She slipped the old photo back into the chest pocket of her parka. When sleep finally settled on her, a wolf-faced nattmara came and sat on her chest. The evil hag whispered death and despair into Brand’s dreams, until a stolen pistol materialized and scared the nightmare away.
49.
The mountains and forests that rose around her were blank. She was the sole human left alive in the dead world of the Fell. That morning in the fäbod, she bit into her last Adderall. Fifteen minutes later, as she strode out to meet the day, the speed kicked in. She started feeling like an All-American girl.
To Brand’s eyes, the fabled Nordic light—the real, actual Nordic light, not her grandfather’s doomed newspaper—always had a strange feel. Now the sun, visible behind a scrim of polarizing clouds, somehow morphed and doubled itself, as if she were living on a planet illuminated by twin stars. It was a trick of atmosphere, sure, and Brand had heard of it happening, but that didn’t make it any less unsettling.
A network of small, snow-covered lanes ran off the main highway, the north-south artery located a dozen kilometers to the east. She tramped on. The amphetamine salts coursing through her blood forced her jaw to tighten, which helped suppress an urge to sing a hey-ho song of the open road. Plentiful animal signs showed in the snow, both scat and tracks. But no people were around anywhere.
The whole area proved eerily empty. She passed an ancient abandoned rail locomotive, decayed and crumbling in the middle of the woods. It looked as though the operators had hopped off and left the big machine there, legging it to more promising environs. Whatever steel rails there were lay buried in snow.
At every crossroads (“if you see a fork in the road, take it” echoed the voice of Willie Uricco), Brand flipped her last ten kronor coin to decide which way to go. Her bad luck held. She lost her grip on the coin and dropped it into a snowbank. She spent a fruitless few minutes searching for it.
Her mind never stayed on any single track for long. Forks in the road led her to think of spoons, which made her think of food. Forks also made her think of knives, a lethal seven-inch blade in particular. Ylva Voss had left her monster knife embedded in the mattress of Brand’s comatose partner in crime, Krister Hammar.
The police would have been all over the incident in the hospital room, just like they had to be all over the business along the Hede River. They would interview Hammar, but of course the man had the right to remain silent, notwithstanding his total inability to speak. Hee-hee, ha-ha, went Brand’s mind. The Adderall failed to focus her as it usually did. She felt dizzy and dumbstruck, as though several IQ points were draining out on the road behind her.
With the morning, the sky had turned sickly blue-white, the color of skim milk. After a quarter hour there appeared what passed for a metropolis in the Fell. Three houses stood jumbled together in a row, with a barn facing them across the road. One of the houses featured a thin finger of smoke coming from its chimney. Human habitation was both a threat and opportunity for her. Houses made her think of food.
A well used black Ford truck sat parked in the driveway of the barn. Brand held back, surveilling the scene for a full fifteen minutes before deciding that there was indeed no one home at any of the houses. The smoke from the chimney merely indicated a heating system at work. She could move forward without much possibility of surprise.
Hot wiring a vehicle always looked so simple on TV crime shows. She had once been on a stakeout where she and Uricco watched a degenerate junkie try for what seemed like forever to hijack a Toyota sedan. After about ten minutes, the bungled attempt began to strike them as funny.
“The most stolen model in the frigging country, this guy can’t put two wires together,” Urrico said, wheezing with laughter.
At the present moment Brand possessed no slim jack lockout tool, no tools at all. She forced a passenger window on the truck, because that side was shielded from the residences across the road. She managed to gain entry without busting the pane entirely. Climbing inside, lying on her back beneath the steering column, Brand faced a nest of wires worthy of Medusa’s hair. She tried every possible combination.
The truck resisted, remaining stubbornly inert. Brand finally found and connected the hot wire to the starter motor. The engine turned over, but only weakly, stunned by the cold along with everything else in the country. After that first miracle hint of success, the starter showed no life at all.
Cursing volubly, damning American manufacturing, engineering, and Henry Ford himself, Brand risked discovery by getting out and popping the hood. She worked to clean and tighten the battery cables as best she could, skinning her knuckles in the process.
“The job’s not complete unless there’s blood,” she recalled her father Nick Brand saying about working on cars.
She got back into the truck and touched the wires together again.
Nothing.
She forced herself to stave off despair. Backtracking, she tried to trace her path to the fäbod where she had slept. She got lost, found her way, then lost it several times more. It took an hour to locate the abandoned house, remove the Saab’s tiny battery, and haul it back with her to the Ford pickup.
The Saab operated on a six-volt electrical system. Such a limited battery would never serve to run the big Ford. But it might turn the engine over. Then the truck’s generator would take up the slack. Brand jury-rigged the two batteries in series. Then she tried the hot-wire again.
Again, nothing.
Then, something. The truck rumbled and bucked to life, coughing, spitting
