Handling the Undead Read online

  The nurse gave him a look of bewilderment before she squeezed past him, into the room and stopped at her first step inside the room. Eva was sitting in the bed and stiffly picking at pieces of the plastic cup. The nurse clapped her hand over her mouth and turned to David, shaking her head, said, ‘…it…it…’

  David grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘What? What is it?’

  The nurse turned half-way into the room again, gestured with her hand and said, ‘It…isn’t possible…’

  ‘Do something, then!’

  The nurse shook her head again and ran without another word back toward the nurses’ station. When she reached the door, she turned to David and said, ‘I’ll call someone who…’ and disappeared inside.

  David remained in the corridor for a moment. He realised he was hyperventilating and tried to calm his breathing before he went back inside to Eva. The thoughts were racing through his head…A miracle…her eye…Magnus. He closed his eyes, and conjured up an image of Eva’s gaze when she was looking at him with her utmost love. The glimmer, the play of living light. He breathed deeply, held onto this image and went in.

  Eva had lost interest in the cup, which lay on the floor below the bed. David moved closer trying not to look at her chest.

  ‘Eva. I’m here.’

  The head turned toward him. He looked just below the eye; toward the smooth, undamaged cheek. He stretched out his hand, stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  ‘Everything will be fine…everything will be fine…’

  Her hand came up so fast that he instinctively pulled back, but then steeled himself and held it out to her again. Her hand gripped his. Hard. A stiff, mechanical grip, painful. Her nails dug into the back of his hand. He clenched his teeth and nodded.

  ‘It’s me. David.’

  He looked into her eye. There was nothing there. Her mouth opened and a hissing sound emerged, ‘…aavi…’

  The tears welled up in his eyes. He nodded.

  ‘That’s right. David. I’m here.’

  The grip on his hand grew tighter; a shaft of pain as a nail pierced his skin.

  ‘…Daavi…hee…heeere…’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m here. With you.’

  He eased his hand out of her grip, replacing it with the other, but angled so that she was squeezing the fingers instead. A trickle of blood ran from the hand she had been holding. He wiped it on the sheet, sat down on the bed.

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘Eeva…’

  ‘Yes. Do you know who I am?’

  A moment’s silence. The hold on his fingers loosened a little. She said, ‘aa…aam…davi…d.’

  It’s getting better. It must be getting better. She understands.

  He nodded, pointing to his chest like Tarzan, said, ‘I David. You Eva.’

  ‘Youu…Eva.’

  They got no further. A doctor burst into the room, stopping short when she caught sight of Eva. She too seemed on the verge of some exclamation of protest but instead, diverted by a professional reflex, she took a stethoscope out of her pocket and approached the bed without looking at David.

  David drew back to let her pass, and saw the nurse again standing in the doorway with another nurse who had no apparent function except curious bystander.

  The doctor placed the bell of the stethoscope on the uninjured side of Eva’s chest. Listened. Moved the stethoscope, listened again. Eva’s hand flew up, grasped the tube—

  ‘Eva!’ David yelled, ‘No!’

  —and yanked on it. The physician screamed, her head yanked forward before the earpieces came free. David grimaced in sympathetic pain.

  ‘Eva, you can’t…do that.’

  A shiver ran through him. He was acting to shield her from authority, as if he feared that they would punish her in some way if she did not behave herself.

  The doctor let out a whimper, holding her hands up to her ears for a couple of seconds, but then with an effort she restored her face to a professional calm and turned to the nurses.

  ‘Call Lasse in Neurology,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, Göran.’

  The nurse took half a step into the room and echoed, ‘Otherwise?’

  ‘If Lasse isn’t there,’ the doctor said with irritation, ‘then ask Göran to come.’

  The nurse nodded and said something in a low voice to the other one, and both of them ducked out into the corridor.

  Eva plucked the head of the stethoscope free of the tubes and it clattered to the floor. The doctor, who was simply sitting there staring at Eva, made no movement to pick it up, so David retrieved it instead. When he placed it in her hand she appeared to become aware for the first time that there was another person in the room.

  ‘How is she?’ David asked.

  The doctor looked at him with a half-open mouth as if he had just asked a question so stupid there was no answer.

  ‘The heart isn’t beating,’ the doctor said. ‘There. Are. No beats.’

  David felt a pain in his chest.

  ‘But don’t you have to…’ he said, ‘aren’t you going…get it going?’

  The doctor looked at Eva pulling on the rubber tubing and said, ‘She doesn’t seem to…require it.’

  They had to wait quite a long time for Lasse. When he finally arrived, Eva’s awakening no longer appeared to be a sensation.

  Danderyd Hospital 23.46

  Mahler parked the Fiesta in the short-term lot closest to the hospital and made an ungainly exit. The car was not designed for his 190 centimetres—nor his 140 kilos. Legs first, then the rest. He stood up next to the car, fanning his shirt against his chest. Dark stains had already started forming under his arms.

  The hospital building loomed in front of him, enormous and expectant. No sign of activity. Only the quiet breath of the air conditioning, the building’s respirator, its way of saying, ‘I am a living being, even if it doesn’t look like it.’

  He slung his bag over his shoulder, walked to the entrance. Checked his watch. A quarter to twelve.

  The shallow pool of water next to the revolving doors reflected the night sky, became a star map; standing next to it like a sentry was Ludde, smoking. When he caught sight of Mahler, he raised a hand in greeting and tossed the butt into the water with a sharp hiss.

  ‘Hi Gustav, how you going?’

  ‘Fine. Sweaty.’

  Ludde was in his forties but looked younger, in a sickly way. If it hadn’t been for the blue shirt with the nametag (‘Ludvig’) you could have taken him for a patient. Thin lips and pale, almost unnaturally taut skin, as if he had had a facelift, or was standing in a wind tunnel. Nervous eyes.

  They walked in through the regular door since the revolving door was closed for the night. Ludde kept looking around him the whole time, but his watchfulness was redundant. The hospital seemed to be deserted.

  When they left the entrance area and reached the corridors, Ludde relaxed, asked, ‘Did you bring…?’

  Mahler pushed his hand down into his pocket, but kept it there.

  ‘Ludde, don’t take this the wrong way, but all this seems…’

  Ludde stopped and stared at him with reproach.

  ‘Have I ever tried to con you? Huh? Have I said there was something and then there wasn’t anything? Have I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re thinking about that thing with Björn Borg. Yeah, yeah. But it was a damn close resemblance, you have to admit it. OK, OK. But this…well anyway. Hold onto your cash then, you bloody miser.’

  Ludde took off down the corridor with angry strides, and Mahler had trouble keeping up. They took the elevator down in silence and then walked along a long, slightly inclined corridor with an iron door at the far end. Ludde pointedly hid the touch pad as he ran his card through and punched in his code. The lock clicked.

  Mahler took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. It was cooler down here but the hike had taken its toll. He leaned against the green concrete wall, pleasantly cool against his hand.

  Ludde
opened the iron door. In the distance, through one or more walls Mahler could hear cries, clanking metal. The first and only time he had ever been here it had been as quiet as…the grave. Ludde looked at him with a what did I tell you grin. Mahler nodded, held out the wrinkled bills and Ludde softened, made a generous gesture toward the open door.

  ‘Be my guest. Your scoop awaits you.’ He glanced swiftly down the corridor. ‘The rest of them use the other entrance so you don’t have to worry.’

  Mahler tucked his handkerchief in his pocket, adjusted his bag.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  Ludde snorted. ‘How long do you think I’d keep my job after that?’ He pointed around the corner inside the door. ‘Take the elevator down one floor—that’s it.’

  As the door banged shut behind him Mahler started to feel uncomfortable. He walked up to the elevator and hesitated before he pressed the call button. He was starting to get twitchy in his old age. The cries and clatter could still be heard below and he stood still, willing his heart to calm down.

  It was not the thought of seeing dead people wandering around that unsettled him as much as the fact that he had no right to be here. When he was younger, he couldn’t have cared less about all that. ‘The truth must be told,’ he would think, and plunge into the fray.

  But now…

  Who are you, what are you doing here?

  He was rusty, and much too uncertain to be able to fake the authority you needed in such situations like that. He pressed the button anyway.

  Have to see what’s going on.

  The elevator rumbled into action and he bit his lip, backing away from the door. He was a little afraid after all, had seen too many movies. Elevators that arrived and someone…something is inside. But the elevator arrived and through the narrow window in the door he could see it was empty. He stepped in and pressed the button for the level below. As the elevator descended he tried to empty his mind, switch modes to become simply descriptive, a camera whose images develop words.

  The elevator starts with a jerk. Through thick concrete walls, I can hear screams. The morgue level comes into view through the window and through it I can see…

  Nothing.

  A bit of a corridor, a wall and nothing more. He pushed open the elevator door.

  The chill came at him. The corridor he was standing in was several degrees colder than the rest of the hospital. The sweat on his body congealed into a cold film, made him shiver. The elevator door shut behind him.

  To his right, an open door gave onto a cold storage room. Outside two people were sitting on the floor, embracing with bowed heads.

  What are they doing?

  The clatter of metal from the autopsy room to the left made one of them raise her head and Mahler now saw that it was a young nurse. Her face was panic-stricken.

  She was holding a very old woman in her arms; white hair like a halo around her head, delicate body and spindly legs that moved over the floor, trying to gain a foothold in order to stand up. She was naked apart from a white sheet that hung around her neck and down one side of the body. Someone’s mother and grandmother; perhaps a great-grandmother.

  Her face was nothing but hard bones under a pale yellow skin and her eyes…her eyes. Two windows opening onto the great Nothing. They were a translucent blue and seemed to be covered in a film of white slime, gelatinous, expressing absolutely no emotion.

  From the sunken lips—a mouth robbed of dentures—there came only a single mournful note, ‘Oooooommmm…ooommm…’

  And Mahler knew, with immediate comprehension, what it was she wanted. The same as everyone wants.

  To go home.

  The nurse caught sight of Mahler. She looked at him in entreaty as she said, ‘Can you take over?’ and inclined her head toward the old woman. When Mahler made no reply she added, ‘I’m freezing to death…’

  Mahler crouched down, put his hand on the old woman’s foot. It was ice cold, stiff; it was like putting your hand on an orange that has been in the freezer. At his touch, the woman’s lament began to rise—

  ‘OOOOOOMMM!’

  —but Mahler stood up with a groan while the nurse screamed at him, ‘You’ve got to help me! Please!’

  He couldn’t. Not right now. Had to see what was going on. Shamed, he staggered away to the autopsy room; the photographer who takes pictures of the famine victims, goes back the hotel room and drinks to assuage his guilt.

  Photographs…the camera…

  As he walked toward the large brightly lit room, he opened the bag. White sheets lay spread along the corridor.

  Later he would have trouble sorting out the scene that was laid out in front of his eyes. It was as if it should have been staged in half-darkness, a battle between the living and the dead pitched in the Goya-esque lighting of some cave.

  But everything was clinically precise and illuminated. The large neon tubes in the ceiling spewed light across the stainless steel counters and over the people who moved around in the room.

  Bare skin everywhere. Almost all of the dead had managed to rid themselves of their shrouds, and the sheets lay strewn across benches and floor. A toga party that had spiralled out of control into an orgy.

  There were around thirty people there, living and dead. Doctors and nurses and morgue staff in white, green and blue coats who struggled to hold onto the bare bodies. All of the dead were very old, many had large, roughly stitched autopsy scars that stretched from the lower abdomen to the throat.

  The dead were not violent. But they were striving, wanted to get away. Lined faces, bodies with the proportions of ill-health. The waving bird-fingers of old ladies, old men who slung their club-fists in the empty air. And the bodies pulled, strained but were embraced, held in check.

  And the din, the din.

  A whimpering and howling as if a football team of newborns had been thrown into the same room and told to express their terror and astonishment at the world they’d come to. Come back to.

  The doctors and nurses talked continuously, soothing—

  ‘Take it easy it will be all right everything is fine take it easy’

  —but their eyes were wild. Some of them had cracked. A nurse was huddled into a corner, her face in her hands, her body shaking. A doctor was standing at a sink, washing his hands calmly and methodically as if he was at home in his bathroom. When he was done he took a comb out of his breast pocket, started to comb his hair.

  Where is everyone?

  Why weren’t there more…living people here? Where were the reinforcements, the agencies—the things that despite everything worked so well in Sweden in the year 2002?

  And Mahler had been here once before. Therefore he knew that the majority of the bodies were stored in refrigerated boxes one floor down. This was only a small proportion. He took a step into the room and fumbled for his camera.

  Just then a man broke free. One of the few whom the process of decomposition had not had time to work on. He was big and strong, with hands that looked like they were used to heaving rocks. Maybe a retired and prematurely deceased construction worker. He moved toward the exit on mottled white legs, jerkily as if on stilts of rough-cut birch trunks.

  The doctor who had lost it shouted, ‘Take him!’ and Mahler didn’t think, simply obeyed the command and barricaded the doorway with his body. The man moved toward him and their eyes met. His were watery brown; it was like staring into a muddy pool where nothing was stirring. No response.

  Mahler’s gaze slid down to the throat, to the small scar above the collar bone where the formaldehyde had been injected and for the first time in this room of horrors Mahler became…afraid. Afraid of touch, of infection, fingers that groped. Wished that he could pull out his press card and shout, ‘I’m a reporter! I have nothing to do with this!’

  He clenched his teeth. He couldn’t very well run away.

  But when the man came at him he couldn’t bear to take hold of him. Instead he simply pushed him away—

  get this away
from me!

  —and the man lost his balance, tumbled to the side and fell on the doctor who had started washing his hands again. The doctor looked up indignantly, like someone interrupted in the middle of an important task, said, ‘One at a time!’ and pushed the man away toward the wall.

  Some kind of alarm started nearby. Mahler thought he recognised the melody of the signal, but had no time to think about it, because at that moment the reinforcements arrived. Three doctors and four green-clad guards forced their way past him. Stopped short for an instant, exclaimed, ‘Jesus Christ, what the…’ and various other expressions of amazement, then overcame their fear and ran into the room to intervene where they were needed.

  Mahler touched one of the doctors on the shoulder and the man turned to him with the expression of someone who was planning to punch him.

  ‘What are you doing with them?’ Mahler asked. ‘Where are you taking them?’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ the doctor asked and the wallop appeared to came an inch closer to reality. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘My name is Gustav Mahler and I’m from…’

  The doctor let out a high-pitched hysterical laugh, and shouted, ‘If you’ve brought Beethoven and Schubert with you, can you get them to pitch in?’ Whereupon he took hold of the man Mahler had pushed, restrained him and shouted out into the room, ‘Everyone to the elevators, two at a time! We’re taking them to Infectious Diseases!’

  Mahler backed out. The alarm continued stubbornly.

  When he turned around he saw that the nurse on the floor had also received help. She rose on shaky legs and transferred the woman she had been holding to a guard. She spotted Mahler and her face was distorted into a grimace.

  ‘Bastard,’ she spat and sank to the floor again, a couple of metres from the corpse. Mahler took a step toward her, but decided that it was best to let it go. He didn’t need to hear more about what a coward he was.

  The alarm, the alarm.

  The melody was ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’ and Mahler started to hum along. A nice little tune for this chaos. The same one he had on his mobile phone. And the same one that he had…