Furnace 5 - Execution (5 page)

I ordered myself to wake up. I just needed to be away from this thing, this unspeakable terror that made the end of life seem so welcome. I yelled at myself, trying to pump adrenaline into my system, trying to shunt myself out of the nightmare.

It was working. The tops of the trees were splintering, dissolving into fragments that soared up into the night. The orchard began to flex and bulge, breaking apart, pieces of dream world scattering like scraps of burning paper.

Don’t leave me
, said the boy, Alfred Furnace.
Please don’t leave me with him
.

But nothing on earth could keep me there, not with that soulless entity between the trees, watching us with eyes as black as pitch – a force so malevolent that it made Warden Cross and Alfred Furnace both look like angels. I put the boy’s pleas out of my head, pushed up from the dream like a diver breaking from deep water, desperate to reach the surface.

I had almost made it when the stranger stepped from between the trees, bringing the darkness with him – a silhouette of flickering shadow who reached out for Furnace with one impossibly long arm, and for me with the other; who fixed me with an invisible grin as I rose from the dream; who watched me go with an expression of wicked delight, and whose silent, deafening laughter followed me all the way back to the waking world.

I opened my eyes with the echo of that insane howling still reverberating amongst my shattered thoughts.

I blinked away the last few scraps of sleep to see that I was inside a large, noisy room, the walls and floor covered in pristine white tiles, so bright that it could have been built that day. It looked like a hospital operating theatre, only much bigger. I was still lying down, wires and sensors strapped to almost every inch of me, countless needles taped beneath my skin. Tight coils of shipping wire pinned my legs and my chest to some sort of metal table. Even before I attempted to struggle free I knew I wouldn’t be able to.

My arms were exposed, held in vice-like clamps either side of the table. I looked at my right hand, the blade of the nectar-blackened limb longer and sharper than ever. I glanced at my left, seeing that the nectar was still at work there. The stump of my left hand had split into three stub-like protrusions. They weren’t fingers, not recognisably anyway. They looked more like the shoots of a plant jutting from the charred flesh. Each
was no longer than a big toe, but when I wiggled them they all moved.

It didn’t make any sense. Had the nectar been trying to grow me a new hand? Could it do that? Why hadn’t it happened with my right arm? There were too many questions and none of them had answers. The transformation must have started when I was unconscious, before they drained the nectar from me. Maybe the nectar behaved differently when you were asleep, when you weren’t in the middle of a fight for your life.

I tried to get a better look, but it was hopeless. I felt like the boy from my dream, Alfred Furnace, trussed up and left to bleed out. It was as though my body had been drained almost to the point of death and I was now running on fumes. The blackened, nectar-filled veins beneath my skin were nowhere to be seen, and my flesh had paled to a sickly grey colour. There was only a trickle of blood left inside me, just enough to keep my heart pumping. Every beat of my pulse felt like it might be the last.

I turned my head, trying to make sense of the room I was in. All around me was chaos. Rows of tables like the one I was on extended in every direction. There must have been a hundred or more. Half were occupied, mostly by rats dressed in the tattered remains of their prison overalls. There was nothing left in them of the children they had once been – before they had been contaminated with Furnace’s new nectar. They thrashed against their restraints, their blackshot eyes full of hatred, hunger, so hungry for blood that their teeth gnawed at
their own lips and tongues, pools of poison spilling beneath them.

I heard a guttural bark and swung my head round to look at the far side of the room. Chained to the wall was a berserker. It stood head and shoulders over the soldiers around it, its rage radiating from it in waves of heat but its face that of a child. Like me, like all of us, it was bound tight, mummified in a cocoon of shipping wire. The only thing it had to defend itself with was its voice.

On the table next to me was another figure, a blacksuit, although he was no longer wearing the uniform of his master. Scalpel handles rose up from his bare chest, dozens of them, like a miniature graveyard. He looked as though he was out cold, maybe dead, his unblinking silver eyes staring at the skylights above him through which sunlight dripped like honey.

I turned my attention away from the freaks to the other people in the room, the ones who weren’t tied up. There must have been thirty of them. A few were dressed in black combat suits and armed with machine guns, but most were wearing long white coats or surgeons’ gowns. And it was these men and women, not the monsters, who filled me with fear, who made me want to rip away my restraints and run.

Because they all had gas masks on.

A few of the scientists were monitoring machines whose blinking displays painted the walls with light. Others walked amongst the forklift trucks lined up against one side of the room or supervised transparent
vats of bubbling black fluid, burning red stars sparkling in their depths. Tubes stretched out from these vats, connected to several of the rats, pumping them dry, leaving nothing but husks. Most of the gas-masked scientists, though, moved between the tables, surgical equipment gripped in their gloved hands, their eyes bright behind misted visors.

I sensed movement above me and I realised the room had an observation balcony, a narrow, glass-walled walkway that ran around all four sides. There were more people up there watching, wearing a mix of suits and military uniforms – not camouflage, but dress gear that bristled with medals and insignias. The phrase ‘top brass’ popped into my head from nowhere, although I didn’t really know what it meant. I managed to open my mouth and call to them.

‘Hey,’ less a word than a grunt, but it obviously did the trick because an intercom crackled, a faint voice hissing out of it.

‘Fourteen is awake,’ it said. There was a pause, indistinct voices, then, ‘Begin the procedure.’

I felt like a puppet whose strings have been cut. The only parts of my body that still seemed to function were my eyes, which turned in their sockets as the mob in the room approached. I could hear their wheezing breaths, heavy with excitement, and their movements were staggered and anxious. A sense of déjà vu sat like a boulder of ice in my stomach.

The closest one reached me, and through the mask I realised it wasn’t a wheezer but Colonel Panettierre. She
reached out with a white-gloved hand and rested it on my chest.

‘Don’t panic,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘The masks are for your protection, not ours. We’ve drained you of about ninety per cent of your blood supply, and we’re worried that without the nectar you’ll have almost no immunity against infection. This room is part of the hospital. It’s where we’re going to try to make you better.’

I knew exactly what kind of room this was. The infirmary back in the prison had been a hospital too.

‘Zee,’ Panettierre said, giving a thumbs-up to the balcony overhead. ‘You want to have a word?’

The intercom flicked on again, nothing but static for a second. Then I heard a voice.

‘Alex?’ it said. ‘Just do what they say, don’t fight them. I think they’re trying to help. Don’t fight them, or they’ll kill—’

There was a clatter, a squeal, then the intercom cut off. I tried to look up, peering through blurred vision to see a shape behind the glass above me, a boy amongst the soldiers. I blinked, my eyelids so heavy they almost wouldn’t open again, and for a second I saw a kid that I recognised. The kid Panettierre had called Zee. There were memories connected with him, too deep for me to make any sense of. But they existed, I was sure of it.

He banged on the soundproof glass, screaming silently at me, and by the time my head had dropped again he was already being hauled away.

‘He knows what’s best for you, Alex; what’s best for you and your friend Simon.’

I scanned the room, looking for the face that matched Simon’s name, but I could barely remember what he looked like. Panettierre removed her hand from my chest, holding it out to somebody beside her. One of the other gas masks passed her something, metal glinting in the sunlight.

In the silence that followed I almost fell back into sleep, dark trees seeming to sprout from the bodies in front of me, spreading like a web of cancerous arteries across the ceiling. I had a flash of the young Alfred Furnace, and of the dark figure who was still mid-step from his pocket of shadow, and that pumped enough adrenaline into my heart to shove the dream away. Better here than there. Better anywhere than in that orchard.

‘This will be painful, Alex,’ Panettierre said. ‘And for that I apologise. But a cure can often be more painful than the disease; that’s simply the way of things.’

The scientists moved in, staring at me like I was the main course at a banquet. I felt like it too, like a spit-roasted pig, trussed up and ready to be carved. I wanted to howl at them, to lash out, to show them I wasn’t some carnival freak show, but the simple act of moving seemed as impossible as leaping over an ocean.

‘Are you ready?’ Panettierre asked, placing the object in her hand against my shoulder. It was a scalpel. I shook my head, opened my mouth to protest, but before I could answer she pushed the surgical knife deep into my flesh. It didn’t hurt, no more than a mosquito bite, anyway. I’d experienced far greater pain, far more severe injuries. But at least most of the time I’d been able to
fight back. Tied up here, unable to defend myself, felt infinitely worse – it was just like being back in the tunnels beneath Furnace.

‘Keep your eye on his heart rate,’ Panettierre said to one of the other scientists as she drew the blade in a tight semi-circle over my shoulder. I could just about twist my head round far enough to see the wound, wide open but bloodless. The woman smiled down at me, although through the visor it looked more like a leer, her lips pulled back too far. ‘You’re doing great, Alex. It won’t be much longer.’ She turned to the group of scientists who were all eagerly monitoring the machines beside me. ‘Any change?’

Somebody muttered something back to her and she nodded, obviously pleased. She pushed the knife deeper, so deep that I felt it grind against my shoulder joint. I winced, more at the thought than at the pain. She placed her other hand on my chest, making shushing noises.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I spat back. ‘Couldn’t you have done this while I was asleep?’

‘We need to gauge your reaction,’ she said. ‘Physiological and psychological. Besides, I don’t think it does hurt that much. Be brave, it’s going to be fine.’

She pulled the scalpel free, handing it to somebody else. The scientists clustered around me, all staring at the wound, their piggy eyes greedy and unblinking. They weren’t looking at a boy, at a human. All I was to them was a science experiment. A
specimen
.

Across the room, something screamed, the noise of a
rabbit caught in a snare. I tilted my head back as far as it would go, everything upside down, and saw another group of scientists surrounding a rat six or seven tables away. The creature writhed wildly, nectar spilling from between its lips. It was no longer human. It wasn’t even an animal any more – it had no desire to eat, or to sleep. It would live a short life of violence before the nectar deserted it, and then it would simply stop existing. If anything, the rat was like a virus, living only to spread to another host.

And yet it still wore those overalls, torn and bloodied but recognisable. Just days ago this rat had been a prisoner inside Furnace Penitentiary, a kid like me wanting nothing more than to survive, to find a way out.

Be careful what you wish for
, I thought.

The scientists around the rat turned and nodded at each other, then called for a soldier. One of the camouflaged figures strolled over, spoke briefly with one of them, then without hesitating placed his pistol against the rat’s temple and pulled the trigger. There was an eruption of dark liquid, mist spraying against their visors, the creature’s movements growing less frenzied, settling into sporadic twitches.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Panettierre, forcing my head forward until the image was out of sight. ‘Some things are broken past the point of fixing.’ She muttered an order and somebody passed her an instrument. It caught the light, leaving a fragment of sunshine in my eye, and for a moment I thought it was another blade. ‘Right, I’m giving him two millilitres directly into the
wound. Pay attention to BP and A-T counts. Everything set?’

Not a blade, then – a syringe.

There were murmurs of assent, and Panettierre slid the needle into my skin. As soon as the liquid entered my body I knew what it was. Nectar. Not much – a thimbleful – but enough to turn my thoughts to thunder. I watched that trickle of red-flecked poison vanish into the hole Panettierre had carved into my shoulder, a single black bubble bursting from my flesh.