Furnace 3 - Death Sentence (6 page)

They hurt
, I wanted to say, although my mouth refused to shape the words and instead they spilled out as one long, low groan.

‘They look strong,’ the warden went on. ‘They’re healing already. You know, an operation like that would kill the healthiest adult, even if he were an athlete, or a soldier. Even if he had been pumped full of nectar. Human genetics truly is a miracle. If you could only see what you were becoming.’

I
knew
what I was becoming. Stronger, faster, better. I didn’t need to see it when I could feel it in every fibre, in every burning nerve.

‘One more procedure,’ came the voice, all smoke and steel. ‘The most difficult but the most rewarding.
One more operation and the transformation will be complete. Then we’ll give you a little test to see how far you’ve come.’

I watched his legs turn and move towards the curtain, but he paused before leaving.

‘And to make sure there’s no going back.’

INTRUDERS

I waited for that final procedure with murder on my mind.

Strapped upright in my metal coffin, the screams and wheezes of the infirmary around me, all I could think about was breaking free of my chains and unleashing my new-found strength. Nobody would be safe because I was the predator and they were my prey. Blood would spill, and it would not be mine.

Whenever I had the energy I would test my muscles, feeling the power that lay in the swollen flesh. I didn’t know what they had done to me – whether it was my own body which had grown, sprouting coiled tendons of steel under the skin, or whether somebody else’s tissue had been grafted to mine. It didn’t matter. All I knew was that I now possessed a raw might that could tear the world to pieces if it wanted.

A picture floated into my head of a boy – the same boy I sometimes saw in my dreams. He was pale, his arms and legs like twigs, his ribs showing even through his prison overalls. A distant part of me, buried deep
beneath a lake of poison, knew that somehow I had once been this boy. But the only emotion this knowledge produced was nausea.

How could I have ever let myself be so weak? So pathetic? The scrawny ghost that pleaded silently in my head was not fit for life. He did not deserve it. That’s why he had died, so that I could be born. The child was gone, his name was gone. All that existed was me, the beast that had grown from his corpse.

I let the growled laughter come, hearing the deep pulses reverberate from the stone like thunder. Nobody would ever disrespect me again. Nobody would ever bully me, or lift a finger against me.

Distant words distracted me from my fantasies and I let my heavy head swing round. Sobs and choked cries were heard frequently in the infirmary, but words were rare. Especially hissed, urgent commands like these. I listened out for the clack of the warden’s shoes, the breath of a wheezer, but other than the wavelike symphony of whispers rising and falling there was nothing.

‘… hurry …’ I made out, the sound of metal scraping against metal. ‘Come on … Cut the other one.’

There was a scuffling sound, the slap of leather on stone, then the patter of footsteps. I felt my heartbeat quicken, the nectar coming to life in my veins. I gripped the chains that held me, tried to force them from their steel casings. I didn’t know what was going on out there, all I knew was that I wanted to be part of it. The metal squealed in protest but held tight.

‘Where are the others?’ one of the voices said.

‘There’s no time!’

‘Just find them …’

More footsteps over panicked breaths, then the sound of curtains being pulled back. The noises grew closer until it seemed as though they were right next door.

‘You okay? Quick, cut the straps.’

A slurred response, followed by the grating of a serrated blade through leather. I heard more words that I couldn’t make out, then something pale and wraith-like pushed its way past the screen to the side of me. I snapped my head round and opened my mouth, letting loose a guttural growl that sent the face skittering back into the next compartment.

Seconds later it returned, and there were two more with it. I knew them, although at the same time they were complete strangers. The first was half boy and half beast, one arm grotesquely muscled the same way mine were. His silver eyes were wide in disbelief and he shook his head as though I was a nightmare that had visited him in the flesh. The two kids standing next to him were tiny by comparison, and they looked unmarked.

‘Jesus,’ said one, smoothing a hand through his hair. He had turned three shades paler in the time he’d been standing there.

‘We’ve got to go,’ said the smallest kid. ‘Wheezers’ll be back any minute.’

‘Is that him?’ said the freak with the giant arm. The other kid walked forward and I wrenched at my chains
again, growling at him. He had no right to look at me the way he was doing now, as if I deserved pity. He was the weak one, they all were. Weak and incomplete. If I could escape I’d show them what strength was. I’d show them power.

All three seemed to recoil at the sound of my growl, but they didn’t leave.

‘Simon, what do we do?’ said the youngest. ‘Can we get him out?’

‘No,’ answered the bigger kid. ‘He’s too far gone. Look at him, for Christ’s sake. I’ve never seen that much nectar hooked into the vein.’

‘We can’t leave him,’ said the third boy. I studied his face and was surprised to see that every trace of weakness had gone. His expression was set in stone, a look of fierce determination, and it sent chills down my spine. I knew that look. I knew it because I had worn it once. A memory swam through the nectar like a whale trying to breach the surface of a frozen sea. I couldn’t grasp it, but I knew that I’d been in this situation before. Only … Only it had been different.

The kid vanished into the next cubicle and returned a second later with something in his hands. I couldn’t quite twist my head round far enough to see what it was, but somehow I knew.

It was a pillow.

‘What are you doing?’ said the small kid. ‘You’re not going to …’

‘Ozzie, shut up,’ snapped the one they called Simon. ‘It’s the only thing we can do. He’s gone.’

The boy with the pillow took a step forward and I felt the terror wash through me. I thrashed against my chains but they were solid steel fingers that held me tight. Opening my mouth, I screamed at him, the sound like the roar of a jet engine. But he didn’t stop, didn’t take his eyes from mine.

‘Alex, are you in there?’ he asked. ‘Because if you are then you have to let me know, right now.’

I growled again, throwing my entire body at him in the hope that my bonds would snap. There was nothing called Alex here, there was just me, and I was going to kill the child in front of me. I was going to kill them all. I was the powerful one, the predator. They were nothing but loose skin on bone, not even worthy of being prey. I felt my face split open at the thought, my grin like the sneer of a lion that knows it is about to feast.

‘Jesus, Zee, hurry up. I can hear them coming.’

Zee
. I knew the word, the name, although I couldn’t think from where. It floated before me like silk in water, surrounded by thoughts and images I could make no sense of. I had almost grasped one – the kid called Zee in a lift, alongside me and two others, being carried down into the guts of the earth – but by the time it had taken shape I felt the pillow on my face.

I almost laughed at the thought that I could be killed by such a pathetic weapon. Then I tried to draw breath and my lungs stayed empty. I bucked, snapping my head back and forth, but the kid must have had all his weight on my face because the pillow didn’t shift.

‘I’m sorry,’ I heard him say. ‘Forgive me, Alex.’

I struggled to draw breath, feeling the panic radiate from my starved lungs. All the pillow gave me was dust and the stench of sickness. If I could just get an arm free then I’d stand a chance, I could kill him before he killed me.

‘Oh God, they’re here,’ said one of the others, his words accompanied by a familiar wheeze which swept in from the back of the infirmary. I tried to scream again, to draw the gas mask’s attention, but with nothing behind it my cry was silent. I felt the pillow press with greater insistency, heard the boys argue amongst themselves as the dry wheezes grew closer. Even with the cloth against my face I could feel the edges of my vision growing darker, the sounds fading like I had cotton wool in my ears.

‘It’s too late.’ The voice pushed through the numbness in my brain, and all of a sudden the darkness was ripped away. I found myself staring into the twisted face of a wheezer. It had one gnarled hand wrapped around Simon’s throat and the other held the scruff of Zee’s neck. The smallest kid was curled up in a ball on the floor screaming the same three words over and over. ‘It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.’

And it was. Even as the boys fought to free themselves the blacksuits ran into the infirmary, fierce silver eyes aiming down their shotgun barrels. They flew into the cubicle like a dark tornado, the butts of their guns causing the boys to fall like pins. It was over before I could draw in my first stuttered breath.

‘Get them back to their beds,’ a blacksuit said, wiping
the blood from his gun before using it to point to Simon and Zee.

Before anyone could move, the sound of the warden’s shoes drifted up from the back of the room. The blacksuits straightened, their faces steeled against the storm that was coming.

‘What now?’ came his voice. He appeared at the open curtains of my cubicle and I turned away before I could meet his eye. ‘Is a little order around here too much to ask for? Go on, get them back before the feed is damaged too much. And that kid, find out how he got in, and if there are any more of them out there. When I asked for the perimeter to be secured I meant just that.’

I felt his glare scuttling up from Ozzie to me like a spider.

‘What about Number 208?’ he asked, his voice directed at me.

‘I think they were trying to kill him,’ replied one of the blacksuits. ‘Same way they killed Number 191.’

‘Any damage?’ This time it was a wheezer that responded, although there were no words in its gargled purr. The warden stepped forward. ‘Find out if there’s brain damage. I don’t know how long he went without oxygen. He looks weaker than he did.’

My fury had lifted my head before I even knew what I was doing.
Weaker?
Even the warden had no right to call me that. I met his eyes, felt the world peeling away like wallpaper, felt the cold touch of death in the swollen pits of his pupils. But I didn’t look away. I held
his gaze until it felt as though my soul had been pulled out of me, and the devil’s breath had taken its place. Only then, when every last drop of strength had been drained, did I let my head drop.

‘Well, I take it back,’ he said. ‘Not weaker at all, just angrier. Good, good. You’ll soon have a chance to get even.’

I heard him stand to one side while the blacksuits hauled their catch from the floor. Even though I didn’t have the energy to move I caught a glimpse of the kid called Ozzie as he was dragged away. His eyes were distant and unfocused, his mouth silently shaping those same three words. Then a giant hand engulfed his head and he was lifted out of my line of sight.

‘Once you’ve done interrogating the intruder, take him to the chamber.’The warden’s voice grew fainter as he walked away, but I could still make out what he was saying. ‘As soon as Number 208 has had his final procedure we can try him out on the child, see just how powerful that anger makes him.’

There was more, but it came from too far away. It didn’t matter. I understood what the warden had said. One more procedure and I’d be let loose, I’d be free. And neither hell nor high water would stop me tearing the life from those who had tried to kill me.

208

In my dream I lay next to the same kid who had haunted my sleep since the nectar had entered my veins. His bony body was strapped to an operating table, a splinter of shadow compared with my own muscled form as I lay beside him. I thought at first that the room we were in was empty, but then the darkness started to move and I realised there were wheezers all around us, their twitching limbs like insects running up and down the dark walls.

‘It’s time,’ said the kid, the one I knew had once been me. His face was calm, but beneath his tattered overalls I could see his ribs jutting up like rock through snow, rising and falling too fast. He was scared, and even in the fog of sleep it angered me.

‘Time for what?’ I asked, my growl so deep it made the table beneath me tremble.

‘Time to let go of me forever,’ the kid answered, and I could see that he was trying to hold back the tears. ‘If that’s what you want.’

Before I could answer the wheezers were approaching,
their staggered movements making them look like puppets. Several grabbed hold of the kid’s arms and legs, but none tried to twist his gaze away from mine.

‘I don’t want to be you any more,’ I answered as another wheezer lifted a scalpel from the tray beside the table. ‘You’re weak. You’re pathetic.’

‘You’re wrong,’ the boy answered, and at last the fear broke through his paralysis and he started to struggle. The rest of his words came in short, sharp bursts as he fought the arms that held him. ‘It’s an illusion. I wasn’t strong, but at least I could think for myself. You’re the weak one, you’re letting them win. You can still stop them.’

I looked at his limbs, nothing more than matchsticks, the whites of his eyes so bright they seemed to light up the entire room. The thought that he was still in my head somewhere, still alive after everything they had done to me, made my stomach churn. He had no right to be there. I was done with him.

‘Please, Alex,’ he pleaded. ‘I don’t want to die.’

The wheezer lowered its scalpel towards the boy’s chest and held it above his heart. Then it raised its piggy eyes to me and I nodded.

‘You died a long time ago,’ I said, watching as the scalpel blade vanished into the boy’s skin, a geyser of blood reaching skyward like one last bid for freedom. The kid screamed, and as much as I wanted to see him die I couldn’t bring myself to watch. I turned away, losing myself in the artificial night of the ceiling until the last wet breath had faded.

There was a shuffle of feet as the wheezers approached me, and I offered no resistance when the butcher pressed his dripping scalpel against my chest. There was pain, but pain was nothing new to me and I didn’t so much as flinch as the blade cut through my skin. Because it was a dream there were no bones beneath, just a hole stuffed with straw and twigs – almost like a bird’s nest. The wheezer laid the boy’s heart down in its new home, the organ still pumping despite the fact it wasn’t connected to anything.

‘Am I done?’ I asked, watching another wheezer thread some surgical wire through a hooked needle and start to sew me back up. They didn’t respond in words, but I could see from their gleaming obsidian eyes that their work was finished. The last stitch was knotted and they stepped back.

I looked round at the kid, sprawled on the table, dead eyes seeming to stare at the world a mile or so above him. It looked as though something had exploded from his chest, and blood pattered like rain onto the floor around the table. There was no room in this world for a boy like him – like the one I had once been. There was only space for the creature that had been born from him.

I lifted an arm and felt the tight zigzag of stitches that marked my chest. The kid had been killed so that I could live. His heart was now mine. I was finally complete, finally whole.

But even in my dream I couldn’t shake the feeling that, despite the immense layers of muscle that bound
me and the stolen heart that ground against my sternum, I was now empty inside.

There was a moment when the world of my dream and that of real life seemed to overlap. I felt myself stirring, saw the wheezers peel away as I bubbled to the surface of sleep. I looked back at the body of the kid one last time, but after a single blink the murdered boy had become a stone wall and the last trace of nightmare drained from my head.

I tried to move but it felt as though I had been stabbed in the chest. Looking down, I saw that the truth wasn’t far off – my entire torso had swollen to twice its normal size, a network of scars and stitches decorating the bruised skin. My face, too, radiated pain, and all I could do was open my mouth and utter a scream, a pathetic croak that barely made it out of my mouth before tumbling unheard to the floor.

Panic gripped me, doubling the agony in my chest and stomach. I had never felt this weak, not ever. Even if I wasn’t held down by leather straps I doubted whether I could have climbed off the operating table. I was as helpless as a newborn baby, ready to be picked off by the first enemy that walked in through the door.

What if something had gone wrong? What if the wheezers had somehow injured my spine as I lay sleeping? What would happen to me now? Bait for the rats, or maybe just incinerated along with the rest of the failures.

Something moved behind me, the flap of a coat and the tail end of a dry wheeze. Oh Jesus, they were coming already.
Wait
, I tried to say, but this time my words were so timid even I didn’t hear them. The noise grew louder, then I felt the sting of a needle as it slid into my arm. Almost instantly the pain began to fade, the strength returning to my new body as the nectar filled me. The relief was so great I swore I could hear thunder in my head, loud enough to drown out the warden until he was standing right next to me.

‘The pain is what kills most people,’ he said, perching on the edge of the steel table. ‘Or what drives them insane. Take the rats. They couldn’t handle the pain so they lost their minds, became animals. The nectar, and the operations, they can have that effect.’

He noticed a trickle of blood that was slowly winding its way towards him. Pushing himself up, he paced around the room as he continued.

‘I was worried about your mind. You see, if you try and resist too much it’s like using a stick to barricade a door. It will only last so long before it snaps into splinters.’ He walked over, pressed a hand on my forehead. The touch released a fresh wave of pain that scoured its way down my face and torso. ‘But you seem to have survived with all your mental faculties intact. Well, the ones we wanted to keep anyway. You dreamed again while they operated on you, right?’

I was in too much pain to nod but the warden didn’t seem to be expecting an answer.

‘It will be the last one. It always is. From now on
there will be no more pain, no more nightmares. Only power. It hasn’t been an easy journey, I know that. But it will be a rewarding one.’

He walked round behind my head and I felt the topmost strap loosen. He appeared on my other side and unfastened the buckle that held my arm. Slowly and methodically he released the bonds that held me, then offered me his hand. I couldn’t look him in the eye to see what his motives were, but I knew he meant me no harm. Grimacing against the ache in my chest, I took his hand and let him pull me into a sitting position.

‘I’m proud of you,’ he said, resting both palms on my head the way a priest might do. ‘You have embraced a new life, our life.’

I felt my chest swell, not with pain this time but with pride. The warden took a step back, checking the sac of nectar which hung from a stand beside the table. When he spoke again the warmth was gone from his voice, taking me by surprise.

‘But we are not ready to accept you, not quite yet.’ I opened my mouth to protest but he stole the words with a single glance. ‘Simply staying alive this long isn’t a guarantee that you are ready. Some of those who make it through the procedure are still weak at their core, they do not have what it takes to join my family.’

He nodded at the door and a wheezer entered the operating room. I watched the creature as it staggered to a tray beside the table and picked up a long syringe. This one was full of clear liquid.

‘Some lack the physical strength to make it as one of my soldiers,’ the warden went on as the wheezer tapped the tube and squirted some of the liquid into the air. ‘Others cannot handle the … responsibilities that their new life entails.’

The wheezer shrieked, and before I could object it jabbed the needle into a vein in my forearm. There was none of the cold rush of nectar, just a pleasant buzz that permeated my entire body. When the warden’s voice came again it was muffled, as if heard through gauze.

‘This is a mild anaesthetic, nothing to be worried about. When you next wake we’ll find out how far you’ve come, and how strong you really are.’

His voice continued to fade as I plunged deeper into the silence of my mind.

‘Get the chamber ready, divert the river, and prepare the rats. Let the test begin.’