Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S2

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.”