outbreaks later up on Sukhumvit came from the trains."

I look down at my notes, but can't find the right page. Paul's claims would later seem accurate, according to Twitter and Facebook archives reconstructed in the days after the outbreak and reported by Al Jazeera. The first social media reports came from the Silom area at Sala Daeng, a station on the BTS line in Bangkok's central business district, at 14:32. Seventeen minutes later tweets began to flood in from around the stations further to the north and south. They radiated out along the BTS and MRT lines, the overhead and underground train lines that serve central Bangkok, for a little more than twenty minutes before the cell networks became overloaded with traffic and the 4G signal dropped out.

Songkran is too crazy for me this year. Lots of fights on Silom Road. Heading home.*

*Text translated from the original Thai. The tweet was accompanied by a blurred photo that appears to have been taken through the window of the McDonalds at the south end of the road, around 50 feet from the bulk of the crowd. The photo clearly shows a teen boy biting a middle aged woman on the thigh.

"I didn't even want to be there, to be honest. I was too old for water fights two decades ago, and the idea of getting doused with dirty water by a few thousand drunk kids didn't sound like my idea of a fun Saturday. You ever spend time in Bangkok during Songkran?"

I shake my head. This had been my first visit to Thailand, and I'd been working on a story on illegal logging up in Vientiane, Laos in the week before Bangkok fell.

"It's a disgrace. It used to be traditional to wash your shrines and images of Buddha with fragranced water during Thai new year, but over the years that nice little tradition somehow turned into a drunken week long water fight. Every year hundreds die in drink driving accidents, and already there'd been a few murders in the city. Some guy got drenched on the way to a funeral, got into a rumble with a drunk kid and ended up stabbed in the chest. Another guy was beaten to death when he got a little handsy with some guy's sister in a crowd. It gets worse every year.

"Now Sala Daeng, that's Songkran ground central in Bangkok. They shut down a section of Silom Road, everyone loads up on cheap booze and for days the whole street becomes a huge party. Thousands of people chuck buckets of water at each other, spray each other with water guns, throw around a ton of minty chalk shit. Not sure what it is, but
that
was what started it."

I frown, confused. "How do you mean?"

"It's the powder they throw at each other. It's like... what do you call it, talcum powder, but it smells like mint. They love to soak you with water then cake you with the stuff. Nasty shit at the best of times, but this stuff was different. This was bright yellow, like turmeric. Nobody else was throwing yellow shit, and from where I was standing up on the flyover I could see exactly what was happening. There was this weird little group of people in the middle of the action, white folks dressed like they'd just come from church, with heads shaved clean like Buddhist monks. They were the ones throwing the yellow stuff, and everywhere they threw it people started acting like they'd been hit with tear gas, trying to blink it out of their eyes. It was like the stuff was burning their skin. A few people fell to the ground, and the rest tried to pour water in their eyes to clear them. Too late, of course. It all went to shit pretty quickly after that. Thank you, my dear."

These last words are to the waitress, who sets down two fresh bottles wrapped in coolers. Paul hands over a wad of cash, tipping the waitress heavily, and lifts his bottle unsteadily. He'd been drinking for hours before I arrived, and after taking a long pull on the ice cold beer he excuses himself, pushes back his chair and stumbles towards the men's room.

At 1,000 baht (around $35) a bottle, Paul is one of the few who can still enjoy the dwindling supply of Thai beer here in the interim capital of Hua Hin. He's done the rounds on the morning shows, popping up via satellite on news broadcasts around the world to support the official story of the Thai government, a job for which he's been paid well. Not a day has gone by in the last two months without this handsome, square jawed Australian appearing on our screens to rail against the Iranians, telling the same story of a massive terrorist attack; of white vans roaming the streets, spraying down the sidewalks with a fine mist. He spoke of masked 'Arabs' (his word, not mine) throwing what he described as tear gas canisters into crowds of civilians.

The new military junta has used him as a tool, hailing him as a hero for his escape from the dead city. He fought bravely through a million-strong crowd of the walking dead to bring word of the Islamic terrorists to the wider world, and his story has served to bolster support for the new government both at home and abroad, allowing it to award itself ever more emergency powers in the name of security. The junta now has complete control of the nation from this coastal stronghold, and few knowledgeable commenters really believe the promises of a return to democratic elections by next summer.

For our part, the western media loves the spectacle. Of the nine million Thais who lived in the capital city almost half were wiped from the face of the earth in the space of just a few hours. Of those not a single man, woman or child made it out alive from the Silom area, the origin of the outbreak, apart from this man who could, conveniently, be played by Hugh Jackman in the movie. When it's inevitably made it will save Hollywood the effort of convincing western audiences that Jackie Chan came from Bangkok.

Paul wobbles back to the table, and as I see him approach I steady our bottles to make sure he won't upset them as he sits. At these prices I can't afford to spill a drop.

"I've only gone and broke the seal," he says, landing heavily in his chair. "Five hours without a piss, and now I'll be up and down every ten minutes."

"Paul, why don't you walk me through what really happened?" My tone is a little impatient. I've been waiting for two hours now while he rambles aimlessly, dropping hints here and there that the story he'd peddled on TV had been as scripted as a soap opera. He'd been the one to reach out to me, not the other way around, and I'm quickly running out of money while he struggles with his conscience.

Paul visibly sobers in front of me. He sighs, reaching for his open pack of acrid, hand rolled Indian beedis - the only thing, he says, that blocks out the smell of the undead. He lights one with my fake Zippo, offering the pack to me. I shake my head and reach for one of my own Marlboro Lights from what must surely be one of the last packs in Thailand.

"OK, here's the truth. It started near the containers of yellow powder. A few of the kids rubbing their eyes, they just went crazy. One cop was helping pour water into the eyes of a little boy, a tiny kid no higher than your waist, and I was staring right at them when the little one launched into him with his fists. The cop slapped him hard and he went down, but by then a few more around him were turning. Poor fucker never stood a chance."

I glance at my notes. "And you were on the flyover at the time, right? What about Ogi?"

Paul visibly flinches at the mention of his wife of four years.

"Yeah, I was well out of it. I was up on the pedestrian walkway above the street, armed with nothing but a fucking camera. Ogi wanted to get in amongst them and get wet, but I was recovering from a broken rib so I didn't want to get jostled. I lost track of her the moment she got down to street level." He stares intently at his beer, once again peeling the label. "Only spotted her once after that."