Cadaver 3

  Copyright © 2023 Nick Clausen

  Edited by Diana Cox

  Created with Atticus

  The author asserts his moral rights to this work.

  Please respect the hard work of the author.

  Any resemblance to real persons, living or undead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  FREE BOOK

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

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  1

  “They’re … infected?” Marit repeats, visibly digesting what Ella just told her. “But how could—”

  “It doesn’t matter how,” Ella cuts her off, picking up her sports bag, which—thankfully—she didn’t unpack. “The only thing that matters is getting out of the house and away from them. They’re not themselves, all right? They’re … delirious. Aggressive. They’re trying to attack us, because they don’t recognize us.”

  Marit swallows, shakes her head, blinks repeatedly. “I don’t … I don’t understand …”

  “You don’t need to,” Ella says, pulling her to her feet. “Just get dressed.”

  Another groan from the other side of the door. This one a lot closer—close enough that Marit hears it, too. “Was that …?”

  “Yes,” Ella says, picking up Marit’s trousers and flinging them at her. “Get dressed!”

  Gunnar—at least Ella assumes it’s him, since Greta probably didn’t wake back up yet—reaches the door and bumps into it. Luckily, he doesn’t go for the handle. At least not right away. Apparently, he’s forgotten how doors work.

  Ella spins around, looking for something, anything, to barricade the door with. It opens in, which means a chair or something similar to pin under the handle would do the trick. But Marit only has a desk chair on wheels, and it won’t work. Instead, Ella notices the shelf right next to the doorframe. It’s wall-mounted, sitting on metal brackets, and there’s an inch of space between the wall and the shelf itself. Meaning that something can be tied around the bracket.

  “D-dad?” Marit asks, her voice shaky with beginning comprehension. “Is that you?”

  “Don’t talk to him!” Ella snaps. “I told you, he can’t recognize you.”

  As she’s talking, Ella goes to the desk, rips Marit’s charger from the socket, and brings it to the door. She wraps it around the shelf bracket, then around the door handle, forming a loop. It’s not easy to tie into a knot, but she does the best she can. Even through the door, she can smell Gunnar. Apparently, he senses her, too, because he begins groping more eagerly, growling, snarling and snapping his teeth.

  Marit says something, but Ella filters it out, focusing on the cord.

  That’s when Gunnar—probably by coincidence—presses down on the handle, and the door opens.

  Ella gives off a cry and instinctively pushes back.

  But something is stuck—Gunnar’s foot—and she can’t get the door closed all the way. He begins pressing from the other side, squeezing his hands through, and as he gropes for her, Ella has no choice: She lets go of the door and steps back.

  Staring as the door swings open another couple of inches, she’s sure the cord will give way and Gunnar will come bursting into the room. She mentally prepares herself to face him.

  But the cord holds. The door can only open six inches. It’s enough for him to reach both arms inside, but not to squeeze through. Instead, he presses his face into the opening, trying to edge his entire head through.

  Marit begins screaming, and Ella can’t blame her. Her father is an awful sight. Besides his greenish complexion and pitch-black eyes, most of his face is smeared in blood, and his jaw, chin and neck are one big awful mess of exposed flesh, completely cut open, skin and tendons dangling like stringy mozzarella.

  He pushes against the door in rhythmical thrusts, growling and snarling, his fingers clawing at them. With each push, the cord is stretched, and the knot that Ella managed to tie is put to the test. It seems to hold, at least for now.

  Get moving.

  Ella pries her eyes off of her uncle, turning to Marit, who’s still screaming her lungs out. She steps in front of her, blocking her view. Marit just keeps screaming, staring right through her, and Ella instinctively does what she’s seen in movies: She slaps Marit hard.

  Her cousin gasps, blinks, and begins bawling. But at least she stops screaming.

  “Sorry,” Ella tells her. “But we need to get going.”

  She drags her crying cousin to the window. Marit keeps trying to look back, but Ella holds her firmly by the arm. “Don’t look at him,” she instructs her. “Pretend he’s not there.”

  She knows it’s futile, of course. But to her surprise, Marit actually stops trying to turn around.

  This frees up Ella’s hands, and she immediately opens the window. It’s divided in the middle by a vertical post, and only the right half can be opened. Luckily, though, it works like a door, swinging out into the cold morning air. Ella leans out and looks down. There’s a steep twelve-foot drop which ends abruptly at the frozen lawn. The jump can probably be done without breaking anything, but Ella doubts she can convince Marit of that. She turns her head and sees a downspout going right by the window.

  Perfect.

  “Marit?” she says, pulling back inside and grabbing her cousin by the shoulders, forcing her to look Ella in the eye. “We’re going to climb down now. You go first. Come on.”

  Marit nods absently, and Ella helps her climb onto the sill. She feels Marit tense up and begin to resist as soon as she sees the drop.

  “Don’t look down,” Ella instructs her. “Grab hold of the pipe.”

  “I can’t … I can’t reach it,” Marit whimpers. “It’s too far away.”

  A bump from behind. Ella darts a look back. Gunnar is really going at it, and the knot looks like it’ll give way any second.

  Marit is still crouching on the windowsill. “I don’t think I can do it, Ella …”

  “Go!” Ella shouts. “Now, Marit! Or it’ll be too la—”

  The cord is untied, the door swings open, and Gunnar stumbles into the room. He immediately heads for them.

  “Change of plans,” Ella hears herself say. Then she shoves Marit hard in the back.

  2

  What am I doing here?

  The question has been haunting her for hours. Ever since she got off the phone with Ella. Why hasn’t she called her back? Isn’t she safe? Did anything happen? Anne tried calling her several times, but got no answer. She should be up there in Mo. If ever Ella needed her around, now’s the time.

  I should just up and leave. It’s a fifty-minute drive if I break the speed limit. I could take the patrol car, put on the flashers. That way, I wouldn’t get pulled over.

  And yet, Anne finds herself bound by her duty. It’s crazy. But it’s how she was raised.

  She has a feeling in her gut that this whole thing might spiral out of control. That it will do so despite their best efforts. It’s simply spreading too fast. The virus is too aggressive. They’ve never faced anything like this before. Covid seems like nothing compared to this. Not only is the incubation time much shorter, it’s also a much, much worse disease. The infected look more than sick. They look …

  Diseased.

  The word keeps flickering through her mind as she watches the footage on the screen mounted on the wall. The cantina smells like coffee and cleaning products. The sandwich she bought from the vending machine is still lying untouched in the cellophane wrapping in front of her.

  As a society—scratch that, as mankind—this is perhaps the worst challenge they’ll ever face. The bubonic plague, the Spanish Flu, smallpox, even HIV … none of those will compare to this if it escapes the nation’s borders. Which, for every passing minute, Anne feels still more certain that it will—if it hasn’t already. Who knows if someone has crossed the border to Sweden? Someone hiding in the trunk of a car? Or worse, someone with only a mild fever boarding a plane to a destination in Central Europe, maybe someone sneaking aboard a ship headed for England?

  Anne willfully shoves aside the gloomy thoughts. There’s still hope. Still a chance of stopping it. She needs to believe that.

  Even though what’s going on in the news seems to contradict it. The television is showing images from Torik. They go back and forth from the studio to the reporters in the streets. All of them have serious expressions and keep using words like “disaster,” “fatality,” “panic” and even “mayhem.”

  Anne tries not to listen. But she can’t help it. She also can’t help but recall her daughter’s voice.

  “
Gunnar was infected. He’s dead.”

  She can’t believe her brother is gone. Poor Gunnar. They grew up together, and although they weren’t very close anymore, Anne finds that some deep feelings of grief are settling into the pit of her stomach, right next to the fear she feels for her daughter’s safety.

  Gunnar was a tough guy, no doubt about it. And yet all it took was a tiny wound. Anne holds no illusions that this thing can be kicked. If Gunnar couldn’t, no one can. She even doubts they’ll ever find a vaccine or something else to promote immunity. The only course of action for now is to stem the flood. Contain the infected, keep them separated from the rest of society. And that’s pretty much all they’ve been doing. And so far, they’re failing. Miserably.

  First Torik. The hospital is all but lost. No one can still be alive up there. Judging from the media coverage, it even seems like they’re not that concerned about keeping up the perimeter around the building. Because now the city is falling, too.

  Then Mo. Gunnar was responsible for that. Anne gets how he probably felt confident he could cure himself. Still, what he did is unforgivable. Abandoning his post. Exposing others to danger—his own family—and spreading the infection way beyond the initial ground zero.

  Simultaneously, it reached Trondheim, where Anne is. One of the quarantined people in Torik unwittingly brought an infected person along with them in the back of the ambulance that Anne herself apprehended. Another stupid act of—

  Her phone buzzes on the table, and she realizes she was nodding off, as the sound almost makes her fall from the chair. She grabs it.

  It’s not Ella. It’s a service number. She answers the call. “Nilsen?”

  “Anne, it’s Bo. I need you to stay put.”

  She has gotten to her feet, already striding for the door. Now she stops, frowning. “Say that again?”

  “I know. It’s bad down here. We’re trying, but …” Her superior pauses briefly, and she can hear shouts in the background. “Even our own people are getting infected, for Christ’s sake. You’d think they’d give us some proper goddamn equipment, wouldn’t you? But they sent it all up north, and now we’re left to clean up this mess that no one expected would ever reach us.”

  “But ... hold on, Bo.” She grabs the remote from the table and kills the sound of the television. It was set way higher than she was aware of. The silence is deafening. “You’ve still got the street, right?”

  Bo scoffs, which isn’t a good sign. She’s never heard her usually levelheaded boss sound like this. “Forget Odin’s Street, Nilsen. We couldn’t even keep the quarter. For every new incident, we need to pull back, and we’re leaving people inside, healthy people, some of them ours, goddamnit … And the circle is growing exponentially. That’s why I’m calling you …”

  Anne is staring at the fridge door, absently reading a handwritten note someone put up: In queso emergency … pray to cheesus. Suddenly, with the television muted, she can hear noises in the background, and not all of them are coming through the phone. She turns to look at the windows. They’re sitting too high for her to see anything but blue skies. A car honks. Someone screams. A banging sound, maybe from a door being slammed. And closer by, more subtly, she can hear low growling, which could be an angry dog warning anyone not to come near it. Except she knows the sound is coming from a human. She heard it before.

  Jesus … I was just sitting here, while it’s spiraling outside …

  “It’ll reach your position soon,” Bo goes on in her ear. “I’ll need you to take charge. I pulled Botten, and Thune was on his way to you when she got redirected here. So you’re it, Nilsen. Keep whoever is there with you—don’t send anyone else out to get in trouble. We don’t want—”

  “No one’s here,” Anne hears herself say. “I’m the only one.”

  “Well … that’s good. You don’t need to worry, then. Just make sure you’re safe. You’ve got provisions, right?”

  “There’s food here, yeah. For a few weeks at least.”

  “Good. I don’t think it’ll be that long, but help could take a while to reach you. Tell you the truth, I think they’ll end up clearing the area with a lot more forceful measures. But you never heard me say that.”

  In a flash of vision, Anne sees jagers overhead, dropping cans of gas. Infantry driving through the streets in combat vehicles, spraying bullets at anything that moves. Drones landing with precision bombs.

  “Christ,” she whispers. “All right. Thanks for the heads-up, Bo.”

  “Hunker down, Nilsen. Wait it out. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I won’t. Any news from Mo?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, no. Sorry, Nilsen. I know your daughter is up there, and—” Someone shouts in the background, and Bo hisses: “Shit!” then ends the call abruptly.

  Anne is left to stare at the phone in her hand. Her heart is pounding away in her chest.

  The thought of being trapped here, alone, for weeks, is even worse than the thought of fighting in the streets. At least out there she could act. In here, she can only sit on her ass and hope. And what’s worse: She won’t be able to get to Ella.

  I’m going, she thinks, slipping the phone into her pocket. I’m coming, Ella.

  3

  She hears Marit scream as she falls. Then the sound is cut off by a thud.

  Ella doesn’t waste time checking if her cousin is okay. Instead, she grabs the desk chair and sends it rolling right at Gunnar. He must see it coming, but he doesn’t seem to care. Walking right into it, he does exactly what Ella hoped: He falls over.

  This wins Ella the few seconds she needs to climb up onto the windowsill. She can hear Marit complain down by the lawn, and as she looks down, she expects to see her, sitting there. But Marit is crawling away, headed for the far end of the yard. This confuses Ella—until Marit darts a look back. Following her gaze, Ella sees the reason why Marit is busy getting away: Greta comes around the corner of the house.

  How did she get out?

  Ella doesn’t have time to ponder the question, as she picks up on a sound from behind. Gunnar is back up, and half a second before he can grab her, Ella jumps out.

  She’s done gymnastics at after school, and she knows how to land properly. Yet this is by far the highest drop she’s ever done—and it’s not a mattress waiting for her, but solid, frozen ground.

  She breaks the fall as best she can, collapsing and rolling. The impact is still hard enough to send jolts of pain up through her legs. But nothing breaks or dislocates, which is all she was hoping for. Jumping back up, her knees and shins hurt, but she can walk. And that’s lucky, because Greta is coming.

  Seeing her aunt’s ink-black eyes and green face is awful beyond imagination—amplified by the fact that she was looking at her just minutes ago, when she was fine, normal-colored and alive. Now, she’s drooling, hissing and reaching out her hands, eager to grab Ella and eat her flesh.

  Ella moves away from the house, in the direction that Marit took. Seconds later, Gunnar comes plummeting from the window. He lands like a ragdoll, arms and legs flailing, and something audibly breaks. Ella feels sick to her stomach, but she can’t help but look at Gunnar one last time. She expects—hopes—that the fall killed him. On the contrary, her uncle doesn’t even seem phased by it. He just meticulously begins getting back to his feet. His hip seems to be dislocated, and one leg is turned almost all the way around, making it hard for him to keep his balance. Still, he limps on, headed for Ella, racing his dead wife to get at the meal first.

  Ella turns and runs after Marit, who’s by now reached the fence separating the lawn from the neighbor’s. It’s made of vertical planks, and there’s a thick hedge right on the other side. Looking to both sides, Ella sees no ways around or through the fence—the only way is up. Unless they want to turn back, which by now has become risky, since Greta and Gunnar are coming for them, cornering them.

  “Ow, my foot,” Marit wails as she tries to stand. “I think it’s broken … it hurt so badly, I can’t—”

  “We don’t have time,” Ella cuts her off. “Here, use your good foot.” She folds her hands in a classic boost offer. Apparently, however, Marit never climbed trees with other kids, because she stares at Ella’s hands like she has no idea what it means. “Step up into my hands!” Ella shouts. “Quickly!”