Chapter 3: The First Outbreaks

Jakarta’s hospitals were no longer hospitals. They were cages of screams.

At Menteng, the night shift began with two guards posted outside the isolation ward. By morning, both were dead. The patients they were guarding had torn through their restraints. One nurse swore she saw a man bend backward until his spine cracked, only to rise again with movements that did not belong to a human. His eyes were clouded, his jaw grinding until teeth snapped from the force. When he lunged, he did not speak, he did not beg, he did not think. He only bit.

Cipto Mangunkusumo was worse. A blackout hit the ICU at midnight. When the lights returned, chaos had spread through every floor. Patients staggered into the halls with blood dripping from their mouths. Doctors barricaded themselves in operating rooms while the infected slammed their bodies against the doors. Security footage later showed them running on all fours, charging walls, breaking bones without slowing down. They no longer felt pain. They only hunted.

The city woke up to panic. Ambulances screamed through Sudirman, honking at cars that would not move. News anchors stammered through live reports, their faces pale as they announced entire wards had been “lost.” They avoided the word zombie, but the public no longer needed it explained. Footage spoke for itself: patients tearing at nurses with their teeth, families dragged to the ground and devoured, crowds scattering as infected convulsed and rose in MRT stations.

Markets turned into nightmares. In Tanah Abang, a group of stray cats pounced on shoppers at dawn. The scratches turned to spasms, the spasms to collapse. Within minutes, people were reanimating on the dirty tiles, biting into anyone close enough to reach. Vendors screamed and climbed onto stalls, kicking down fruit baskets as they tried to escape. By the time soldiers arrived, the entire block was swarming with the infected.

The panic split the city in two. Some rushed to hospitals, hoping for medicine or safety. Others barricaded themselves inside apartments, dragging furniture across doors, clutching machetes, praying the infected would pass them by. Videos on TikTok and Instagram showed the horror in real time. Families screaming behind locked gates as neighbors, once familiar faces, slammed their bodies against the iron bars with bloody hands.

Agus, the reporter, stood in the control room of his station, watching the flood of footage come in. His editor begged him not to say the word zombie on air. But Agus no longer cared. He remembered the official’s lips, the phrase burned into his mind. “All going to plan.”

He looked into the camera during the evening news and said it out loud. “This is no rabies outbreak. This is not an accident. Jakarta is facing a plague of the dead.”

The broadcast cut across the city. Some cursed him for spreading hysteria. Others believed him instantly. That night, the toll roads out of Jakarta clogged with cars. Families abandoned their homes, their jobs, everything. Some never made it past the gridlock. The infection spread faster than the traffic moved.

By dawn, the city’s rhythm was broken. Morning prayers echoed from mosques, but the voices outside were not human. They were guttural cries, inhuman roars, the sound of hunger.

Jakarta was infected.

And the dead were walking.