But now, in the total silence that suddenly falls on everyone when it happens, there is nothing but terror and fear. It used to be more than two years since that last happened, but now it’s very recent indeed.

  “WOOF!” a solitary guy says somewhere in the Hed stand, too pumped on adrenaline to notice that everyone else has their mouths closed. Someone hisses “Shut up,” someone else starts singing something else, but it’s too late.

  “What do you want to do?” one of the guys below Teemu asks.

  Teemu is standing with his gaze fixed on the Hed stand at the other end of the rink. There’s nothing in his eyes. No empathy, no forgiveness, no mercy. Perhaps he’s thinking of the promise he made to Tails not to start any trouble this week, but he wasn’t actually the one who started this. The men from Hed have come to his rink, his home, to boast about killing Sune’s dog, and he’s not allowed to do anything about that? Like hell. His voice is cold:

  “Fuck it. Break the neck of every last one of them.”

  The black jackets jump over the barrier and start to run as a single organism. The whole of the seating area seems to hold its breath, families with children and pensioners trip over each other in their rush to get out of the way. The black jackets surge forward like a single wave of darkness, trampling hot dogs and popcorn everywhere.

  Adri grabs Teemu’s arm and yells:

  “DIDN’T YOU SAY YOU PROMISED THE CLUB YOU’D STAY CALM?”

  Teemu stares at her, not with any regret, but perhaps with sympathy:

  “The club? We are the club.”

  Then he runs too, with Benji beside him. Adri tries to stop her brother but she doesn’t stand a chance. The barking from the other stand has already been swallowed up in an agitated roar, but Adri’s palms can still feel the weight of the little animal as she lifted it into its grave. She might not want violence, but she can no longer criticize the people who do.

  The dads down in the players’ tunnel recognize the danger the way you hear the rumble of an approaching flood wave, they yell to the thirteen-year-olds on the ice to get off, panic breaks out and chaos takes over the entire rink in an instant.

  * * *

  Tobias sees the black jackets approaching from the other end of the rink, and sees his own stand divide into two groups: those who start to back away and those who rush forward to meet the threat. Tobias has two parents who have always taught him to run toward fire, so he doesn’t even think, he just jumps over a barrier and drops several yards, landing on concrete, then he runs as fast as he can straight for the ice. All he can think is that he has to get his younger brother away from here.

  Hannah and Johnny come running down the stand, consumed by the same thought, but the crowd is too dense and the chaos too overwhelming. They are swept along with the flow toward the corner of the rink closest to the locker rooms, which is where Bobo manages to reach out a hand and grab Johnny’s shoulder. Johnny spins around and falls apart inside in every possible way when he hears Bobo yell:

  “TESS IS WITH ME! DON’T WORRY! GET TOBY AND TED AND MEET US IN THE PARKING LOT!”

  In the other direction Hannah loses her grip of Johnny’s fingers for a single moment and it’s as if they’re torn apart by merciless undercurrents, in the flash of an eye they’re ten yards apart. Tobias and Ted appear out of nowhere, Ted still with his skates and all his hockey gear on, Tobias flailing wildly to clear their path. Behind them Teemu and the first of the black jackets reach Hed’s stand, some of the men in red who have stayed behind to defend it have torn bits of wood from the floor of the stand and are swinging these makeshift weapons wildly toward the black jackets as they try to clamber upward. Noses get broken, jaws cracked, but the black jackets just keep moving forward. Someone’s going to get killed, Johnny has time to think, but Hannah pulls herself through the crowd and grabs hold of him before he has time to finish the thought.

  “THE BOYS! GET THE BOYS OUT!”

  The father of one of the boys on Ted’s team is having a full-blown fight with two of the dads from the Beartown team behind her, an elbow hits her on the temple and she almost loses her balance, Johnny sees what happens and throws every single person between them into the air. Just as he reaches her, Tobias gets to her from the other direction. Johnny hardly recognizes him, the fifteen-year-old looks like a grown man, entirely without fear. He’s pulling Ted along behind him, and helps his mother up with the other hand. A small gap opens up in the crowd and the whole family sees it at the same time and pushes toward the exit. The boys first, then Hannah, and Johnny at the back, and he makes the mistake of casting a glance over his shoulder as they run. He never sees the man who comes running around the corner from the storeroom beyond the locker rooms, they crash heads by mistake at full force and for a few seconds everything in Johnny’s head goes completely silent. Then he feels his forehead getting sticky but without feeling any pain. He blinks confusedly through water-filled eyes and sees the man in front of him sink to his knees with blood gushing from a split eyebrow. It’s Peter Andersson.

  86 Blood

  The cafeteria quickly fills with panic-stricken families with children fleeing the violence. Kira doesn’t have to think about what the right thing to do is, she just stands, legs wide apart, in the doorway. She assumes she has some sort of naive idea of guarding it in case the men down at the ice decide to storm the cafeteria, even though she’s already thinking: “So how, Kira? HOW are you going to stop them?”

  Then she feels someone brush past her left side, then someone else on her right. Maya and Ana. Maya is there to protect her mother, Ana is there to protect the whole world. Only once do two young men come running up the stairs, Kira doesn’t even have time to see if they’re Hed or Beartown, but they’re clutching lengths of metal piping in their hands and that’s enough for Ana to wait until the first one is close enough to get a kick to the chest that he’ll never forget. He flies backward and his friend stops midstride with his eyes staring wildly. Then he makes the best decision of his life and flees.

  “SHIT!” Ana yells, jumping back on one leg, because it feels like she’s just broken her damn foot again, why the hell do guys have to be so damn HARD when you kick them?

  Kira pulls her and Maya back into the cafeteria again and closes the door behind her. A few minutes pass, then it’s as if the inferno outside suddenly stops, like someone pulling the plug from a loudspeaker. When they open the door again the ice rink is almost empty.

  * * *

  Peter is on his knees whimpering with pain as blood trickles into his eyes. Johnny is bending over him, not to hit him but to help him, but that isn’t how it looks. Teemu sees them from up in the stands. And then everything goes to hell.

  * * *

  Adri still hasn’t moved from the Beartown stand. It doesn’t even occur to her to run off in any direction. She doesn’t want to fight, but she doesn’t want to run away either. She isn’t full of hatred, nor full of fear, she just feels empty. Only when she hears someone calling her name does she get dragged back to reality and turns around. It’s Benji. He’s holding Alicia in his arms. How he managed to get hold of her Adri will never understand, but somewhere between the Beartown stand and Hed’s Benji heard the child’s voice, and, while all the black jackets carried on running forward, he veered off.

  “What are you even doing HERE, you crazy kid?” he yelled.

  “I wanted to watch the game but Sune didn’t want to, so I came ON MY OWN!” Alicia snapped back, trying to sound angry even though she was actually terrified.

  Benji reached down and lifted her out of the chaos, and is now carrying her as if she was his little girl. She has her arms wrapped around him like she’s always been his, clinging on like seaweed to a body that’s just stepped out of the sea. Adri’s fury vanishes instantly, leaving nothing but exhaustion. She straightens her back as if she needs to get the feeling back into all her limbs, then quickly guides her brother and the little girl toward one of the emergency exits. When they emerge into the parking lot all the tension disperses and Alicia starts to cry and the Ovich siblings don’t even stop to glance back toward the chaos in the ice rink, they just keep going toward the trees. They walk the whole way back to Sune’s, turning away from the crap instead of running into it, taking care of someone instead of taking everything out on someone else. Alicia doesn’t let go of Benji the whole way home. She sleeps next to Adri on the sofa that night. They might never be counted as a family by the authorities, but one day, many years from now, the girl will play her first game with the national team. When she’s asked what name she wants on the back of her jersey, she’ll give their name.

  * * *

  Peter looks up and blinks through the blood, he sees Johnny’s outstretched hand and he sees Teemu jump down from the stands with some sort of metal pipe in his hand, but with all his strength Peter can barely manage to utter a feeble, faltering:

  “Look out!” Not to Teemu but to Johnny. The fireman spots the danger and knocks the metal pipe aside at the last moment. Teemu loses his footing and stumbles straight into Peter, which buys Johnny a few seconds to back away, and by the time Teemu finds his footing and is about to rush at him, someone else is standing in the way. He’s short and fat, but the zip of his jacket is pulled down and Teemu sees the pistol tucked into his belt long before he sees Lev’s face a little higher up.

  “Come!” Lev says tersely, shepherding Johnny behind him.

  He has the pistol in his hand now, holding it half-hidden in the palm of his hand, pointing at the floor, but his eyes are fixed on Teemu.

  Hannah, Tobias, and Ted are standing a few yards away. They back away behind Lev, and Teemu stands so still that everything around him also seems to slow down. Perhaps it’s a direct chain reaction when a few members of the Pack see what’s happening to their leader and stop instantly, then a few more, and a few more, and when enough black jackets stop fighting, everyone else does as well. The crowd is still dense, but it becomes less aggressive. People tumble out into the parking lot, less panic-stricken now. The last of them almost stroll out as if they were walking out of a cinema. Hardly anyone except those closest to Lev even saw the pistol. It all happened so quickly, and out of nowhere it’s over.

  “Community spirit, yes?” Lev says to Johnny with a smile almost of amusement as they step out into the snow.

  Johnny is too shocked to answer, so blinded by fear that something could have happened to his children, and so grateful that Lev managed to get them out that he isn’t even thinking about the pistol, which disappears into the man’s belt again. They part with a curt nod, and Lev seems to vanish into thin air among the vehicles in the parking lot.

  * * *

  Teemu doesn’t look frightened, mostly just surprised. Almost fascinated, in fact. As soon as Lev disappears he seeks to shake it all off, as if it were just a children’s game where this was what you should expect. He bends down and asks:

  “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t know,” Peter replies honestly.

  “PETER!!!” a voice yells, cutting into his ears.

  “Oh fuck, now you’re going to get it,” Teemu grins.

  Peter will never stop being surprised at how calm he is. He seems to have developed an immunity to adrenaline.

  “DAD!” Maya cries out, running beside her mother, and behind them stumbles Leo, who looks like he’s been sick but that’s too long a story for any of them to feel like explaining to Peter right now.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” Kira cries so wildly that even Teemu bounces out of the way, but he still can’t stop himself blurting out:

  “Oh, you know, just hooligan behavior, typical of Peter to start fighting! We tried to stop him, but you know how he gets when he’s angry…”

  He’s seriously pretty certain Kira would have killed him there and then if Peter hadn’t thrown himself between them. The lies come so easily to Peter that he surprises himself:

  “I ran into a post, that’s all, darling. It was nothing but a stupid accident.”

  87 Profits

  Out of all the men in the ice rink today, only two are dressed in a suit and tie. They’re sitting a long way from each other, possibly unaware of each other’s presence. One is Tails, the other is Richard Theo, the supermarket owner and the politician who each have such a bad reputation in their respective fields for their competitors to believe that they don’t follow the rules. They themselves claim that that’s precisely what they do, they just play the game better than everyone else. They’ve come to the rink for different reasons. Tails hopes to be able to steer events, Theo merely hopes to analyze them. Tails watches the thirteen-year-olds on the ice, Theo just watches the crowd. One looks at players, the other looks at voters.

  Tails has spent all day hoping desperately that he’s going to be able to instigate a truce between Beartown and Hed long enough to save both clubs, but when he sees the size of the crowd and hears the first “woof!” from the Hed stand, he knows it’s all over. It doesn’t matter that Teemu has promised to stay calm. No one stands a chance.

  But Richard Theo sits there, apparently untroubled, watching as the trouble breaks out. The supermarket owner runs toward the ice like a man possessed, trying to stop everyone from killing each other, but the politician is thinking that perhaps this is exactly what’s needed: what saves the two clubs might not be peace, but war. He just needs to figure out how to use that to his advantage.

  It’s Peter Andersson who turns out to be the answer, as he so often is in this town, one way or another, Theo thinks with a little smile. He’s sitting so high up in the stands that in the end he’s the only person who has a complete overview of the chaos down below. He usually says that his political successes have come about because when everyone else runs in one direction, he runs the other way, but this time he just has to sit still. He sees Peter Andersson rush out of the storeroom and crash into a large man the same age wearing a fire brigade top. He sees Peter’s eyebrow split in a fountain of blood, but he also sees how Teemu reacts instantly as if it’s his duty to protect Peter and throws himself toward him, then he sees how Lev appears to defend the fireman. The alliances might be unexpected, but they aren’t illogical, at least not to a politician who has built his whole career out of unusual friendships.

  When everything suddenly calms down right after that, when the trouble is over and the ice rink drains of people like water from a basin, Tails is drenched in sweat but Theo is cool. One is only thinking of all he could lose now, the other already has a strategy for how he can get everything he wants.

  While Tails is wandering around the parking lot to see if anyone is seriously hurt, Richard Theo walks calmly to his office. It’s a beautiful evening, the stars are bright and snow is falling, the ice is in his nostrils and crunching beneath his shoes. He loves this place, no one would believe that if they heard it, of course, but he’s traveled all around half the world and still hasn’t seen anywhere like this. The forest and the lake, the wilderness and snow, it’s unbeatable.

  He isn’t surprised that this town drives people to violence, it could have driven him to violence too if he thought someone was trying to take it away from him. That’s the insight that’s going to help him solve everyone’s problems. That’s how he’s going to win.

  88 Hooligans

  Bobo and Tess are waiting beside the van. Johnny and Hannah leave their sons with them and turn back to see if anyone is injured or needs help. Surprisingly, they don’t. The thirteen-year-olds who were supposed to be playing are unharmed, of course, because they were wearing full hockey gear the whole time, and among the parents and other people in the crowd there are just a few bruises and scrapes that happened in the crush rather than from any fighting. The men in the standing areas were only after each other. Johnny knows that some of the younger firemen usually call it “Honor among hooligans.” Several of them have tattoos of the red bull, much bigger than his own. They’re firemen, but first and foremost they’re from Hed, and they’re different from him. Angrier. Unless Johnny has just gotten older. Sometimes he thinks that boys who grow up in his hometown now have fewer ways to identify themselves than he had in his day. Every individual needs to feel important, is looking for something to belong to, but there are fewer and fewer things to cling on to in Hed. “We only fight the Pack, we never touch civilians,” one of them once said, and Johnny can’t help thinking that that’s the problem, that they use the word “civilians” as if they were soldiers.

  Car engines are starting up everywhere and the parking lot quickly empties. In other towns and among other people the panic would probably have been greater, but here people seem to get over it in a matter of minutes. Almost all of them have seen a fight between hooligans before, as soon as the drama is over everything goes back to normal, tomorrow most of it will be forgotten.

  Johnny realizes that the only thing that might feel different this time is that it has been so long since it last happened. Two years since the last really big fight, which ended with a gang from Hed setting fire to the Bearskin and the Pack from Beartown hunting them through the forest, cars crashing and a teenage boy from Beartown getting killed. After that it was as if everyone realized that things had gone too far, and that if the conflict continued it would have led to all-out war. Even the worst of the men from Hed pulled themselves together enough to stand up and join in the singing of Beartown’s song in the next match: “We are the bears.” That was a white flag, and Teemu and his guys accepted it. Everyone backed down. For two years. But now? Even if today’s trouble is soon over, Johnny knows that this is either the end of a small conflict or the start of one that’s much, much larger.