The man who stood next to her on the karaoke stage, laughing at her jokes, is covered in dried blood from head to toe. His beautiful face is swollen, barely recognisable.
He looks at her.
And she gets it.
Calle
Calle watches the water level rise in the grey plastic bucket. Crumbs, specks of dirt and an old plaster are drifting in circles on the surface. He worked aboard the Charisma for several years and yet he has only the faintest notion of where the water in the taps comes from. There must be tanks somewhere, and they must be enormous to provide the water needed for drinking, showering and cooking for thousands of people.
Water being shipped back and forth across water.
He hangs the pre-rinse tap back on its hook above the sink and stands motionless, watching as the debris moves ever more slowly across the surface. He’s picturing the man with dreadlocks.
He has killed someone. He has killed.
‘Let’s get this thing done,’ Filip says.
Calle looks up, bewildered.
Filip is talking to the children, who have climbed up on a counter and are sitting cross-legged side by side. ‘And then we make our way to the life rafts, bringing along as many of the non-infected as we can, and get off this boat,’ he continues. ‘Easy-peasy. The sun’s going to come up soon and we’re not too far from Finland. Someone will spot us.’
‘Sure,’ Lo says. ‘Easy-peasy.’
Albin says nothing; he just stares vacantly into space.
‘What do you say, kiddo?’ Filip says.
No response.
He tousles Albin’s hair and walks away. Calle can plainly see how tired and scared he is. He wonders how he could have ever forgotten how much he liked Filip. He thinks of the picture of the two of them in Filip’s cabin.
Filip comes up to him and grabs hold of the handle of the bucket. They lift it out of the sink together and put it down on the floor. Water sloshes over the edges onto Calle’s boot.
Marisol comes as well. She has found a fire-axe somewhere; now she puts it down next to the sink while she fills another bucket.
‘I’m glad you managed to get through to Vincent,’ Filip says. ‘I don’t know what happened between you, but he seems like a good guy.’
‘He is.’
It suddenly dawns on Calle that he knows almost nothing about what Filip’s life is like now; Filip was just thrown headlong into his own private inferno last night. There are so many things Calle wants to ask him. Afterwards.
‘If you do end up getting married, at least you’ll have a solid proposal anecdote,’ Filip says, and Calle bursts out laughing.
‘Maybe the two of you should consider postponing your sewing bee,’ Antti calls to them. ‘Hurry the fuck up, will you?’
Calle looks at the lift. It will take them all the way down to the beating heart of the Charisma.
And they are going to stop it.
Madde
It is just how she dreamed it would be, except seen through a fun-house mirror. Dan Appelgren is walking towards her in the luxury suite, and he wants her.
His teeth are snapping slowly in his swollen face.
‘It’s you,’ he says. ‘You’re the one who sang the Grease song with that other cow.’
His words sink into her body, boring through her bones, and then she realises he just spoke. He is like the sick ones, but he can talk. The others don’t appear even able to think.
She backs into Vincent, who pulls her towards the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices that Marianne has left the sofa and is standing with her back pressed against the wall, with the dining table between her and Dan.
Madde and Vincent turn and bolt up the spiral staircase.
The streamers rustle softly when Dan reaches in between the balustrades, groping around for them. He seizes Madde’s ankle and pulls and she falls, her elbow slamming into the edge of a step. She screams as a wave of pain breaks over her, but she manages to get back on her feet. She can hear Dan behind her now, at the foot of the stairs.
Vincent shouts at her to duck and a champagne bottle zips past her head. There is a satisfying thud when it hits Dan. Madde reaches the upper level, turns around and discovers him still climbing the stairs, unperturbed.
‘Get the fuck out!’ she screams.
His lips draw back. His teeth are far too white, so clearly a part of his skeleton.
Brand new.
‘You’re the ones who don’t belong here,’ he says, and puts his foot on the floor of the upstairs landing.
Vincent throws the Plexiglas ice bucket at him, but it overshoots and hits the wall behind Dan with a loud crash. Vincent picks up one of the champagne flutes, breaks it against the banister and holds it up in front of him, a stalk with sharp, glittering petals. When Dan comes closer, Vincent slashes at his face.
But Dan grabs hold of his wrist with one hand and Vincent’s tank-top with the other, then stares him straight in the eyes.
‘Leave him alone!’ Madde screams.
His teeth, his contagious teeth, are so close to Vincent’s face.
And then Dan braces himself and pushes Vincent over the banister.
There’s a heavy thud below. Madde believes she heard something hard snap.
Marianne shrieks.
What is she seeing down there? What happened?
Madde backs away until she feels the edge of the bed against her legs. Dan turns towards her, and the worst thing about him is the look on his face. He is so bored. He doesn’t care about what he did to Vincent in the slightest, or about what he is going to do to her now. She is just a chore to get through: tedious but necessary.
‘Just let us go,’ she pleads, stepping up onto the bed. ‘Please. We won’t do anything.’
‘You won’t do anything?’ Dan sneers, moving closer. ‘Now isn’t that just a generous fucking offer? You can’t do shit. Is that somehow unclear to you?’
‘No,’ she whispers, because she knows he is right. She is pathetic for pretending otherwise. She has nothing to offer and nothing to threaten him with, and there is no way out of this other than giving up.
He reaches out for her, tugs at the thin fabric of her dress, and she falls to her knees on the bed. He slaps her so hard her ears ring. The starched linen rustles softly when Dan climbs on top of her.
‘It is high fucking time for this cow to get slaughtered,’ he says. The puffs of air from his mouth smell sweet and fusty but are cool against her face.
She shuts her eyes tight when he presses her upper arms into the mattress, straddling her stomach. She can feel the muscles in his buttocks; his thighs pin her down. He is so heavy her internal organs are being pushed out of the way, and it hurts so bad and she can’t breathe and she hears his teeth snapping, just like Zandra’s.
Darkness materialises in her field of vision and she runs towards it, welcomes it. She doesn’t want to be here when he bites her.
Is this how I die? Madde thinks. Is this how it ends?
She barely notices when the pressure across her abdomen eases and the hands around her arms disappear, but her body inhales greedily, gasps for breath.
Dan is standing on the floor by the foot of the bed. He shakes himself like a dog.
‘I can’t take any more.’
Is this a trick? Is he toying with her?
She pushes herself up until she’s sitting. Her stomach hurts with every breath. She is afraid of him, but at least as afraid of the hope flaring up inside her.
‘I’m tired,’ he says. ‘I just want to be alone. Someone else will get you anyway.’ He leans out over the banister, looking down. ‘You hear me?’ he bellows. ‘I just want to be alone!’
He stays there, his back to her. Madde climbs off the bed. Her cheek is burning, her stomach is tender. She slowly moves towards the stairs without taking her eyes off Dan, prepared for him to turn at any moment: to come at her, laughing at her.
You really fell for that?
But he d
oesn’t even register her presence now, just gazes out of the window on the lower level.
She walks to the stairs and pauses, studies his profile. His chin is drooping; his jawline is gone.
‘Close the door behind you,’ he says flatly.
Vincent is lying on his side by the coffee table, his face ashen. Marianne is squatting beside him. It looks like he just came to. Blood is trickling from one of his wrists. Madde glimpses a flash of bone poking through his skin and quickly turns away.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Hurry.’
The sound of footsteps from above. When she looks up, Dan is no longer standing by the banister.
She knew it. He was just toying with them, like a cat toys with a mouse: letting them think they have escaped, only to— She hears him sitting down heavily on the bed.
With Marianne’s help, Vincent gets to his feet, and Madde leads the way towards the door. She presses her ear to it. The corridor outside is silent.
The life rafts are close by, but who knows who they’ll encounter on their way there.
She opens the door a crack and peers out. No one in sight. She opens it fully, eyeing the side passage where the cabin she shared with Zandra is located.
Marianne and Vincent follow her out. Marianne is holding a thin chequered scarf she must have found in the hallway. After pulling the door softly shut behind them, she gingerly grabs Vincent’s injured wrist, murmurs soothingly, and then gives it a push. There’s a clicking sound and Vincent moans loudly, beads of perspiration on his forehead.
Marianne wraps the scarf around his wrist. ‘I used to work as a medical secretary,’ she says when she notices Madde staring. ‘And before that I was a nurse.’
Madde checks the corridor. Where the fuck are they supposed to go now?
‘Calle,’ Vincent says. ‘If Calle comes here …’
Marianne starts rummaging through her purse and pulls out a lipstick. A mail-order brand Madde vaguely remembers from when she was little. She wonders if the old lady might have lost her marbles. Is she going to put on makeup now? But Marianne puts the lipstick to the door, moving it firmly across the wood.
KALLE! DON’T OPEN!
She underlines the word ‘don’t’ so hard her lipstick breaks in half. She discards the rest on the floor. Vincent gives her a grateful look.
‘Can we go to your cabin?’ Marianne asks Madde.
She shakes her head. ‘The door’s broken.’
They hear a scream from somewhere, glass breaking in the distance, and every hair on Madde’s body stands on end. ‘Let’s go to the life rafts now,’ she says. ‘There don’t seem to be that many on the outer decks.’
‘Not on the bow deck, sure,’ Marianne says, ‘but we have no idea what things are like up there. And it’s far too cold. The two of you are barely dressed.’
‘So where’s your cabin?’ Madde asks.
‘On the lowest deck.’
‘Deck two?’
She had thought Marianne fancier than that. Madde and Zandra booked the cheapest cabins the first time they went on a cruise without their parents, so she knows exactly what it looks like down there. And what it smells like.
‘I can’t go back down there,’ Marianne says.
Madde agrees. If they get trapped down there, they will have nowhere to run.
‘The two of you should get up on the roof,’ Vincent says, ‘but I’m going down to the car deck.’
Marianne and Madde turn to him as one.
‘That’s where the engine room is. Calle’s there. Or at least I have to believe that. And if there is anything I can do to help him …’
‘With a broken wrist?’ Madde says, and it comes out much harsher than she had intended.
But Vincent just nods. ‘I just want to … I just want to find him.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Marianne says. ‘I have nowhere else to go.’
‘Are you out of your minds?’ Madde bursts out. ‘You want to go further down when we’re so close to the life rafts?’
But she already knows she is going to go with them. It is her best option. She knows the worst thing they can do is to stand here dithering for even one more second.
Marianne
Two women are sprawled on the floor at the top of the stairs. Marianne wonders who they were, if they knew each other, which of them died first and if the other had to watch. She looks away, tears filling her eyes; she does nothing to stop them and they fall silently, quickly, as though something inside her has burst.
There are more bodies on the stairs.
Marianne doesn’t know if she can do this: moving downwards through the ship goes against her every instinct. It feels like descending straight to the inner circles of hell. But she follows Vincent and Madde and tries not to look at the bodies. She can’t take any more death. The carpet is wet in patches, blood-soaked, and Madde whimpers quietly when she steps in it with her bare feet.
Eighth floor. Bodies litter the long hallway where she was almost trampled. She would have been if not for Vincent. The lift doors are closed now.
She hears shouting from the floor below, glass breaking, running. Cheering. That might be the most terrifying sound of all. What could there possibly be to cheer about?
They reach deck seven. The windows of the tax-free shop have been smashed. Dark shapes are moving about inside. Marianne freezes mid-movement.
That is where they are holed up.
But then a group of men come dashing out of the shop with their arms full of liquor bottles and cartons of cigarettes, and Marianne recognises one of Göran’s friends. She’s pretty sure his name is Sonny.
‘Marianne, sweet as the mints!’ he calls out smarmily. ‘What have you done with Göran?’
Her cheeks flush when she feels Vincent and Madde’s stares. More people come running by with their loot. Some have grabbed baskets and piled them high with sweets and perfume and booze. Always booze.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I thought he was with you.’
‘But he ditched us to go back to yours!’
Marianne looks at him without comprehension. ‘He did?’
Sonny smiles maniacally. The front of his shirt is blood-spattered, she realises. Has he been bitten? Have any of the others?
‘Tag along,’ he says, pointing with his thumb to one of the men Marianne doesn’t know. ‘We’re off to his cabin to drink ourselves into a coma until this shit is over!’
‘No,’ the man says firmly, and shoots Marianne an apologetic look. ‘Nothing personal, but I don’t know you. At least I met these guys … before.’
‘I understand,’ Marianne tells him.
She looks at Sonny, wanting to ask about Göran, but she doesn’t know how.
A few of the men outside the shop, entangled in a fight over a jumbo pack of snus, are tripped up by a couple of the dead bodies and start rolling around on the floor. That quote from Sartre, about hell being other people, comes to Marianne’s mind. And she notices a few of the corpses on the floor have started moving: they’re waking up.
They need to get out of here. Vincent has noticed too.
‘Would you mind giving us a bottle?’ he says. ‘The stronger, the better.’
‘Get your own drink,’ one of the strangers tells him, but Sonny hands him a bottle of lemon vodka.
‘Thanks,’ Vincent says, accepting it with his uninjured hand.
‘All right, sweet mint, seems we’re going to have to toast each other in separate cabins,’ Sonny says.
‘We’re not drinking this,’ Vincent says. ‘We’re making a Molotov cocktail.’
‘Smart,’ someone in the other group says with reluctant admiration. ‘Bloody smart.’
‘You’re setting fire to the booze?’ Sonny says, and his maniacal smile grows even wider. ‘Now that’s what I call substance abuse.’
It occurs to Marianne that Göran would probably have laughed at that stupid joke.
‘Good luck,’ she says.
‘You too. A
nd if you find Göran … look after him.’
He hesitates. Marianne looks around nervously. The fight is still ongoing. A woman drops a stack of six-packs outside the shop and cans roll in every direction. The ruckus is going to attract more of them.
‘I will,’ she says.
‘He’s a good ’un, is Göran,’ Sonny says.
She nods at him and continues down the stairs.
The Baltic Charisma
Dan Appelgren is in the shower. The hot water is making the blood warm again. The red streaks swirling into the drain are growing wispier. He washes himself meticulously. He has vomited and feels less bloated, but the thoughts won’t stop churning in his head, racing in circles, chasing their own tails, doing endless somersaults. He presses his lathered-up fingers against his skull, because it feels like the only thing he can do to keep it from exploding. Dan has been through this before, after too much coke. It’s going to pass, you just have to wait it out. Keep cool and stay strong.
*
The dark-haired woman is standing inside her caravan, looking at the photographs in her locket. After all these years, the pictures are burnt into her retinas, carved into her heart. She only has to shut her eyes to see them. Even so, she can’t bring herself to close the locket. Memories and feelings wash through her and for once she does nothing to stop them, this last time. Her son. Her husband. The time before her son fell ill. Before she used her contacts in spiritualism and found the apostates from the Theosophical Society, who introduced her to two of the Old Ones: the ones who can no longer pass for human, who depend on assistants. Back then she was rich enough to believe money could buy her anything, and she was right. The Old Ones acquiesced, despite their objections, when she offered them all the money she had.
Afterwards, she and her husband brought their son home to their flat in Stockholm. They had taken every possible precaution: they took turns draining themselves with a razor. Those days that turned into weeks disappeared in a haze; she was constantly faint with anaemia, with grief and fear, terror and hope. Their son always wanted more, and he grew strong and healthy, living off what her body could give him, just like when she had nursed him a few years earlier. It felt like a miracle when he seemed to become himself again. His father finally relented and loosened the straps tying him to his bed.
Blood Cruise Page 36