One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (44 page)

Meanwhile, people were hiding down
at the water’s edge around the island. They saw the boat disappear from view. Eskil Pedersen received desperate texts from those still on the island and replied: ‘Get away! Hide or swim!’

Then he rang the Labour Party leadership to alert them.

*   *   *

Lara was lying behind some rocks down at the shoreline, thinking about the chainsaw Bano had found the day before. That would have been good
to attack and to defend oneself with, she thought. She had left her phone behind when she ran, and she so much wanted to talk to Bano. Bano was bound to have found a good place to hide. Maybe she was hiding in the cellar where the chainsaw was kept. That would be a great hideaway: the door could be bolted from the inside, and then you could pile things up against it so no one could get it open.

But Bano was not hiding indoors. She had been on the edge of the woods by the campsite when Breivik approached the café building. She was with some girls she did not know. Their names were Marte and Maria.

‘If there really is a person shooting, then somebody’s got to talk to him,’ said one of them. ‘We’ve got to ask him to stop,’ said the other.

As AUF members they had grown up in a culture
of words. The debate must be won. It is the strength of your argument that gives you power. The young people on Utøya this Friday were used to being heard.

‘We won’t die today, girls. We won’t die today!’ said Bano as they stood there by the trees. They could hear the shots, but did not know where they were coming from. It was only when they saw a boy being shot down by the café that they ran.
Up the hill behind the campsite. Over harebells and yellow bird’s-foot trefoil, over heather and wild strawberries. They ran until they reached Lovers’ Path.

On the path they met Anders Kristiansen. He was used to the sound of gunfire from the firing ranges at Bardufoss, where his father worked.

Now he was desperately ringing 112 for the emergency services. But they seemed permanently engaged.
Finally he got through.

‘There’s shooting on Utøya!’ he said. But because the local emergency switchboards were jammed, his call was put through to a police district where they still had not heard what was happening on the island. The eighteen-year-old was told he was mistaken. It wasn’t shooting on Utøya, it was a bomb in Oslo.

Futile. Anders hung up.

They went further along the path. There
were lots of them. They squatted down, poised to run. Beneath them, a long way below, the Tyrifjord lapped against the rocks. Some people were running by barefoot or in their stockinged feet.

On the path they were discussing whether it was genuine, or just some kind of joke.

‘It just isn’t funny to fool around like that,’ said one girl.

‘Maybe it’s some sort of PR stunt,’ a boy suggested.

The young people huddled down behind a slight rise in the ground. Sitting there, they could no longer see the café building where the last shots had gone off. That must mean that those firing could not see them either.

Then they heard heavy footsteps in the heather.

One boy suggested lying down in strange positions and pretending to be dead. It was too late to run away, after all.

Bano lay down
on her side with one arm under her and the other thrown out at an angle. She had pulled the fluorescent yellow hood of the red sailing jacket half over her hair. On her feet she had the size 38 wellington boots.

Anders bent down beside her. He, who from his earliest years had always liked to have an overview, lay down on the ground. He who had learned rhetoric from Obama and was passionate about
parliamentary debate found no more words. This eighteen-year-old who had fought wars in the forest with a gun carved out of wood now lay down to play dead. He put his arm around Bano.

The uniformed man had reached the slight rise, a few metres from them.

‘Where the hell is he?’ he asked.

Nobody answered.

He started at the right-hand end.

First he shot a boy.

Then he shot Bano.

Then he shot
Anders.

The shots were fired at intervals of just a few seconds.

Our dear little moon, shines down on those

Who have no bed and have no home

The two girls who had been with Bano on the edge of the woods when it all started were near the end of the row. They were holding hands. A bedtime song was going round in Marte’s head. It had come to her as she lay, listening as shot followed shot.

May all the world’s little ones sleep tonight

May none of us cry, may none be forsaken

The song had soothed her when she was little and it soothed her now. She lay quite still, eyes closed.

Marte and Maria had only just joined the youth organisation and were on Utøya for the first time, to see whether it was the sort of thing for them. Their faces were turned to each other. They were wearing
their new AUF sweatshirts. The flame logos on the chest were turned to the ground.

Marte stole an upward glance and saw a pair of muddy black army boots, and above them a chequered reflective band.

Then a bullet hit her best friend in the head. Maria’s body jerked, and the twitching ran down into her hand.

Her grip slackened.

Seventeen years is not a long life, thought Marte.

Another shot
rang out. It was as if a current ran through her body, as if someone was playing drums in her head. There was a glitter in front of her eyes.

Then everything faded out. The ground beneath her disappeared, and then all sound.

Blood ran down her face and covered the hands her head was resting on. So much blood. I’m dying now, she thought.

The boy beside her was shot several times; he reached
out his hand and said, ‘I’m dying.’

‘Help, I’m dying, help me,’ he begged.

But there was no one there to help him. Marte wanted to, but she could not move. He gave a jerk, but went on breathing. His breathing got quieter and quieter, until it stopped.

Breivik had put a bullet or two in each of them. Then he had gone back and shot them again. Those who had tried to get up were shot more times;
one boy had five bullets in his body.

The weapons could be lethal over a distance of up to a couple of kilometres. Here, the gunman stood at the feet of his victims and aimed at their heads. The bullets expanded and fragmented when they made contact with tissue.

The killer was surprised by the sound emitted by people’s heads when he shot them in the skull. It was a sort of
ah
, an exhalation,
a breath. How interesting, he thought. I had no idea.

The sound did not always come, but usually it did; he wondered about it each time he killed a person.

Twenty-five spent cartridge cases were strewn around them, some on top of their bodies. Five from the pistol, twenty from the rifle.

The smell of blood, vomit and urine hung about the eleven on the path. Two minutes earlier, the smell had
been of rain, earth and fear.

From somewhere in the middle of the group came a faint moaning. Before long there was nothing but little cheeps. And then there was silence.

Marte’s brain was bleeding. Burnt gunpowder fouled the wound in her head. Then she too lost consciousness.

A few raindrops hit the ground.

*   *   *

‘Psst, Ylva, come here so I can cover you.’

Simon sat crouched on Lovers’
Path. Ylva Schwenke, one of the youngest girls from Troms, crept towards him. ‘Come here,’ whispered Simon, holding out his hand. He had been helping people get over the log. He was strong. They could hang on to him until they got a foothold and then let go and run to hide.

‘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.