{chapter 7}
Sigrun missed by fraction of a second. The troll had raked its boney claws down her side a fraction of a second too soon, or else the fight would've been over before it began. But she didn't make the same mistake again.
She looked for a head on the thing, a difficult task. It had four arms and two legs, that's really all you could make out of it. The rest was some abstract, flat shape that seemed to change anytime the troll moved. It's skin was stretched out across its appendages like a bat's wing, and it's head must be somewhere by the top middle... For crying out loud, how did it scream without a stinking face?!
The captain growled and took a chance. It stopped screaming. But it wasn't dead. It ran for Emil, lifting its head from a hiding spot along its chest.
The cleanser yelped and tried to run away, but the troll caught up with him quite easily. His second instinct must have been to try and stab it, a good choice. If he opened his eyes
With an exasperated sigh, Sigrun came running to the rescue. She went for the head, while avoiding Emil's blind stabbing, and killed the troll. It had stopped moving, anyway. Emil shoved it off of him with an 'ew' and stood up.
"It must have been pretty bad, huh?" The captain mused, noting the small numbers printed on the troll's back. '005', it read. "What they did here..."
"I guess..." Emil muttered as he glanced back at the dog. It looked so pitiful. Once golden fur matted and stained. Rash-created, armor-like hide covered its back and sides. A muzzle of bone and a face mutated to an unrecognizable state. "But, my aunt did this kind of thing. They don't torture them or anything,"
"But it's different. I glanced inside one of the journals, yesterday. It said if they didn't capture enough trolls, they infected one of the team."
"What? Well, they must have a better reason than that!"
"They didn't want to wait," Sigrun stated grimly. Emil shivered and looked at the floor. "Now let's go upstairs, already. The scout's already up there."
*******
The third floor was just like the first, just as plain and uneventful. Only instead of peaceful, it was ominous. They were just waiting for some horrible to happen. The only bad thing that happened, though, was Emil falling down the stairs with a pile of books. No matter, they finished in good time. They now sat in the tank, on their way to the new camp.
Lalli slept in the passenger seat, beside Tuuri as she drove through the snowy streets. Reynir had grown tired of practicing runes, so he started doodling all over his paper, instead. He was currently concentrating on drawing sheep. A lot of them. Meanwhile, Emil and Sigrun had returned to their usual spaces, glancing out the window occasionally. Sigrun had already told Mikkel of her findings on the history of the building. He was in Tuuri's office, reading though some of the notes.
Some of the notebooks, he found, were half empty. Most of these had ended in a number stamped on to the paper, some of them even had goodbye letters to their lost family. He thought it odd. After all, why would they infect the few members they had if there was a chance they wouldn't survive long enough to be tested on, anyway? But, of course, they had probably lost hope by then, isolated in the middle of the city with limited food and resources.
At last, Mikkel had found the journal that Sigrun saw. He only knew by the torn out page containing the exact thing she had told him of. He sighed, reading over the page before replacing the few torn pages into their book.
"Sigrun, what happened that you decided to read?" The medic asked smugly from the other room.
Her eyes widened and she looked around the corner of the doorway. "I did not decide to read! The book fell and when I tried to catch it some papers ripped and I - involuntarily - saw a few recognizable words!"
Mikkel smiled faintly at her reaction and continued to look over the books in silence. The sun started to sink as the Cat-tank bumbled into the new camp and the team got ready to search the surroundings.
