Game: A Thriller (24 page)

Shit!
was the only contribution his brain could come up with, then he tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground.

He felt the rush of wind and heard the sound of the undercarriage missing his head by the smallest of margins, before he suddenly realized he had a mouthful of gravel.

The engine noise started to decrease and HP raised his scratched face just enough to see the plane bank in a slow left-hand turn. It took him a couple of seconds to become aware that the pilot was climbing to gain enough height to make a second attempt.

Fuck!
he thought in panic, staggering to his knees and then forcing his paralyzed legs into action. He abandoned the gravel track and headed off straight across the field instead, in the direction he knew the bus stop was in. Dust and soil swirled up around his feet, and the stubble left by the crop tore at his trouser legs.

Scratch-bang-scratch-bang-scratch-bang.

HP was running as he had never run before, that much was certain.

At least five hundred meters left to the road, to salvation. The plane was almost halfway through its circle. His heart was pumping so hard in his chest that he thought it would burst. He could taste blood in his mouth, and his pulse was pounding in his temples.

Then he heard the roar of the engine get louder again as the plane dived toward him Alfred Hitchcock–style, and now the noise was even more earsplitting, if that was possible. He ran on in panic, trying to zigzag to present a harder target, the way you did in Counter-Strike. But this was IRL, and not some damn computer game! The plane was coming closer and closer and nothing seemed likely to divert it.

All at once he caught sight of something in the stubble a few meters ahead of him. It looked like a white plastic stick of some sort, about two meters long.

He didn’t really know where the idea came from, but just before the plane was on top of him he threw himself at the stick, grabbed it with both hands, and with one end stuck under his armpit, something like a knight’s lance, he rolled over onto his back.

The plane filled his world; the roar of the engine was deafening. As the rush of air whipped his breath away he felt the stick strike something solid and then it was torn from his hands.

Then the plane was gone. HP rolled over onto his stomach again. The remnants of the shredded stick lay scattered a few meters away.

Must have hit the propeller, he thought as he struggled to his feet again.

The plane had started to climb again. But this time the engine didn’t sound quite so angry. It was rising and falling as if the engine was running unevenly, and HP could clearly
hear a whistling sound that must have been coming from the damaged propeller.

The pilot was clearly having trouble, but HP didn’t wait to see how he was going to deal with it.

Instead he set off at full speed toward the bus stop, which was now visible up ahead. As he got closer he saw a bus just passing the stop and he changed direction in an attempt to intercept it. He might just make it . . .

Then he caught sight of something from the corner of his eye and realized that the pilot had changed tactic. Instead of diving from a few hundred meters up, the plane was sniffing across the field, and HP could see the undercarriage almost touching the stubble.

This time it wouldn’t do any good to dive; he’d get his skull crushed either by the wheels or the bar between them.

Terrified, he sped up even more. He raced toward the road, seeing the bus come closer, and exerted every last bit of strength to beating it. The sound of the plane was coming closer and closer.

He put one foot in the ditch, which made him lose his balance, but he was running so hard that he carried on, stumbling up onto the side of the road, just in front of the roaring bus.

Then a shriek of brakes, a squeal of tires, and the airplane motor roaring overhead.

A moment later he was knocked over and everything went black.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Hey, man, are you okay?”

The voice was coming from far away and HP sat up with a jerk. For a panic-stricken moment he thought he’d gone blind,
that he’d got brain damage or something like that, and was condemned to a life of eternal darkness. But gradually his senses returned and he managed to open his eyes.

“You okay, man?” A young man in a uniform that was too big for him was leaning over him, and beside him he saw a couple of anxious old ladies’ faces.

“You came out of nowhere, man, I hardly had time to brake, but I don’t think you got much more than a knock.”

HP didn’t answer, just tried to get up with an effort.

The driver, an immigrant of about thirty or so, gave him a hand.

He did a quick check of his limbs, with satisfactory results.

“We ought to call an ambulance,” one of the old ladies trilled. At a guess, she must have been on the bus.

“. . . and the police,” the other one chimed in. “That plane . . .”

“No ambulance!” HP interrupted. “I’m fine!”

He was too. Apart from the scratches to his face and hands, and the fact that the wind had been knocked out of him when the bus hit him, he felt fine. The last thing he needed right now was a load of nosy cops.

“Sorry,” he muttered to the driver. “I misjudged it, my fault, my bad!” he managed to say as his voice started to work again. “I’m fine, really!”

“Great!” the driver said in relief. “Maybe we should get going?”

He nodded to the two ladies who were standing anxiously at the side of the road.

“No damage done, so no ambulance. Everyone on board!”

Then he brushed the grit from HP’s back as he whispered:

“You’re not going to file a complaint, are you, man? I’ve already got one charge for speeding, and I need this job, you know?”

“No worries!” HP replied, starting to get a grip again. “Don’t worry, just let me off without paying and it’s all forgotten.”

“No problem, friend!” The driver smiled in relief and gestured invitingly toward the door of the bus.

“You should just make it to the train, but it’ll be tight.”

HP just nodded and collapsed in the nearest seat.

“Did you see that plane, man? God, it was flying low!”

HE COULD HARDLY
remember the journey home. HP had completely exhausted himself running across the field, and if you added that to his close encounter with the bus, it wasn’t so surprising that he was shattered. He did actually try to stay awake and check to see if he was being followed, but it had been impossible. His eyelids just kept drooping and he ended up all the way out in Älvsjö before he realized that he’d dozed off and gone too far.

It wasn’t until he eventually made it back to Slussen that he woke up properly and managed to do the secret agent trick to shake off anyone following him. But by the time he finally got home to the little allotment cottage he instantly felt wide awake.

His heart was racing and adrenaline was rushing through his body, and it was like he was reliving the whole thing again. For a few minutes he actually believed he was about to have a heart attack, that he was going to die out there in the cottage and his ant-eaten corpse wouldn’t be found until Auntie showed up to close the place up for winter.

But then his galloping pulse finally calmed down and the fog in his head began to lift.

What in the name of fuck had actually happened?

Had
it really happened, properly, or had he just dreamed it all?

It only took a quick glance in the mirror to write off the dream theory. Filthy, covered in scratches, and the bottom of his jeans left in tatters by the sharp stubble in the field. It was a damn good job he hadn’t been wearing shorts!

The man in the plane really had been trying to bump him off, and he’d probably have succeeded if HP hadn’t made it onto the bus. His pulse started to race again and he felt sick, and it took a few minutes and several liters of water before he felt he was back in control again.

His thoughts were churning wildly in his head—the drying machine in there seemed to hit some sort of hyperspeed.

The Game, the assignments, everything that had happened to him—it was all just a betting game for bored rich bastards?

They’d pressed all his buttons, pushed his boundaries, and got him to play along merrily. Was he really so fucking easy to deceive?

The alternative was obviously that Erman had been lying, and had just been talking a load of crap.

Okay, so the guy clearly didn’t have all his sheep in the meadow, but he didn’t seem like a liar. The hillbilly obviously believed one hundred percent in what he had said, and most of it also fitted in with HP’s own experiences. The problem was that he just couldn’t take it all in; it was too much.

But if he split the story into two, it worked better. If he bit the rotten apple and accepted that he’d merely been a crazy puppet leaping happily into action whenever the Game Master pulled the right strings, and if he bought all the stuff about betting and the way the Game was set up . . .

If he did that, then the first part of what Erman had told him pretty much explained everything he had been through.

Even if it stung badly to accept that he had been a sort of court jester in some casino, the explanation made sense, unlike the rest of the story. At least it kept more or less on the right side of the crazy line.

But he was still having trouble buying the conspiracy theory.

The idea that the Game spanned the whole world, took on all manner of dirty jobs, and also had ears and eyes everywhere—that was impossible to take in.

Erman himself had said that those were conclusions he had reached all on his own, not based on anything he had seen or experienced directly. Possibly one result of too many lonely hours spent out in that cottage with no contact with the civilized world. You really had to feel sorry for the poor bastard. Even if he’d practically scared the shit out of HP out there in the forest, he still felt some sort of weird connection with Erman. They actually had quite a lot in common. The Game Master hadn’t exactly been particularly lenient toward either of them. Tracking them down, making them feel special, and then, once the Game had had enough of their talents, dropping them like they were yesterday’s news.

So what if Erman had lost some of his marbles? To be honest, HP was actually really fucking grateful that the poor reclusive bastard had helped him along. Opening his eyes, and possibly even giving him a way of accessing the Game.

Whatever, he was feeling considerably calmer now. The nausea had almost gone and he was starting to feel hungry. Some Heinz baked beans was all he managed to find, and he ate them straight from the can.

So what about the plane, then, the guy who’d tried to get him? How the hell could you explain that?

No one had followed him out there, he was absolutely certain of that, so what the fuck had happened?

Okay, in theory it
could
all have been a mistake. He and Erman were roughly the same height and had the same color and length of hair. From a distance you might get them mixed up, and from a height of a couple of hundred meters it was probably impossible to tell the difference.

The nut lived alone out there, so maybe the pilot simply assumed that the person emerging from the trees had to be Erman, especially when the description seemed to match?

That’s what must have happened!

Whoever it was in that plane, he must have had some beef with Erman, not him.

Maybe some angry neighbor or inbred local who had run into the psycho in the co-op? And decided to scare the shit out of the crazy fucker, Alfred Hitchcock–style, when the opportunity unexpectedly arose. Stuff like that happened sometimes, you just had to take a look at TV3. Christ, there was a whole fucking series about people who did shit like that . . . !

The more he thought about it, the more likely it sounded. Some sort of sick neighborhood dispute that had got out of hand. It was a considerably easier to accept that explanation than the alternative.

♦  ♦  ♦

“Global conspiracy, my ass,” he muttered to himself. “Yeah, right!”

He’d never even been close to falling for that.

Relieved, he leaned back in the kitchen sofa and turned on his laptop. There was nothing like a bit of television to make you forget your problems. You could always find some poor bastard out there who was in a worse state, and made you feel better about things. Once everything had calmed down a bit, he’d think about what to do next.

Even before he heard the voice coming out of the speaker he grasped what had happened. The local television news pictures were enough on their own for him to get it—the burning house, flashing blue lights, and fire engines parked among the nettles.

For the past hour firefighters have been trying to extinguish a fierce blaze in an agricultural property just west of Sigtuna. It is not currently known if anyone was in the building when the fire broke out. The property is listed as uninhabited since the death of its last occupant, but according to witnesses there have been one or more people living in the house in recent months. The police would like to contact a man in his thirties who was involved in a minor collision with a local bus at a nearby bus stop earlier in the day . . .

Half-digested baked beans all over Auntie’s sink. HP was vomiting like a champion.

“Fucking fuck! Fucking fuck! Fucking fuck!” was all his brain was able to come up with.

♦  ♦  ♦

It had taken him several days to recover. He must have picked up some sort of virus or some other crap, he had a fever, and
the projectile vomiting didn’t let up until there was nothing left but bile.

As usual, it was Mange who came to his rescue, when he turned up to see why he hadn’t been in touch and found him flaked out on Auntie’s rib-backed sofa. Totally fucking embarrassing, but Mange had shown he was a true friend. He’d taken him off to the Eriksdal pool so he could get cleaned up, then conjured up some clean clothes and rose hip soup, and he hadn’t even minded cleaning up the disgusting kitchen.