The Devil You Know

I made it to Lamma Island the day the ferry stopped. I’m an American who has lived in Hong Kong since high school, I know the territory, and I choose my escape route carefully, though I admit I barely speak a word of Cantonese. I made the right choice. It turned out that Lamma Island, green, sparsely populated and just two kilometers off the coast, might be the best place on earth to survive a zombie apocalypse. 

Let me explain more. Banana and papaya trees pepper the jungle here, and the South China Sea teems with sea life. In an apocalypse, food is the first order of business, right? Fish, clams, shrimp, squid, and octopi appear immune to the virus. Not that we had anyone to prove that. The scientists told us not to panic, and they all stayed home. They all died, and those of us who panicked survived.

Anyway, to get to the beginning of my story, in our village in Lamma, the usual protocol was to club intruders to death with long bamboo poles. Not my style, but the village council, being local Chinese elders, had their own ways of doing things. They were fishing villagers at heart, and centuries of hardship forged their survival instincts. The pandemic reactivated their ancient ways.

My conversations with Lamma's village leader would go like this:

“Can I keep living here?”

“Ok.”

“Am I safe here?”

“Ok.”

He didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak Cantonese, so I didn’t have a lot of information about what was going on. The three other westerners on the island were a ceaseless source of complaining and argument, so I mostly avoided them. On rare occasions, one of us would unearth enough warm beer in an abandoned house that we could lubricate ourselves enough to have a decent conversation. The others hadn’t learned anything about the intentions of the Chinese villagers, either. The whole island was under some sort of unfathomable tribal law. The rules for “giving face” and the hidden rivalries amongst the villagers were too subtle for us foreigners to grasp. At times, I would hear screams and see people with bleeding wounds on their backs.

I often feared for my life, feared that I might wind up on the barbecue if they got hungry enough. It helped that I was the only snake catcher on Lamma. The locals were terrified of snakes. With the snakes' natural predators wiped out, the venomous bamboo snake was a constant threat. My cat Thunder was amazing at spotting them from a distance, and I knew how to handle them.

The year after, the villagers hadn’t captured and murdered any swimmers from the mainland for months, and everything had gone quiet, when one day, a foreigner arrived on a sailboat. A British man who greeted the villagers cheerfully in Cantonese. The man grinned broadly, displayed his bare chest and back-free from any sign of infection. He said he was from Peng Chau, where a large community of uninfected people lived, and he was seeking a dentist.

We didn’t have a dentist, either. He then offered the village leader cans of corned beef, the one with the cow on it, said there was more. With the many tourist restaurants on Lamma Island, and tourism at a standstill, we had an almost unlimited supply of unutilized soy sauce, chicken powder, and black pepper. After a lengthy discourse, a trading route was formed.

The man on the sailboat left with his boxes of soy sauce, and that was the last I heard about him for a while. 

A month later, he returned, and each month thereafter, we would trade cooking ingredients in exchange for canned food his people must have pillaged from a warehouse or cargo ship some place. 

One summer morning, after checking my fishing nets, I returned home to another breakfast of green bananas. I was sick of them, but thankfully, there was no theft on Lamma, so at least I had something to eat.

Meow!

My cat, Thunder, stood outside the window, wanting to come in. The morning light showed him holding a small green snake in his mouth. I opened the window; he dropped the dead snake at my feet and brushed against my legs. Months ago, when the cat food ran out, I thought he’d run away, but he remained my loyal companion. He managed to get enough food from his solitary scavenging around the island. Under all that fur, I wondered if I would even know if he had the purple sores that were a sure sign of infection. 

In the slow grind of the “diplomacy” of our local Chinese council, they eventually got around to asking the man on the sailboat about who lived on Peng Chau. Some of them had family members that lived on other islands. The man on the sailboat relayed the names from Peng Chau, and we provided the names of the people on Lamma. When the Peng Chau list trickled down to me, I saw her name. Rebecca Richardson. My heart skipped a beat.

She had lived in Hong Kong, and honestly I had stopped thinking about her a long ago. I used to look across the water for hours. Flickers of light appeared in a few high-rise apartment windows over there, and then nothing. Hong Kong was an island but no one had the foresight to cut the bridges and tunnels before the infected came across.

Looking back at the list of names, I saw they were mostly British. Surely I would be safer there, than being surrounded by villagers with bamboo spears with whom I could barely communicate. 

Next month, we were going to send a representative to Peng Chau. I explained to the village leader that Rebecca, who lived there, was my girlfriend. 

“Please, let me go!” I pleaded. I had seen him club people to pieces, and I knew it was a risk to push him too far.

He had a long chat with his daughter, who spoke some English, and then said, “I want you to listen carefully,” he said, his voice low and steady. “If you go, I can’t guarantee the safety of that cat of yours here.” He pointed toward Thunder.

In the early stages of the pandemic, I had seen worse things on the barbecue.

We made an agreement. The day the sailboat arrived, I strapped my carrying bags, and in an inner pouch, muffled by fabric, nestled Thunder. With the gentle winds, it took hours. When the boat approached Peng Chau, my heart raced. I couldn’t believe I was about to see Rebecca again.

When I finally spotted her, red hair, standing on the dock with a radiant smile, my breath caught in my throat. “I can’t believe you’re alive!” I said after I stepped off the boat, rushing toward her.

“It’s great to see you,” she beamed.

A crowd of men with British and Australian accents unloaded the sailboat, and it appeared that me and Rebecca were free to go off on a walk of our own. On Lamma, if a visitor wasn’t clubbed to death, they would be invited to an hours long banquet.

“I’m not the same person you knew before,” she said as soon as we were alone. I knew an announcement might be coming, but I wasn’t ready to hear it yet.

“Let’s go for a walk first before we catch up? I have something to show you.” I felt Thunder moving in my pack.

When we entered a secluded orchard, I said, “Wait a second.” I pulled Thunder out and set him down.

“Cute cat!” Rebecca squealed with delight. She reached down to pet him. As her hand approached, concern flashed in her eyes. “Is he infected?”

“No,” I assured her, noticing what a mess thunder was after being trapped in my backpack for hours.

Rebecca reached down to pet Thunder, and I felt her relax. Finally. Maybe everything was going to be ok. We could somehow, someway, return to our old relationship.

To celebrate the moment, I reached up and picked a low hanging mango from a fruit tree—

***

“—I think we have heard enough,” the judge interrupted, his voice slicing through the air.

“But it wasn’t my fault…” My heart thumped loudly in my ears, drowning out the murmuring of the crowd watching us in a makeshift courtroom on Peng Chau.

“Peng Chau follows British Law, and under British Law, ignorance of the law is no excuse,” he stated, his tone devoid of empathy. “Ignorantia juris non excusat, as it is known in Latin, A legal principle since Roman times. This special judiciary panel of Peng Chau finds you guilty of violating our communal food regulation, section 2.14. The bailiff will now carry out the proscribed punishment.”

From the side of the courtroom, four stocky men approached, carrying sharpened bamboo poles. Rebecca and Thunder were nowhere to be seen.