Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S2

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

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 … can think instead.”

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’s why 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 05:46 it says in the pop-up box that appeared after Amanda tapped the icon.