Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S2

“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.