Furnace 5 - Execution (9 page)

‘Impostor or not, Alfred Furnace is the only lead they have. They’ve dug up loads of stuff about him – this is military intelligence we’re talking about, and not just ours, either, the whole world is joining in. There’s not much about his early life, but apparently by the turn of the century – the nineteenth, that is – he had come into a vast amount of money, set himself up as a duke or something. He was famous for his army, led them in the November Uprising against the Russian Empire in 1830, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and in the January Uprising twenty years later, too.’ He paused, swallowing, his eyes flitting up to the window over my head. ‘Y’ know, I’ve heard about all this stuff. We did it in history. It’s real.’

‘He got about a bit, didn’t he?’ I said. ‘How come he wasn’t made a king or anything?’

‘Hungary was still part of the Austrian Empire then. They didn’t have their own king. Besides, Alfred Furnace was a peasant. As far as we can tell, anyway. But he was certainly as powerful as one. His soldiers were feared across Europe, across the world.’

‘Let me guess: super fast, super strong, more animal than human.’

‘You got it,’ Zee said. ‘And famous for wearing black on the battlefield. But they were an elite group, never more than a handful of them.’

‘I don’t remember hearing his name at school, though,’ I said.

‘That’s because he wasn’t called Furnace, not back then. Alfred Furnace is a translation of his Hungarian name, Alfréd Kazán.’

‘Kazán? Sounds like a magician.’

‘Yeah, and people thought he was, too. Black magic and stuff. Anyway, he had this terrible reputation for bloodshed and murder on the battlefield all the way through the 1800s, and then he just disappears, vanishes into thin air. The records, what few there are, assume he died.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘No, he didn’t. He just moved.’

‘Where?’ I asked, trying to stretch the cramped muscles of my legs, the wire holding me tight. ‘Here?’

‘No, to Austria, Vienna. Except he told the authorities he was his own grandson, Heinrich.’

‘Tricky,’ I said.

‘Yeah, you could say that,’ grinned Zee. ‘Anyway, he had connections with the university, built his own college up there. Any of this sounding familiar?’

‘Should it?’ I asked. Zee’s smile flashed back for a second, uncertain.

‘It’s like the plot of Frankenstein,’ he said. ‘Furnace got into trouble, was accused of meddling with stuff that shouldn’t be meddled with. Some sort of eugenics, they thought; selective breeding. Only it wasn’t that, it was nectar. There’s nothing specific in any of the papers or anything, just that he was pretty much forced out of the city. If you ask me, Vienna’s when he started trying to reproduce the nectar artificially, rather than just letting
people drink his blood or whatever. I guess he couldn’t make many soldiers by just feeding them his own nectar so he wanted to replicate it, find a way to generate it, maybe make it even more powerful.’

I imagined how much of his own supply it would have taken to build an army. It must have been a constant drain on him.

‘I think that’s why he went there in the first place,’ Zee continued. ‘Because it was like the scientific capital of the world.’

‘So what happened next?’

Zee shook his head.

‘That’s where the trail runs cold. There are dispatches that mention a Kazán during the First World War, in Germany, but they’re too vague to confirm anything. He must have been in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, though. He’s not mentioned by name in any history books, but I think Hitler and those other creeps gave Furnace the chance to work on the nectar. I think they recruited him, charged him with creating the ultimate super soldier.’

‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ I said, remembering what the warden had told me, what he had shown me. ‘And when they lost the war Furnace came here, changed his name from Kazán, set himself up as a businessman, opened the prison, built his tower, and carried on perfecting the nectar.’

‘Bingo,’ said Zee. ‘Except, of course, they don’t believe he’s three hundred years old. They’re working on the theory that the man who built the prison, the man
behind the attacks, is a distant relative of Alfréd Kazán. There’s enough of a paper trail to link the Furnace estate with funds deposited in Kazán family accounts around the world. But apparently the actual company records are so messed up and complicated that they don’t think they’ll ever know for sure. In short, they’ve no idea who they’re looking for; the only thing they’re sure of is that it’s
not
Alfred Furnace – I mean Kazán – the original one. Ironic, don’t you think?’

There was a moment of quiet while I tried to digest what I’d heard.

‘They managed to find all that out in a few hours?’ I asked. ‘That’s pretty good going.’

Zee glanced up at the window again, then over his shoulder at the camera, all the time chewing on something.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘It’s not been a few hours, Alex,’ he said. ‘You’ve been drifting in and out for four days now.’

‘Four days?’ I said. ‘How’s that possible?’

‘They’ve drained you of almost all the nectar. It’s part of their plan to try and find out what this stuff is, and how your body copes without it. You’ve only got a trickle left in you.’ He pointed to the side of a room, to an IV bag filled with crimson liquid. ‘Plus plenty of that.’

‘Blood?’

‘Yeah. They’re seeing what happens when you replace the nectar with normal blood.’

‘It’ll kill me,’ I said. I didn’t know that for sure but I
felt it. My body was used to the nectar, putting blood in my veins would be like putting water in a car’s petrol tank. Eventually the engine would just splutter and die.

‘I know,’ Zee said, nodding slowly. His voice lowered to a whisper again. ‘They’ve already killed off dozens of rats, berserkers too, by doing the same thing. They’re butchers in here, and that Panettierre is the worst of them. They’ve dissected them, boiled them, burned them alive, shot them full of acid, hacked off their limbs. I’ve seen it, Alex. They made me watch because I was in the prison, because I saw for myself what the warden was doing.’

He shot a look back at the camera, then turned his sad, tired eyes to me.

‘But it won’t be long before they try and cut me to pieces too. I made the mistake of telling them I was immune to the nectar.’ I remembered, back in the tunnels beneath the prison, the warden had been about to throw Zee in the incinerator because his system didn’t respond to the nectar. ‘You should have seen their eyes light up, like it was Christmas. They told me I was safe, because I was human, but I know bull when I hear it.’

He swore, crashing back on his chair, staring at the wall.

‘They’ve got Simon, too,’ he said softly. ‘He’s in the same ward as me, in a cell. They don’t call it a cell, they call it our quarters, but they keep the doors locked. Panettierre’s keeping him alive for the same reason she’s keeping you alive, because he can talk and everything,
because he’s still, y’ know, human. But he’s on her list, I’ve seen it.’

‘List?’ I asked, trying to put a face to the name Simon, pulling vague strands of memory loose from the confusion in my head – a boy with silver eyes and one overgrown arm, a boy who saved my life back in the tower, when I was fighting the warden. Zee nodded.

‘Yeah, they’ve got this list of test subjects, mainly rats and berserkers, but you’re on it too, and Simon. You’re both marked as expendable. They don’t care if they kill you.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I muttered.

‘Okay,’ Zee said, leaning forward again. ‘I bet you don’t know why they’re trying to harness the power of the nectar.’

‘So they can stop Furnace,’ I replied. ‘So they can find a cure, save the world.’

‘After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve seen, you honestly think that’s why?’

I frowned, shrugging imperceptibly beneath my restraints. The ache in my head was growing. There was a clatter from outside, the door squeaking as it opened to admit two armed guards and a wiry, redheaded man in a suit.

‘That’s your time up,’ said the man. Zee looked from him to me, reaching out and squeezing my arm as he got to his feet.

‘But they’re still looking for Furnace, right?’ I said.

‘I think they’ve given it up as a dead end,’ he said. ‘I told you, they only care about the nectar. And they care
about the nectar because they want it for themselves.’

‘For themselves? I asked. ‘What do you mean? Why do they want it?’

Zee shook his head sadly.

‘Because they’re going to create an army of their own.’

The door slammed shut, the lock mechanisms sliding into place, leaving me more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

It was worse than when I’d been in solitary confinement, miles of rock in every direction except one and a massive steel hatch over that. Even though there was a shaft of pure sunlight blazing into the room, even though I could hear birdsong from somewhere outside, even though I knew there were people all around me, I felt truly and utterly isolated.

At least back in the prison, buried beneath the ground with the blacksuits and rats and wheezers, it had been a clear case of us and them. We were the good guys, the warden and his freaks were the villains. But here I had no idea what was going on. These soldiers, these scientists, they were supposed to be on our side. We should have been working together to try and find Furnace and bring down his army.

Instead, I was a prisoner again, bound in chains and locked in a cell. Not only that, I was a specimen, too;
just a hunk of meat for them to cut open and study. The warden had butchered me, but the truth was he had wanted to patch me up again, make me better than I had been before. Here they would murder me and call it science. And if Zee was right then they weren’t going to kill me in order to find a cure. They weren’t even going to kill me to work out a way of stopping Furnace’s freaks.

No, they were going to kill me so that they could create monsters of their own.

I pictured what would happen if the world’s militaries got hold of the nectar, if they started to use it on the youngest of their soldiers. All those kids pumped full of poison, driven insane, turned into killing machines. It would be like hell on earth, tens of thousands of rats unleashed on the battlefield, tearing each other – and everyone else – to shreds. The generals, the politicians, they’d think they could control it, harness its power, but they’d be wrong. They’d bring about the destruction of the world far more quickly than Alfred Furnace ever could.

Maybe that was Furnace’s plan all along. Maybe he knew the army would capture some of his rats, his berserkers, that they’d discover the nectar. And it didn’t take an evil genius to work out that they’d try to use it. Human nature was human nature. If that happened, if the nectar became an official weapon of war, then Furnace could sit back and watch the world’s superpowers do his work for him.

I tugged at my restraints, frustration bubbling through
my veins, every muscle silently screaming. The chair rattled, but the shipping wire didn’t budge. I studied the IV bag that was feeding blood into me. If it was having any effect I couldn’t feel it, other than the aching sense of weakness that sat over my whole body. Blood wouldn’t keep me alive. Quite the opposite.

Death wasn’t an option, though. Not now, not yet. Even though the thought of falling into an endless, dreamless sleep was almost too wonderful to resist. There was too much to do. If the army didn’t believe Furnace was alive, if they weren’t going after him, then I had to do it myself. I’d made a promise. I would find him, and I would kill him. Then I would have the rest of eternity to sleep.

I flexed the stubs of my left hand, those charred fingers opening and closing. It looked monstrous, but at least the nectar was trying to repair me, studying the blueprint of my genes and building me a new limb. Why was I growing fingers this time when before I’d grown a blade? Perhaps the nectar possessed some intelligence, giving me what would be of most use to me. Before, when I’d lost my right arm on the car-park roof, I’d been mid-combat – fighting tooth and nail with the blacksuits and the helicopters which rained fire from overhead. Back then a blade was exactly what I needed, a weapon when I was defenceless.

Now, though, I wasn’t in immediate danger – not the same life-and-death kind anyway. Maybe the nectar sensed that what I needed most now wasn’t a weapon but a tool, a hand. True, it wasn’t exactly perfect; I’d
never play the piano again, but I’d never been able to play the piano anyway. Still, I might just be able to hold a cup of tea.

If I ever got out of here alive.

I heard an engine start up outside the window, accelerating out of earshot. I wondered where exactly I was. It was a hospital that was being used as a military base, or a military base that was being used as a hospital, that was as much as I knew. Either way, that meant hundreds of soldiers, all armed with machine guns, plus helicopters, trucks, probably even tanks. But compared to Furnace Penitentiary this place might as well have been a nursing home for the elderly with walls made of polystyrene and fences woven from silk. I was above ground, after all, and those soldiers were only human – nine pints of blood wrapped in paper-thin skin, so fragile and so breakable that it was almost a joke.