The orange miasma was first spotted by a young girl off the eastern shores of Malaysia. She was gazing at the setting sun, her hands smoothing the outer walls of a sand castle that had taken all afternoon to build. Her parents stood further up the hill, packing up the picnic baskets with their eldest son.
The miasma appeared like steam billowing from a toppled dry ice bucket. It waded quickly towards the shore, and the haze was thin enough that the young girl spotted silhouettes deep in the middle of the expanding mist. They looked like cloaked riders on horseback, but the girl knew that couldn’t be right because mommy had told her that horses could not gallop on water.
Finally, the miasma came ashore and the girl breathed in the fumes, which tasted and smelled like nothing. Then the girl crumpled onto the beach and died. Her sand castle was crushed under her body. It then continued to crawl forwards, slowed for a moment by an uphill climb. The girl’s parents finally noticed the mist and saw their prone daughter. Not knowing she was already gone, the father called out and raced into the orange haze, only to collapse and die as well.
The mother and the eldest son began to run, but by now the miasma had learned the terrain of the shoreline and had picked up speed. The mother, slowed by years of backbreaking labor in the rice fields, was caught by the haze and died. The eldest son, perhaps the healthiest in the family, kept running, yelling for others in nearby buildings to vacate and flee for their lives. The edges of the miasma clipped at his heels, and the eldest son, in a fright, tripped, breathed in the mist, and died.
By evening, the miasma had reached Kuala Lumpur. By then, people knew that the mist only affected humans. Crows and vultures nipped away in the mass graves of small villages and big cities. The forests bristled at the moisture in the air. The ocean and its sea creatures continued as it always had.
People on the other hand tried everything. Gas masks, locking their homes, locking themselves in their cars, fanning away the mists. Nothing worked and the roads were flooded by bodies who had been trampled or stuck in traffic. The miasma endured, pushing now in all directions towards Singapore, Cambodia, and Thailand.
In Singapore, the first death was a young man walking alone in an underground parking lot. The mist entered through the central air system. The man was hungry and had just left his car parked on his way to his favorite chicken restaurant. He approached the mist without much thought, only thinking that he might catch a whiff of his favorite fried dishes, but instead, he toppled over and died.
In Cambodia, a local fisherman spotted the miasma as it approached the southern peninsula. He gave it very little thought. He stowed his fishing gear, drew his oars, and began to row back towards shore. He had been taught from a young age by his father that it was not safe to travel in misty waters. The fisherman figured it would be best to simply return home to his wife and child and wait for the weather to clear up. The miasma surrounded his fishing boat and in the next moment he was dead.
The miasma snaked towards Thailand, avoiding the neighboring shores as if it was set on ambushing the city of Bangkok. A row of foreign tourists peered into the gulf from a rustic red bridge, a popular spot for spotting dolphins and the sunset. Many had lost their cellular internet and reception that morning and had nothing better than to do. Some of them were concerned they wouldn’t be able to make their flights the next morning, while the others joked to themselves that it was perhaps good fortune that their vacations had been extended.
The miasma came and killed everyone standing on the bridge, and then it killed everyone surrounding the bridge, and then it continued inland past the bridge killing everyone at every shrine and restaurant and highway. The Wat Arun on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River, where Yasushi Kazuo had visited when he had finished university and found himself mesmerized by its listless architecture, was littered with the corpses of tour guides and Buddhist practitioners.
Some heard the neighs and prances of horses before they died, though too few lived to remember the sound clearly. Others saw the cloaked riders themselves, shrouded in ordinary dark garbs, but most who were close enough to see them died shortly afterwards. Word spread too slowly for people to pack their things and flee, the miasma moved ever faster, crossing great distances with the speed of a galloping steed, spilling into Laos and Vietnam and Indonesia.
By the next morning, almost all of Southeast Asia had been covered by the orange miasma, and everyone still within was dead.
In spite of her distaste for human affairs, it was very rare for Morgan to unleash her miasma of death. Humans, like rats or rabbits caught and caged in a sterilized lab, were creatures to be used for experimentation. And besides, the miasma of death was a special concoction. Morgan had only ever used it once before.
At her beckoning, the enigmatic Riders of Fata Morgana galloped from dawn to dusk without rest, releasing their master’s specially brewed miasma into the wild. Each time, the mist would do something different. Some humans lost their memories and walked for the rest of their lives with both foggy body and mind. Other times, people grew feral, formed packs like starving wolves, and fought over food, having abandoned all semblance of reason and etiquette.
Fata Morgana always chose a specific element of human nature, some kind of civilized preoccupation, like love or culture or reason, and brewed her miasma with the intent of erasing it from the human psyche. Just to see what happened. To Morgan, it was her proof that in the end, all human enterprises were malleable and feeble, nothing more than ephemeral echoes, too easily lost in a haze of an endless mist.
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