Her only luggage was a scruffy rectangular rucksack, yet she was wearing an expensive quilted jacket suitable for use in the mountains, and designer boots. She would have looked more at home on some exclusive Alpine trek rather than by the roadside somewhere between Härnösand and Sundsvall.
It was this discrepancy in her appearance and my curiosity rather than the thirst for blood that made me slow down; the air brake hissed as I maneuvered the truck into the rest area where I had slept through a short winter’s day just two weeks earlier.
I flashed the brake lights a couple of times to indicate that I really had stopped to pick her up. I could see her in the wing mirror, jogging alongside the forty-foot trailer. I leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. A couple of seconds later, her face appeared above the seat.
“Hi there,” I said. “Where are you heading?”
“South.”
I smiled and nodded in the direction of the highway. “That’s pretty obvious, but where exactly?”
“Does it matter?” Before I had time to reply, she asked another question. “What’s your destination?”
“Trelleborg.”
She glanced back at the trailer. “The docks, I guess?”
“Correct.”
“Excellent.”
She swung herself up onto the step with surprising agility, the rucksack slung over her shoulder; she settled down on the seat and pulled the door shut. Our brief conversation hadn’t exactly told me a great deal about her.
If she meant mainland Europe when she said “south,” then my offer of a ride all the way to Trelleborg should at least have made her pretty happy, if not ecstatic. After all, we were talking about a distance of some six hundred miles that she was going to be able to cover in one fell swoop, and yet she had accepted the information as self-evident, just one fact among many others.
As I put the truck in gear and drove out of the rest area with half an eye on the trailer, I decided that for the time being I would assume that “south” meant “away.” That she didn’t have any particular destination in mind but just wanted to get away from the place where she happened to be at the moment.
The irregular roar of the old V-8 engine became a steady hum as I changed up to cruising speed and zoomed along the highway into the night.
Perhaps I would drink her, perhaps not. I had many hours ahead of me in which to reach that decision.
Last year, I clocked up twenty-five years as a truck driver, trucker, slave to the highway. I did my first trip with a provisional category-C license burning a hole in my pocket when I was twenty-two. Pet food from Värtahamnen in Stockholm to a wholesaler in Västberga. Only a year or so later, I gained my CE license and was able to start driving articulated trucks. Since then I’ve acquired my ADR certificate, which allows me to transport hazardous material, and taken a couple of courses on how to handle goods and livestock. To put it briefly, I can drive anything at all from point A to point B, and I can also load and unload the truck by myself if necessary.
It’s a profession that is full of contradictions; maybe that’s why I like it. On the one hand you’re free, your own master, yet on the other, you’re totally ruled by driving regulations and timetables. Everything is highly technological, with GPS and computerized tachographs, yet at the same time it is utterly primitive. Pick this up and move it to there. You’re kind of omnipotent out there on the road with forty tons behind you, but you’re also the most vulnerable when it comes to ice and snow, accidents and holdups.
But I have spent twenty-five years in the industry without being involved in anything more serious than the odd dent and scrape, and a few pallets that came off because they hadn’t been properly secured. Of course I’ve had a few close shaves, and admittedly I’ve run into or over just about every breed of wildlife in this long, narrow country of ours (because it certainly is long and narrow, I can confirm that), but nothing more. I’m a good driver, that’s all there is to it.
Bearing in mind what I’ve just told you, I ought to be forty-seven years old. It’s true that I have lived for forty-seven years, but I am no longer quite so sure about this age thing. I’m almost starting to believe that I could carry on driving up and down these roads forever and ever. I’ve been wondering whether to switch to another haulage firm to avoid arousing suspicion.
Only the day before yesterday, Lena in the office said: “Jesus, Tompa, you look younger with every passing day!” She meant it as a compliment, but it took a real effort for me to smile and say: “Have you forgotten to put your contact lenses in?”
I don’t think I’m getting younger, but I do believe I’m not getting any older. I stopped at forty-three. Which means that to those who are aging normally, like Lena, it can look as if I’m getting younger. People might admire that for a few years, but only up to a certain point. I have to be careful.
“What are you driving?”
We had just passed Sundsvall when my passenger broke the silence. I dragged myself back from the landscape of diffuse images that constituted my brain’s daily diet while I was on the road.
“You mean the truck? She’s a Scania—”
“No, what are you carrying?”
“Some kind of steel. Fixings for rolling mills, among other things. They’re being shipped overseas.”
“Where to?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
“Aren’t you interested?”
“Why should I be?”
The woman shrugged and looked out through the front windshield, where the Kronan Bar and Restaurant was gliding toward us like a cube of light through the darkness. I used to enjoy their meatball sandwiches with beetroot salad, back in the days when I still thought food tasted of something.
“What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“Are you being shipped overseas?”
She gave a snort of laughter at the way I had put it and seemed to be on the point of answering, but then she folded her arms and slid down in her seat as she let out a sigh. When she hadn’t said anything for a minute or so, I went back to my thoughts and that meatball sandwich. It did nothing at all for me these days.
The memory from a lost world of tastes and flavors gave me a hollow feeling in my chest, and my thoughts drifted to the first time I succumbed.
It was just over a year after I had been infected. I was falling apart. My body was plagued by a constant nagging, gnawing hunger. Food tasted of nothing, but I ate anyway just to keep going. And yet it wasn’t enough, somehow. My doctor had given me food supplements and vitamins, but nothing helped because I still hadn’t accepted what was within me.
Everything changed over the course of a couple of days in 2009 outside the MoDo terminal in Örnsköldsvik. Ten thousand gallons of ethanol were to be transported to Helsingborg, and I had driven an empty tanker up from Stockholm. I was standing on the snow-covered loading area with my hands in my pockets; I nodded to the guy who was paying out the hose and was just about to go inside to have a cup of coffee and get warm while the tanker was being filled up when I heard him swear.
I don’t know exactly what had happened, but presumably the guy had dropped the heavy hose valve and trapped his fingers. Anyway, he was standing there staring at his hand as the blood dripped down onto the snow. After a few seconds he pulled himself together, tucked his hand under his armpit, and lumbered off toward the terminal and the first-aid box.
I stood there staring at the dark red stain on the snow. I took a step forward, and then another, until the stain was right in front of my feet. My mouth was watering in a way that it hadn’t done since I got back from Barcelona a year ago.
And yet still I hesitated, for two reasons. The first is obvious: because it was madness. The second is that when I say “snow,” you might imagine something soft and fluffy and reminiscent of “White Christmas.” In which case you’ve never been in the loading bay outside a chemical factory, where the snow is slushy and gray from diesel exhaust fumes and God
knows what kind of spillages. In spite of that, I had to swallow several times to prevent the saliva from trickling out of the corners of my mouth.
I really didn’t want to do it, but it was as if something else seized the upper hand. After a quick glance around I squatted down, scooped up a fistful of the blood-soaked snow, and without further ado, stuffed the slushy mass into my mouth.
At first I was aware of only cold, water, and indefinable chemical tastes. But then . . . it was indescribable, but I’ll try. Think of the best thing you’ve ever drunk, along with the best thing you’ve ever eaten. Then add the sensation of your first kiss. Put all that together, and it still isn’t enough. My knees almost gave way from sheer bliss.
I swallowed and swallowed, running my tongue around my mouth until there wasn’t a trace of that glorious deliciousness left. I was panting and leaning against the tanker for support when another guy came along to take over from the one who’d hurt his hand.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you, Tompa? You look like shit.”
It was Allan; I’d sat with him over a cup of coffee several times. Apart from a certain fixation with illness and disease, he was one of the good guys. He seemed to be wearing at least two Helly Hansen fleeces underneath his protective jacket in order to keep out the cold, and yet the only thing I could see was a warm, pulsating body filled with pints and pints of . . . I ran a hand over my eyes, straightened up, and said: “I’m fine. Just a bit dizzy, that’s all.”
He picked up the hose and screwed the valve in place, then gave me a skeptical look. “Are you sure? If you come off the road carrying this there’ll be one hell of a fucking bang . . .”
“I know,” I said, unnecessarily aggressive. “I said I’m fine.”
Allan made a face and shrugged before heading back to switch on the pump. Soon I could hear the 90 percent spirit gushing into the tanker. I felt like an empty vessel into which someone had poured just a few drops of liquid, making it echo even more emptily. What had so far been terrible and difficult to bear had now become too terrible and utterly impossible to bear.
Something had to be done, and soon.
The woman had produced a bar of chocolate from her rucksack and was now munching away with an expression of indifference, not unlike the way I probably looked when I ate normal food. We were just passing a Statoil gas station, and I glanced across at her in the brightness of its floodlights.
She was about my age, or a few years older. She was neither beautiful nor ugly; her appearance was pretty unremarkable, apart from her hair, which was entirely gray, and a certain hardness in the lines of her face. She didn’t look like the kind of person who could be lured to some isolated spot on a pretext. If I was going to drink her, then an element of cunning would be required. Or speed.
“We all do what we have to do, don’t we?” I said, hoping to open a conversation that would give me some clue as to what kind of person I was dealing with.
To my surprise, she responded with a certain amount of enthusiasm. “Absolutely. You’re right. I’ve thought the same thing many times. It’s a kind of consolation.”
There you go. At a stroke, the tone between us had changed completely, so I carried on along the same track. “The problem lies in accepting it. But once you’ve done that, there’s kind of no turning back.”
She nodded. “It can take years. And yet you’re still not sure.”
She was confiding in me. Excellent. That gave me the opportunity to probe further. I needed to know whether other people knew she’d been planning to hitch. I needed to know whether she had a cell phone that could be traced. Among other things.
You can’t just go around killing people. Once, maybe, provided you don’t have any kind of relationship with the victim. But if you intend to do it again, it takes planning and thought so that you don’t leave clues that could be put together to form a pattern.
My hands were shaking and my body was a screaming, empty hole when I drove away that day in 2009 from the MoDo terminal with my highly explosive load and six hundred miles ahead of me. I was an accident waiting to happen, an accident big enough to destroy a small community.
Twilight was falling, and it seemed to me that the E4, which is as straight as an arrow, was slowly undulating first to the left and then to the right, like a gigantic water snake. I was drawn to the side of the road, and when I tried to correct it, I almost skidded as the heavy load pushed me forward. When I spotted the compact outline of the Docksta Bar up ahead, I decided I had no choice but to pull off the road and park in order to catch my breath and come to my senses.
I switched off the engine, folded my arms on the steering wheel, rested my head against them, and closed my eyes. It was no longer possible to pretend, to ignore what had happened to me that night in Barcelona a year ago. With the help of logic and reason, I had managed to keep it at bay because it was an impossibility, but now my body had spoken.
The hooker had infected me; the infection was a slow poison, and now it had started to work in earnest.
The dock area in Barcelona could accommodate a small kingdom in its vast expanse. This was in 2008—I had traveled down with a load of office furniture from Kinnarps and had decided to spend the night in the truck’s cab. Sometimes I rented a cheap room down there or even up in the city, but that particular night I was so tired that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk the necessary five hundred yards. It was easier to crawl into the compartment behind the driver’s seat and get a few hours’ sleep before it was time to pick up a load of Moroccan clementines, nectarines, satsumas, whatever the hell they were called, and then set off for home again.
I had closed the curtains and started to get undressed when there was a gentle tap on the door. I peered out and saw a woman standing in the darkness by the truck. She made a gesture to clarify her intentions, and I thought it over. A whore. A truckers’ hooker. Presumably there was also a name for them in Spanish, but I didn’t know what it was.
I had availed myself of their services a couple of times in Germany, and I recalled the smell of perfume that had remained in the cab for an unexpectedly long time, a lingering sense of regret. Although it would be nice, a little relief on this miserable January night, and after all, I’d saved money by not renting a room, so I opened the door and asked: “Cuánto?”
“Francés?”
“No, sueco.” I shook my head as I remembered. She hadn’t been inquiring about my nationality, but about what I wanted her to do, so I corrected myself and said: “Ah, no. Sí. Francés.”
“Treinta.”
Thirty euros. Three hundred kronor. I wasn’t exactly an experienced client, but the price seemed reasonable, so I shifted over to the passenger seat and waved her inside, then I switched off the light and pulled down my pants. When she closed the door behind her it was dark in the cab, and I could see nothing but the faint silhouette of her head. I felt her long hair caressing my left thigh as she bent down and got to work.
I was hard in no time, and she was good at her job. Only then did it occur to me that the price was pretty low, and that I hadn’t really seen her face. She could easily be a transvestite; there was no shortage of those in Barcelona.
Whatever.
The service she or possibly he was providing was very enjoyable in any case, and the transaction could be completed without my needing to know one way or the other, so I leaned back in my seat as best I could and allowed the simple pleasure to surge through my scrotum with each movement of the hooker’s lips and tongue.
I was getting close to shooting my load when I caught sight of a bright light out of the corner of my eye; I heard the sound of an engine, and the next moment three things happened more or less simultaneously. I heard a loud bang, the cab shook, and the hooker sank her teeth into my cock just before she was thrown to the floor.
“Fucking hell!”
The part of my body that had just been a source of enjoyment was now a burning rod, sending jabs of pain all the way up into my gut.
Instinctively I switched on the light in the cab to check out the damage and discovered to my relief that the involuntary bite had only punctured the skin, and a single drop of blood was oozing out.
I could hear shouting outside the truck in some Eastern European language as the hooker scrambled up into the driver’s seat. She looked fucking terrible, to be honest, and I don’t think I’d have been able to get it up if I’d seen her face before she started.
She might have been around fifty years old and had black, badly colored hair. Her face was wrinkled and sunken, and so thickly plastered with heavy makeup that I couldn’t tell if it really was a man or a woman, even in the bright light. One side of her neck was covered in a bloodstained dressing the size of the palm of a hand.
Fucking disgusting.
As I pulled up my pants, I asked in broken Spanish what had happened. She let loose a tirade of which I understood less than half; I was able to pick up only odd words—anoche, pareja, viejos, locos, and suecos. Some crazy old Swedish couple, last night. Then she held out her hand, demanding her money, just as someone knocked on the passenger door.
I couldn’t have her hanging around while I sorted out the accident, so I paid up. Three hundred kronor to get bitten on the cock. Bargain. The hooker slid out through the driver’s door as I opened up on my side with some difficulty, then spent a couple of hours on paperwork, telephone calls, and general chat with two Romanians who had a problem with their hydraulic braking system.
As the hitchhiker tucked her legs underneath her and rested her head against the side window, I glanced at her rucksack. There is usually a connection between how much baggage a person has and how far they are traveling, but the woman’s small rucksack didn’t even look full. Okay, so she exuded an air of integrity, but after all, I had done her a favor in picking her up, so I ventured a question in a casual tone: “Are you on the run?”
Seize the Night Page 47
