If you see Gwasuwon ramen noodles, throw it away and call FBI immediately.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the recall alerts on TV. It looks like a public health alert, but it’s not. If you call in to inform them, it’s not the FDA people who will come down, but the police and emergency services. I know because I was there when the first breakout occurred. Michigan was ground zero. They came down with police trucks, biohazard suits and ambulances. First, they took the students away. Then the FBI got involved. And they took Jenny and all her boxes away too. Or was it the other way round? I am not sure. My memory is fuzzy these days. I have to write it down before I go aw — before I forget.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I’m an undergraduate student in Michigan. I stay on campus at school and I have — had a roommate called Jenny. She majored in architecture and she was an instant noodles fanatic. And when I say fanatic, I really mean fanatic.
She ate only ramen. She’ll have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. I never saw her eat anything else. She might add an egg or some frozen peas and carrots. But that’s about it. But that doesn’t mean she shies away from experimenting with her food. Once I saw her pour boiling hot coffee into her cup noodles. Another time, I walked in on her making beer ramen. (She offered me a large cold glass. I gave it a pass.) And then there was the episode where she tried to bake ramen cake in the hall kitchen, and I had to help her put out the flames when the batter caught fire.
Otherwise, she was just a normal girl who likes anime, big spectacles and funk music. We became fast friends in residence hall and we had crazy times together.
She had a YouTube channel where she does ramen reviews. She would live stream the entire review process. She would do a show-and-tell of the ramen package and open it up. She would cook the noodles in it, eat it, critique it and rate it, all on live video.
It was quite a popular channel. People all over the world would mail her their country’s instant noodles for her to review. Bacon ramen from UK. Cheese curry cup noodles from Japan. Borscht packet noodles from Poland. Purple wheat noodles from Singapore. I even saw a cup of soft shelled turtle soup noodles on her table once. You name any instant noodle flavour or brand, she would probably have tasted it at least once already.
Sometimes, ramen companies would send her cartons of instant noodles. Her side of the room was always full of cardboard boxes of ramen. She would gift them to her YouTube fans or give the noodles away for free to her schoolmates or the hall residents. Her classmates and hall mates love her.
Jenny was patient zero.
I remember how it started. It was on a Tuesday at the beginning of the semester. I remember because it was the first day of my entomology class and I was fussing about having the right lecture notes printed that morning.
I noticed a carton box by her bed that was marked with Korean words. The cardboard was already cut open, revealing packets of ramen inside it. Usually, I wouldn’t have paid it any attention. But the noodle packets in this box caught my eye. Ramen packets were usually bright and colourful with pictures of steaming bowls of noodles, mushroom, chicken or whatever flavour they were about.
But the noodle packets in this box carton were just plain white with some black print on it.
Curious, I fished out a packet to take a closer look. There was just a black, bold Korean title on a white background, and the word “Gwasuwon” in smaller print under the Korean characters. I looked up. Jenny was already slurping up noodles in front of her laptop, blasting some YouTube music video at her desk.
“Keep it down,” I said. “Natalie is going to complain to the resident assistant again.”
Jenny made a face at me, but she did turn the volume down a little.
“Smells good,” I said. The noodles smelt spicy and tangy like kimchi.
“Came in this morning,” she said, waving her chopsticks languidly at the box I was looking at. “Some new company I never heard of.”
“Weird packaging.” I flipped the white crinkly packet around in my hand. “No list of ingredients and all that.”
“Mmmm. It’s one of those minimalist concepts, like Muji.” She turned around, holding out the bowl in her hand. “Hey, this is really good. You wanna try some?”
Now I love spicy food. And I’m always game for anything with hot sauce, kimchi, wasabi and the like. But something about the smell put me off. A sort of cold, refrigerated smell underneath the spicy scent. It was very faint, but I could smell it. I was surprised Jenny didn’t mind it.
“Nah,” I said, waving my entomology lecture notes ruefully. “Heading out for lunch.”
“Enjoy the fruit flies!” she grinned.
I threw one of my soft toys at her before walking out.
I didn’t think too much of it. But I did notice that Jenny was having Gwasuwon noodles more often than the other brands. I kept smelling it in our room. And always present was that faint, undefinable, freezer odour underneath the spicy tang of the noodles. Soon, the smell permeated the other floors of our residence hall too. I was in the hall pantry when I caught a whiff of it again.
I turned around to see Mike removing his bowl from the microwave with a towel.
“You’re eating this too?” I asked, curious. “Did you get it from Jenny?”
“No. Got it from super mart,” he said as he placed the steaming bowl carefully onto a plate. “Jenny gave me a pack earlier on. It was so lip smacking good that I went to the mart to get more.”
And he was right. They were on sale at the campus mart. I watched the man in front of me unload armfuls of the noodles onto the cashier counter.
“That good eh?” I said to the cashier as I eyed the man walking off with his bags of ramen.
The cashier laughed. “They are flying off the shelves. We can’t stock them fast enough.” She scanned my drink can with a beep. “I tried some myself. They are really tasty.”
The rest of the semester passed rather uneventfully. The only thing that was even remotely notable was the flu bug going around the campus. It was so bad that the lecture theatres were half-filled because so many students were ill.
Jenny was sick as well. She had been feeling under the weather for a couple of weeks now. I checked in on her before I went to class. She was looking a little puffy around the face. The curtains in our room were drawn. The light hurts her eyes, she said. She muttered something about her YouTube live stream. I told her to give it a rest. Her fans will understand. When I closed the door behind me, Jenny was fast asleep under the covers. I could barely make out her form underneath the blankets in the darkness of the room. I think it was the last time I saw the real Jenny.
Natalie was in the corridor when I walked towards the hall’s lift lobby. She gave me a dour face as she entered her dorm room next to ours. I ignored her. We got a break from her complaints this week because Jenny had stopped playing her loud videos.
Class was barely half full today. A lot of the students called in sick. The professor looked resigned as she began her lecture. Which was a shame, because the class was interesting. It was a continuation of last week’s lecture about fungal infection in ants. Zooommbie ants, Jenny would have said if she had been well enough to listen to me yak about it.
On the bus back to my hall, I took out my mobile to watch a few videos on YouTube. I saw on the app notifications that Jenny was live streaming. I felt a faint twinge of annoyance. I had told her to rest. I tapped on her channel video just to see what she was up to.
My mobile screen went dark for a moment. Then Jenny’s face appeared. She looked like she had just woken up. Her hair was a mess. But she wasn’t moving or talking. She was just staring fixedly into the camera, her mouth slightly ajar. Her face was so close to the camera that I could see her cracked lips.
The video live chat was already abuzz with comments.
wat’s wrong wif her???
OMG she’s drooling gross
does anybdy knw where she lives? she needs help!!
where’s my nooodles
20 min already and cou nting
watever she’s having I want some too lololol
I called Jenny immediately. She didn’t pick up my call. I dashed off the bus when it stopped at my hall. Something was wrong with Jenny. I hammered the elevator button with my hand. The lift was taking too long. I bounded up the stairs instead, my backpack bouncing on my back.
I rushed to our room and flung the door open, out of breath.
Jenny was sitting in the dark, hunched before the laptop. She didn’t even react to my sudden appearance. She was just sitting there, very still.
“Jenny?” I said, huffing.
I strode in, leaving the dorm door wide open behind me.
On hindsight, that action probably saved my life.
I reached out a hand to touch her. But something made me pause. Jenny’s hair was falling over her shoulder and I couldn’t see her face.
“What are you doing?” I asked tentatively, slinging my backpack down.
She didn’t reply.
“Jenny?” I said again, my voice louder.
She stirred. The light from the door fell on her hair, and it was then I noticed it. Her hair hadn’t been combed and it was a tangled mess around her face. But I could see that there was something on her head. It was a little black stump sticking out from the matted hair on her head. It looked like a stalk.
Jenny began to turn around slowly.
Her face was pale and drawn, and she was drooling. But it was her eyes that froze me. I will never forget the look in her eyes as our eyes met. But I didn’t have time to think, because the next moment, Jenny was lunging at me, her mouth wide open in a snarl and her hands outstretched in claws towards my face.
I screamed and threw my bag up in front of me. She dove into me, slamming both of us into the wall. The only thing keeping her teeth from me was my backpack. Her eyes were bloodshot and wild above my bag. And her fingernails were scrabbling at me, scratching my face.
I screamed again. “Jenny! Jenny! What’s wrong with you?!! Jenny!!!”
I heard Natalie’s furious voice at the door. “Look! I told you to keep it dow — ”
Natalie never had a chance. Jenny turned and threw herself at the stunned girl standing in the doorway, sinking her teeth into Natalie’s shoulder. Both of them toppled into the corridor.
I don’t quite remember what happened next. It was all a blur. There was blood all down the front of Natalie’s blouse. She was shrieking in terror, beating at Jenny with her fists. And I was desperately yelling and pulling on Jenny’s neck and shoulders, trying to get her to release Natalie. But she wouldn’t let go. It was as if she had a ferocious death grip on the Natalie’s body. And all this time, I was staring madly at the stalk at the top of her head. It was thick and dark, with a little bulb at the end. It looked like some sort of deformed mushroom sprouting out of Jenny’s hair.
The campus security arrived within minutes, but it felt like forever before someone dragged me away from Jenny. They managed to pry Jenny apart from Natalie, but not before a good part of Natalie’s shoulder came with her. I heard the ambulance siren blaring away downstairs. Natalie was already unconscious by then. There was blood all over the corridor. It was horrific.
I don’t know how much time passed as I stood there in shock, watching the paramedics and security officers rush around me. I heard a sudden burst of static. I turned around and stared at a security officer some distance away as his walkie-talkie chattered into life. He listened to it for a moment, jerked up straight and disappeared hurriedly down the corridor. It was a little far, but I overheard the message clearly.
There had been another incident.
I went back into my room amid the noise and turmoil. I sat down. My hands were trembling. I was trying to think. The stalk on Jenny’s head. The biting. I shivered and clasped my arms around me. There was something gritty on my hands. I looked down at my arms. They were covered with some sort of dark dust. I jumped up and frantically tried to brush it off.
A light caught my eye. Jenny’s laptop. The camera light was was still on. Her computer had been streaming live video all this time. Whoever was watching her video stream could see me. I walked over and slammed down the cover of the laptop.
I don’t know how much time I still have.
I went into emergency mode. I grabbed whatever I needed. My wallet. My driver’s license. Cash. Some clothes. My lecture notes. I stuffed it all into my backpack. My eye fell on the cardboard box by Jenny’s bed. There were some packets in it. I don’t know why I did it. But I grabbed a packet of the Gwasuwon noodles and stuffed it into my bag. I was out of the door in less than five minutes.
I hit the elevator button at the lift lobby. The lift floor indicators on the wall lit up slowly one by one as the elevator came up. One, two, three, four. I couldn’t wait. I turned and took the stairs. I was two floors down before I realised I had forgotten my passport. It was in my wardrobe. I headed back up the stairs. I was going to push open the staircase door to the corridor when I saw through the door glass panel that the floor was full of people.
Not students. Or campus security.
Men in dark jackets talking into their walkie talkies. Some had gloves on and they were holding large plastic bags. I could see my dorm door from where I stood. Some of the men were entering my room. The words “FBI” were emblazoned on the back of their jackets.
The loudspeaker came on. It was the dean’s voice. The campus was in lockdown mode. Everyone was to stay in their rooms. I took off for the carpark where my car was.
It was chaos at the ground floor.
There were ambulances and police trucks at the entrance. People in biohazard suits were ushering students out, some of them in wheelchairs. The students looked pale and listless. I saw one of them being carried out on a stretcher. His head was turned to the side. There was a black bump on top of his blonde head. I backed away.
Nobody paid any attention to me in the chaos as I unlocked my car and tossed my backpack in. I was sweating heavily by then. I can make it, I can make it, I muttered to myself as I slid into the car seat.
“Hey, you can’t leave.”
I looked up. It was the campus security guard. His hand was on my open car door.
“I need to go,” I muttered. “I have to go.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. His other hand was moving to his walkie-talkie.
“You should go too,” I said abruptly. Loudly.
He stopped and gazed down at me, surprised. “What?”
“Half of them are sick,” I said. I think my voice shook a little. I looked up at him, my eyes wide. “You should go now.”
He stared down at me. Something flickered in his face. Uncertainty. Fear.
He knew.
He knew what I was talking about.
He hesitated, his walkie talkie paused in mid-air. I took the chance. I started the ignition and stepped on the accelerator. He jumped away in surprise. His hand fell away from my door. I slammed the door shut as I drove out of the parking lot. I looked in the rear mirror as I sped out of the carpark. He was just standing there with the walkie-talkie in his hand, looking after me.
I drove for ten hours to my aunt’s place in Kansas. I kept the radio on, listening for any news about the school. There was nothing. Zilch. Nothing on the air about any incident or epidemic in the campus I left behind. During meal breaks, I stopped at gas stations and chewed on burritos in my car while I feverishly flipped through the lecture notes in my bag.
The stalk. I had seen it before. It was on the projector screen in the lecture hall.
“The Ophiocordyceps fungus infiltrates the ant’s body and head, but leaves the brain relatively untouched. The neurons in the ant’s body begin to die and the fungal cells insert themselves in their place. This is effectively a hostile takeover of the ant body. In the place of the neurons, the fungus releases chemicals that contract and expand the muscles of the ant.
It is important to note that the brain is not infected by the fungus. It is speculated that the ant brain is still aware and is a prisoner in its own body as it watches the fungus manipulate its limbs…”
I stopped reading.
I remembered Jenny’s eyes.
The way she looked at me as she lunged towards me.
I opened the car door and vomited everything I ate onto the side of the road.
There was a creek next to the road. I threw out the backpack into the water before I drove away. I have no idea why I did that. My wallet and everything else I had was inside that bag.
That was two weeks ago.
My aunt let me stay at her place. I told her that it was semester break. My parents were in Florida. It was far enough. Or so I tell myself. I scoured the news everyday. There was just a brief news flash about a mass food poisoning in my school. I gripped my fists. They are not telling the truth about what happened in the campus. Then I saw the product recall alerts. The word “Gwasuwon” flashed on the television screen. I felt my blood chill.
It was contained, I keep telling myself. The government will take care of it.
I tried not to think about it.
But yesterday I saw something that changed my mind. That was what prompted me to write this down to warn you.
I was taking out the trash yesterday when I saw the bird. It landed on the fence a few feet away from me. It had a stalk on its head. Just like Jenny. It flew away when I threw a rock at it. I watched it squawk and wheel away in the air to join the other birds in the sky. I walked back into the house. The news was on. Something about rats biting each other. I switched off the TV and drew the curtains. I sat down on the couch and started shaking.
It was supposed to be safe. Kansas was supposed to be safe. The FBI and the police took care of it. They took away all of Jenny’s boxes, didn’t they?
I have so many questions. Is it contagious? A virus? Some sort of parasite? Can it spread by proximity? What if it gets into the food chain? Where can we be safe from it? And why is the FBI involved?
I don’t know. I have no answers. I only know that the world is going crazy. And that I am not feeling myself these days. I am tired. My face looks a little puffy. The light hurts my eyes. I am going to lie down now.
But I have one piece of advice for you.
If you see Gwasuwon ramen noodles, throw it away and call FBI immediately.
Just throw it away.