Dead Under

Adi dragged on his cigarette, the hot smoke filled his lungs, the clove filter left a sweet taste on his lips. He had quit but that seemed unimportant now that he had started to show symptoms. The power was out so he sat enjoying the moonlit rice fields from his balcony. It had been such a long time since he had done this. He sat deep in thought and looked back on his life. It wasn’t what he had dreamed it would be but on reflection he was happy.

Adi had finished his medical degree at a university in Jakarta. It was a requirement that all medical graduates do a volunteer year in a place of the governments choosing. This tiny village on the edge of the jungle was where they had put him. The adjustment had been hard at first, but the slow village lifestyle had grown on him and after a time the tight-knit community had accepted him.

Adi took another drag. The cloves crackled and popped as they burned. The tickle in his throat built. He blew out the smoke and began coughing. His cough was getting worse. He was almost certain he had caught the sickness too. At least the vomiting hadn’t started yet. He ashed his cigarette. There was no need to irritate his throat further. Five of his patients had already died and four more were in comas taking up the beds in his clinic. He had been following the news and was growing more worried daily. As far as he could tell it had all started here in his village. Then it had spread across Indonesia, and now he was seeing reports of it in other countries.

“Adi, have you been smoking again?” He heard his wife whisper from in the back door. His family had set him up with a politician’s daughter back in Jakarta. They had let their disappointment be known when he had married a village girl instead. They had liked his plan to stay on in the village even less.

“No,” he whispered, hoping not to wake the children. “What is it?”

“Agus called, there’s a problem and they need you in at the clinic, I think Patra’s been injured, he said to come quickly.” Her hair was a mess, and she wore one of his old shirts. To Adi, she was still just as beautiful after all these years.

Adi kicked his cigarette away, gave his wife a kiss, then got on his scooter and headed to the clinic. His little clinic wasn’t big enough to handle most of his patients now, so only those with the most serious conditions stayed under supervision. The rest he visited in their homes during the day. No one improved their conditions only got worse.

“How did that happen?” Adi asked, the wound on Patra’s arm looked bad, but it was hard to tell under the candlelight.

“One of the patients woke from her coma,” Agus said, not looking up from his work. “Something’s wrong with her.”

“She’s aggressive,” Patra said, wincing as Agus pulled a stitch tight. “I tried to calm her and she bit me, we have her restrained on the bed, I think she’s possessed.”

“It’s all because of those damn foreigners, they just couldn’t leave it be,” Agus said. Adi held his tongue. The villagers all believed in black magic and demons. There was no point arguing with them as he had learnt. “We warned them that something like this would happen.”

The ancient temple in the jungle featured in most of their ghost stories. A month ago Archaeologists had come to investigate, and Adi hadn’t heard the end of it since. Adi thought it was a brilliant idea. It would be a great tourist attraction once restored. The villagers however had been angry. Adi could tell that their anger hid their fear. Only a few weeks after they entered the temple, people started getting sick. Now the villagers all were sure a curse lay on the village.

“It’s probably delirium from the coma, I’ll go check in on her,” Adi said, heading in the direction on the rooms. “Once you’re cleaned up, go home Patra, I’ll cover the rest of tonight.”

“I’ll come when I’m done here,” Agus said.

Adi held a candle over the dim patient’s room, the light barely lit the long room. There was a strange smell in the room, he could smell feces and disinfectant but those he expected. It was something else strange, it smelled of like slightly sweet metal, it almost smelled like blood. A strange squelching noise came from the further end of the room and then something tore wetly.

He scanned the room with the candlelight. The first bed held the woman who had woken from her coma. She thrashed against her bonds. To his surprise, the next two beds lay empty. He moved through the darkness to the last bed. Two figures hunched over the patient laying in it. As the candlelight revealed them what he saw horrified him. One a man was ripping a sliver of flesh from the coma patient’s forearm with his teeth, the other a teenage girl pulled intestine from a gaping wound in the patient’s stomach and shoved them into her mouth. Worst of all, he could see the patient was moving. She was waking from her coma.

Adi stood in shock. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. He tried to move or call out to Agus, but he just stood there. The two devouring poor coma patient seemed to lose interest in what they were doing and slowly turned to Adi. Their eyes were dull and their lips pulled back to bare their teeth. They let out a guttural moan and ambled slowly in his direction.

As they closed on him Adi snapped out of it and turned and ran crashing straight into Agus. They fell to the floor in an awkward pile. In his panic, Adi flailed to get himself untangled. A powerful hand clenched his upper arm. The hand gripped so hard, the nails dug into his arm. A sharp pain burned in his neck as someone fell on him and bit deep into his flesh. Adi realized he was screaming as he tried to roll and kick it off. He was almost free when the other grabbed him, pulling him back to the floor. He fought frantically as hands and teeth tore at him. Adi did not die easily.