He hid his head under his arms and shut his eyes tight and lay that way until everything had gone so quiet around him all he could hear was his own laboured breathing. He had no idea how much time had elapsed. He raised his head and looked around. The heavy tread of Näcken’s boots. The glop spattered across the board-and-batten wall behind the elder’s lifeless body dripping slowly onto the ground like some kind of sap. Of Ipa’s head, resting on the quad bike’s handlebar, only the lower half remained. Everything below her nose was intact; her soft, delicate lips expressed an indifference that seemed unsettling in the context. The silence rumbled inside him. The little ones who so loved to comfort him were nowhere to be seen. Stava was gone too.

The pale oval of a face was visible through the doghouse door. Anders stared at the little girl. Then he got up and dashed over at a crouch. He crawled in and made a space for himself next to the child, who shifted further in and sat with her knees pulled into her chest, watching him guardedly.

‘Let’s just sit here for a bit,’ he whispered. ‘Until it stops.’

After a while, his eyes were drawn to a shadow stretched out in the grass. At first, he thought someone was standing outside, studying the devastation, but after a long time passed without the shadow moving, he figured it must belong to a tree or some such that he hadn’t noticed earlier.

Just then, it slid sideways.

He turned to the girl, holding his index finger to his lips.

A grey-bearded man whose face was shaded by a camouflage baseball cap peered in through the opening.

‘Well now,’ he said. ‘There you are.’

He didn’t look hostile at all. Friendly, if anything.

‘I’m not really supposed to be here,’ Anders said.

The man mumbled something inaudible and straightened up. He was holding a rifle by his hip, a shotgun, a gas-operated, semi-automatic shotgun with a chequered forend. The barrel had a ventilated rib and red front sight and Anders saw the red dot being aimed at him and then he saw nothing else.

It was incomprehensible…

It was incomprehensible to me that Roland could eat, and a pizza at that. Or a Bedouin pancake, as he called it with a veiled smile. I had pushed my chair back and was glancing at him askance as though it were cheese-crusted roadkill he was cutting up with his knife and fork. It turned my stomach. And he could tell. Because he pushed his plate over with a grin behind his moustache.

‘Care for a bite?’

‘I’m good, thanks.’

He looked out at the street, chewing.

‘Pretty dead around here.’

‘They may never come back.’

‘Whatever happened to that graphite mine?’

‘Don’t you get that, Roland?’

‘What?’

‘They may never come back.’