‘Girls first,’ he said gallantly. The shots were getting closer.
Two Troms girls came towards him, holding on to each other. Eirin Kjær was carrying Sofie Figenschou, who had been shot in the shoulder and stomach as she ran across the campsite. While the two were lifted down, the queue built up. Tonje Brenna, standing at the bottom to make sure people got down all right, needed assistance. Mari, who had been up on the path, went down to help. Simon gently lifted the badly wounded girl and passed her down.
This was a winding section of the path. Not far away, round a couple of bends, the killer kicked the eleven on the ground to make sure they were dead.
He was finished there. So he moved on along Lovers’ Path.
The island was still.
Where had they all gone?
Then he saw a hole in the fence. A log wedged across it at an angle.
Mari saw the policeman coming.
That’s the man who’s shooting, he’s the one shooting us, she thought the instant before she jumped. She slid down the cliff; her foot broke on landing. People were jumping over her. She lay down flat on the ground.
Simon came leaping down the cliff towards the water.
A voice called out.
‘Simon!’
The voice reached the jumping boy in mid-leap. It was Margrethe, his companion on the romantic walk along Lovers’ Path the night before.
‘Come here!’ she called.
Simon threw himself towards her. The rock ledge was full, but they managed to make space for him.
The murderer looked over the log and down the steep drop. He would not be able to get down to the water. It was easy to lose one’s balance with all that gear, and he would have difficulty getting up again.
He caught sight of something brightly coloured behind a bush. Lying hidden in the scrub and undergrowth were more kids he could murder.
‘I will kill you all, Marxists!’ he shouted gleefully, raising Gungnir.
He shot three girls at the top of the cliff. None of them died instantly, but they soon bled to death.
Breivik saw a foot sticking out from under an overhanging rock and fired again. The shot hit the ankle. Simon screamed. He plunged from the rock ledge. Did he fall or did he jump? Those left sitting did not know. He flew down the cliff face, he hovered, he seemed to hang in the air, before a bullet caught him in the back.
He landed on a rock, without bracing himself, without a shout. His arms dangled down. His feet were barely touching the ground. His left hand was clenched round a snus tin. In his right hand, Margrethe’s warmth would last for a little longer.
Then Viljar was shot.
Viljar and Torje had been sitting at the other end of the rock ledge as the shots came closer. They were squeezed further and further along until they were entirely unprotected. Torje wanted to go, Viljar wanted to stay. When the shots hit the cliff face above them, Torje jumped first.
The brothers landed at the water’s edge.
The bullets came fast. Viljar took one in the shoulder and dropped to the ground. He stood up to run and was hit in the thigh. He fell again, and tried to get up. He lurched to his feet and was almost upright when he was hit once more and toppled back down.
There was a buzzing and whining in his ears as he knelt at the water’s edge, and then another shot went right through his arm.
His little brother was howling.
‘Torje! Get away!!’ cried Viljar. Torje must not see him like this.
He tried to kick water at his brother to make him run away from the bullets.
He got up once again, and staggered. Blood was running down his body.
The fifth shot hit him in the eye and shattered his cranium. He keeled over. Five bullets had fragmented inside his body. The bullet in his head had splintered into little bits that were now embedded in his brain tissue. One bit had stopped just millimetres short of his brain stem. His shoulder and arm had been virtually shot away. Half his left hand had gone.
But it was Torje he was thinking of.
The little brother he should be looking after.
‘Torje,’ he whispered.
There was no answer from Torje.
Shots were raining down on the young people at the shoreline.
Ylva Schwenke, the fourteen-year-old that Simon had lifted down from the path, had been hit in both thighs and in the stomach. Then in the neck. She pressed her hand over the bullet wound as she cried out to her childhood friend who was lying right beside her.
‘Viljar, I’m dying!’
‘Oh no you’re not,’ he answered from the water’s edge. He could no longer see.
In films you die when one bullet hits you, thought Ylva. How could she still be alive when she had been shot four times? It’s impossible to survive that, she thought, and lay there waiting for the light.
But no light came. So she had to try to stem the bleeding instead.
‘I think I’ve been shot in the eye.’ It was Viljar.
She looked at him. ‘Oh shit!’ she said. That was all, because she didn’t know what you say to someone who has been shot in the eye.
Eirin was lying a little further up. ‘Please don’t shoot, I don’t want to die,’ she had shouted when her leg gave way under her. A bullet was lodged in her knee. Then she was hit in the back. The bullet came out her front, and now there was blood spurting from her stomach. I’m going to bleed to death, she thought as she lay there on the shingle, coming to terms with it. They were definitely all going to die. The girl beside her had been shot in the shoulder and stomach, one lung and one arm, and was drifting in and out of consciousness. It was Cathrine, the elder sister of Elisabeth who had been shot through the ear while she was talking to their father on her pink phone.
A girl with deep wounds in her back and legs tried to use her arms to drag herself to some sort of cover. She slipped back into the water, where she lay coughing up blood. A couple of boys pulled her out of the water before retreating to their hiding places.
‘Tell Dad I love him,’ they heard her say.
The whole thing had taken the gunman two minutes.
It was 17.35.
He moved on.
Viljar lay at the water’s edge, trying to orientate himself around his body. He discovered that his fingers were just hanging by some scraps of skin. He could see nothing out of one eye, and put his hand up to it. He could feel that there was something wrong with his head. He ran his hand over his skull and felt something soft. He was touching his brain. He took his hand away quickly.
Viljar’s skull had been shattered.
Bits of his brain were outside his head.
But he was thinking. He was thinking that it was important to breathe, not to pass out, not to give up. He was thinking about things that made him happy. That he would go home to Svalbard and drive a snowmobile. He thought about a girl he wanted to kiss.
Then he went very cold and started to convulse. He was shaking. Consciousness came and went.
‘This is going all right Simon, we’ll get through this together,’ he said to his friend who was hanging over the rock beside him.
Viljar was rambling. ‘We can deal with it, Simon,’ he said, and started to hum.
He told jokes, he sang, he called to Torje.
‘Shush, he might come back and then he’ll get us,’ said the others around him.
But Viljar did not hear them.
Oh if I could write in the heavens, yours is the name I would write… sang Viljar.
And if my life were a sailing ship…
Torje had thought his brother was running along beside him, until he looked round and saw Viljar fall, get up and fall again. He stopped and cried out. Then he turned, ran out into the water and started to swim.