The Survivors
Malmö, Sweden
Year 3, Day 27
0949L
Sigrun Eide leaped nimbly over the flailing tentacle trying to disembowel her and stabbed through another of the Giant’s brains. This was the most massive Giant she’d taken on in the three years since the Outbreak, but if it wanted to take out her crew, it would have to go through her first!
Faster than anyone could have reacted, more tentacles sprang their trap, snapping Sigrun’s knife arm like a twig. The Giant screamed in demonic triumph at Sigrun from at least twenty more mouths, and she knew, with bleak certainty, that she was about to die.
Of course, she didn’t plan on making it easy.
Right as the Giant was about to strike, a Molotov Cocktail hit its trunk, flames shooting along its fetid, hideous bulk. As Sigrun turned to see who her rescuer was--probably Emil, but he was supposed to be watching the south end, so she’d have to remonstrate with him for leaving his post--she heard her own voice cackle gleefully, “Bullseye, Goldilocks!”
But Sigrun hadn’t said that. She finished turning--and nearly fell over at the sight of the six figures approaching her in garb straight out of those John Wayne movies Mikkel, Onni and Emil loved so much, for not only did they include Tuuri, Reynir, Lalli--Lalli, whose leg she’d helped set just yesterday!--Mikkel and Emil, but another Sigrun walked with them as well.
It was at this point that the shock of her broken arm combined with the shock of seeing the doubles and knocked Sigrun out, though not easily. Characteristically, she struggled against her impending black-out, but eventually succumbed.
*
“It looks like a cat,” Lalli Ghost-of-Forest commented dryly. So it did, albeit a bit more grungily than when Lalli Hotakainen had made the same observation three years earlier.
Mobility was the key to surviving in the city, and there had been not a few running (well, crawling really, but you get the point) battles over those three years. Sigrun and Emil had scrounged together a meager assortment of weaponry for those running battles, but their nights were still spent under whatever cover they could suss out, most of the crew sleeping with one eye open against the possibility of the grosslings (as they called the monsters) sussing them out.
Of course, the Westerners knew none of this; all they knew was that now!Sigrun’s tracks led back here, so here they had carried her unconscious form. “OY!” the Western Sigrun shouted.
Before she could say anything else, Emil popped out from behind them and, putting his finger to his lips in the universal “hush!” signal, motioned with the gun he carried for them to move to the vehicle.
When they reached the door, Emil went up to it and drew his fingers along it in a specific pattern of scratches, whereupon Mikkel opened the door from inside.
“These guys found Sigrun hurt and brought her back here,” Emil said. Unfortunately, he spoke in Swedish, which was about as intelligible to most of the Westerners as Greek.
Most of the Westerners couldn’t understand what now!Mikkel’s reply was. Western Mikkel, on the other hand, spoke bad and badly accented Danish, and so heard his counterpart tell Emil, “You all need to be decontaminated, you know.”
“Do we have extra masks for those two?” Emil asked, gesturing at Reynir and Tuuri. “I mean, assuming this isn’t just some weird dream I’m having.”
“We all wish,” Mikkel said gently. Then, “I think we have a few more spares, assuming they haven’t already been infected.”
“They haven’t,” the Western Mikkel interjected. “They’ve had their faces covered since we came out of the sewers.”
Emil turned to his Mikkel a grin and said, “Wow. He speaks Danish badly enough that I understand him better than you.”
*
The decontamination process was pretty quick; three years of practice had honed it to a science. Tending to Sigrun’s arm, however, was a bigger problem, even with two Mikkels at work.
Tuuri and Lalli Hotakainen were having a desultory conversation in Finnish when Tuuri Face-Like-Baby and Lalli Ghost-of-Forest came up to them. Fortunately, the Hotakainens also spoke enough English for the foursome to converse.
“Mostly, we’ve been doing okay, so far,” Tuuri Hotakainen concluded. “Except for my brother, Onni, over there.” She gestured at a large form huddled miserably beneath a blanket under a bunk at the back of the vehicle. “About a year ago, he started asking when we were going home, and we realized that his mind had... snapped under the pressure.”
At the lost look in Onni’s eyes, bright burning anger sprang to life in Lalli Ghost-of-Forest...
