Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S2

Dano has tears in his eyes now. He’s staring angrily at the ground, not daring to look Iris in the eye.

“That…that doesn’t have to have been the case”, he mumbles. “They…they might have actually wanted to shoot her first so that she…well, so she didn’t need to see her mama die.”

And then he presses his face into the grass and starts sobbing silently.

Dano feels powerless. It’s a feeling he’s been familiar with for half his life: he wasn’t quite seven when the unrest broke out at home in Syria, when his parents’ conversation increasingly turned into murmuring and whispering and occasionally held in French so that Dano would not understand what they were discussing. He never had an opportunity to influence what was happening around him, steered by more powerful forces which were almost always rooted in evil: threats, persecution, war.

Everything was going to be different in Sweden. And it was – it was a lot worse.

He feels Amanda’s hand stroke his hair as he’s lying in the grass. He doesn’t want to look up – so much snot and tears on his face – it’s like he’s a kid. And he is a kid, but he also knows that there isn’t any space for him to be one right now. Perhaps he’ll never be able to be a kid again.

“Dano, listen to me”, he hears Iris saying. Her voice is broken and thick. She’s stressed and tries to hide it but he can hear it in her English – it gets worse when she’s scared, and he’s noticed that before. It was actually only when they were sitting in the bed store yesterday afternoon and allowed themselves to eat and rest that her Swedish pronunciation broke through again, when he was talking about his family’s flight through Europe. Sigrid was sleeping in the bed next to them, and she felt a calm inside. Dano could both see and hear that.

“Dano”, she says again. He nods slowly to indicate that he’s heard her.

“I’m really sorry that it turned out this way”, she says. “But I…I actually can’t think of another way. You might be right – that they did what they did in order to spare her in some way, but that doesn’t really change anything. They were going to kill us, and that’s still their intention. Their plan is to kill everyone who survives the virus naturally. And it’s not just a desperate plan – it’s pure madness. I don’t for one second think that they have a chance of succeeding – the only thing they are doing is consciously sabotaging things for the people who can actually continue living. We can’t let that happen.”

Dano sits up slowly, leaning against the cold surface of the rock. For the first time in a really long time he feels cold. He looks at Iris. There’s so much grief in her face. In some way, the pain she is radiating reminds him of his grandfather in the days before they set off, when the knowledge that he was perhaps going to lose his daughter forever gave him a similar appearance.

Iris raises her eyes to meet his, but is silent. Instead, it’s Amanda who strokes Dano’s hair and then begins to speak quietly.

“Hell,” she says. “I don’t know. But…I think she’s right. Nothing of what we’ve witnessed so far indicates that they’ll give in and leave us immune people alone.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds.

“But you don’t have to do it. Give me the mobile phone.”

Iris starts handing the phone over to Amanda but stops when Dano shakes his head.

“No”, he whispers, with a sigh. “If we’re still going to do it then it doesn’t matter who the virus comes from – we’re all equally guilty. I’m the smallest and have the greatest chance of getting over there without being seen.”

He takes the phone out of Iris’s hand. Amanda looks like she wants to protest but he just nods and she gives him a hug instead.

A couple of minutes later, they’ve gone through the details. Just as Dano is about to creep off to the ditch, he turns to Iris:

“If they hadn’t taken Sigrid last night, would you still have chosen to do this? Would you still have been convinced that we were the ones who had to stop their crazy plan, if she wasn’t in danger?”

Iris starts to answer but breaks off before any sound leaves her throat. She shakes her head ashamedly.

At first, Dano can easily move forward in the ditch because visibility from the barn is impaired by trees, but soon he has to lie down and inch forward on his forearms.

The ditch is half a metre deep and at the bottom in the middle, there’s a ten-centimetre wide furrow filled with small stones. To avoid scraping his chest and stomach and making them rattle underneath him, he has to put all his body weight onto his elbows. Having only come half way, he can already feel his skin has rubbed raw.

As the ditch starts to follow the road in parallel, he rests his shaking arms for a bit before continuing. Those last ten metres might be inconsequential but better to be overly cautious. If the guard sees him crossing the road, all is lost.

He still feels wretched about what he is about to do – his body is shouting IT’S ALL SO WRONG – that this is bringing them down to the same level as Sigrid’s kidnappers. He had in fact wanted Amanda to be the one to go, but then he would have been alone with Iris and he didn’t want that.

Iris’s unpredictable nature and coldness scares him. If something unexpected happens that requires them to change their plan, it’s better if Amanda is there and can at least make some sort of well-thought out decision.

Dano takes a good look at the barn. No movement, no sounds, but from this proximity he can clearly see that the window has been removed – it’s leaning against the wall they couldn’t see and, as they thought, this is also where the entrance is. He looks towards the farm. No movement there either. Then he runs as quietly as he can over the narrow grit road and right into the field until he is out of sight of the window. From there he moves to the furthest end of the barn as quickly and noiselessly as he can.

Dano lies down on the grass and creeps round the next corner. This long side of the barn faces the forest and can’t be seen from the other buildings close by. He listens for sounds, but apart from his own heartbeat, the world is silent – uncomfortably silent.

He gets out Iris’s phone, and with shaking fingers, taps in the code she taught him. He has to make two attempts before succeeding. He does what she showed him in the app, choosing “Add new unit”, waiting for that anticipated row of numbers.

Nothing happens. No pairing.

So it’s Plan B. He feels a knot in his stomach.

With the phone still in his hand, he steals forward in a low crouch, careful not to tread on the patches of gravel lying here and there around the façade. When he reaches the middle of the barn, he checks the app again to be sure. It’s the same crushing result: Sigrid isn’t here.

At the corner of the building closest to the window, he lays down on the ground again and listens. If they’ve worked it out right, there’s a guard just a few metres away from him. Dano points the back of the phone in the direction of the rock at the edge of the forest, where Iris and Amanda are hiding. One flash for ‘yes’, two for ‘no’. Dano clicks on the torch icon: on, off, on, off, waits ten seconds and repeats the procedure with a heavy heart.

He realises the plan has several potential flaws. Firstly, the guard who is going to be infected has to stay at his post by the window right until the replacement has gone in and assumed his look-out post. Ideally, they should also stay by the window and talk to each other for a while so that they have time to get properly infected. Secondly, the whole plan relies on the notion that the guards aren’t wearing gas masks. But Dano doesn’t think they are – masks would hamper their line of sight too much for them to be able to keep a lookout. He also guesses that they consider the area closest to Erstavik to be safe. If anyone approaches along the road from the forest, the guard has plenty of time to both put on a mask and shoot them before the attacker has managed to get close enough to be a risk of infection.