Furnace 4 - Fugitives (18 page)

‘Oh no, Sawyer, no no no,’ the warden said, and even though I couldn’t see him I knew he was wearing that corpse’s smile. ‘Dr Furnace may want you alive, but I don’t. I’ve wasted enough time on you. Take one more look at the city, Alex, take one more look at the world you have created. Because it will be your last.’

The blacksuit pulled the walkie-talkie away, but not before I heard the warden’s final words fizz from the handset.

‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘Kill them all.’

Changing

I thought they’d taunt me for a while, dangle the inevitability of my death in front of me the way they always did, driven by the sick sense of humour that all blacksuits possessed.

I was wrong.

The closest blacksuit lifted his shotgun, pointed it at my chest and without so much as a word or a laugh he pulled the trigger.

The world came apart, becoming a blur of sky and concrete and black suits that dissolved into a sickening spiral. I realised I was airborne, and for a crazy moment wondered if I’d managed to shed this grotesque body, if that fistful of lead shot had somehow released me from the warden’s curse, let my spirit soar free into the sunlight.

Then I hit the floor, my flesh wrapping itself around me again, even tighter than before. And this time there was pain, not the itch of the nectar but real agony that scrubbed the inside of my chest like a cheese grater. I tried to lift a hand, to feel the wound the shotgun had
opened up, but nothing seemed to work. I had no control. I was the pilot of a sinking ship, my body slowly descending into the depths and absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I heard another shot, the growl of the dogs, a scream. Was it Zee I heard yelling ‘no’ over and over again at the top of his voice? Or was it a blacksuit?

I dropped beneath the waves of unconsciousness, the world vanishing for what might have been a second or an hour. I fought it, trying to stay afloat, trying to keep my head above the darkness. The pain in my chest was pounding harder, and by sheer force of will I managed to open my eyes. Sunlight screwed its way in, but past its glare I could see what they’d done to me.

My arm – the one that was mutating – had taken the worst of the shot. It had almost been torn clean off, just a knot of elbow bone and a few threads of twisted ligament still connecting it. The limb lay on my chest, concealing another ragged hole there which was oozing dirty blood. The impact must have stripped my shackles clean away as well because they were nowhere to be seen. I cried out silently, my lungs refusing to lend precious air to my fear, my disbelief. Nectar was pouring out of the severed artery in my arm, pooling beneath me, trickling away on the sun-baked concrete.

Or was it? I squinted into the light, tried to make sense of what I was seeing. The nectar was being pumped out, but it wasn’t draining away. It looked as if it was forming a black web between the two halves of my arm, as if a spider was hard at work there. The skin of my
ruined limb was bulging, swelling out then shrinking, almost like it was breathing.

And inside that nectar I saw fragments of fire, red flecks that burned alongside golden ones under the morning sun.

‘Let the dogs have them,’ I heard a blacksuit shout, followed by more screams. And then another voice, surely a blacksuit, ordering somebody to stop. An argument was breaking out between the guards, but I couldn’t understand the words. I couldn’t make sense of what was going on up there, my eyes refusing to focus on anything but my wound. I could barely even remember why I was lying on the floor. It was as if every single resource in my body was being diverted to my arm, the nectar doing its best to patch up a wound that should have been fatal.

The web was twisting itself into thicker strands, knotting together as though an invisible pair of hands was manipulating it. The black liquid had covered my entire arm now, from my fingers all the way up past the exposed bone to my shoulder. It looked like it had been burned to a crisp, only the sensation was cooling, like a breeze blowing against my skin. Gradually, incredibly, the pain was lessening, settling back into that infuriating, unscratchable itch I knew so well.

I heard a blacksuit swear, a dark silhouette rising above me, casting the world into shadow.

‘Go on, finish him off. Don’t mess it up this time.’

‘No, Dr Furnace forbids it. Get away from there. That’s an order!’

‘Screw your orders.’

I heard the pump of a shotgun, the acrid smell of gunpowder stinging my nostrils. I blinked twice, the world gradually swimming back into shape and revealing the smoking pit of a shotgun barrel like a black hole in my vision.

I was moving before I even knew it, my broken, blackened arm sweeping up from my chest and smacking into the weapon just as the guard pulled the trigger. He obviously hadn’t been expecting me to move, as the gun clattered out of his hands, the shot carving a hole in the concrete inches from my head and making my ear pop into silence.

The suit bent down to reclaim the shotgun, but the same arm – the limb that had almost been severed in two, which should have been nothing but a hunk of meat on the car-park floor – shot out and grabbed him round the neck. I watched, half in horror and half in fascination, as strands of nectar rose from my fist like scorpion tails, darting forward and puncturing the blacksuit’s throat. He tried to pull away but the nectar wouldn’t let him, the claw fastened in his flesh, lodged there until the colour drained from his eyes, turning them from silver to lead.

I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to. All I knew was that the strength was filtering back into my body, the nectar’s insatiable bloodlust taking over. My arm seemed to have a mind of its own, tossing the corpse of the blacksuit to one side, raining nectar down onto the floor.

I pushed myself to my feet, and this time when I
stretched out a leg the ankle cuffs snapped as if they were made of silk thread. One side of my head was ringing, the other drenched in silence, making me feel even more unbalanced. The world seemed to have slowed down again, the blacksuits lurching towards me like clumsy puppets, firing off shots that were too far away to do any damage. Somewhere in the confusion I noticed that Zee, Simon and Lucy were on the move, heading for the ramp that led down into the car park.

And next to them … Were two blacksuits locked in battle?

Another guard was pulling a dog from the army truck, yelling. Even though I couldn’t hear him I could lip read his words:
Kill him, boy
. But the dog wasn’t having any of it, its gaze refusing to meet my eyes, its body hunkered, tail between its legs. I watched as it turned on the suit, clamping its jaws down on his arm, then retreated back across the roof, ears flattened to its head. The other two followed with nervous backward glances and I didn’t blame them.

I was changing, and fast.

My arm seemed to have doubled in size in the seconds since I’d found my feet, hanging from my shoulder like a broken branch. My fingers now reached past my knees, still coated with nectar, marbled with those glowing red galaxies, but somehow being fused together into an obsidian blade. I tried to move them, to separate them, to wiggle them,
anything
. But they were stuck fast.

‘No!’ I heard myself shout, tearing at my arm with my other hand, the good hand. It would have been better if
the mutant limb had been lying on the roof, better to spend the rest of my life with only one arm than to see myself turning into one of
them
.

A blacksuit was suddenly in front of me, moving fast. I flinched, but once again my arm knew what to do, the nectar in my system operating it automatically. It twisted back then thrust forward like a spear, my fingers slicing into the blacksuit’s stomach. His mouth became an ‘O’ of surprise and he looked down to see my arm inside his guts, up to the elbow. He grabbed it, shaking his head in denial.

With a grunt of effort I swung my body round, flicking him away. He slid off my arm, tumbling end over end across the roof and sliding to a halt on his side, sunlight pouring through the ragged hole in his torso. The sight of him there, the knowledge of what I’d done, sat over my thoughts like a weight, a pressure that pushed everything else to one side. I growled, the noise throbbing up my throat, making me smile.

No
, I called out again, but this time it was just in my head, lost beneath the rolling swell of a sea of nectar. I scanned the car park, seeing the blacksuits close in, their eyes full of fear. Right now they were all just meat, already dead even though they didn’t know it.

None of them could fight me. I was unstoppable.

I had set off towards the nearest blacksuit when I heard the sound of thunder above me. A shadow threw itself over everything and I teetered round to see a chopper hovering next to the edge of the roof. There was a hiss, like a snake, and four missiles slithered out of
the launchers, two from each side, heading right this way. Three sailed over my head, and I lashed out at the fourth, managing to swat it away like a fly. It darted off on a tangent, hitting the vans on the other side of the roof and detonating in a fireball the size of a house. The floor shook as the three other missiles found a target, a fistful of heat and noise catapulting me over the concrete.

Something was cutting through the nectar, and I realised it was fear. The air was on fire, bringing a scalding pain with each breath. In every direction was heat and smoke, and above it all the relentless buzz of the chopper. There was another hiss, two more white trails blasting overhead and causing another wave of destruction. The flames around me danced in the shock wave, curling up and splashing down like I was swimming in a burning ocean. If I didn’t move now then I’d be cooked alive.

But there was nowhere to go.

I panicked, throwing my huge arm over my face. I’d have to run for it, into the flames. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open, the force of the heat drying them out, hot enough to make my eyelashes wither.

I started running, keeping my eyes closed, my hand up. I bumped into something soft, sending it flying. Then everything went white, a light so fierce it seemed to ring in my ears. My trainers stuck, melting on the concrete, but I kept running, not breathing, not looking, not feeling, only throwing one foot in front of the other.

I struck a wall, momentum flipping me over. Then I was falling. I hit something solid, too soon to be the
street below. I risked opening my eyes, seeing that I’d landed on the ramp. Flames had taken hold of my clothes, burning off the smiley face on what was left of my hoodie, and I patted them out as I got to my feet.

Above me, through the gap, it looked as if the heavens were burning, and I retreated down the ramp into the glorious darkness of the level below. I hurdled the barrier down onto the next floor, and again, dropping level by level until the carnage was just a whisper overhead. Eight floors later and I was back on solid ground, the car park’s lights now off and a constant rain of dust drifting from the steel rafters.

I slumped against the wall, my body drained, my arm so heavy that it felt as if it had been stuffed full of rocks. It looked like it, too, the skin stretched over the expanding muscles, rubbing against sharp ridges that could only be bone. Those weird strands of nectar stood up from my wrist, undulating like sea plants. The limb was a mess, and I wanted nothing more than to find a saw and get rid of it, cut it off before whatever was inside could spread. What had Captain Atilio said about the plague in the city? That it was like a severed artery, you had to stem the flow before it bled out. It was the same inside me. If I didn’t stop it now then it would be too late. I would become one of them.

I would become a berserker.

Since the moment my arm had begun to grow I’d suspected as much, but it was the first time I’d admitted it to myself. There was no denying it. The bite wound, the infection, the red-flecked nectar that was somehow
spreading inside me. I’d been turned. The knotted limb that hung from my shoulder could have been that of the berserker I’d fought back in the prison, a beetle-black weapon that should have belonged to some nightmare, not to me.

I was distracted by the sound of a door opening further down the car park. Three familiar shapes barged from it, checking the shadows before scampering towards the sun-dappled entrance. I lowered myself into a pool of darkness. It was better that they didn’t see me. They’d stand a better chance of surviving this if I wasn’t with them.

But I guess when you’ve been through so much with somebody, when you’ve travelled to hell and back, when you’ve experienced the very worst of the world, and laughed together even though death is just around the corner, then you share a bond with them, some link that can’t possibly be there and yet somehow still is. Because just as they were running up the slope, vanishing into the golden blur of day, one of the figures stopped and slowly turned.

‘Alex?’ said Zee, his eyes scouring the car park, eventually finding me. I pressed myself further back against the damp concrete, but in a flash he was there, bathing me in a smile. Simon appeared next to him, his own grin a lot less even but welcome all the same.

‘Come on,’ Zee said, offering me his hand. I didn’t accept and he grabbed me by my new arm, yelping at the heat but hanging on, Simon helping him.

‘Glad I’m not the only one who’s lopsided now,’ the
bigger boy said. ‘You’re starting to make me look almost normal.’

Together they helped me up, Simon lumping my arm over his shoulders to help me support the weight.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Zee said as we shuffled forward, looking like contestants in some weird three-legged race. Lucy was waiting for us by a pillar, looking at me even more uneasily than she had before. ‘The army’ll blow you to pieces the moment they see you, looking like that.’