Chapter 10: The Last Survivors

By the time the sun reached its peak, the Java Sea was littered with ghosts.

Boats drifted aimlessly, their hulls scarred by claw marks, their decks silent except for the creak of wood and the slap of waves. The ocean was calm, almost mocking in its serenity, as if the water itself was indifferent to the carnage it carried.

Here and there, bodies floated in clusters, bobbing like broken buoys. Some were still twitching, mouths opening and closing as if trying to breathe. The smell of brine mixed with rot, carried on the wind.

Yet a few still clung to life.

On a battered fishing boat, perhaps thirty souls remained. They were gaunt, sunburned, and wide-eyed with exhaustion. They had lost half their number overnight when the infection swept the deck. The rest survived only because they had acted ruthlessly, tossing the sick into the waves before the change could take them.

Among them was Agus, the reporter. His once-crisp shirt was now tattered, soaked with sweat and salt. His camera was gone, but his sharp eyes remained. He sat near the bow, staring at the horizon, muttering the words he had lip-read back in Jakarta: All going to plan.

The phrase haunted him. He had seen it on the lips of a government official, whispered during a broadcast as the outbreak spiraled. Now, watching the bodies drift past, he wondered if this was the plan all along; not a rescue, but a purge.

At night, the survivors lit no lamps. They sat in darkness, listening to the infected groans echo across the water. Some boats had become floating prisons, filled with snarling corpses that pounded against their hulls. Others drifted too close, and survivors heard the scratching of claws trying to bridge the gap. One by one, they cut their lines and pushed away, alone again on the sea.

The hunger grew. Rice sacks dwindled. Water turned stale. Children cried until their throats were raw. Fathers stared at the horizon with hollow eyes, their hope stripped away by the endless blue. The ocean stretched on forever, but there was no land in sight.

Then, on the fifth day, they spotted it.

A chain of islands rose from the sea, green against the sky. The survivors stirred, their despair breaking into desperate prayers. They rowed with renewed strength, paddling with hands, with planks, with anything they could find.

But as they drew closer, their hope soured.

The beaches were littered with wrecks. Fishing boats, ferries, even yachts had already run aground. Figures staggered in the tree line, moving with jerks and spasms. The islands were not untouched. They were infected, too.

Panic gripped the survivors. Some wanted to press on, to search deeper inland. Others screamed to turn back, to stay on the water no matter the cost. Fists flew. Knives were drawn. Blood spilled once more on the deck.

Agus knew then that survival was no longer about escaping Jakarta, or the cats, or even the infection. Survival meant enduring the collapse of trust itself. Humans were breaking faster than the virus could spread.

By nightfall, only a handful remained. The fisherman’s boat floated under a sky full of stars, carried by the tide into the unknown. The cries of the infected drifted from the islands. The ocean whispered against the wood.

No one spoke. They knew what they had become; refugees of the end, caught between a dead city behind them and a poisoned sea ahead.

And still, somewhere in Jakarta’s ashes, the cockroaches fed, carrying the next wave of the plague into the soil and drains of Indonesia.

The apocalypse was not over. It was just beginning.