The Light at the End of the World

By U.D. Sandberg

An eerie room is found far below the surface of the Old Town in Stockholm after three men are infected with a mysterious disease. A strange fossil is discovered in a valley in Colorado. During a record heat wave the disease begins to spread all around the world.

From Swedish author U.D. Sandberg comes a novel about nature's power over Man, faceless terror and Mankind's place in world history.

Three men are quarantined when they are infected by an unknown virus working in a sinkhole in the Old Town of Stockholm. On a visit to Stockholm, American epidemiologist Noah Chandler investigates the outbreak and finds a room at the bottom of the sinkhole which they suspect is the reservoir for the virus but uncertain in what way. The room is strange: it ́s far below the surface, built out of an unknown material not found in the surrounding rock and it is impossible that nature could have created it.
The quarantine fails when an infected person escapes. Soon other similar cases emerge, the number of infected explodes and the millions of interactions between people every day make the pandemic impossible to stop and track.
Noah ́s wife Katherine and their daughter Amelia are stuck in Minnesota. After years of drought forest fires on the coasts are left uncontrolled when most firefighters are infected. The fires force a large part of the population toward the center of the country. Millions are sick and society is rapidly falling apart around them as Katherine and Amelia try to avoid people and race through the country to their home in Virginia.

Noah's investigation leads to a valley in Colorado where they find a T. Rex skeleton whose stomach contains an unfamiliar fossil. In an unexplored cave system beneath the fossil they find something unimaginable. They have more questions than answers about the origin of the virus when the world is heading toward collapse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: U.D. Sandberg
• Release date: Feb 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463085035

U.D. Sandberg

Swedish author U.D. Sandberg grew up in a small town just outside Stockholm. Graduated from Stockholm University with a degree in Business administration and History. He spent fifteen years working as a business controller before writing his first novel. He currently lives with his wife and family in a suburb of Stockholm and at the family ́s small cabin in Stockholm ́s archipelago. When he ́s not writing he ́s traveling the US with his family.

Book preview

Part One

Noah J. Chandler

50 days after Day 0

At night we water the grass. We try to water 100 yards in every direction outside the walls of Monty Hall, but it´s hard to finish before dawn. As soon as we hear something, as soon as we think we see something, we run back behind the walls. Then we hide at the gates and scout for a while. And sometimes we sneak out again.

I hate this perpetual darkness.

When we´re outside the walls I´m scared all the time.

But we have to water at night.

There´s no point in watering the grass during the days, it´s too hot.

Despite the sun and the heat, it´s still quite dark during the days. We can see the sun far away through all the smoke, as if it´s shining behind a thick and dirty curtain. The only benefit of this daytime darkness is that, from the hills up here at Monty Hall, we can more easily spot the cars on the road down in the valley, those who have their car lights switched on. But we can only spot a few.

We don´t discover most of the cars until it´s too late and they are all the way up here at the gates with the lights off.

Robbie and I have fled to my family estate Monty Hall, here in what was once the old, green Virginia. In what is today the new, yellow-brown Virginia.

I can´t think of a way to understand what has happened but until recently the world was a beautiful place or at least a place full of life. What is it now, I don´t know.

We have sealed off almost the whole house. There are over 60 rooms in this old stone house but we only use a few. We have put up boards over all the windows, boards that we bought after the storm last spring, except in the corner room where we usually stay during the days. The corner room has a good view of Monty Hall's park. And we can see across the valley below the walls.

We should have done something about the damage in the wall immediately after the crash this morning. But after lunch today, we just stayed in the corner room on the second floor as usual. Systematically we checked the valley and Monty Hall's shell of a park. Every now and then I looked at the damage in the wall. It was a stone´s throw from the small church located inside Monty Hall's park and the orangery down by the lake. The red Mercedes, which was stuck in the wall after the crash, didn´t move. Those in the car were still motionless.

Robbie sat at the window with a coin in his hand and stared at the car. He pulled his thumb over the grooves, felt the letters, reliefs, etchings. He started over. In the background an old Caruso recording of Bizet’s Mi Par D'udir Ancora played. It played on repeat: we didn´t bother to change it. For a long time, I don't even think we heard it.

We had seen the red Mercedes drive by yesterday. It veered off the country road and began the climb on the hill road drive up to Monty Hall but stopped after a while and turned around. Then it stopped down on the country road. After a while, it drove off.

At dawn today we saw it again. At first it edged along slowly on the country road but suddenly it accelerated and made a sharp turn and drove off the country road in the valley. Out in the dry grass and then up the hill toward Monty Hall. The driver never let go of the gas as the car approached. It rammed through the wall in the western part of the park but got stuck with the hood on our side of the wall.

We thought there would be a storm of others but no one came.

From our surveillance cameras it looked like there was a middle-aged woman in the driver's seat and possibly her daughter in the passenger seat. Both without seat belts. Like everyone else, they were desperate. I hope they died immediately when they crashed into the wall. Although they came for us, I find it hard to blame them: we are just like them, we do everything and anything to survive.

We knew we had to repair the wall to be safe but that required us to leave the house. Father, or if it was mother, had long ago bought a large supply of bricks which, as long as I can remember, had been stored in the brick barn down by the lake, on the other side from the orangery.

In the afternoon we pulled together and loaded the stones, the mortar and the tools in the tractor down by the brick barn. Drove to the wall. We worked fast. Without finesse we rammed the wall and the car with the tractor. It was not difficult for the tractor to push away the car and tear down the wall section that the car had damaged. The power of the tractor compensated for how poor workers we were: I was a doctor and Robbie an officer in the US Army.

The fear of being exposed to the outside pushed us to work hard for several hours despite the heat. Our clothes were completely heaped with sweat and stuck to our bodies. We drank all the time.

When we had reached halfway, we saw two shadow figures a few hundred yards away. In the valley below Monty Hall's park. On their way toward us.

I squinted with the sweat in my eyes. It was a man and a woman.

Robbie turned around and went to the tractor. Grabbed the shotgun from the cabin. Went back over the half-finished wall. When the woman and the man were 50 yards from us, Robbie pointed the shotgun at them. With his calm barytone voice he instructed them to stand still and not move a muscle. And they did.

Even though it had only been a short while, both looked exhausted and thin as needles. Torn clothes. Dirty. Both with a staring and crazy gaze. Even if they had wanted to hide it, it would have been impossible: their blood-red eyes almost glowed in the twilight. Blood stains under the skin along their bare arms. The man touched his face with his dirty fingers, over his dry cheeks and bloody forehead.

They begged and asked us to let them in.

It wasn't safe out there.

Not safe for anyone.

Least of all for them.

I said they could have some cans and some water. But we couldn't make an exception for them. They were too many out there. I was just about to turn around to go and pick up the cans when the woman pulled out a knife. The man had managed to hide a stick behind his back. Crazy as a bunch of wild dogs they ran toward us. Robbie shot the woman in the chest, she fell backwards. Then he shot the man in the head. It echoed in the valley below.

We wrapped the man and woman in plastic. I told myself that I was on another job assignment in Africa for the CDC to take the edge off the seriousness of the situation. But the fact is that I was scared and disgusted.

We shoved the couple into the red Mercedes together with the mother and daughter. With the help of the tractor, we pushed the car down the hill to the valley toward the country road that rolled through the valley. The red Mercedes rolled toward a bunch of other cars that were parked a few hundred yards apart along the road.

Some cars were abandoned.

Abandoned by those who tried to attack us and get inside Monty Hall.

But in several cars, there were lifeless bodies completely soaked in blood.

My wife Katherine and our little daughter Amelia are out there somewhere. I keep telling myself that they are still on their way here, like we agreed. We would meet here in our home. It was the safest option.

Every minute I reject the thought that they might be dead.

But many have died. Most have actually died.

But not Katie and little Amelia.

They are on their way home.

Noah J. Chandler

4 days before Day 0

It started in May, almost two months ago. Katie, Amelia and I were playing around in the little stone church near the orangery in Monty Hall´s park. A few years back, Katie and I got married there. Amelia had been nagging us for days that we would replay the wedding ceremony. Amelia, now three years old, had seen baby pictures of her as we walked into the church with her and when I held her in my arms during the ceremony.

Katie took one step at a time and hummed the wedding march when something began to patter on the windows. It sounded like it was raining. But the weather outside was sunny and clear. The church was dark and we couldn´t see what was going on through the colored windows. We went out and looked. The church was on a small hill and over the walls we had a view of the valley and the country road below.

A warm wind blew on our faces. Small grains of dust stuck to the hair and lips. Far away, a black tsunami towered up and barreled toward us. The wind was rising. The trees in the alley up from the lake toward Monty Hall blew heavily back and forth.

Things happened so fast that we didn´t have time to go back inside before the huge dust cloud was over us. I pressed Amelia against my chest and covered my eyes with my hands and we ran back into the church and closed the gates.

There were clear windows on the balcony of the church. We went up and looked. But the visibility was zero. We were completely engulfed by the dust storm. The dust shattered loudly against the windows and the storm wind whizzed through the small church.

After two hours we were still stuck. Amelia looked at me and said.

Daddy, I'm a thirsty.

But there was no water in the old church. She sat in my lap. I ran my fingers through her hair. Katie kissed her forehead and said. Soon, sweetheart, we will go back to the house.

But the storm didn´t settle. After another two hours we took a blanket from one of the benches. As best we could, we wrapped it around the whole family and made our way up to Monty Hall. The dust crept under the blanket, into the clothes. The skin was like sandpaper when we entered the house. Amelia ran to the kitchen for water.

The entire Monty Hall was covered in dust. The housekeeper, along with her staff, had been cleaning the house when the unexpected dust cloud appeared. Several windows were open and the storm broke them. Now almost the entire interior of the house was covered with dust.

In the evening I called Jamie. He managed a farm we own in Oklahoma. It was a fairly small farm with only a few hundred acres of land but it was close to my heart because it had been in the family for a long time, even longer than Monty Hall. I had seen the news on TV and found out that the dust storms were blowing over the great plains of Oklahoma close to the farm, then on to Kansas and then all the way to us in Virginia. No one had thought the storms could come this far east. It hadn't happened since The Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Jamie was dispirited.

It´s bad. But the dust storms have probably settled for at least a few days what I've heard.

Several years of drought had gotten worse. There had been some rain at the end of March but since then it had been completely dry. Now it had been over 30 days without rain in the spring when everything should have taken root and grow.

I'll fly down tomorrow.

There was really nothing I could do. Jamie managed the farm well and I knew nothing about farming. I just wanted to go there again. See with my own eyes that the old farm was still there.

Please do. But bring water bottles if you need to stop somewhere. It is difficult to describe how dry it is and Oklahoma State has tightened water restrictions here.

I really wanted to go there alone under these circumstances with unpredictable weather, but I didn't want to leave Katie and Amelia. I had been away from them for over two months. I had just come home from work in a small rural village in the Kivu Province in eastern Congo. I had participated in an operation to battle an outbreak of a Marburg virus. Together with the WHO delegate and my Swedish colleague Ester Steen, who was the head Public Health Advisor in Stockholm, I was the responsible epidemiologist in my role as Public Health Advisor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC.

Katie really didn't like my job: an epidemiologist out in the field, often in poor areas of Africa with really bad conditions. She understood that someone had to do it, but it was too dangerous, she thought. Especially now that we had Amelia.

And, after all, it wasn´t something I dreamed of doing as a kid.

The reason for my medical degree was to gain a greater understanding of the family's investments in the pharmaceutical industry, even though the core investment still was the bank M. Chandler Securities.

What was supposed to have been a temporary service at the CDC instead became a permanent one. The reason behind that was something that happened early in my service. I was in Sierra Leone on behalf of the CDC to help with an Ebola outbreak. I was responsible for over 50 patients in a hospital in the Kailahun district in eastern Sierra Leone, on the border to Guinea. It was just death and misery all around us. I was completely exhausted, completely unprepared for how demanding the work would be. What a misery it was. I was close to giving up.

In one of the rooms of the hospital was an Ebola-infected mother with her Ebola-infected infant. The child died after just 24 hours. The mother survived but became so severely depressed that she stopped eating. A few days later, an eighteen-month-old orphan boy came in, whose parents had died in Ebola. We put him in the same room as the depressed mother.

One day when I visited them, I saw that the mother was taking care of the orphaned boy as if it were her own son. Then I began to cry behind my protective face mask. It was so powerful to see life that way. That the spark of life could return. When I saw them, it was like everything clicked: everything I did there had some kind of meaning, to help these helpless people that almost nobody wanted to help.

For the first time ever, I did something that actually mattered. Here it was not just turning paper and seeing the world in numbers.

But it became more difficult to be away after I met Katie at an exhibition a little while later. Even more difficult since Amelia was born.

The plan was that I would work at the CDC for another year and then completely devote myself to the bank and the family business.

Before I went to Congo, Katie, who is an artist, had also been on a gallery tour on the east coast for several months and we had only seen each other on the weekends.

So, we took the simple decision that the whole family would go to the farm in Oklahoma. Right after Oklahoma we would go on vacation to Bretagne in France where we had rented a house while they restored Monty Hall after the storm.

*

We landed on the small airfield a few miles from the farm in southern Oklahoma. Jamie had arranged a car for us there. Along the small gravel roads on the way to the farm, the soil lay like big, dry cakes out in the fields where nothing grew. When the car drove over the dry dirt on the gravel road, the hard crust broke and dust blew up from the cracks. A dust cloud followed behind the car.

We arrived after half an hour. We greeted Jamie who was waiting for us at the driveway. He showed us around. The old farmhouses had begun to sink because the ground was so dry that it contracted under the houses. They had been recommended to water around them, but had to stop because of the latest water restrictions.

As soon as I opened my mouth it became dry. The tongue was stiff and dirty. A thin layer of dust in my mouth.

It's like I said on the phone, Mr. Chandler, it's the third year now. We thought we would have a bit more luck this year with the corn compared to the last two years, but it doesn´t seem to go our way. It's just not possible in this drought.

Both Katie and I heard that Jamie was nervous. Fluttered voice and stare. He was afraid of losing his job.

Yes, it's not what we hoped for. But don't worry, Jamie. We'll probably find something. We give it a year or so, if things don´t change, then we will think about alternatives. Is the house open?

Jamie regained his mood a little.

No, I shut it down last fall and haven't opened it yet.

We went in. Jamie had sealed all the windows, covered all the furniture with sheets. It was hot and dark.

You see, no matter how much we seal, the dust gets in anyway, even if it's not much.

Jamie wiped off a windowsill with his hand and then brushed it off on his pants.

We went outside again. Outside the farmhouses we saw the fields with low, dried corn plants. A wind rattled through them.

Jamie's Labrador ran toward us. He licked Amelia´s face. She laughed and sat down in the dry, warm dust and patted the dog lightly on his head, tilted her head and said there, there and nodded in her special way.

Corn prices are soaring now, after all, it's not just us who have problems, but what good does it do when we can't harvest anything, Jamie muttered.

Jamie, we will solve this. I'm just glad you take care of the estate. Just make sure it´s maintained and I'm happy. I don´t give a shit about the farmhouses, but the main house must be looked after.

Thank you, Mr. Chandler. I wish I could do something about the weather.

Forget it, it's like this all over the country. From what I understand it´s even worse in California and we´re not quite there yet. There is still some water left here. Large parts of California can´t even meet the basic water requirement. I heard that since a week ago tons of water are being driven in with tankers from other states. It's just as bad up in northern California. We own some forest there and my manager called yesterday and said that they had inspected the tree canopies from the air and 90 percent were dehydrated. He had never seen that before.

The rain will come sometime. It will.

I looked at Amelia playing with the dog in the dust. Despite being over three years old, she had hardly seen rain here or at home at Monty Hall.

We had intended to stay longer but it was a quick visit. It was not particularly uplifting to be there. The dust formed a gray fog and the sun shone through the dust like a blood-red orange. I walked up to the big cross that stood at the driveway, which I think Grandpa Montgomery planted there. The drought had eaten itself into the wood, and it looked pitiful and barren. Not at all like the grand cross from when I was a kid and was hanging around dad. I looked at it for a while, thinking about one of the few memories I had of dad, when he cleaned it with me when I was maybe four years old. He had put a pocket radio on the ground playing My Man by Billie Holiday, whom he loved so high and holy. He sang along and wiped the cross with a sponge.

The disgusting dust got back to me: the smell of the sunny dust filled the air and it was so damn dry that the mucus in my nose hardened to a crust.

*

We had only been in Bretagne for a few days when Ester called from Stockholm. She understood that it was much to ask of me, but if I could attend a conference concerning the Marburg outbreak in Congo, she would be eternally grateful. She would do all the preparation, I just had to hold a short part of our joint presentation and answer questions at the conference the following day.

I knew Ester pretty well. We had worked together several times and had become friends. She and her husband Erik had visited us at Monty Hall last year.

I liked Ester. Katie liked Ester. Both Katie and I loved Stockholm. One of the most beautiful cities in the world. My grandfather Montgomery Chandler was born in Stockholm, while his parents were visiting some relatives: my family is Swedish way back. Every summer we always spent a few weeks in Stockholm´s unique archipelago where Montgomery had built a house on a small island, around the same time he built Monty Hall. That´s where I picked up my somewhat strange American accent, which has some traces of Swedish in it. So, it was easy for us to decide to make a little getaway to Stockholm for a few days.

In other words, it was a mere coincidence that I could attend the conference in Stockholm. If I had been in the US I would have said no, then the flight would have been too long. And then, I probably would not have become a part of the big investigation in Stockholm which later on expanded further out into the world.

I'm not sure it would have been better if we hadn't gone there. But I might still have been with Katie and Amelia. But now, it is what it is, there´s no point on harping old decisions.

*

The conference was at the Sheraton in Stockholm. Arranged by Smittskydsinstitutet, the Swedish equivalent to the CDC. I was alone from the CDC and really didn't know anyone else but Ester. I remember that we drank coffee and ate muffins a few minutes before our presentation about the CDC's and WHO's new protocols for Marburg viruses and other hemorrhagic fever on location during an outbreak: Case Study on the Marburg outbreak in the Kivu province.

Ester's phone vibrated: a notice from the Swedish Meteorological Institute. Ester translated.

SMHI

WARNING CLASS 3 HURRICANE WINDS AND EXTREME RAINFALL

Stockholm

Extremely high water flows.

Hurricane winds exceeding 50 m / s.

Dangerous to stay outside. Extensive damage to forests and buildings with severe disruptions in traffic and electricity supply.

The public is recommended to follow new information on the Internet, radio or TV.