The dog is still barking, and now it’s pulled its tail between its legs and is hiding behind its owner’s feet. This causes the man to get entangled in the leash as he staggers backwards, obviously wanting to get away from the approaching woman. He stumbles, falls, and lands hard on his ass. He drops the leash, and the dog bolts down the street, whimpering. The man struggles to get back up, but he’s very slow, and the woman is only a few steps away.

  Hagos was always good at thinking and acting fast in situations of danger—something he’s gotten plenty of practice in already from a way too young age—and it takes his brain only seconds to conclude that the woman is in fact intent on hurting the man.

  So, he steps through the doors, ignoring the cold air, and runs to help.

  6

  First order of business is getting her gun.

  Why she was stupid enough to follow protocol and lock her service weapon in the locker room is beyond her. Probably because at the time she still thought the situation was under control.

  Striding through the building, she reaches the back hallway and turns right. She’s internally planning her escape route—get the gun, leave building on the south side, get to vehicle parked one block over, exit town via the smaller roads—which is probably why she walks right past the open fire doors.

  It’s the cold draft that makes her stop dead in her tracks.

  She turns and stares out at the empty lot behind the building. The view is cut off by a wooden fence and a couple of dumpsters. A plastic bag tumbles by. Then, from the other side, comes a teenage boy. His lower belly is open like a fanny pack, his intestines dangling out like spaghetti. His black eyes land on Anne. He reaches out his arms and heads for the doors.

  Anne shrieks and does the same. She reaches the double doors half a second before the boy and slams them in his face. Pushing against them with her shoulder, she fumbles for the lock, then realizes it’s one of those sliding things that go into the ceiling. She reaches up, snaps it into place, then steps back, ready to run if the doors don’t hold.

  They hold just fine. Even though the boy goes at them pretty fiercely, there’s no chance of him breaking them down.

  Anne stands there for a moment, panting, feeling her heart pound away above her collarbone.

  Who the hell left the doors wide open?

  Someone in a rush to get away, obviously. But it means the building is compromised. She turns and looks down the hallway. Filtering out the sounds from the boy, she listens for any noises coming from within the building. She can’t hear anything.

  Perhaps I was lucky and no one got in.

  Just as she begins walking again, she feels the bottom of her right shoe land in something sticky. She looks down to see a trail of blood. There are also traces of at least two sets of shoes that have stepped in the blood. They disappear in different directions. She has no way of knowing whether they were left by infected people or not.

  Need to be very careful.

  She presses on, senses alert, ready to run at any moment. She avoids stepping in more of the blood, and she does her best to make sure she moves quietly.

  Reaching a place where the hallway splits in two, she needs to make a left turn, and then the locker room will be within sight. But she’s suddenly aware of a sound that’s very unsettling. It’s pretty clearly someone eating—she can make out clacks from teeth, chewing and slurping. In any other situation, she would have assumed the sound was from a kid eating a big slice of watermelon and making a mess of it. Right now, however, she’s pretty sure what she hears comes from something much less benign.

  It’s hard to tell which direction the sounds are coming from, so she keeps in the middle of the hallway as she slips carefully forward, turning her head back and forth, trying to look both ways at once.

  The sounds are coming from the right. She can’t immediately see the person producing them. A few yards down is an open door, and a pair of legs are sticking out—one of them missing a shoe. The legs jerk and move slightly, and at first Anne takes it to mean the person is still alive and conscious. But as she looks closer, she can tell the movements are aligned with the noises, and she connects the dots: Someone is eating away at the upper half of the poor bastard.

  Goddamnit, Anne thinks, breathing hard through her nose to keep the dread and nausea away. It proves a mistake, though, because it brings in the smell of blood and raw flesh. What kind of disease is this? What type of virus turns people into man-eaters?

  It sounded like science fiction from the moment she learned about what was happening up at Torik. And now, as she’s witnessing it firsthand, it doesn’t feel much more real—except it is. She used to watch a lot of documentaries of wildlife, animals and nature, and she recalls one about parasites and how they can do absolutely incredible things to their hosts after hijacking their nervous system. Like the one that would infect ants, then control them into climbing straws of grass so they could reach the underbelly of sheep, which was where the parasite really wanted to live. The poor ants were just a temporary vehicle.

  Impressive. And there was a purpose. The parasite had to get from the ground to the woolly environment of the sheep.

  What is this illness all about? What does it want? Why are the infected drawn to attacking, killing and eating away at the living?

  Anne is a firm believer in cause and effect. She believes that everything in nature makes sense, even when the reasons aren’t readily apparent.

  But this ... it strikes her as something beyond what’s natural. Beyond reason, even. It seems like pure evil.

  Anne can’t help but shiver.

  Get moving.

  She turns left, heading for the locker room. She reaches the door and grabs the handle. It doesn’t budge.

  Shit, I forgot …

  Because of the firearms, they had to lock the room. They were all given a key card, and as Anne’s hand goes to her pocket, she finds it’s still there.

  Thank God!

  She pulls it out and drops it. It lands with a clatter between her feet. To Anne, it sounds like gunshots.

  She looks towards the door with the legs. They’re still there. Whoever is having a feast doesn’t seem to have picked up on the noise. Or they simply don’t care. Or maybe—

  “Help me …”

  Anne spins around at the hoarse voice from behind. She expects to see someone there, but the hallway is empty, save for a roller table with some kind of equipment on it. It’s parked against the opposite wall, and Anne didn’t pay any attention to it. Until now. A man is sitting behind it, resting against the wall. He’s pale, sweating, and he’s clutching his bicep. He can’t quite stop the blood, and a pool of it has formed around him. Judging by his color, he’s not got a whole lot left of it in his body.

  “I need … help …” he croaks.

  He fights to keep his eyes open, his head lolling back and forth.

  “I don’t … I don’t have anything to stop the bleeding,” Anne tells him a low voice. She’s pretty sure the guy won’t survive, and even if he does, he’s infected. It’s clear that the wound on his arm was made by teeth, seeing how the fabric is shredded. Looking closer, she notices several bloody scratches on his neck and hands. His skin is already starting to turn green.

  “Please,” he says, his voice breaking. “I have a wife … I don’t want to die …”

  Anne feels the knot in her stomach tighten even further. Empathy wants her to try and save the guy. But logic tells her not to. She could pull off her belt. She could compress the wound. She could tell him it’ll be all right. She could even carry him to safety.

  But Anne was never one to let emotions rule. And she’s not going to now.

  “What’s your name?” she tells him.

  The guy just keeps pleading for help.

  “What’s your name?” she asks a little louder. “Your full name?”

  He blinks and looks at her like he just noticed her. “Bjørn … Svendson.”

  “Bjørn, I’ll find your wife and let her know you died thinking of her. I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  His expression goes from confusion back to agony, and he reaches out his good hand. “No, don’t leave me!” He leans forward, loses balance, and slumps to the floor, facedown. He doesn’t get back up. Anne can’t tell whether he’s still breathing.

  She picks up the key card, checks one last time in both directions—the feast is still going on—and then she lets herself into the locker room.

  7

  “ Hey !” Hagos shouts. “Don’t touch him!”

  He realizes he’s talking Bantu, which he only ever does in his thoughts and when he’s on the phone with some of his friends from his home country.

  It doesn’t matter now, though. All he wants is to catch the woman’s attention. To distract her. To buy the man a few seconds to get on his feet.

  But either the woman is deaf, or she’s too focused on whatever she’s about to do, because she doesn’t even flinch at Hagos’s voice. Instead, she throws herself on top of the man, who just managed to get up onto one knee, and, shrieking, he shields his face with both arms.

  The woman pushes him back down, latching on to his side like a furious dog, thrashing and frothing, tearing the jacket to shreds. She turns her head just enough that Hagos catches sight of her eyes, and it finally drops into place for him.

  He has no idea how it’s possible. But he knows without a shadow of a doubt that this woman is ill with the Torik virus. And that she’s extremely dangerous.

  I can’t let her touch me.

  Still, he instinctively keeps moving forward. The poor guy can still be saved, because so far, the woman has only eaten away at his jacket—the white, puffy stuff that was inside is spilling out, and the woman shakes her head to get it out of her teeth. The guy tries to defend himself by swatting away at her, but due to his thick mittens, the blows are way too soft to cause her more than slight annoyance, and she instead catches the left mitten and begins gnawing away at it.

  That’s when Hagos reaches them. He places the sole of his boot on the woman’s shoulder and kicks hard. She rolls onto her side, pulling off the man’s mitten. Hagos bends, grabs the guy by the collar and pulls him away. The man obviously hasn’t seen Hagos coming, and seems convinced that it’s another infected person dragging him along. He keeps shrieking and flails his arms, trying to slap Hagos.

  “It’s okay,” he groans in Norwegian. “I’m helping you.”

  The man stops fighting, and Hagos stops dragging him. They’ve managed to create a little distance to the woman, but she’s now stopped chewing the mitten and has gotten back up to her feet. Hagos pulls the man up—at least he tries to. The guy is so heavy, it takes him several seconds to get up. He stares at his torn jacket, his eyes big, terrified and dazed. “What …? I don’t … Why would she …?”

  “Get inside!” Hagos instructs him, shoving him towards the glass doors.

  The man staggers along clumsily, almost reluctantly. Having been in life-or-death situations before, Hagos finds himself not surprised at all that the man seems to act as though he doesn’t want to be saved.

  There are basically two kinds of people. Those who do well under pressure, and those who don’t. Hagos knew already that he himself belonged to the first group. He also knows that most other people fall into the second. And that they will do all kinds of irrational things, simply because their brains aren’t operating properly.

  “Keep walking!” Hagos demands, pushing the man as he tries again to turn around. Hagos doesn’t want him to look back and see the woman pursuing them, as that could cause him to flip out or shut down completely.

  The glass doors open and let them inside. As soon as they’re both through, Hagos steps to the right and looks at the panel on the wall. There’s an emergency button, but he’s pretty sure that will permanently open the doors, which is the opposite of what he wants. There’s a lock function, but that requires a key.

  “Damnit,” he mutters, as the doors—which were just closing—now open again for the woman.

  There’s nothing I can do to keep her out, he realizes, running to the man, who’s shambling across the entrance hall, looking like he just dropped from the moon.

  Hagos quickly runs over his options. He has a mental schematic of the building in his mind; it’s basically a horseshoe with two wings, and right now, he’s in the middle. He can go north or south, left or right. There are only two other staffers at work right now, one of them Louisa, the manager. She’s probably in the faculty lounge, because the morning rounds haven’t started yet. The lounge is in the north wing.

  Hearing the woman enter the hall, dragging her feet, moaning and groaning, the man turns around, and this time, he sees her. He gasps and is about to shout, when Hagos grabs his upper arm and yanks him along.

  They jog down the north hallway, heading for the lounge, when the door to apartment 24 suddenly flies open. Hagos jumps aside, halfway expecting an infected person to come stumbling out. Instead, it’s a young girl with red hair, not much more than fifteen—certainly too young to be a resident here. She’s obviously been through an ordeal, because she has a lot of scratches, and she’s only wearing nightclothes. Her eyes are red from crying, and as they land on Hagos, he sees how desperate the girl is.

  “Help!” she yelps. “Please, we need help in here!”

  Hagos automatically draws back as the girl reaches for him. “Are you infected?” he asks.

  She looks confused, then shakes her head. She glances down herself. “No, this … this isn’t from … it’s from the hedge … we climbed over the—” The girl interrupts herself as she looks past Hagos and sees the woman. She shrieks, turns and runs back into the apartment.

  Hagos is a natural servant. He reacts instinctively whenever someone needs help. It’s not always the best option. But it’s how he’s wired. Growing up in a dog-eat-dog society with only his nearest family to trust, he learned from a very young age that if people don’t help others in need, everyone will soon suffer the consequences.

  So he makes a snap decision. He follows the girl.

  8

  It’s only as she steps into the locker room that she realizes someone could very well be in here. Perhaps even someone infected.

  “Hello?” she asks, closing the door gently behind her. She doesn’t worry about announcing her presence. It seems preferable to walking in and surprising someone who might be armed and scared. “I’m a police officer. Anyone in here?”

  Her voice reverberates between the tiled walls and the metal cabinets. There’s a shower section around the corner that she can’t see from here. The locker room seems quiet and has no alarming smells—no fever, no blood, only shampoo and aftershave.

  “I’m stepping inside now,” Anne announces. “I’m not armed, and I’m not infected.”

  She takes a few steps forward, which allows her to see down the rows of cabinets. A lot of clothes are left on the benches and the hangers, but she can’t see any persons. To be sure, she crouches and looks under the cabinets. They’re raised a foot above the floor on thin legs, and she can see the entire room this way. No feet in sight. The only place left to check is the showers.

  Anne slips around the cabinets and peeks into the shower section. It’s empty. But by the wall is a chair which is obviously out of place. Anne looks up and sees one of the narrow windows. It’s open all the way.

  Someone made a clean getaway. Good for them.

  Outside, on the street, she can hear the chaos still going on—even worse now. There’s a lot of shuffling feet nearby. Meaning the window is probably not a good way to escape the building.

  Anne goes back and locates her locker. She dials the combination—Ella’s birthday, the passcode she always uses for something like this—and opens it. She’s relieved to find her gun hanging in its holster. She puts it on, and she immediately feels better.

  She strides back towards the door to the hallway, reminding herself to be careful, because the guy out there—Bjørn Svendson—might already be—

  Anne freezes at the sight of the woman.

  She’s sitting on the bench, both legs pulled up against her chest, a jacket pulled over her. Her head is leaned back, her mouth open, her eyes closed, her skin color unmistakably green. She’s relatively unscathed, save for three, nasty slices running down the side of her neck. The nails that grazed her didn’t cut open her jugular, since only a little blood has dripped from the wounds, but they obviously did allow the infection to enter the woman’s system and kill her. And now—

  Before Anne can think or do anything, the woman tilts her head forward and opens her eyes. The black cue balls immediately fix on Anne—she suspects she’ll never get used to the feeling of being stared at by those dead eyes; it’s like being pinned down by a predator—no, worse, a demon—and she lets out a hungry groan. Clumsily, she stands up from the bench and comes for Anne.

  Anne finds herself backing up, and her hand automatically goes to the gun.

  As her back meets the wall, she raises the firearm and takes aim at the woman’s chest.

  Anne never fired her gun in active service before. In fact, she never fired it once since she learned how to do so on the gun range over ten years ago. As officers of the law, they are technically obligated to keep their firearms “in working order at all times,” and to “practice firing at static and moving targets regularly,” making sure their skills don’t deteriorate.

  But that is just a regulation. This is Norway. The least violent country on Earth. Where no one, not even the police, ever fires a gun. And neither Anne nor any of her colleagues ever really expected to have to shoot at anyone.

  Now, however, Anne not only needs to fire her gun. She needs to kill the woman coming for her.