The floors at Kastrup Airport, were made of light Scandinavian wood, or at least a kind of wood that gave the same impression. Most likely some kind of pine woodwork fresh from the forests of Denmark, or maybe Sweden. The woodwork was covered with twig marks in darker shades, some of which was barely showing and with some marks in dark brown and even near to black colour.
The floors were covered in a clear topcoat that gave reflections of the light from the great windows on the side of the walkway from the passport control and to the security check area. Still, it was easy to see that the number of people queuing through the narrow passway had worn the floor down over several planks and in these places, there were hardly anything left of the clear topcoat.
The reason why Beate was able to observe the floors in such a thorough matter, was the long line of people queuing from the passport control and waiting to get to security. Despite the large windows on the one side of the corridors that allowed the passengers to look outside at life on a busy airport, Beate kept her eyes on the floor in front of her.
She could not quite get the point of watching life outside the airport halls as she walked along and felt it took most of her concentration to keep up with a rapid moving line of passengers that all seemed to be in a hurry to get to the next destination. But the great windows let in quite a lot of daylight and even a few rays of sun when the Nordic weather allowed for it.
Beate was not used to travelling, at least not by air, and felt as if she had been in an endless line of people since she came to the airport. She did not care at all for looking strangers in the eyes and kept for that reason also her eyes at the light Scandinavian floors.
While Beate was studying the floors and the queue moved slowly forward, she suddenly noticed a tiny drop of blood on the light floor work. She barely had time to notice it before the line moved forward again, and she merely made a registration of the small drop in her mind while she kept walking.
After a few steps she noticed another drop. She sat her foot down in a way as to not tread in it and continued walking forward. It looked like the kind of blood drop one would get from a small paper cut in ones finger, and though she took a step to the side not to thread in it, it was not an amount she would have noticed if she had not been keeping her eyes to the floor while she walked.
But suddenly Beate had to step aside again for yet another drop of blood, and then some more of them. The drops were larger now and she could see that some of the other passengers, clearly not watching the floors of the airport, had put their shoes in them and smeared them out over the clear coat. How could it be that she was the only one to notice?
The long hallway in front of her were now covered with so many larger drops of blood that some other passengers had started to notice and turned their heads to look as they walked on. Beate looked straight into the eyes of a woman in front of her, and from her look Beate realised that the woman also had noticed the blood. Several of the other passengers started looking at each other and turned their heads to see where the blood came from.
Further down the queue had started to lose the tempo in which it had moved earlier and some of the passengers had stopped entirely and stood quite still, while looking around to see where the blood came from. Some of the passengers were now pressed against the wall on account of the large number of people that gathered up as the queue stopped. Some of them stood with their backs against the large windows and all of them tried not to step in the blood drops, that no longer merely were drops as much as large puddles of blood.
Beate saw one man whose foot leaped aside as his shoe slid through a puddle of blood. Most of the passengers in front of her had stopped and she could see that the security personal at work had noticed something going on in the line. An elderly woman with a small yellow trolley suitcase tried to turn around and walk the other way in the line but soon realised that se could not get anywhere in that direction eighter.
Beate stood entirely still now. A rare quiet humming of voices could be heard from the crowd of people that stood around her. At the same time, she could still see passengers going through security check point in an ordinary manner, so it became clear that not everyone had noticed what was happening in the queue.
She could hear the large plastic trays with personal belongings humping over the metal rails and the odd beeping when something metal was detected further on. A big open space had started to clear in front of the counters as most of the passengers had stopped up. The now quite large puddles of blood made the passengers stop in the front of the line, at the same time as the passengers in the back pushed forward.
Beate was pushed away from the windows and up against the nearest security counter. The posts with the black tape to keep the passengers in a line before security check had started to fall and when a few of them fell over, the others started to fall also. Some of the quiet voices she heard earlier had now grown into load sounds of people that were bewildered and scared.
A woman and two men in uniforms had noticed something going on and had started making their way towards the first security counter. Beate noticed at the same time a man who pressed a black backpack against his chest, while leaning over the counter. He could not seem to hold himself upright and fell more over the counter. The conveyor belt kept going and the man’s head was beating for every bump of the grey plastic pipes.
Beate could see his shoes fill with blood as he laid forward and came out under his black pants before it guttered out onto the floor. There was nothing resembling a drop of blood anymore. Beate new by instinct that this kind of amount of blood had to be fatal. One of the security guards managed to take the man’s arm before his black backpack fell to the ground and blood spread all around him.
