Furnace 5 - Execution (4 page)

I gave up, taking a deep breath to drain away the frustration.

‘And I am going to kill him,’ I said, softer this time. ‘Just as soon as I find him.’

‘You know where to look?’ asked Panettierre. I shook my head.

‘Okay, it’s good to know we’re on the same side,’ she said after a pause. ‘And right now that side is the losing one. Around a third of the Home Battalion is KIA, dead, and we can’t pull in reserves quickly enough. Hell, sixty per cent of our troops are overseas. The emergency services are screwed, and it’s spreading, faster than we can keep track of. It’s already passed the county line, west and north. We’re lucky we’ve got the coast to the east otherwise it would be totally out of our hands. If we don’t find a way of stopping this … this plague, then I give the whole country days, maybe a week, before it’s overwhelmed.’

She returned her attention to the machines, to one in particular – a large, empty bell jar connected to me with a thick, transparent plastic tube.

‘We need to find whoever’s responsible for this,’ she said. ‘And at the moment the person at the top of our hit list is Warden Cross. You know where he is?’

‘Dead,’ I said, remembering his ravaged face, one eye blinking at me as the wheezers overwhelmed him. ‘I killed him.’

Panettierre didn’t say anything, just ran a hand over the jar.

‘That gives us one less lead to follow,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘Okay, then tell me about the liquid, the black blood that’s inside you, inside the creatures. What do you call it? Nectar?’

‘That’s what Furnace calls it,’ I said, taking it slow,
trying to remember what I knew. ‘They never told us what it was, only what it does. It messes with your genes, making you stronger and bigger. And it keeps you alive when you’ve been injured; it can patch up wounds, heal broken bones. It can make you immortal, too. That’s how he’s still alive, Furnace.’ The poison in my blood seemed to know I was talking about it, my pulse quickening as it blasted through my system, an animal waiting to be unleashed. ‘But it’s more than that. It alters your mind, too. Strips away all the weakness. And most people, when it comes down to it, that’s all that’s there underneath – weakness. When that’s gone, when all the pathetic emotions are gone, all that’s left is anger, hatred. That’s what those creatures are – they’re what’s left when you take away everything human.’

‘But you’re different,’ Panettierre said. ‘You can talk, you know what’s happened to you. How is that?’

I tried and failed to shrug my shoulders.

‘I refused to forget my name,’ I said. And there was no other way of explaining it.

Neither of us spoke again for what could have been a full minute, and I was the one to break the silence, if only to reassure myself that time hadn’t stopped.

‘Let me out of here,’ I said. ‘I can help you. We both want the same thing. I’ll find Alfred Furnace, and I’ll kill him. It’s the only chance there is to end this.’

The colonel’s shoulders seemed to sink and I heard her sigh. She lifted a hand towards the machine, hesitated for a second, then flicked a switch. I heard a motor start up inside it, the bell jar chattering like joke false teeth.
Something tugged in the skin of my arm, the discomfort of a needle buried deep in my flesh. I struggled, but I may as well have been paralysed from the neck down – it was just like in my dream.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ she said over the din. ‘It’s just too dangerous for you to be released right now. We’re here to look after you, Alex. That’s my priority, to make sure you’re okay.’ That uncomfortable smile appeared on her face again. It showed too many teeth. She patted me on the top of the head as if I were a dog. ‘And at the moment the best place for you is right here, in bed.’

There was a sucking sound, and suddenly the tube leading to the bell jar turned black, piping nectar out of me. It spurted into it, clinging to the sides, steaming, filling it fast.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, struggling pathetically.

‘You don’t need to worry about it,’ Panettierre replied, stroking my hair. ‘We’re just taking a sample of the nectar from you. We only want to run a few tests on it, try to find the best way for us to help you, to cure you.’

‘Losing the nectar will kill me,’ I growled. The woman’s smile widened for a moment, and I wondered if it was meant to comfort me. It didn’t. It made her look like a shark, those teeth, and the glint in her eyes, imprinted on my retinas.

‘It will make you better,’ she whispered as she walked to the door. ‘Hush now, sleep for a while, get your strength back. Remember, we’re here to watch over you. You’re safe now, I promise. We won’t let anything bad happen to you.’

Even as the threads of reality began to come loose, the room growing dark as if being buried beneath a mountain of sand, I could sense how difficult those last words were for her.

She was lying.

I died in that orchard
.

Furnace’s voice rang in my ears as the nectar drained from my arteries. All I could do was watch as the black fluid cascaded into that jar, my racing pulse emptying my body of the life force that fuelled it.

The edges of the room began to crowd with shadows. My head thrashed back and forth as I tried to stay awake. I knew that if I let the darkness take me now then I’d never see the light again. But the more nectar that spilled from me, the more the world began to fade. I tried to talk, to plead, but Panettierre had already gone.

I died, but it wasn’t the end
, he continued, his words seeming to push the last of the light away. The room flickered, the nightmare orchard flashing over reality for a fraction of a second, leaving skeletal trees imprinted like veins over my retinas.

I blinked and the scene reappeared, every leaf, every decomposing apple, every feather on every bird picked out in perfect detail, so much so that it seemed more real than the room I was in. I could even feel the breeze on
my face, a cold zephyr like a dead man’s breath, and it was this sensation that finally made me surrender. I blinked again and I was back in the hospital. I turned, saw the jar almost full, then I closed my eyes, Furnace’s words ringing through me as though my whole body was now hollow, his whisper carrying me into unconsciousness.

Death is never the end
.

It was as if I had woken from a deep sleep – the cell, the bed, the woman called Panettierre nothing but a blurred memory which faded away after a couple of blinks.

Only I knew that
this
was the dream world, the nightmare.

The orchard around me was impossibly clear, focusing a little more every time I visited. There was sound now, too, the creak and crack of distant branches, the rustle of the leaves in the breeze and the coarse caws of the crows as they abandoned their feast of apples and crowded greedily around the boy on the tree.

No time had passed since I had last been here. Heavy night suffocated the moonlit orchard as before. Furnace’s eyes were open but only just, looking at me as if I’d never gone away. The flow of blood had all but stopped, leaving his skin as pale as bone. His chest fluttered, as weak as a newborn bird, fighting for every breath.

I didn’t expect to be able to move, but when I tried to turn my head I found that I was no longer completely
paralysed. My legs were still rooted to the ground, my torso as stiff as wood, but my hands were now free, and when I lifted them in front of my face I saw that the nectar-grown blades had gone. My hands looked like they had before I’d gone to prison – the normal hands of a normal kid. I stretched my arms out towards Alfred Furnace but he was too far away to reach. His eyes swam in and out of focus as he fought to see me.

‘Where are we?’ I asked, my voice startling the birds, causing some to take flight into the safety of the branches. The braver ones ignored me, looking round briefly before dipping their beaks back into the blood-soaked soil. But when I clapped my hands, the noise like a gunshot, even those scattered in a flurry of raucous cawing.

‘This is a dream, right?’ I said, as much to myself as to Furnace.

The boy shook his head, the effort seeming to drain him of the last of his energy. His lips opened, words tumbling out in that strange guttural language that I could somehow understand.

To you, it is a dream
, he said.
To me, it is a memory
.

Even here I could feel my body grow weak, and I remembered that back in the world, the
real
world, I was being drained of the nectar that kept me alive. But almost as soon as I sensed it, the dream numbed my panic. The real world didn’t matter here. There was only the orchard, and Alfred Furnace.

‘A memory?’ I said. ‘You mean this actually happened? When?’

A long, long time ago.
The boy spat out a bullet of crimson phlegm, his entire body spasming.
They thought I killed my brother
.
But I didn’t.
He
did it – the stranger who lives in the orchard.

‘The stranger?’ I looked around nervously. ‘Who do you mean? Is he still here?’

Quiet
, hissed Furnace.
He’ll hear you. And you don’t want that. This may only be a dream for you, but he still has power here.

‘So the orchard is real?’ I tried again.

It was once real. This is a bad place, it always has been. Battles were fought here many centuries ago, countless lives taken, countless souls crushed. The soil here is tainted, the fruit of these trees nourished on blood. That is why he is here.
He paused, his eyes swivelling as his thoughts took him somewhere else.
We were told never to come to the orchard, that it was cursed. But we dared each other, we came, and my brother paid the price. Now it is my turn. They have left me here for the wolves but the stranger will get me first. I do not have long.

‘Tell me what to do,’ I said. ‘I can help.’

It is too late
, Furnace replied.
The boy I once was died a long, long time ago. These events have already happened, they cannot be changed. But it is important that you see for yourself.

‘It’s not too late—’

Furnace shot me a look of white-eyed terror and the rest of the sentence dried up in my throat.

Hush
, he hissed.
He is here.

The temperature in the orchard dipped, as though
the forest had been submerged in ice water. Even in the dream the cold clawed into my bones, making me feel like I had never in my life experienced warmth. The air grew thin, stripped of oxygen, yet at the same time the darkness seemed to gain weight, an invisible fist grinding me into the dirt. As I gasped for air I felt something swell inside my chest, a feeling a million times worse than death, so awful that I would have chosen to leave the world right here and now, for ever, rather than suffer it any longer.

It was terror, I realised, the kind reserved for nightmares, when your mind has no defence against the dark. It was the most primitive, most powerful emotion of all, and I had never, ever felt it like this. This wasn’t just a fear of losing my life, but a fear of losing my soul.

I scanned the orchard, frantically searching for the source of my panic. The gnarled trunks of the apple trees circled us like the bars of a cage. Between them were pockets of night, so utterly black that it was as if nothing existed beyond, as though to step out of this clearing would be to step right out of life itself, into the abyss.

My eyes fell on the void that separated the two trees closest to where Furnace had been crucified. There was nothing there, at least nothing that I could see. And yet I knew that something stood in that spot, shrouded in shadow, watching us. I could feel it, radiating coldness and darkness like an inverse sun, dead eyes scouring the orchard.

My heart lurched, my mind screaming, every fibre of
my body railing against the thing in the woods.
It’s a dream
, my mind howled, but there was no fooling myself. It was real, completely and utterly real. Nothing in my entire life had been more certain. Whatever stood there was real, and it was evil.

More than that, I realised that this thing was trapped here, amongst the blood and the filth of this orchard. Don’t ask me how I knew that, I just did. Some truths are instinctive, absolute. They have to be, because your survival depends upon getting as far away from them as possible.