Mattias Berg - The Carrier

I understood right away, of course, what the Nurse had been after: whom she had wanted to bring out. But I said nothing.

Then it was my turn—while Ingrid lay there and stared straight into the mirror, saying not a word, trying to piece together herself and her new face. I laid the briefcase on the bunk. Braced myself against both sides with my knees, prepared for all eventualities. When the Nurse removed the bandages, loop by loop, it felt as if she were pulling pieces of barbed wire out of my skin.

You can never be prepared for the unguessable. However much you train to do just that.

So I had to put one foot on the floor, and try to fend off the feeling that I was falling not just forward but inward, even though I was propped against the bedhead of the metal bunk. Took a succession of deep breaths when I saw myself , or whatever I was supposed to call it, in the mirror. Transformed beyond recognition.

My nose was the most striking thing. A large meaty lump in the middle of my face, still swollen, blue-red. Even my mouth had become thicker, coarser, because my lips had been made much fuller. But the totality of the change was most noticeable. Not just in certain parts of my face—but in everything that had been me to this point. It was the work of a master.

The Nurse, the master herself, stood between my bunk and Ingrid’s. Put her hands on my shoulders and looked, with me, in the mirror.

“Lionel Barrymore. Don’t you think?” she said with a meaningful smile.

I made no reply, did not even know if it was a question or an answer. Some sort of code.

“You know, Erasmo: ‘Malaya’, ‘You Can’t Take It With You’, ‘Mata Hari’, ‘Grand Hotel’, ‘Sadie Thompson’.”

The list of movie titles sounded like a badly encrypted message. I combined them in my mind to make a conceivable yet incomprehensible message. Mata Hari in the Grand Hotel in Malaysia tells Sadie Thompson: ‘You can’t take it with you’.

“‘Mata Hari’ is probably the only one I’ve seen… But that one I’ve seen a great many times.”

She said nothing, just wheeled me and Ingrid away from the mirror, the drip stands along with us. When we had got back to our places in the larger rock chamber, the Nurse changed our drips and tucked us in—so tight that we would, in our current state, not be able to get out.

“O.K., sweet dreams. And fucking keep still for the next few days. Anything beyond breathing and blinking is at your own risk.”

After precisely thirty minutes, Ingrid wobbled ahead of me toward the door opposite the one leading into the operating theater, where I imagined the Nurse was. Long enough for her to have fallen asleep.

My whole body felt like jelly, pain was burning all over my face. I heaved my weight after her through the darkness, up to the concealed entrance. Just as Ingrid opened the door—it sounded like the exact code that she had used to get us both out of the shelter and into the Test Rooms: eight beeps, in the same rhythm—all of a sudden my legs folded under me. I keeled over to the side. Fell straight onto the razor-sharp edge of the last fume cupboard along the rock wall.

Ingrid helped me into the tunnel system, now coal-black. Carrying her headlamp, she switched it on and directed the beam at my hip. A large patch on the uniform jacket, about four inches by six, was red-brown with blood. I stopped myself from checking in on my body: knew that adrenaline can suppress the pain of even the worst injuries.

“It’s O.K., I can hardly feel anything. We can stitch it later. Just take us where we’re meant to be going,” I said.

“Absolutely, my treasure. We’ll soon be in a safe haven.”

She switched off her headlamp again and went down the spiral staircase at astonishing speed. That woman—whoever she might be—must have phenomenal basic fitness. I clung to the handrail, concentrated on keeping up through the pitch-black, not losing the feeling of her proximity.

“Besides, you don’t even have a scratch.”

I heard her voice from somewhere down the stairs, stopped and waited. Knew that the follow-up was on its way, after the artificial pause; just held on for that melodic voice. Her seductive little tales.

“What you’ve got on your jacket isn’t blood, Erasmus, but a compound of gunpowder and rust—which has covered most of the metals in there for decades. Gunpowder accelerates corrosion, as you probably remember: not even stainless steel remains rust-free when enough test charges have been detonated, small prototypes for bigger things. So there were a number of reasons why we called that place the Test Rooms.”

Proceeding down the spiral staircase, I tried to recall Edelweiss’ lectures on this very topic, check whether any of it might be true. Still I said nothing. As soon as my feet touched level ground, the L.E.D.s in the tunnel floor came on. Ingrid was standing a few feet ahead in the middle of the passageway; as far as I could see, without having contact with any controls along the wall.

“How did you do that?” I managed to say before running out of breath.

Without replying, she set off again at an even faster pace—all but breaking into a run—along the shining red line which extended as far as the eye could see. And even though I could not remember the last bit to the Test Rooms at all well, with the anesthetic still humming through my body, I was almost certain that the diodes were showing us a different route to the one before.

I breathed in as deeply as I could, trying to oxygenate myself down here in the close and humid tunnel system, and set off after her. For some reason Ingrid seemed to have recovered better than I had, even though I had devoted the whole of my adult life to preparing myself physically for just this sort of challenge. Maybe it was the paradoxical effect of her age: the twenty years which separated us had given her much more time to train.

Whatever the reason, there was nothing to suggest that the woman who was half running ahead of me was close to seventy years old. No evidence, other than scant biographical details which as students we had found in the university’s registers—after taking bets as to her real age.

Her backpack—a combat pack which seemed a replica of my own—was my navigational beacon: the only thing I had to steer by, that I needed to keep in my sight. Underneath it one could also see something smaller, flatter. It looked like a normal case for a normal laptop. But it couldn’t be.

After half a mile or so heading straight, the L.E.D.s along the tunnel walls began to show the path leading up a steep gradient. Here again we placed our feet on either side of the steep passage, crosswise to the fall line, braced ourselves against the walls, allowing us to keep going, albeit at a slow pace. I kept an ever tighter hold on the briefcase as we climbed. Wound the security strap around my wrist, until my fingers began to grow numb and my knuckles bled from scraping against the rock walls.

Ingrid was now panting. As she turned regularly to check where I was, the blue of her bruised face appeared even stranger in the red glow of the diodes.

My wrist-watch showed how fast the tunnel passage was rising to surface level. At 22.54 the depth was 247 feet; at 23.08, 167.7 feet; at 23.21, 107.9 feet—and at 23.46, 26.9 feet. Then, on a small ledge at the foot of yet another winding spiral staircase, Ingrid drew up. Looked at her watch and turned around.

“Fourteen minutes left. That’s more than enough.”

She reached toward my combat pack, and took something out of an outside pocket before I had time to react. Then, leaving her own backpack on the tunnel floor, she disappeared into one of the system’s passages.

I had nothing else to do but remain standing there in the light from the diodes, peering into the tunnel where I had last seen her. Had no other place to go: abandoned in this strange underground landscape. I wasted no energy trying to guess where she had gone, why, or for how long. A few moments or an eternity. I just counted the seconds and then the minutes for myself.