This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  “The dead man’s place,” Ylva whispered as they examined the chalet through field glasses. “It belonged to Mattias Rapp, Jarl’s right hand.”

  Malte nodded. “The body in our game locker at Västvall.”

  “So it would make sense Jarl would set up there, waiting to cross the border,” Ylva said.

  From their post on the ridge they were blocked from a view of Jarl’s Volvo parked on the other side of the chalet. The sighting would have sealed the deal for them. Neither could they see the big Scania truck parked farther down the highway.

  As usual in such situations, they indulged in a quick back and forth over choice of ski wax, with Malte arguing for high fluoro and Ylva rolling her eyes.

  “It’s like minus eight and dropping, this snow is way too dry for high fluoro,” she said, kicking a small flurry at him with her boot. “Gotta go blue.”

  They were waxing not for grip but for speed. It wasn’t a debate, not really, more a pressure-valve release of nervousness and anticipation. They went with LF, blue low fluoro wax.

  It turned out not to matter much. They had great good luck, schussbooming down off the ridgeline like valkyries as darkness dropped. Suddenly there was Krister Hammar, walking alone on the frozen river. Ylva dispatched the meddlesome lawyer with a battle axe blow to the head. Together she and Malte dumped his body through a jagged crevice in the ice, watching it slide into the river’s abyss.

  But disaster struck a few minutes later, on their approach to the chalet through the woods. Ylva worried about not knowing the exact location of the New York detective. She feared Brand might be armed. At any rate the woman might prove to be a hard case. Instead, they came upon Jarl Voss, consumed with fear, nose running with snot, fleeing panicked through the woods with a monster wolf on his tail.

  She and Malte had to react purely on instinct. Malte dropped the bizarre beast with a single crossbow shot through the heart, a spectacular feat given the low-light conditions and movement of the target. Ylva gave a yell of triumph and approval.

  “Fräckt!”

  It was to be the last achievement of Ylva’s hero cousin. Yet another strange apparition arrived on the scene, stranger still than the beast, a young punk with his pink hair shorn into a Mohawk style haircut.

  The newcomer had a pistol in his hand. He raised a gun and fired.

  Her beloved Malte fell next to the downed beast.

  Ylva retaliated, killing the shooter.

  She knelt and put an arm underneath Malte, cradling her twin cousin, watching the light fade from his eyes.

  “Help me!” she screamed at the pathetic, fear-struck Jarl.

  The stupid kid stared, paralyzed.

  Feeling a rare, gut-wrenching sense of panic herself, Ylva dragged the bleeding Malte out of the woods with no help from her younger cousin. Jarl was a Voss, so she resisted the urge to end his pathetic life. He was the cause of this fiasco. His drug dealing and human trafficking had led the family down an unsavory path they had not chosen.

  The two managed to lift Malte into the Porsche. While Jarl drove, Ylva tended to Malte, checking for a pulse, shining a flashlight in his eyes, monitoring for signs of life, performing what limited triage she could. It all seemed hopeless. She could see brain matter amid the clumps of clotted blood from his bullet-shattered skull. Malte was gone, or going quickly. Ylva, frantic, screamed at Jarl to hurry his sad ass.

  To no avail. Malte Voss breathed his last on the pedal-to-the-metal journey to seek emergency help at the Voss Medical Center in Sveg. Feeling his pulse fade, Ylva didn’t want to believe it.

  “Faster, you fool!”

  “It’s too late,” Jarl said.

  “Shut the hell up!”

  “Look, we should just go home.”

  “Home?” Ylva yelled. “Home, you ass?”

  “There’ll be, like, outsider eyes in Sveg,” Jarl said, attempting to reason with his raging cousin. “Doctors, police. They’ll want explanations. We need time. The family will have to figure out how to play Malte’s death.”

  “He’s not dead!” Ylva shrieked.

  Jarl looked at her with pity in his eyes. She couldn’t stand it. He was about to speak again. She silenced him with a punch alongside the head. Jarl took the abuse. He had no defense against the wrath of Ylva, none at all. Even as children, she had always terrified him.

  Malte’s death. The two words practically stopped Ylva’s heart. Her fury collapsed into despair.

  “Just get us to Sveg, Jarl,” she said quietly. “Just get us to the Medical Center.”

  A weather front advanced from Norway, and it began to snow.

  42.

  When she saw Hammar’s crumpled form sink from sight, Brand broke out of her paralysis and sprinted toward the river. As she hit the bank her feet went out from under her. She sprawled backward. Limping upright, she staggered toward the stain of bright crimson blood, splashed around the hole where the wounded body of Krister Hammar had disappeared.

  Brand’s disturbing memory of seeing Hammar pushed into the icy water worked on her, but she forced it out of her mind. Instead, she recalled stories of people falling into freezing water and surviving for several minutes, fifteen even, maybe as long as a half hour. Something about the extremities shutting down and brain function slowing to a crawl, with life being maintained on oxygen already in the circulatory system.

  Don’t give up. Never give up. Always the driver, never the passenger.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to lower her body into the flowing, bone-chilling current. A paralyzing vision of the East River seized her mind. She commanded her limbs to move. They refused to obey. She yelled Hammar’s name, as if that would do a damned thing.

  His words at the sauna came to her. Don’t think. Just do.

  Fear choking her, she kneeled at the water’s edge feverishly searching with her hands in the black water. Her upper limbs instantly froze in the frigid water. She flipped her body and committed to the cold, the darkness helping to pull her in deeper. She felt her feet land on the mucky bottom as the water reached to her chin. The cold pressed every bit of air from her lungs, but she compelled herself to feel around in the dark current, hoping against hope.

  Nothing.

  Panic-stricken, flashing on her own previous flirtations with death, she tried to scramble back onto the safe land, fell, and almost got pulled back in by the weight of her own body. Finally succeeding in heaving her body out, she lay there, helpless, unable to catch her breath, watching a black curtain fall in her mind.

  She could not do it. She simply could not go back in. The darkness defeated her.

  He’s down there, she swore to herself. His head might be split open by a berserker’s battle axe, he might be drowned and frozen, but she had to retrieve him, dead or alive.

  Looking down river, Brand could perceive the vague outline of a contorted tree, half submerged, half sticking up out of the ice.

  She could not think of doing what she had to do. She could not even imagine thinking it. And she most definitely could not do it.

  He would do it for you, came the thought.

  She rolled over, sucked air into her lungs with great freezing gulps, then flopped forward, slipping into the current, forcing her body through the chunks of ice debris haphazardly scattered along the shore.

  The East River had reached out and grabbed her once again.

  Darkness. Cold. The world telescoped down to those two qualities alone. She would die.

  Kicking her feet, she found again the squishy bottom. Moving with the flow, she bumped along, a blind woman, a bobbing, sightless human ice cube. Her body kept pushing up against the fractured ice sheets, forcing her back with every labored step.

  She counted off the seconds. Five, ten, fifteen. She thought of the exotic creatures deep in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench, fish that carried their own illumination with them. Clawing at her belt, her cold-stiffened fingers found her small tactical flashlight, a little Stinger that had been with
her since her subway patrol days.

  The cold took over her body. Her brain began to shut down, her thoughts went foggy.

  She would not find Hammar’s broken body. She would die, condemned to a freezing underwater grave.

  Miraculously, the Stinger worked underwater, illuminating the unforgiving pull of current forcing her forward. But it didn’t matter, since the flashlight’s beam penetrated only a few feet.

  The ghostly shape of the submerged tree came into focus. An ethereal figure hung in the dendritic tangle, swaying slowly back and forth in the flowing water.

  Brand almost floated right past Hammar. She dug her boots into the shifting sand on the bottom, found a foothold, and grabbed hold of his collar. He was impossibly snarled among the branches. She worked to dislodge him. Despite not feeling connected, her frozen hands followed instructions from her brain.

  She dropped the Stinger and yanked. Branch and body moved together. With a heave she managed to break the man free, but the effort cost her. For a sick second the two of them floated free, and the current took her again.

  Kicking out with one foot, Brand caught hold of a gnarled branch, using it as a lifeline to pull herself toward the shoreline. Heaving the Hammar’s lifeless body forward, she clawed out of the relentless flow, dragging herself and her burden through the cold slosh of the shallows onto solid ground. The still, icy air froze them in place.

  They lay side by side for a long moment, two frozen corpses, one more dead than alive, one more alive than dead. Brand faded in and out, her body shaking involuntarily in survival mode. Her companion was unnaturally still. She felt unable to move with purpose. They would perish there together.

  A few snowflakes fluttered in the air. Staring upward, Brand could see clouds splinter, revealing the stars in the sky. Far off, she heard the sound of a single gunshot from the direction of the chalet. The report came to her faint and muffled, but rang out in a way that seemed familiar.

  Her Glock, Brand thought, fired off inside the chalet.

  After a beat, another shot from the same gun, sharper this time, echoing across the flat river to the opposite shore. She concluded that the shooter had now brought the pistol outside, emerging from Mattias Rapp’s cottage.

  They were coming. She had to move. Brand judged afterwards that it was the hardest thing she had ever done, hauling herself upright that night. She peeled herself off the winter ground with a slight ripping sound, because in the mere seconds she had lain there her sopping clothes had frozen to the earth.

  Brand found strength she didn’t know she had, humping Hammar’s dead weight to the car, placing him upright in the front seat. With her cold-stiffened hands, she eventually located the ignition keys to the car. Once the engine turned over she put up the heat to full blast. With great difficulty, she began guiding the car on the twenty-minute drive to the medical center in Sveg.

  When the interior warmed she pulled to the side of the road and stripped off Hammar’s jacket. Shivering uncontrollably, she struggled to remove a sweater and underneath that a long sleeved undershirt, stripping him to his bare skin. She knew the cold water drill—remove wet and frozen clothing immediately. For herself, there was only time to take off her sodden jacket.

  With that done, she drove on. Her lifeless passenger slumped in the seat beside her. The aurora flared green and purple off to her left.

  She had no choice. The Voss Medical Center in Sveg was her only hope. She sped through the deserted downtown to the outskirts. The brick rockpile looked dark and empty. A lone blue-white sign shone like a beacon: Akutmottagning. Brand didn’t know what that meant (acute care?), but it looked promising.

  She left the Saab running with Hammar still inside. She dashed to the front door. It slid open noiselessly. Incredibly, the place seemed vacant.

  “Help!” she cried. “Someone!” She attempted to put Swedish spin on the word. “Hjälp!”

  Her call echoed through an empty hallway. She had a frantic thought that the Voss family had somehow ordered care withdrawn for their enemy clan, the Dalgrens.

  Then a trio of medical personnel spilled out of an inner doorway. Rattled and pushed beyond the limits of her endurance, Brand burst into tears upon seeing them. She couldn’t find words. Gesturing to the vehicle parked outside, she sank to her knees.

  The night turned senseless. She later remembered only bits and pieces of the first few hours. The hospital personnel stretchered Hammar in. As he passed Brand was felt certain he was dead. His corpse-like pallor gave her little hope. The wheeled gurney disappeared into the bowels of the medical center.

  Additional figures in scrubs appeared. They seemed to be concerned for her—for Brand herself, while the real worry had to be Hammar.

  “No, no, not me,” she mumbled, as they ushered her into a curtained cubicle and began to take her vitals. “Help Krister,” she said weakly.

  The doctor assigned to her care, a youngish woman with a brisk, no-nonsense manner, shocked Brand with a curt announcement.

  “Your body temperature is low,” she said in English. “Thirty-two-point-two degrees.”

  As far as Brand’s brain could tell, this meant she was essentially deceased. The blood in her body had been frozen. But the doctor clarified the situation by converting the number from Celsius into Fahrenheit, a calculation that at the moment Brand herself would have found impossible.

  Even so, a core body temperature of ninety degrees was in the emergency range. She had presented at the medical center with ghost-white skin and enlarged pupils.

  Treatment of hypothermia the staff could handle, having had a lot of experience in that particular area. Hammar’s case presented more difficulties. Apart from a head wound, where the battle axe had scalped off a section of skin, his time in the water had shut down brain function to a degree that was impossible to determine. He remained comatose and unresponsive. Brand was not allowed to see him.

  As her mind swam into clearer focus, she kept anxiously asking about Hammar’s condition. The doctor—her name tag read “Annika Gedin, Läkare”—tried to calm her. Brand kept babbling.

  “He was in the water…through the river ice…he drowned…”

  “Yes, yes,” Annika said soothingly. “Your friend is in very serious condition. But he is still alive. I have read of such cases. All is not lost.”

  The woman perched alongside Brand on the hospital bed. “Do you know about something called the Mammalian Dive Response? The Diving Reflex? Parasympathetic stimulus to the cardiac pacemaker increases in response to environmental conditions.”

  Brand wondered if the doctor was speaking English after all.

  “It happens when the human body is submerged, especially when the water is very cold. The circulatory system attempts to save itself. There’s bradycardia, or extreme slowing of the heart rate. Oxygen in the blood withdraws from the extremities and concentrates in the brain and vital organs.”

  “So he’ll be all right?”

  Annika reached out to pat Brand’s arm. “Krister is not out of the woods yet—is that how you say it? He’s lost blood. His head wound is very serious, but the blow did not crack the skull.”

  The doctor smiled. “Is your friend a hard-headed individual?”

  “No,” Brand said. “He’s a mushy-headed old softie.”

  Annika informed Brand that they would be airlifting Hammar to a central care center as soon as he was fully stabilized.

  The next morning, before full light, Brand crept out of her own room and searched the cavernous medical center, passing like a revenant through the empty corridors.

  She found Hammar, unconscious, his head wrapped in bandages so completely that it was difficult for her to be sure it was him. What little of his face that was visible displayed bruising and a harsh frostbite coloring.

  But the respirator’s wheeze and click reassured her. He was still breathing. Hammar would never be able to forgive Brand if she had pulled a mere vegetable out of the drink. He had better come out of
his coma, she thought, and tell her how they would both live to sauna together again.

  There in the darkened, eerily silent medical center, Brand climbed into bed beside Hammar. She cuddled up and slept beside him until a shocked nurse came to separate them a few hours later.

  As she shook the cobwebs from her brain a single overriding conviction gripped her. The Vosses would be coming for them. The Voss Medical Center would be the first place they would look. She and Hammar had taken refuge in the lion’s den.

  Part three: The vengeful master

  And a terrible stench rose up from the dead bodies lying in the square and that was a pitiful and everlasting sight, how the blood-soaked water and wood ran down the gutters. // Svenska Krönika, an eyewitness account of the 1520 Stockholm Bloodbath

  43.

  Polisinspektör Oliver Engmark, the first responding officer from the tiny village of Hede, felt himself in over his head. The scene at the Rapp chalet along the Hede River overwhelmed him.

  Engmark should say the former chalet of Mattias Rapp, since the structure had already burned to the ground by the time he arrived. Fire crews could do no more than wet down the smoking ruins, standing in silence, taking only a cursory notice of the dying hisses and cracks as the blaze consumed the last of the structure.

  What a fiasco. Engmark had never seen anything like it. In the drive sat a burned out Mercedes, an expensive current model sedan, and an equally upscale Volvo SUV, also destroyed. Two dead within the house, plus one male on the drive just outside of it, half cooked by the flames but still recognizable as human.

  Complicating his preliminary investigation, snow had increased steadily since the previous evening. The soft, accumulating fall obliterated anything in the form of impression evidence left on the grounds. Certainly there were signs that something happened on the shores of the river, but polisinspektör Engmark had no idea what. He put a call into the National Forensic Centre, requesting personnel reinforcement, and stood by to bide his time.