Chapter 1: The First Cases

The first ones came quietly.

At Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Central Jakarta, the emergency ward smelled of antiseptic, sweat, and something sharper that reminded the nurses of rust. A teenage boy was wheeled in at dawn. His eyes darted wildly, his shirt shredded by claw marks that ran from his neck down to his ribs. His mother wept as nurses strapped him to the bed. The boy’s skin was hot to the touch. His muscles spasmed so hard that the bed rattled. When the doctor leaned in with a stethoscope, the boy lunged forward and sank his teeth into the man’s shoulder.

Screams tore through the ward. Orderlies swarmed the bed, pinning the boy’s limbs while a nurse jabbed a sedative into his arm. Silence returned for a few minutes. The doctor pressed a wad of gauze against his bleeding shoulder and insisted it was rabies. Jakarta had seen rabies cases before. But the other staff knew something was wrong. The boy’s fever was climbing too fast. His aggression was far beyond what rabies could explain.

By noon, two more patients arrived. A motorbike courier from South Jakarta convulsed so violently his helmet cracked on the tiles. A grandmother from Menteng clawed at her own arms until her fingernails split. Both were strapped down. Both sedated. Both unresponsive.

Then came the whisper.

A nurse returned to check on the boy. His monitor screamed the long note of death. Flatline. No pulse. No breath. She sprinted for the doctor. When they returned together, the boy was sitting upright. His eyes were glazed with a milky film. His teeth ground so hard they splintered. The restraints snapped like string as he surged forward. Two orderlies went down screaming.

That night, Fatmawati Hospital faced the same horror. A mother dragged in her daughter, both covered in scratches from neighborhood strays. The girl shrieked in a voice that did not sound like her own. When her eyes rolled back, the staff thought she had died. Seconds later she bolted upright and tore into her mother’s face. The corridor echoed with screams as nurses pulled them apart.

Doctors wrote their reports with trembling hands. They listed rabies. They listed methamphetamine psychosis. Some even suggested a new synthetic drug. The staff who had seen the patients up close knew the truth. This was not rabies. This was not drugs. This was something else.

By the third night, the dormitories filled with whispers. Staff huddled over instant coffee in the break rooms. They spoke in hushed voices. Patients were not staying dead. They came back. Stronger. Hungrier.

And then came the detail that no one wanted to say too loudly. Almost every patient had been bitten or scratched by cats.

At first, the idea felt absurd. Cats were everywhere in Jakarta. They lounged in mosques, hunted scraps in markets, curled up on doorsteps. They were harmless, part of the city’s rhythm. Yet every stretcher that rolled into the ER told the same story. A scratch while feeding leftovers. A bite from a stray outside the warung. A late-night encounter in a dark alley.

By the end of the week, the numbers multiplied. Dozens became hundreds. Entire wards filled with twitching, snarling patients. Families begged for answers in waiting rooms. Some doctors threatened to walk out. And still, the stretchers kept coming.

One evening, a blackout swept across Menteng. The hospital generators coughed, then failed for five long minutes. When the lights flickered back on, three beds were empty. Two nurses lay dead in the corridor. Security footage later showed patients crawling on all fours, faster than human, attacking anyone in their path before vanishing into the stairwells.

Jakarta had not yet realized what had begun.

In the narrow alleys of Kemayoran and Tebet, cats gathered in clusters. They did not beg for scraps. They did not scatter when people passed. They only watched, eyes glinting in the glow of the streetlamps. Silent. Waiting.