Speaking of, the boy has tucked his face into the space between Iver’s chest and upper arm and seems to be sleeping.
Iver feels a stab in his heart of both sorrow and relief as he realizes he kept his promise to Mille.
And before he can think about it, he bends his head and places a kiss atop the boy’s golden hair.
“We made it,” he whispers. “We’re safe now.”
TWENTY-TWO
It takes Eli less than ten minutes to reach Claus’s place. Running through the streets with the sun now baking down from above makes him sweat profusely and expulses the last alcohol from his bloodstream.
He looks back several times to make sure no one’s following him. The city seems oddly quiet for a late Wednesday summer morning. It’s like people have decided to stay at home, despite the lovely weather.
No wonder. They probably watched the news.
Eli reaches the right address and stops in front of the door. He rests his hands on his knees for a minute, catching his breath. He doesn’t want Claus to see him like this, all flustered and panting, so he makes an effort to steady himself before going inside.
It’s difficult, though; his hands are shaking and he can’t seem to get his pulse down all the way.
Somewhere in the distance, he hears a siren. It sounds like a police car. He feels a stab of panic.
Don’t worry. The Demon Voice is back. They’re not looking for you. They came because of the assholes who tried to stop you.
Eli darts a look around and sees a car coming down the street, going slowly, as though looking for something.
He steps swiftly into the stairwell leaving behind the sunlight and is met by a pleasant, cool atmosphere. He scans the list of names on the wall and sees Claus’s.
“Third floor,” he whispers to himself, then runs up the stairs, his steps echoing.
He reaches the third-floor landing and looks at the door. He’s never actually been in Claus’s apartment; all their meetings took place either at Eli’s home or in a public place.
He takes a deep breath then rings the bell. Immediately after, he looks down at himself and sees his shirt is all messed up. He smooths it out as best he can.
No one comes to the door. Eli rings a second time. Still nothing.
He takes out his phone and sees three missed calls, all from Claus. He calls him up and Claus answers right away.
“Eli?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on, man? You scared me half to death.”
“Sorry about that. And sorry about how I talked to you. I was … panicking.”
“Are you okay? Jeez, I get a call from you telling me you’ve almost died and then there’s a bang like from a car crashing. I thought you were in an accident!”
“I was,” Eli admits, swallowing dryly. “Look, it’s a long story. Could I please come in? I’m right outside.”
“Right outside where?”
“Your place.”
Claus sighs. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, buddy: I’m not home. I’m not even in the country.”
Eli gapes at the door. “What? Why? I mean, where are you?”
“I’m on Mallorca with the wife.”
Eli’s insides feel like they all drop a few inches. “Oh, no,” he whispers, closing his eyes. “I … I really needed you …”
“I know, bad timing. Look, why don’t you tell me about it over the phone? I’m sure whatever it is, we can fix it.”
“No,” Eli mutters, shaking his head. “Not this. This can’t be fixed.”
“Sure it can,” Claus says, but Eli doesn’t hear it; he disconnects and puts the phone back in his pocket.
For a long moment, he just stands there, staring at Claus’s door, feeling the last hope leave him.
He thought he was only feet away from the one person who could help him; turns out, that person is hundreds of miles away. Without him, Eli is lost. Without him, there’s only The Demon Voice. And before Eli is even aware of it, his thoughts are searching for the nearest access to anything that might take away his awful feeling of hopelessness.
Axe had a bag of weed in his room; you could go to his place. His parents probably aren’t home.
But Eli isn’t sure smoking a joint will be enough to dull what he’s feeling right now.
There’s also the guy, The Demon Voice suggests invitingly. Remember him? Used to bring you the really good stuff. You deleted his number, but you know how to get it, don’t you?
He does. It would take him maybe half an hour. He only needs to—
A sound from below. The front door is opened, and someone enters. Two persons, as far as Eli can tell. They’re talking together in hushed voices as they come up the stairs. There’s also the panting of a big dog. The newcomers stop at the second floor, right below Eli.
He listens intently.
“It’s here,” one of them—a guy—says. “Let’s just hope he’s home.”
There’s knocking.
Then, waiting silence.
For some strange reason, Eli gets the sense that whoever is on the landing below him, and whoever they’ve come to see, it’s important.
The sound of a lock turning and a door opening.
A man’s voice: “What can I help you gentlemen with?”
“Sebastian, right? You’re a pilot?”
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“My name’s William. I’m a friend of your brother’s. Can we please come in?”
The guys are let inside, and the door closes. As soon as Eli hears the lock turn again, he jumps down the stairs to the second-floor landing, crouches down and gently flips open the mail slot.
TWENTY-THREE
“Dad?”
Lærke’s voice calls him out of a deep sleep. It takes an effort to open his eyes enough to see her silhouette sitting up in bed next to him.
“Huh? What is it, hon? You gotta pee?”
“No, it’s your phone. It keeps lighting up.”
“Oh. Well, turn it off, then.”
Sebastian sinks his head back down onto the pillow. Lærke places a hand on his ribs and a knee on his thigh as she climbs over him.
“Jeez, hon, could you go around the bed?”
“I already got it,” she says, climbing back over him. Luckily, she’s skinny and weighs barely sixty pounds.
He senses the light from his phone as she activates the screen. The bedroom is almost completely dark thanks to the blackout curtains, despite the burning afternoon sun right outside. The temperature in the room is nice and cool; the air conditioner was one of the best investments he ever made.
He just came back from his latest flight this morning. He went by Heidi’s place and picked up Lærke, then went straight home and jumped in bed, trying to catch up on the sleep he missed. Luckily, he never suffered from jet lag.
Lærke wasn’t tired, of course, but whenever she was with him and he needed a nap, she would lie next to him playing silently on her iPad. He found it adorable, to be honest, and he was glad she didn’t mind him spending some of their precious time together sleeping.
“You’ve got a bunch of missed calls, Dad.”
“Huh,” he grunts. “I’ll call ’em back later.”
“There are, like, thirty-two,” she persists.
“Hon, I’m trying to sleep.”
“… and most of them are from Grandma. There’re five from Mom, too.”
He’s about to get annoyed and tell her to please stop talking—when it suddenly dawns on his sleepy mind what she’s saying.
“Did you say thirty-two missed calls?”
“Yeah! And a whole bunch of texts, too.”
Sebastian sits up. “Give it to me, please.”
Lærke hands him the phone. “Where’s mine?” she asks.
“Where’s what?”
“My phone? Maybe Mom tried calling me, too.”
“I have no idea where your phone is,” he says, squinting at the light from the screen. �
�Where you last put it, I suppose.”
She gets out of bed and begins rummaging through her suitcase on the floor—it’s always amazing to him how much clothes a ten-year-old needs to bring for a week.
Sebastian scrolls through the list of missed calls, peeking out through one stinging eye. All thirty-two of them have come between 11:04 PM when he went to bed and now, 2:11 AM.
Something bad happened.
The thought comes to him with jarring certainty. People don’t try to reach you that desperately unless they had awful news.
Two of the calls are from private numbers, meaning it’s either from work or some official business. But since he isn’t on call, it’s probably not work. He doesn’t have any flights scheduled for the rest of the week; he made sure of that, since Lærke would be spending the first week of her summer holidays with him.
“Mom called me too,” Lærke—who has recovered her phone—informs. “Should I call her back?”
“No, hold on a minute, hon. Let me handle this, okay? It might be something serious.”
“Like what?” The anxiety in her voice immediately makes him regret his choice of words.
“It’s probably nothing,” he says, sending her a brief smile, but realizing his daughter is too old to be fooled by half-baked lies any longer. “Let me handle it,” he repeats, and she nods and sits down on the bed.
He looks back down at his phone and scrolls through the texts. They’re all very similar and don’t really tell him anything.
Heidi wrote: You up? And then, three minutes later: Call me. Important.
His mom wrote four different versions of: Call me back ASAP.
He notices four messages on the voice mail and decides that might be a place to start before he calls anyone back; he’d like to know what this is about before he has to talk with anyone.
He makes the call to the voice mail and looks at Lærke, realizing she’s staring back at him expectantly.
“Who are you calling? Mom?”
“No, voice mail. Listen, I could really go for one of your ice teas right now—why don’t you go and mix us a couple of glasses?”
Lærke eyes him for a moment; it’s clear that she doesn’t want to leave, that she’s dying to know what’s up. But to his surprise, she gets up and goes to the kitchen.
Good girl, he thinks, just as a female voice tells him how many new messages he’s got.
The first one is from Heidi. “Hey. You’re probably sleeping, but … I think you need to call your mom. She just called me, and … well, shit … it’s bad news, Sebastian. I’m so sorry …”
The message ends.
The next one is from his mother. Right away, he can tell how upset she is from the shallow way she’s breathing. “Oh, dear God … Sebastian, can you please pick up? … It’s Mom again … I don’t know … I don’t know what to do … They called me from the hospital … oh, God … and I can’t even go to see him … they’ve made a curfew, but … but I tried to go anyway … I just had to see him … there were soldiers there, at the hospital … they told me to turn around, or they’d … they’d have to force me to … can you believe it? They wouldn’t let me see him, Sebastian … oh, God …”
His mother breaks into sobbing at this point, and it goes on for ten seconds or so, before the message ends.
Sebastian listens to two other—but very similar—messages from his mother, not getting any the wiser, until the end of the third message, which his mother ends by whispering: “Please call me back as soon as you get this, Sebastian … It’s about your brother …”
Sebastian lowers the phone and stares into the wall. From the kitchen he can hear clanging of ice cubes being dropped into glasses. His heart is pumping, his brain is working hard to fill in the blanks.
He knows about the situation up north, of course; everyone does, it’s all they’re talking about in the media. A very contagious disease of some kind broke out a few days ago and is spreading like wildfire.
His parents, his brother and his aunts and uncles all live in or around Viborg, where it apparently started. Sebastian called his mother yesterday to make sure everyone was okay.
She told him they were. She had kept indoors like the authorities had ordered. But she had called everyone and made sure they were safe.
The only one she couldn’t reach was Janus.
That wasn’t uncommon, though; Sebastian’s younger brother was never easy to get hold of. He had always been the family’s outsider, never listening to advise and always going his own way, even moving away from home at the age of fourteen.
So Sebastian hadn’t given it much thought. He was sure Janus could take care of himself. He might be young and stupid, but he wasn’t reckless. He knew to take the situation seriously and not get himself in harm’s way.
And yet something bad must have happened to Janus.
“They wouldn’t let me see him, Sebastian …”
Why had Janus ended up in the hospital? Did he catch the virus? Or had he been in an accident? Sebastian had seen footage of rioting in the streets of Viborg just last night.
The sound of a car horn blaring a couple of blocks away makes him turn his head and look to the window, which of course tells him nothing about what’s going on outside.
Suddenly, he feels a pang of intense fear. Not so much for himself, but for Lærke. There’s a hundred miles from here to Viborg, and he had assumed that was a safe distance. But just last night the infection had reached Aarhus, which was only eighty miles away. At that speed, most of the country could be taken over within a week, maybe even shorter once the snowball got rolling.
Still, Sebastian had believed the calm faces on the news, telling him in reassuring voices that there was no reason for panic, that the infection would be sealed off and dealt with efficiently, that this would be over in a matter of days.
Now, all of those reassurances sounded empty to him. The life of his daughter wasn’t worth any risk, no matter how small, and as he’s sitting there on his bed in the dark bedroom, he curses himself for not having heeded the warning signs. He should have ignored the authorities and gotten the hell out of here. Maybe even left the country.
Perhaps it wasn’t too late.
Perhaps they could still—
Lærke enters the room, carrying two tall glasses of ice tea, one in each hand.
He forces a smile as she stops in the doorway. “That looks great, hon. Thank you.”
But she doesn’t come to him as he reaches out his hand. Instead, she looks at him and whispers: “Someone’s at the door, Dad.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The next time Dennis wakes up, it’s not a nightmare calling him back, but something a lot less terrifying: he needs to pee really bad.
He gets up from the bunk and leaves the room to find Mom all dressed by the table in the bunker’s dining area. She has put up her black candles, placed them in a half-circle, and is sitting with her eyes closed, muttering her usual midday prayer.
“Is it morning?” Dennis mutters, scratching his hair.
Mom opens her eyes. “It’s almost one.”
“Oh.”
“I have a few chores for you today,” Mom says. “We need to finish the preparations Holger started yesterday. Do you know how we get to the vegetable garden? Did Holger tell you anything about that?”
Dennis shrugs. “No. Can’t we just go outside?”
Mom shakes her head. “It’s completely fenced in. There must be a secret entrance somewhere from underground.”
“Like the one in the courtyard?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I don’t know where it is.” Dennis sees the idling monitor and recalls the two men who came in the middle of the night and killed all the dead people. “Did they come back?” he asks, looking at Mom.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Good. I didn’t care for them.”
“Me neither. We might see more people coming by in the days to come. I don’t know how many knew
about Holger’s safe place, but apparently, we weren’t the only ones.”
Dennis thinks about that for a moment. “Well, I’m glad we got here first,” he says, then remembering the boys and the pretty girl who were here before them, adds: “I mean, kind of first.”
Mom looks at him. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really. But I need to pee,” Dennis says and heads for the door to the tunnel.
“The bathroom is over there,” Mom says, nodding towards the corner.
Dennis stops and bites his lip. “I’d rather use the one upstairs.”
Mom sends him a curious look. “Why would you go all the way upstairs when there’s a perfectly fine toilet down here?”
“It’s just … the seat is made of metal,” Dennis says, wringing his hands. “It’s really cold and uncomfortable.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“But I tried to use it last night. I … I couldn’t go, no matter how hard I tried. Can I please use the one upstairs, Mom?”
“It’s better we stay down here for a couple of days,” Mom says. “Just until we’re sure those guys from last night aren’t coming back.”
Dennis gazes towards the bathroom door and shifts his feet. “I just … I just really don’t think I can use that toilet, Mom.”
Mom sighs. Normally, when she tells him no, there’s no debating. But on this particular subject, Dennis suspects Mom might give in. She knows how difficult it is for Dennis to go in public bathrooms and how he used to wet himself when he was younger. He also never learned to pee standing without getting his pants wet.
“Fine,” she says. “You can go upstairs. I’ll go with you; I need to get the vegetables from the kitchen anyway.”
Dennis smiles in relief. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Let me go first,” Mom says as Dennis heads for the door. “You keep close to me, okay?”
Dennis looks at the dagger which is suddenly in Mom’s hand, and he feels an involuntary chill down his back; the sight of the dagger always does that to him.
Dead Meat Box Set, Vol. 2 | Days 4-6 Page 32