Virus: Stockholm - S2 E-Book

Daniel Åberg

• Herausgeber: Storytel Original
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Virus: Stockholm
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 476

Beschreibung

A deadly, very aggressive and airborne virus has destroyed civilization. In the midst of devastation we follow the survivors, Amanda, Iris, Sigrid & Dano. But having survived the apocalypse is no blessing - now hell begins. The four of them just want to heal their wounds. But an uninfected, heavily armed, gas mask wearing militia has other plans for them. Sigrid is kidnapped. If they can't find the militia's hiding place before morning, Iris's daughter will die. Poorly equipped, their rescue operation begins. But the desperate plan has a dark side, and as the death toll rises, the question must be asked: how far is it morally justifiable to go to save the one you love? Society may have perished, but there is still much to lose.

Leseprobe

www.storytel.com

Copyright © Storytel Original 2021

Copyright © Daniel Åberg 2021

Publisher: Storytel Original

Original title: Virus - S2

Translation: Anita Shenoi

ISBN 978-91-7967-699-5

PART 1

The noise filling the car reminds Iris of the screech of the metal door opening to the bike store of her apartment block when she was little. That grating sound would scream in her ears, making her react like some do when they hear fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. Because she had hated that sound so much, she was reluctant to go in there, and one evening, when she’d left her Monark in the bike stand outside and forgotten to close the cable lock, the bike was stolen. She had to walk for the rest of the summer before they could afford to buy her a new one.

Now she claps her hands to her ears, not understanding where the sound is coming from. She just saw Amanda switch off the car ignition, and the vibration of the engine has stopped, so why is it still making a noise?

Amanda looks at her from the driver’s seat. Iris can see her face is haggard. Her sweaty hair is done up in a messy knot and she has dirt on both cheeks – something green on one of them, something brown on the other. Sweat has run tracks down to her chin on both sides – it’s a chin that Iris sees moving up and down jerkily. Why? Is Amanda talking? Iris can’t hear anything – the piercing noise is drowning everything out. She tries to make a move, to get away from the noise, but discovers to her surprise that Amanda is holding her back firmly. Iris’s broken arm, which is in a sling, is pressed against her ribcage and stomach and she senses how the healthy muscles of her arms are quivering in frustration as she is stuck in an unshakable grip.

Then the grip on her forearm releases and a moment later, Iris is hit by a hard slap on the face. Once, twice – OUCH!

“STOP SCREAMING!” roars Amanda. “STOP, STOP! SCREAMING WON’T HELP!”

Is that me making the noise?thinks Iris in surprise.Isn’t it the door to the bike store that’s screaming? Why would I be?

But at the same time, she feels her throat burning, and her body shaking with exertion.

Sigrid. They had beaten her unconscious, taken her, carrying her upside down so that her head almost hit the tarmac; they’d flown away with her in the helicopter. That’s why Iris is screaming – because there’s nothing she can do about it.

Except die, perhaps. Does the pain go away then?

“Quiet”, hisses Amanda. “Stop … yelling … so we … canthinkinstead.”

Iris starts sobbing and hears how the noise in the car changes when she momentarily breathes in rather than continuing to squeeze the last air from her lungs. She takes a breath through her nose and mouth, the stagnant air inside the car filling her lungs. It smells stuffy and of rancid sweat. A weak impulse wants her to start screaming again but she stops herself, letting the scream continue only in her head.

She looks around, drowsily. She hears Dano’s heavy, yet shallow breathing from the back seat – he seems to be close to breaking point and she wonders what scars he will bear from this. What effect does it have on a twelve-year-old boy to see his family wiped out, and then go on alone, only to be forced to witness death upon death?

Iris hastily glances backwards. He’s sitting in the middle of the backseat and their eyes meet. She catches a glimpse of shame in them before he looks down at his hands, twisting and turning and flexing them, uncertain of what to do with them.

“Stop”, Iris says to him, in as controlled a tone as she can master in English. “It wasn’t your fault they took Sigrid. I shouldn’t have left you two alone in there – I should have protected you.”

“But if I’d only… I should have been able… no, I don’t know, but I should have made more of an effort to bring her to safety. We should have run as far away as we could – instead I led her back to…” He sighs so deeply that he seems to be emptying his lungs of air, and is immediately compelled to draw a heavy, reluctant breath.

Amanda shakes her head.

“Stop it, both of you”, she says in a tired voice. “It’s not our fault this happened. None of it is. It’s theirs – no-one else’s.”

They sit in silence. Iris is blinking hard in an attempt to hold back the tears but she fails, and with eyes overflowing, she starts fumbling for the car door handle to open it. She needs fresh air and wants to scream…

“Wait”, says Amanda sharply, and leans over her. “I’ll help you.” There’s a click and the door swings open. Fresh evening air gushes in and Amanda opens the door on her side as well, allowing the air to flow freely through the car and blow away some of the rancid stench of sweaty desperation they are excreting.

“There are two things we need to work out”, says Amanda. “How to find them and what to attack them with. If we can work that out then we’ll have her back with us soon.”

Iris lets out a lifeless laugh.

“How the hell can we find her?” she says. The scene replays in her mind over and over again: how her daughter’s lifeless body was carried like an indelicate object, upside down, her head swinging back and forth just a few centimetres from the ground; how the masked soldier threw her into the helicopter in the same, careless and almost disgusted way that she herself had thrown the mattress that Filip died on out of the bedroom window.

Amanda looks her firmly in the eye.

“We have no choice other than to try and find that place they were talking about. It’s possible they’ve taken her somewhere else because of the risk of infection, but we haven’t got anything to go on. If we’re lucky, they’ve taken her there and are keeping her isolated until they’ve been able to do whatever it is they want to do with her.”

Iris shudders at Amanda’s last words, feeling the scream bubble up inside of her again, but she controls herself and shuts her eyes tight. Stop, she thinks. Please stop dangling lifelessly in his unyielding arms.

“The app”, says Iris after a while. “Even if it didn’t help us find Sigrid, we might have use for it – there was a cached map in it.”

Amanda reaches for the iPhone from the dashboard, taps the home button and is confronted by the code lock.

“1919”, says Iris in a mechanical voice. Amanda taps in the four digits and goes into the app. She is presented with a map view of the area around Nytorget and the blue, drop-shaped icon. Just as she’s about to zoom out, she stops herself and taps on the icon instead. She bites her lip, in thought, and Iris gives her an enquiring look.

“What is it?”

“We’re so bloody stupid”, says Amanda. “There was never any chance of us finding Sigrid with this.”

“Why not? The GPS system is still running – we could tell from the drone – it made its way to us and then returned to base. It was the GPS that did that, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s not enough. The thing with Sigrid’s phone is the same as with the drone – it can receive information about its position from a GPS satellite but it needs a functional mobile phone network to be able to transmit the position from the wristband phone to the app on your iPhone.That’swhy they couldn’t control the drone – they had only programmed it with the GPS coordinates. So it flew to the right position, and hovered over and filmed it before returning once the batteries started to run out.” She holds the phone up towards Iris. “Look at the date stamp on the icon”, she says.

Sigrid 2016-06-29 05:46it says in the pop-up box that appeared after Amanda tapped the icon.

“It shows the position of the telephone when the mobile network went down last Wednesday morning”, says Amanda.

Iris has a think.

“So it doesn’t still have to be at Nytorget? Sigrid might be wearing the phone on her arm, it’s just that we can’t see it?”

Amanda nods.

“Yes, that could be the case, but it doesn’t really help us now.”

Iris thinks again.

“No, but … oh, I don’t know.” She dismisses it. One thing at a time she thinks – we can consider that later if it becomes relevant.

She pauses in mid thought. Notifit becomes relevant –whenit becomes relevant. She’ll be damned if she fails to find her own child .

“What about the map – did you get anything from it?”

Amanda zooms out, scrolls down past their own position and continues South, zooms out again, waits a moment and then sighs.

“The map hasn’t downloaded far enough from the place it was last used, which was back at your place, I assume”, she says despairingly. “Perhaps we can try driving to a petrol station and break in – they usually have roadmaps for sale, don’t they?”

Iris shrugs.

“Perhaps. But we haven’t got time to look for maps. We have to find Sigrid – NOW!”

Dano moves forward. Iris notices that he’s looking at the phone in Amanda’s hand. She doesn’t know how much he’s understood of what she and Amanda were talking about and she’s a bit ashamed they leave him out so often by speaking Swedish to one another, but it feels so unnatural to speak English to Amanda, especially about things he wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Do we need a map to find Sigrid?” he asks. Iris and Amanda nod at him.

“I have detailed maps of all the countries in Europe saved in a map app on my mobile phone”, he says, his face brightening slightly. “We fixed that before leaving Syria so that we could always check where we were, even if we couldn’t get a signal. Wait here.”

And before either of them can open their mouths, he’s out of the car and on his way into the bed shop to fetch his phone.

Dano feels his energy return as he rushes into the bed store where they had sheltered earlier in the day. He takes the stairs two at a time, runs up to the window where he left his phone charger and phone, grabs them and runs back towards the stairs. Then he sees the bag over by the bed with the Batman duvet. He hurries over to it and packs the few things they had time to grab from the store, before hurrying out to the car.

“I took our stuff so we can get out of here right now”, he says to Amanda and Iris, throwing the bag and then himself into the backseat of the car.

He pulls out the charging cable – the phone only has 9 percent battery left – and leans forward so the other two can see. He activates the map app and waits for the GPS signal to be picked up by the phone to give him the right map coordinates.

“We’re heading south”, says Amanda. “I remember Linda said their base is a farm just up from Tyresö, and we should avoid taking the road to Älta because that’s the one they use themselves”, she says, pointing to a road on the screen, which, after meandering eastwards a little, turns off in a southerly direction through the countryside.

“That’s the road to Älta, and that is…er…that’s Tyresö over there”, continues Amanda, after zooming out a bit. “So they should be there somewhere”, she says, pointing to an area east of the road.

They stare at the map in Dano’s hand. He taps on an icon and tries to switch to satellite view but all he gets is a fuzzy green image.

“Of course, only the map view gets saved off line”, he says disappointedly. “We can see where all the roads go but unfortunately not where there are buildings and houses.” He’s a little embarrassed – he thought his maps would help, he wanted to be useful – make them see him as an asset.

Iris covers her face with her good hand, as if trying to hide the tears that everyone knows are running down her cheeks.

Dano feels he has to do something. They can’t give up.

“Perhaps the map can help us a bit after all”, he suggests. “So she warned you about this road because that was the one they used? Well, perhaps we can find another road into the same area.” Dano scrolls east on the map and then north. “What about this one?”

Iris dries her eyes and looks at the screen again. Dano has zoomed out, making the smaller roads into the tiniest of streaks on the map. He points to a road going south through what they presume is a forest, a few kilometres east of their current position. On the map, the road meanders, runs through a few crossroads and eventually joins a road that stems off of the one they had been warned about.

“What d’you think?” That’ll take us down to the same area but without having to take that Alt…Elt…well, that road we weren’t supposed to take,” he says, blushing when he sees Amanda’s faint smile at his attempt to pronounce the Swedish name.

Dano traces the route backwards, trying to see if the small road he found can be reached by only using the back roads, where the risk of traffic congestion is less. It’s a maze of side tracks, some lead into housing areas and dead ends,and he has to backtrack. The small size of the screen makes it too difficult to get an overview and it reminds Dano a little of the tangle of mazes in puzzle books he used to solve when he was little.

“It can be done”, he says, once his finger reaches their current location. “Look!”

“Good”, says Amanda. “But it’s not enough. We’ll need a better map once we get closer. We have to work out exactly where they are if we’re going to have the slightest chance. We have to get one of those terrain maps.”

“Do they get that we kind of know where they’re holed up?” asks Iris.

“I don’t think so – I think she mentioned the thing about the road before picking up the radio and secretly transmitting to them, but I’m not sure.”

Dano listens to what they are saying – they’ve switched to English now, even when they’re not talking directly to him, and this makes him happy. He wants them to see him as a fully-fledged member of their quartet – yes, he’s still going to think of them as a quartet because Sigrid will be back. No more people are going to disappear now.

At the same time, a lot of what they are talking about is difficult to work out even though he understands the words. The Radio? And who’s the woman who told them about the road? One of the ones he saw go into the department store? And why did they take Sigrid?

He feels he needs to know everything that’s happened – and soon. That was something he’d learned during his escape through Europe, and that he’d got his parents to understand after a while too – that if they were honest with him everything would be much simpler. In the vulnerable situation they were in, there was no space to treat him like the kid he actually was. And that was true even now.

“It doesn’t matter if they know we’re coming or not”, says Iris. “I’m going to get to that farm even if they’re lying in wait for us with guns at the ready.”

Amanda nods slowly.

“Yes, but it’s just as well to prepare as much as we can. What’s the time?”

Dano clicks the map away and checks the top of the display.

“Almost half ten”, he says.

“Okay”, says Amanda. “So we have a few hours of darkness to reach the area where it starts getting interesting to search. Luckily, now it’s summer, it gets light as early as three, so we should be able to make our way easily. Although I’m not sure you should tag along with that arm of yours.” She nods at Iris’s sling.

Iris says something back in Swedish which Dano doesn’t understand but the tone of her voice makes it pretty easy to work out:Try and stop me.

Dano studies both women. He doesn’t understand their relationship. Clearly, they know each other well, but they don’t seem to be friends. When they first met, Amanda did tell him that she and Iris’s dead husband had been close, but that friendship doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on the two women. It was more like they tolerated one another.

“A petrol station then”, says Iris. “Where’s the nearest one?”

Amanda shrugs but then her face brightens.

“Wait ... isn’t there one pretty close to here - an OKQ8? Just on the other side of the Saltsjöbanan rail track?”

“Yes, so let’s go there then”, says Iris in a stressed tone. “Dano, you take the spider wrench, Amanda the machine gun and I’ll take the pistol. We’re bound to scare somebody.”

They leave the car and half run up the same street they’d been running down earlier after the hand grenade attack. Amanda points at something and whispers that there’s a pedestrian tunnel under the rail track.

Once there and down a short set of steps, Dano hesitates – the tunnel looks scary. Even if it’s only about twenty metres underground, the lack of lighting makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable.

“Are you okay?” asks Amanda, as Iris impatiently signals with her gun hand that they have to go, almost pressing the trigger to make them continue moving forwards. The great anxiety in her face compels them forward, of course, but Dano still wishes they’d taken a few seconds to think it through. So much has already gone wrong.

Clutching the spider wrench tightly, he sees Amanda go first into the darkness, the automatic weapon raised in front of her. He really wishes it was a working gun.

The tunnel smells damp. It’s a strange contrast to the bone-dry world above ground and he holds his breath, hoping they won’t trip over something or someone. They continue up along the wall of the narrow stairs on the other side. There’s a pizza restaurant in a little red station house to the left. His stomach growls as he sees it, but then he catches sight of the station platform. There’s a dead body, half lying on a bench, half slumped over a large bag on the floor beneath it. It’s a strange position to die in – practically impossible – but the thing that overpowers Dano with an icy chill and stops him in his tracks is something else. Iris, who was last through the tunnel, almost crashes into him. She goes round him, urging him forward with a stressed expression: move it! But he doesn’t move.

“What is it?” Amanda takes time to ask, giving Iris a glance of irritation as she does. Dano shakes his head, trying to cast it from his mind but still staring at the body on the platform.

“My mama”, he says in a low voice. She and my little brother…they…they were also at a train station, on the platform…when they died.”

Iris continues down the street, one side of which has a high stone wall rising above it. Dark and empty apartment windows stare down at them.

Amanda stays where she is, searching Dano’s face.

“Come on. I promise to do everything in my power to give you time to grieve your family, but not now.”

He smiles faintly. So much grief, he thinks. We’re all carrying it.

A muffled cry makes them turn towards Iris, who is now some fifty metres in front of them. They run towards her, and once they’re almost there, Iris gesticulates with her gun hand. On the other side of the street, Dano can see the strange abbreviation OKQ8 on a sign placed high up.

“It’s just an unstaffed petrol pump”, says Iris. “There’s no-one here.”

Amanda stares at the pathetic excuse for a petrol station. FILL UP CHEAPER HERE! it says on a large arrow pointing towards a minimal roof under which a couple of petrol pumps and a card payment terminal have been squeezed in.

Fucking bloody apocalypse, she thinks, briskly rubbing her hands against her face after slinging the automatic weapon up on her back – a movement she is painfully aware that she blatantly copied from the man who took Sigrid. He did exactly the same thing before jumping out of the helicopter. She looks at Iris, wondering if she clocked the move, but her sad eyes are fixed on their latest failure.

“Okay, so we’ll start thinking bigger”, says Amanda, as positively as possible. “Physical maps – where are they? They might not even have them at petrol stations anymore”

Iris suddenly says.

“The book shop, of course! There’s one in there”, she says, pointing down towards Sickla shopping centre, which now stands out like a dark mound, a hundred metres away. “We don’t even have to go into the actual shopping centre – they have a shop window onto the street!”

Iris starts running towards the shopping centre. Amanda calls after her.

“Wait, I’ll get the car. Who knows if we’ll have to get out of there fast.”

Iris waves in reply, but carries on, and after some hesitation, Dano opts to follow her.

Amanda hurls herself into the driver’s seat but yells out as a sudden pain shoots up her neck. In her haste, she completely forgot she was still wearing the automatic weapon. As she thudded down on the seat, the barrel was thrown straight up, hitting her hard on the back of her head. She untangles herself from the rifle and wedges it down the back of the seat.

She spends a few seconds trying to find the automatic half beam and turn it off. They don’t need to alert the world to their presence – and if they drive slowly, it shouldn’t be a problem to navigate in the dark. She starts the car, reverses a few metres, brakes and frowns. What the hell, she thinks, and gets out of the car again with the automatic at the ready. She smashes the brake lights so that they wouldn’t be seen when driving.

A few minutes later, Amanda stops the car outside the book shop display window. She looks at Iris.

“What is it? You look utterly devastated.”

“There are thick iron bars on the inside”, says Iris dejectedly, nodding towards the window. “I don’t think breaking the glass will help.”

Amanda takes a deep breath.

“Okay”, she says. “Then we’ll go in through the shopping centre. We know there’s a clear way in, don’t we?”, she says, giving a wry smile.

They reach what is left of the entrance. The rubbish container in which the hand grenade exploded looks more like a tube now – it has no top or bottom and is lying on the road, thirty metres away. The whole shop front of the department store where they tried to get in is windowless, and glass shards crunch underfoot as Iris enters the shopping centre a few metres from where the entrance doors once were.

“We should …”, Amanda starts saying, but Iris has already been swallowed by the darkness inside and they hear her footsteps disappear into the distance.

“But what the hell …”, says Amanda, before turning towards Dano. “Wait here.”

She goes back out to the car and pulls Iris’s mobile phone out of the charger. Those few minutes the phone was charging should be enough to be able to use the torch for a little while?

“Iris?” She whispers as loudly as she can, as she and Dano reach the passage between the department store and the large central courtyard with shops on both sides. They’ve been lucky – the big sliding door was never pulled shut and locked before the virus really hit, so they can walk right in without any difficulty. Amanda gets no answer but detects a movement in the direction of the book shop. In the weak evening light that is still trickling through the skylight, the silhouette looks quite awkwardly one-armed.

“Come on Iris, calm down!” she hisses as she walks towards the figure. “We all want Sigrid back but it won’t help her if you hurry on ahead. They might have laid other traps.”

Amanda and Dano rush out into the dark passage way – the well-known store logos bring back memories as Amanda and Dano move forward – they are all so terribly familiar, it’s hard to take in the fact that they have the smell of death all around them. Amanda knows that the owner of the shopping centre had started to use scent in some of their temples of merchandise to encourage people to buy more, but she doubts this particular scent is part of their marketing strategy.

Most of the retail units are shutttered up but in some places the doors are still wide open, as if no-one had enough strength to close them properly last Tuesday. When they pass a clothes shop that is still open, the sweet macabre scent immediately intensifies, and Amanda gives Dano a sideways glance. He grimaces but neither of them says anything and they simply keep going. Amanda is almost hoping that the door to the book shop will be pulled shut and locked, even if it makes their job more difficult. She can’t handle seeing any more death.

Iris has stopped in front of the book shop. She leans her head against one of the two glass windows beside the entrance. The entrance itself consists of a lightweight metal roller front. There are no bars on the side windows – they’ll be able to get in. Amanda feels hope rising in her chest.

“They must have a map in there. If not, I can’t handle it any more”, says Iris with a low sigh.

“Now don’t you just lie down and give up – ever”, retorts Amanda, defiantely. She turns to Dano:

“Give me the spider wrench. And you, Iris – move out of the way.”

All of these glass windows in my way, thinks Amanda, as she takes a swing with the wrench and shuts her eyes.

The bang is almost silent, and the wrench practically bounces back. The window is rocking a little but otherwise unperturbed by the hit. She takes another swing, this time using both arms and trying to hit the same spot in the hope that the glass will have weakened, but to no avail. She has a third, fourth and fifth go at it.

“What the fuck”, she mutters, in both frustration and surprise. “There’s not even a real dent. I smashed the newsagent’s window with a briefcase the other day – how is this possible?”

Amanda gives it a whack a few more times with the same result, and then goes over to the glass on the other side of the entrance. The result is the same – not a scratch.

“Fucking arsehole book shop, why don’t you just die!” she shouts, before making one last desperate lunge towards the glass pane. But the only thing that happens is that she loses her grip on the wrench and it bounces across the floor with a metallic clatter. In pure frustration, she marches after it, picks it up and smacks it as hard as she can into the back of a chair by the café in the courtyard outside the book shop. The chair crumples.

Meanwhile, Iris is beginning to hyperventilate with exhaustion. No, thinks Amanda – no, no, no – don’t bail on me now.

But Iris looks so tired. She’s an empty shell that can barely hold herself upright. She’s alive but lifeless.

Amanda looks around. There has to be a way. There has to be. But how?

Iris suddenly stops panting and complete quiet descends on the shopping centre. Then they see her run back to where they came from, without saying a word.

“What the hell…where are you going?” Amanda shouts after her. “Iris – what are you doing?”

But she has already disappeared from view. They hear the sound of crunching glass and some murmured words that Amanda can’t decipher, followed by a shrill but clear:

“Come and help me then!”

Amanda and Dano rush back down the passage way. They hear scraping noises mixed with crunching glass and once they’re inside the store, they see her pushing a low bench filled with shoes.

“Dano, help me clear the floor of furniture and then go back into the shopping centre and push all those weird sofas and flower arrangements we passed out of the way. And you Amanda – get in the car. Don’t you see – the hand grenade practically ripped open the entire entrance wall. We’re going to do a smash and grab!”

Iris forcefully pushes away a rack of summer dresses. It slams into a cash desk and topples over; she repeats the procedure with a rack of t-shirts.

She shoves aside a low table, making it slam into a high set of shelves, inducing a cascade of scented soaps from the force of the movement. She kicks headless mannequins to one side and turns canvas footrests upside down.

It’s good she’s venting all her rage on home decor that no longer serves any purpose, but she would rather direct her pain at the people who deserve it.

Dano tries to remove the one thing that is actually blocking their ability to drive the car in: a part of the frame of the shop’s burglar alarm. He pushes against it and bends it backwards and forwards several times to weaken the metal down by the floor attachment, and eventually it breaks and hits the ground. The floor attachment remains but is so low that the Volvo can easily roll over it without damaging the chassis.

“Okay”, he says to Amanda. “Drive.”

A minute later, Amanda has steered the car through the opening, veered to the left and within a hair’s breadth managed to get past two supporting pillars to reach the sliding doors facing the central courtyard of the shopping centre. Having driven with the lights off, she switches them on once she’s some way in – the headlights cast a ghostly beam of light along the row of shops but it shouldn’t be visible from outside.

Amanda slowly nudges the car forwards so that Iris and Dano can go in front of her and clear the way. They push aside benches, rubbish bins and chairs that are lined up beside the bar of a sushi restaurant in the middle of the corridor. Once they’ve roughly come half way, they pass a small play area, and Iris holds her breath as she topples a big flower arrangement towards it. From what she can see in the dark, there are no signs of any kids bodies being left among the play things.

Arriving at the bookshop , Amanda has to drive past Iris and Dano and then get out and help then clear the chairs and tables by the café outside the entrance. They push everything towards the store on the other side of the central walkway. After quite a bit of manoeuvring as Amanda manages to turn the car so that the bonnet is finally pointing towards the large left-hand side window of the shop. She leaves the engine running and gets out again.

“Right”, she says, in a slightly hesitant tone. “Shall I... yeah, just drive right in now, or what?”

“Put your seatbelt on”, says Iris. “You shouldn’t have to drive that fast. The book shelves inside look like they’re on wheels, so shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What about the airbag?” asks Dano. “Won’t that pop out?”

“We’ll see”, says Amanda, getting back in the car. They see her fasten her seatbelt, put the car in gear, press the accelerator a couple of times and then release the clutch.

The distance from the bumper to the shop window is no more than three metres from the start, so the Volvo can’t pick up any speed before crashing into the window, but Iris can still see Amanda’s head jerk forwards as the car hits a shelf of paperbacks, half a metre inside the shop. The glass wall is pushed in first, looking almost elastic, before pulling away from the ceiling strip and falling heavily onto the bonnet and smashing to pieces. Iris and Dano shield themselves with upheld arms, Iris unfortunately doing so with her broken arm, which makes the pain flare up again.

“Wow”, exclaims Dano, once the echo of falling glass shards has died away. Amanda switches off the engine but keeps the lights on, the rays flooding the rows of bookshelves and lighting up one best seller after another. She opens the driver’s door and looks down at the floor.

“We have to sweep away the worst of it so we don’t get a puncture on the way out”, she says, but Iris has already squeezed past the car and is inside the shop.

She sees display signs for PAPERBACKS, CRIME, KIDS, MEMOIRS & BIOGRAPHIES, FICTION, TRAVEL and SPORTS & LEISURE, but the winning word MAPS is not to be found.

Damn, double damn, she thinks.

She runs off to STATIONERY but only finds hole punches and notebooks. In the TRAVEL section, the closest thing she can find is a guide to the inner archipelago of Stockholm. She looks around again; but she does not find what they are looking for.

Please, thinks Iris. Please, please, please let us have a bit of luck. There have to be maps somewhere.

“Here!” shouts Amanda. Iris looks up and sees her standing by a small counter further inside the shop, where she is checking the contents of a revolving stand. Iris rushes over to her.

“Möja, Svenska Högarna, Söderarm, Dalarö – what the fuck – why does everyone only want to go to the archipelago all the time?”, Amanda says with a sigh, spinning the rickety stand filled with maps in plastic folders half a turn. “City maps”, she reads. “No, not there.” She continues rotating the stand, looks down at the floor, sighs again and stands tall, looking at the top rows; spins the stand a quarter turn again and gasps, making Iris’ heart beat twice as fast. “Northern Stockholm, almost right, come on, find one for the other side too…Here!”

She pulls out the map folder positioned behind the one for Northern Stockholm. Iris can see the National Land Survey logo at the bottom, the words TOPOGRAPHIC MAP in capitals and in a smaller font, the heading 606 Southern Stockholm.

Please God, let it be the right one, she thinks, as they hurry back to the car. Amanda starts pulling the map out as she walks.

They lay the map out on the ground in front of the Volvo’s headlights. All three of them stare intensely at the area in question on the map.

“Älta farm – can that be it?” asks Amanda, after a few seconds of searching. Iris looks at the small cluster of buildings but shakes her head.

“It’s almost by this big road going south, isn’t that a bit too exposed?”

Amanda shrugs her shoulders.

“What about here?” Dano points to a group of buildings located a little way off into a forest a few kilometres east.

Amanda scrutinises the map and then looks up at Iris, as if she has an answer.

“It’s difficult to see what it is,” says Iris. “There’s no name to it so it’s probably not a big farm but on the other hand, there’s nothing indicating they’ve chosen a large place either.”

“But it should be a fair size”, says Amanda. “That Linda never said how many were there but I got the feeling that…well, that it’s around forty people at least. Maybe more. That guy Gustav she was talking about – hadn’t he been her company commander? God knows how big a UN company is but when my brother did his national service , I think it was about a hundred in his. Let’s say Gustav rang half of them and around half of them took him seriously and listened to his advice and that some took others with them – then we’re easily up to forty, fifty of them.”

“What about this then?” Dano points further east, towards a larger group of buildings.

“Well, look at that”, says Amanda. “That’s exactly where the roads we were looking at meet – that’s the one from the north we were talking about taking and that’s the one leading off the Älta road. It says Erstavik. That must be it. Erstavik is a gigantic estate. The family who live there own pretty much all of the land covered by this map I think.”

She points to the buildings.

“It’s not a village,“ Iris exclaims, “the buildings belong to the estate. I bet this is the place they’ve taken over. There’s plenty of space for around fifty people to live there.”

Amanda examines the area in detail.

“It’s surrounded by fields and open spaces – it’ll be hard to get in there without being seen.”

She points to the road they’ve been scrutinising.

“I wonder if that road really is better. Look – on this map you can see there are more roads into the area than we saw earlier and they join in two places before reaching the estate itself. There’s bound to be guard posts there, and perhaps even land mines so no unauthorised people can get past. We’re going to have to leave the car far from there and walk through the forest for several kilometres. D’you think we can do it?”

Iris feels panic grip her stomach again. They have to get moving – now. The mere thought of it makes her want to throw up but the fact remains: if they haven’t got hold of Sigrid before dawn tomorrow, there’s a big risk they will have already had time to kill her.

“What about that?” Dano points to the upper right-hand corner of the map. A road meanders off from Erstavik in an easterly direction towards a swimming lake, from which a smaller road continues off the edge of the map page.

“What’s that where the road ends?” Iris says urgently. “Does that road lead anywhere? If it does, then I think that’s the one – they seem totally focused on stopping people coming from the direction of Stockholm.”

Amanda feverishly turns the map over and spins it round so that she can see the end sheet, with an overview of the map in question plus adjoining map sections.

“Number 608 is the next map section to the east”, she says. “Did any of you see one of those?”

Before Amanda has finished her sentence, Iris is already on her feet and running back to the map carousel. Once there, she mercilessly starts tearing out maps and tossing them away after a quick check of the title and overview page. Soon, the floor is covered in rejected green, plastic-covered maps.

“No!” she shouts. “It can’t end like this!”

Amanda and Dano are now beside Iris and Amanda tries to put her arm around her. But she doesn’t want to be comforted, and simply pushes the arm away, already walking back towards the car.

“We’ll take the road we talked about first – at least we know it goes all the way there,” she says, with a forced calm in her voice. “We’ll leave now.”

“Wait”, says Dano, but Iris ignores him and simply continues towards the car. “Just wait!”, he shouts, and she stops this time, mostly from the surprise of his raising his voice.

“My map app”, he says, holding up his mobile phone towards Iris. “So that small road can’t be seen on it, but you can see there’s a settlement about one kilometre east of the end of the map. Don’t you think it could be a cycle- or footpath from the houses to the lake? We should be able to get there using that.”

He stares down at the screen.

“So … Sul … no, I don’t know how to pronounce that in Swedish.”

Amanda takes the phone from him. She can’t help but laugh bitterly when she sees what it says.

“Solsidan – it looks like we’re going to attack those arseholes from the sunny side.”

Amanda drives slowly through the night. The cloudless sky provides some light, although they are now completely surrounded by darkness. If she looks up through the windscreen, she can see the stars. She can’t remember when she last experienced something so truly black as night, in the real sense of the expression. Perhaps she never had.

They had swept away the worst of the glass shards and manoeuvred the car out of the shopping centre without getting a puncture. The new plan to drive down to Solsidan via Saltsjöbaden meant twice the driving distance, and they decided to take the risk of selecting the larger roads. If they were going to get there by daybreak, it would be their only chance. The fuel gauge was showing half a tank – that should be more than enough. The only threat could be traffic jams and accidents along the way.

“Eat more”, says Amanda sharply, when she sees Iris has only managed to consume one of the protein bars they shoved into a bag from an abandoned pop-up shop in the shopping plaza – they didn’t seem that appealing but hopefully they would give them a little more energy than an ordinary Snickers bar.

“We have to eat and drink if we’re going to get through this.”

Iris gives Amanda a vacant look and takes a few gulps from a bottle labelled Wellness Nutrition. Iris’s mechanical and sleepwalker-like behaviour makes Amanda uneasy. She’s exhausted too and feels like slumping over the steering wheel and weeping or fainting. But she forces her body to obey and hopes her brain will have the stamina to at least signal correctly…well, how long do you think this can take? It mustn’t take too long, regardless of Sigrid’s status – they’ll collapse.

“Look”, mumbles Dano, from the middle of the backseat, his mouth full of oat crunchies.

Damn, thinks Amanda.

They’ve come a few kilometres down the motorway towards Saltsjöbaden. Significantly more people seem to have tried to leave the southeast corner of Nacka than chosen to drive here, and the two lanes on their side of the road have been spared traffic jams and accidents – until now.

Around a hundred metres in front of them, they glimpse the beginning of a queue. Amanda presses the clutch and lets the car roll forward silently for the last bit of the approach.

Further off in the darkness, they can make out a shape stretching the whole width of the road, but their view is largely blocked by the vehicle in front, so it’s hard to see what it is.

Amanda chooses to drive in the left lane, which succeeds in taking them forward a few hundred metres before they have to stop abruptly. They take their things and walk the last bit.

It’s a fuel tanker with a trailer that has been parked across both lanes. It’s so long that the front part with the driver cab is down in the ditch to the right of the road.

With Amanda in the lead, they zig-zag their way between the vehicles and up to the front of the fuel tanker. Not everyone left their cars once they got stuck in the queue, and a heavy scent of death hangs over the place.

Their jaws drop at the sight of what remains of the driver cab.

“It’s them”, says Iris. “The military. It’s their way of stopping people from coming down to their territory. Look – the driver cab hasn’t just burnt out – they’ve blown it up, all to make sure the tanker can’t be moved.”

Amanda just nods. It certainly is their work: a barrier intended to protect them in a bubble of peace and quiet while the world outside falls apart. It’s physically impossible to continue in a vehicle: metre-high concrete blocks prevent driving across to the lanes headed into town, and the junction on the right is blocked, unless you happen to be in a military tank that can tackle the steep embankment.

“We’ll continue by foot. We’ll find a new car to take soon enough”, she says, as decisively as possible.

They climb over the concrete barrier to the other side of the road and walk. Amanda has the automatic weapon across her back – she’s got used to it. Dano carries the spider wrench. Iris has a hard grip on the unloaded pistol and the bag of clothes over her good shoulder. Amanda has the food and drink in a bag.

They say nothing, just search their way forward. After barely a kilometre, they reach an abandoned car. It’s empty and locked, so they move on. Shortly afterwards, they spot a small grey car at the junction. It’s one of those with a front seat and not much more, and there’s someone sitting in it.

Shit, thinks Amanda.

She can smell it even before her hand grasps the door handle. After hesitating for a second, she gathers herself mentally and opens the door.

It’s worse than she could have imagined. The stench that hits them makes Dano throw up, his food consumption of the last half hour spattering down on the asphalt. Even Amanda is close to having everything she’s managed to consume leave her. After quickly removing herself to a few metres away, her stomach calms down and she stands with her head between her knees, taking deep breaths of fresh air.

After all, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t the air still unusually fresh? No exhaust fumes for several days, no emissions from industrial chimneys, no airplanes spewing carbon dioxide over the globe. Just the natural, good-natured rotting of millions of bodies, she thinks. The planet must be jumping for joy.

“Come on”, says Iris in a harsh, impatient tone – one that would usually irritate Amanda. But she’d rather handle a pissed-off Iris than a laconic one.

Amanda glances at the car. The driver’s seat is now empty and Amanda can see a pair of low-heeled shoes sticking up from the side of the road junction. While she has been avoiding throwing up, Iris has pulled out and dragged off the dead woman all by herself.

“It’s not that bad if you only breathe through your mouth”, says Iris, climbing into the passenger seat.

A couple of minutes later, they are back on track with the headlights turned off and the backlights smashed. The windows are down and Amanda is sitting on a sweater that Iris threw at her from her bag as she gave her a knowing look at the urine and fecal stains left by the owner of the car.

“Well it certainly looks dry but it might soften with your body heat.”

Dano is sitting on the adjustable armrest between the seats. He is still pale, and despite the din of rushing wind in the car as they shoot forwards with open windows, Amanda can hear Dano has taken Iris at her word: he’s breathing through his mouth, with his lips practically shut to filter the incoming air, if possible.

Dano had presence of mind enough to take the adapter from the abandoned Volvo, so now both he and Iris are charging their mobile phones in the 12-volt power point. Dano tries to check his map app to see how much further they have to drive.

“Unfortunately, we don’t really know where we’re going”, he says, with minimal mouth movement, making his English extremely difficult to understand. “But anyway, there’s a fair bit to go until we have to start guessing.”

They drive into a forest and the road around them becomes darker. Amanda slows down, and they roll forward at scarcely forty kilometres an hour.

“Stop! Stop!” exclaims Dano, after they drive past a barrier where the Saltsjöbanan rail track comes out of a tunnel beneath them. Amanda brakes and Dano almost bangs his head straight into the dashboard.

He points to a sign immediately in front of them to the right.

“Wasn’t that the name of the farm?”

Erstavikbadet station, Amanda reads.

Dano looks at his phone for a few seconds.

“I thought we should go all the way to that place and drive through the housing area to get…er, there”, he says, pointing his finger at the glass screen.

“But that was only because it looks closest on the map. Perhaps this is where people usually go to reach that swimming lake?”

The sign points to the left, where a footpath disappears between the trees. The train station is probably over there. To the right, however, there’s a proper road, a P sign also testifying to the presence of a car park.

“What d’you think?” Amanda looks at Iris, who has once again closed herself off in her own bubble. These constant mood changes worry Amanda. After letting off steam by dragging out the woman’s stiff corpse, Iris has just been staring apathetically out into the dark night.

Or is it in fact the opposite? Is this the look of steadfast resolve?

“We’ll walk from here”, says Iris after a few seconds of silence. “It will be more difficult to discover us on foot.”

The car park is located a couple of hundred metres into the forest. A few vehicles have been abandoned there. Before switching off the ignition, Amanda circles the small gravelled area so that the car is positioned to face the exit – it’s just as well to be prepared for a quick getaway. They leave the car, the windows wound up with a ten-centimetre gap, which will hopefully help to get rid of the rotten stench inside.

And so they stand at the edge of the car park, staring at a wide path with a slight downward slope that disappears into the darkness of the forest. The stars can still be seen in the sky but it’s almost two o’clock and it will get light in an hour. The line-up is the same as before: Dano has the spider wrench. Amanda has the automatic rifle, and Iris the pistol. Not much in the way of weapons, thinks Amanda – more like comfort blankets, something to hold in your hand.

They take a last glance at the map. It’s not as the crow flies but it isn’t more than one and a half kilometres to Erstavik farm. In reality, they will have to walk just over two kilometres. So close. Yet Amanda feels they are so far from their goal.

“What exactly are we going to do when we get there?” asks Dano.

Amanda is standing silently, her eyes fixed on some undetermined point in the darkness. She has no idea.

Iris is the one to break the silence.

“We’re going to use the only real weapon we have”, she says coldly. “We’ll infect them with our virus and then watch them die as we go get my child.”

PART 2

The dry moss crunches underneath their feet as they creep forwards along a trail, some ten metres from the footpath. Amanda goes first, Dano in the middle and then Iris. They keep a couple of metres’ distance from one another and try to avoid branches, but the thick vegetation makes it difficult for them to see where they are putting their feet.

Using the path would probably have been sheer suicide. Considering how painstaking their opponents have been so far, it doesn’t seem impossible for them to have laid explosive tripwire all over the forest, even though this is the least likely point of entry for an enemy to attack.

Iris’s plan was not well received by the others. Amanda protested, but after failing to deliver a Plan B when Iris directly asked whether she had a better suggestion, she simply mumbled something about it feeling wrong and started walking.

The weight of anxiety in Iris’s stomach is almost a physical lump and she has to concentrate to even manage to stay upright. But the image of her daughter’s unconscious body being thrown into the helicopter sharpens her wits.

She hates them. It’s almost laughable when she thinks about it. Iris thought she had known hate before – hate towards a parent at Sigrid’s kindergarten whose daughter discovered that Sigrid was a little too sensitive to jibes and was therefore an easy victim to tease. It had started innocently but in just a few days escalated into a bullying campaign which a number of kids joined without even understanding why. They were only three years old – but the mother’s indifference towards what had happened – how she refused to even speak to her own daughter, motivated by the idea that it was better for the girls to resolve it themselves – Iris hated her for that. She remembers she said precisely that to Filip:I hate her.

But regardless of how honest she thought those words were, she now understands that those feelings could at the most be likened to simple contempt. Hate is something completely different. From a purely objective point of view, she realises how repulsive and even evil her feelings are, but they seem natural – if this is what is needed for her to be able to retrieve Sigrid alive from the farm, then she’s willing to kill them all. No, not willing, she concludes – eager.

Amanda has stopped and is surveying the road ahead. Between the trees they can see a cylindrical box around half a metre high. It’s surrounded by three dark silhouettes: one large and two smaller ones.

A parent and her kids, thinks Iris. On the way back to the car from the swimming lake. Is that a cool bag of food beside them, and a plastic bag with wet towels and swimsuits? Yes probably.

They survey the scene. The sound of bird chatter can be heard from the foliage above them. Under the protective canopy of the trees, they still can’t see it but simply sense morning approaching. When a different bird responds to the call, Amanda starts walking again.

The silence among them feels liberating. Iris does not want to talk to them – does not want to have to explain or defend her plan. Just move forward now, with silent steps through the sparse forest and a desperate hope that no-one will catch sight of them.

They pass a small dark lake just a few metres away from them. It looks so peaceful.. After this, the terrain starts to slope and get rocky, and they have to slither down along the flat rock faces. Iris steadies herself with her hand, managing to press it into something sharp. She muffles a cry and bites her lip hard, her mouth filling with the taste of blood. Damn it.

As they start approaching the end of this section of forest, they more frequently catch glimpses of the bay that Iris guesses has given Erstavik its name. Iris takes her phone out of her pocket, lighting up the display and shielding it against her stomach before discretely glancing at it. It’s ten past three and the charging session in the car has given her around twenty percent battery power. She daren’t hope for too much and hasn’t said anything to the others, but the fact is she has a faint hope that Sigrid’s wrist phone may be useful after all. But for that to be the case, Iris’s phone has to stay live until they get there.

If her thinking’s right, if Sigrid’s even wearing it and if in turn it has some charge left. And if this is really where they are, she thinks, feeling blackness instantly consume her inside. They have to. Sigrid has to.