“I know,” he said eventually. “It’s not the first time someone has come back.”
“What happened to him?”
Donovan turned slowly, then slid down the bars until he was sitting on the rocky floor. He ran his fingers through his hair, then let his head fall gently into his hands.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “No one here does. It’s only happened a few times, five or six maybe. I don’t know, maybe more. Most of the time people get taken, they never return, they just disappear. Dead, most likely. Sometimes, though . . .”
“They come back,” I finished unnecessarily.
“The first few times I saw them I thought they were creatures, animals. Like monkeys or something. They were brought in just like Monty was last night. I never saw what happened before, they were always out of sight. I just thought they whaled on the inmates a little, taught them a lesson.
“Then one time I saw this kid get taken. Real nasty one. He was young, but he had all these tattoos of guns and knives and death and things, all over him. Gang ink, you know? Well, a few days after he was taken, the blood watch brought in this monster, like last night. They dragged him to a cell on this level, only a few away from ours. Walked right past the bars, and I saw these things weren’t no monkeys.”
He wiped his eyes and I saw he was crying.
“Its skin was all ripped and stitched, all bulging in weird places with all those muscles underneath. But I could still see those tattoos. It was him, that kid, no doubt about it.”
“But what happens to them?” I repeated. “Monty was taken two nights ago, what the hell could they have done to him to change him like that?”
“Don’t know,” was his reply. “Don’t want to neither. Only one way of finding out for sure, if you follow me, and by that time it’s you who’s ripping through your old cellmate.”
“But why bring them back? Just to scare us?”
“To scare us, to kill us, to give us something to talk about in the morning. How the hell should I know? This is Furnace, Alex, they can do what they like.” He paused for a minute, then lashed out, smashing his fist against the bars hard enough to draw blood. “Christ, that thing killed Kevin. I mean, it tore him to pieces.”
I saw my chance and took it.
“You still sure you want to stay here?” I asked. Donovan looked up at me, his dark eyes boring right into mine.
“Can you promise me that river exists?” he whispered.
“No, but I’m pretty sure.”
“Can you promise me it will get us out of here?”
“No, of course not.”
“Can you promise me they won’t catch us?”
“No, Donovan. I can’t promise anything, except that dying while trying to break free is better than being killed by one of those things.”
“Or becoming one of them,” he added. He sucked the blood from his knuckle, deep in thought, then turned his face toward the ceiling. “Okay, I’m in.”
BY THE TIME we’d made it downstairs we had a plan. Now that Donovan had finally accepted the possibility of escape, he was on fire, his mind blasting out idea after idea in hushed tones as we made our way to the trough room. I could barely get a word in edgeways, but it was a relief to finally hear someone else as optimistic as me.
Zee met us at our table and we hunched together over our plates of mush, doing our best not to look too much like coconspirators. After a quick check to make sure nobody was in earshot, I filled Zee in on the details. He was as surprised as I was to see Donovan’s change of heart.
“It’s about time, big guy,” he said through a grin.
“We’re going back in to scope out Room Two,” I whispered.
“With a light this time, presumably?” said Zee.
“Yeah, I’ll keep my helmet on,” I replied. “I may be an idiot, but I do learn from my mistakes.”
“What about the guard?” Zee asked. “I mean, he nearly caught you before.”
“That’s my job,” added Donovan, licking his lips and leaning in even farther. “I’ll distract him. Won’t give you long, but should be enough time to work out what’s in there.”
“Distract him how?” said Zee. “Do the old feeling sick trick?”
“No, I’ve got something a little more dramatic planned,” he said, flashing us a look halfway between a grin and a grimace. “Just stay by the door in the chipping room, you’ll soon see. Five minutes, that’s about all you’ve got. Make it count.”
“We will,” I said. Zee nodded, then his brow suddenly creased.
“Hang on, we?” he asked, looking frantically between Donovan and me. “Surely it’s better if just you go. I mean, not that I wouldn’t do it, but isn’t it twice the risk if two of us break into the room?”
“But it will take twice as long to search it if it’s just me,” I responded. “Besides, I want someone to keep me company in the hole if we get caught.”
“Alex is right, Zee, it’s a big room and there’s probably still rocks everywhere. If you’re gonna find where that noise is coming from, you need as many pairs of eyes as possible. Hell, if you don’t wanna do it, you can always distract the blacksuits instead.”
Zee blanched and shook his head.
“Right,” I said, pushing my untouched breakfast across the table and cracking my fingers. “Let’s do it.”
FORTUNATELY, DONOVAN AND I had been assigned to chipping duty that morning. Zee was scheduled for the laundry, but Donovan told him to ignore the duty roster.
“People don’t always stick to their jobs,” he explained. “The guards make sure everyone on the list for chipping is there, but they don’t check to see if there’s an extra body in the halls—they figure no one would be stupid enough to do this if they didn’t have to, y’know?”
We followed the usual routine, selecting our equipment and marching like drones into Room Three. Zee and I stayed as close to the entrance as possible, but Donovan made his way toward a group of Skulls who had already started hacking at the wall. I wondered what the hell he was doing, and prayed it wouldn’t be anything too dangerous. He turned and winked at me, then nodded toward the ceiling prop that was wedged between him and the Skulls.
“Oh no,” I said. “He wouldn’t.”
He did. With a swing of his pick he smashed the wooden prop into pieces. The Skulls all leaped back, yelling at Donovan to stop as a curtain of dust and rubble fell down from the unsupported ceiling. He swung his pick again, sweeping it upward and letting go of the handle. It struck the ceiling where the prop had been, dislodging a massive chunk of rock that crashed to the floor, narrowly missing the nearest Skull.
By now everybody was watching with terror in their eyes, including me. Donovan reached down and picked up a melonsized piece of rock, then lobbed it toward the Skull who’d almost been flattened. It struck him square in the nose, and he crumpled earthward.
“Cave-in!” yelled Donovan at the top of his voice. “Man down!”
The call worked. The blacksuit ran into the chamber so quickly he was almost a blur. He dashed across to where the Skull was lying, leaning over him and watching the blood drip from his nose. The boy was out cold, and none of his friends seemed able to pluck up the courage to speak. Donovan looked at me from the other side of the hall and mouthed something: “Make it count.”
“Time to go,” I said, running for the door. I didn’t wait to see if Zee was following me, just flung my pick onto the equipment room floor and dashed to the wooden boards sealing off Room Two. The bottom board was still unfastened, the missing bolt obviously unnoticed. Pulling it out as far as I could, I hissed for Zee to get inside. With a quiet curse he did, squeezing his body through the gap. Once clear, he used his foot to keep the board away from the wall while I clambered in.
“Piece of cake,” he said, his voice shaking.
The hard part was over and I breathed a sigh of relief, staring into the mouth of the abyss that had so terrified me yesterday. We stumbled forward a few paces
, keeping our lights off until the equipment room was out of sight. Halfway along the tunnel we heard movement behind us and ducked down. Through the gaps between the boards we saw the blacksuit dragging the unconscious Skull toward the yard, and waited for him to vanish before pressing on.
“Man, I hear it,” said Zee as we reached the end of the tunnel. It was pitch-black ahead, but the faint roar filled the darkness. Once again I panicked, thinking that the sound was a growl from the warden’s dogs, or the wheeze of a gas mask. But when I flicked on my helmet lamp the only thing it illuminated was rock.
“Jesus, look at this place,” Zee whispered, switching on his light. The twin beams did practically nothing to combat the dense blackness of the room, the pale tendrils of light reaching no more than a few meters before surrendering to the shadows.
“Five minutes,” I said. “That’s all we’ve got.”
“Well, far as I can tell, it’s coming from that direction,” Zee said, turning his helmet and pointing a trail of light toward the back left-hand side of the cavern. The roar seemed to come from everywhere, but I took Zee’s word for it. My hearing never was my strong point.
We made our way across the cavern, forced to scale the massive boulders that littered the floor. Every now and again I’d see a shard of white, or a suspicious stain on the floor, but fortunately the bodies of the kids who’d died here had been removed. Once again I wondered if their souls still remained, but quickly put the thought out of my head.
I wasn’t sure how many minutes it took us to cross the hall. Too many, I knew that much. More than once we had to double back after reaching a blockage, or duck under a treacherous archway formed by unstable blocks of stone. But with each step we took, the roar got louder and more distinct, the sound becoming less like a growl, more like the thunder of a waterfall. The closer we got, the fresher the air became. I could have sworn that there was even a fine mist suspended in the cavern, one that clung to our skin and gave us the strength to proceed.
And then, like finding an oasis in the desert, we rounded a truck-sized mound of stone and saw it. Our way out. It was a crack in the floor of the cavern, one that stretched over twenty paces from the far wall to our feet. There was nothing but darkness through the rift, but we didn’t need to see. Where we were standing we could practically feel the river that raged beneath us, the torrent that would set us free.
“We were right!” I shouted at Zee, no longer caring about the noise. “I don’t believe it, there’s a way out!”
But he didn’t share my enthusiasm.
“Are you seeing something I don’t?” he muttered. “I mean, did you happen to bring a crate of dynamite with you?”
I looked back at the cracked rock and frowned. Then, feeling like someone had just punched me in the gut, I saw what he meant. The rift in the floor may have split the cavern wide open lengthways, but the solid stone had only parted a few centimeters. Our way out was no wider than a fist.
MY DARKEST HOUR
ZEE PRACTICALLY HAD TO drag me back through the rocky labyrinth of Room Two. The sudden switch from thinking we were home free to knowing there was no way through the slit in the ground was unbearable. In the space of a second I had lost the will to carry on, and with it had fled the part of my brain that could remember how to do simple things like walk and talk. I must have bumped into a dozen rocks, scraping my shins and arms and even my face. But I didn’t care. It was over.
Several wrong turns later and we found our way back into the tunnel. Zee switched his lamp off, then mine, leading the way toward the wooden planks. Beyond them the equipment room was empty, but we had no idea where the blacksuit was. He could have been right outside, waiting for us to emerge so he could pump us full of shot. The thought didn’t bother me. At least it would be quicker than festering away in Furnace for the next seven decades.
I dived down onto the floor and pushed my way through the loose board, ignoring Zee’s frantic protests.
“Wait, for God’s sake!” he hissed, but by the time he’d repeated himself I was already out. The coast was clear, the guard nowhere to be seen. Zee pushed himself through, scrambling to his feet and grabbing our picks from where we’d left them. “Let’s get back.”
“What’s the point?” I asked, not moving. Zee grabbed my sleeve and hoisted me forward, pulling me into Room Three. With the heat and the noise nobody even saw us enter.
“Come on,” he said, his words almost lost in the hammering. “Did you really expect it to be that easy?”
We spotted Donovan hard at work and shuffled over. He took one look at our expressions and his shoulders slumped.
“No river, then?” he said matter-of-factly.
“It’s there, but the gap is too narrow and the walls are too thick,” Zee explained when I didn’t open my mouth.
Donovan nodded then returned to work, mumbling something like “too bad” over his shoulder. Zee shrugged at me, then started hacking away at the wall. I lifted my pick halfheartedly and took a swing, but I just couldn’t find the energy to make it count. I mean, why bother? If a lifetime in this sweaty room was all I had to look forward to, was all any of us had to look forward to, why didn’t I just ram the pick into my brain?
I’m sorry to say that my thoughts were like that for the rest of the morning—a slide show of ways to put myself out of my misery. Not that I think I ever would have gone through with it, but I’d been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom—one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.
We walked from the chipping rooms with all the enthusiasm of death-row prisoners going to the electric chair, showering and dressing without a word. Silence followed us as we grabbed our food in the canteen and sat down at an empty bench. We all made a good job of thoroughly poking our mush, but nobody seemed to be eating it.
“So are you saying we need to lose a little weight before we fit in the crack?” asked Donovan after a few minutes, pushing his plate away and folding his arms. “ ’Cause I think I can do that.”
“Even a baby wouldn’t be able to get through,” Zee replied, holding his hands a few centimeters apart to demonstrate the size of the gap. “My cat wouldn’t be able to squeeze its bony ass into that hole.”
As usual, lunch was interrupted by the sound of crashing plates and yelling. I peered over Zee’s shoulder to see the Skulls going to work on some kids in the middle of the room. From here it looked like the other new fish, Ashley and Toby. They were getting food poured down their overalls and rubbed in their faces, but I didn’t even think about trying to help. After dreaming of escape the reality of Furnace seemed even heavier, even more claustrophobic than before. The oppressive air pushed down on me like a weight, I felt like I couldn’t move a muscle.
“And we couldn’t chip it?” Donovan went on.
“Even if we could all get in there it would be too noisy,” Zee answered. “Besides, it would take us weeks to break through.”
“Any of you guys know how to make a bomb?” Donovan went on, smiling, but he got no response. “How about the gas tanks in the kitchen? They’d blow a hole in anything if they were lit up.”
“You’ve seen those things,” Zee countered. “They’re bolted and strapped and secured tighter than the gold in Fort Knox. There’s no way you’d be able to get them loose, let alone smuggle them across the yard.”
Donovan wasn’t willing to give up.
“Come on, you get me all excited about this, then you’re telling me it’s impossible? That’s just cruel.”
“Well, boo hoo,” I suddenly snapped. “Poor you. You’ve been wasting away here for half a decade, Donovan. Why didn’t you find your own way out? What do you want from me?”
He stared at me like he was going to lash out, then his face fell and he got to his feet.
“Wait, Donovan,” I said to his back as he walked away, but it was
no use. The world was falling to pieces, and I was crumbling right along with it.
IT WAS OVER the next few days that I started to understand how people survived knowing they’d never again be free. It was as simple as just switching off, forgetting that you were alive, that you’d ever existed outside of Furnace’s red walls. You just made your way from place to place, did what they told you, ate and slept, but you stopped thinking of yourself as human. We were robots, automatons who had every appearance of humanity but who were dead on the inside.
By some twist of fate, it was Zee and Donovan who did their best to keep the idea of freedom alive. Every time I saw them they talked about ideas they’d had—trying to melt the rock with laundry detergent, trying to chip their way down to the river in Room Three, greasing themselves up with canteen fat so they could squeeze through the gap. I just scoffed at their plans the same way they had scoffed at mine, the idea of getting out now laughable to me.
But there must have been a part of my mind that still dreamed of escaping, because the image of the river never truly left me. I’d find myself thinking about it while working, while my conscious mind was engaged with chipping or bleaching the laundry or cleaning the filth off the toilets. I’d suddenly notice that I was trying out different scenarios in my head, testing escape plans without even knowing I was doing it.
I tried to stop the images because they were so painful—like wishing for something you knew you could never have. But they just wouldn’t go away. My body and my mind were confined here, but my soul, or my imagination, or whatever, wouldn’t rest until I was breathing surface air.
A week passed since Zee and I broke into Room Two, a week where I barely said a word to anybody, barely even made eye contact. Donovan and Zee started spending more time alone without me, giving me cautious glances whenever I approached. I didn’t blame them, I was a shadow of my former self and my dark eyes were haunted by something that scared my friends. As if my resignation were a plague that would spread to anyone close by.
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