Death Sentence

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said, his voice a sonic pulse that echoed around my brain. ‘The procedure hurts like hell. You’ll feel like your body is being pulled apart piece by piece, then sewn together again with hot needles. I guess that’s not too far from the truth. But stick in there, ride out the pain. Because when you’re done you’ll be one of us.’

  Something swelled in my chest, a feeling I hadn’t experienced for a long time. I don’t know if there was a name for it, but I knew what it meant. I belonged. The blacksuit patted me gently on the shoulder, then cast a suspicious look at the wheezers as they moved in.

  ‘Ride it out,’ he said without looking back, then walked out of the door. I turned to watch the surgeons approach, a wall of filthy leather and ancient syringes. One slid a needle into my arm and the welcome numbness of the nectar swept through me. The other two lifted glinting weapons in their tattered gloves, the pitch of their wheezes even higher than usual. But I wasn’t scared. I welcomed them. Because they were here to give me what I wanted.

  Very soon now I’d join the ranks of the powerful, the blacksuits.

  My brothers.

  He hadn’t been lying: it did hurt like hell.

  I must have blacked out with the first incision, the sensation like somebody holding a blowtorch to my skin. But even under a shield of sleep I could feel them working on me, as though the nectar wanted me to sense the pain in my muscles, in my bones, to feel the transformation taking place.

  The agony filled my head with images that must have been memories, but which I couldn’t place. I pictured a boy being beaten to a pulp in an old gymnasium, other kids with skulls on their bandanas letting loose with kicks and punches. I saw the same boy caught in the jaws of a foaming river, only luck keeping him from being torn to pieces on the knuckled walls. I saw him falling into the flames of an incinerator, pulled from the fire before it could take hold.

  And that same boy – whose face I knew so well yet at the same time didn’t – followed me into my dreams, where he pleaded with me to remember who I was. But even as the guards carried him off into the black recesses of my nightmare the kid couldn’t tell me what my name was.

  He too had forgotten it.

  The pain was so intense that it consumed every other emotion. Except for the anger. I lay on the table, alone in the small room, while the fury inside me grew. It was as if the searing heat in my legs was a fire, one that literally made my blood boil.

  I didn’t know what fuelled the hatred inside me. It wasn’t directed at the wheezers, or the warden. Certainly not the blacksuits. It was everything else. All the pathetic people of the world who led their lives as meekly and quietly as possible, who had no idea of the forces at work beneath their feet. All those who relied on others to fight for them, who didn’t have the strength to survive by themselves. The thought of them, the idea that I used to be one of them, made me sick with revulsion.

  I shifted my body as best I could beneath the leather straps, the movement causing a fresh explosion of pain in my legs. I couldn’t lift my head high enough to see what the surgeons had done to them but I knew anyway. They would resemble immense slabs of muscle, barely contained by the skin stitched around them. As soon as they healed I’d be able to outrun anyone, catch any prey. And I would show no mercy to those who could not defend themselves.

  I wanted to see past the anger, to remember how I’d got here. Surely I hadn’t always been like this, so full of rage. But there was nothing in my head other than Furnace. I must have been born here, in this place. Yes, this was my home, and the warden my father.

  And yet still something tugged at the back of my mind, a nagging thought that came and went too fast to make any sense of, like a bluebottle smashing its haphazard path from window to window. There was something else, something I had forgotten, something important.

  How important could it be? I had the nectar swimming in my veins, giving me strength I never knew I could possess. And I would soon have the body to match my mind, one that would never know what it was to be weak.

  Again the thought fluttered and I saw the boy from my dreams, his whine like the furious beat of the bluebottle’s wings. I pictured myself reaching into my head and snatching the image, crushing it beneath my heel until nothing remained but a gritty smear. There was no other world, only this one, only my one. And here I would be king.

  I laughed, but the sounds were pistol shots fired out from the anger in my gut. I squirmed against my restraints, desperate to be free so that I could unleash the fury I felt on the first thing I saw. Opening my mouth, I shouted for the wheezers to finish what they had started, but all that came out was the deep, throbbing growl of an injured lion. It didn’t matter. I had no use for words, only violence. What good was speech when you were getting pounded by broken knuckles? What use was language when you faced the monsters of the world?

  I growled again, this time using every last drop of air in my lungs. It rose in pitch like a jet engine, so loud that I heard the scalpels on the tray beside me tremble against one another. It felt good, and I unleashed another, a devil’s roar which blasted from the room and chased its own echoes down the corridor. I opened my mouth for a third but my lungs were starved of air and all I could produce was a weak groan and a string of spit which trickled from my mouth.

  ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’ said a voice from the door. The warden was standing there, half in and half out of the room. He wore that same empty smile, like the painted face of a Punch doll, but I could sense the pride emanating from him. I still had no words, but he didn’t wait for a reply. ‘To feel the power growing from your pain, to feel your body become something nature never could have made.’

  He ducked out of the door and I heard him bark an order. By the time he looked back at me I could make out the slap of booted feet on rock behind him.

  ‘I can sense that hunger for strength in you, more than most. I can smell it. The world will pay for what it has done to you. Together we will make it suffer.’

  He must have noticed the gleam in my eye as my imagination gave life to his thoughts. The warden nodded at me, then stood to one side as a pair of blacksuits marched in, one wheeling a gurney. They gently unfastened the buckles that held me, lifting my body onto the wheeled stretcher. As they did so I caught a glimpse of my legs, like two tree trunks wrapped in crimson gauze. The pain still radiated from them but I relished it because it meant they were a part of me.

  ‘They’ve done a good job,’ the warden went on, gently smoothing down the bandages. ‘These will heal up in no time.’

  My arms, I tried to say, coughing up another snarl.

  ‘Patience,’ the warden said, obviously delighted. ‘The rest will come in time. Too much, too soon, and you won’t be able to cope. Your body is young enough to handle the nectar, the surgery. But your genes are only so flexible. And you don’t want to find out what happens when they’re pushed to the point of meltdown.’

  The blacksuits began to wheel me out of the room, and as I passed the warden he rested a cool, dry palm on my forehead.

  ‘Rest, and dream of darkness,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long.’

  He lifted his hand but I could still feel the cold weight of his fingers as I was pushed out of the door and down the corridor.

  I heard the infirmary long before we reached it. Something was screaming inside, not in pain but in anger. The sound was loud enough to make my ears ring as the suits pushed my gurney through the plastic slats.

  I tilted my head to get a better look, saw the curtains of one of the cubicles billow as vague shapes wrestled inside. There was another scream, then the dull thump of a fist on flesh.

  ‘Number 195 again,’ growled one of the blacksuits by my side, running over to the cubicle and disappearing inside. The other guard wheeled me across the stone floor, muttering something under his breath. It was as he was preparing to lift me from the gurney that all hell broke loose.

  Another scream blasted from behind
the curtain, this one followed by a blacksuit crashing back through it. He tripped over his feet and spun through the air, a delicate double helix of dark blood spiralling from his nose. He hit the floor hard, racked with spasms that made him resemble an overturned beetle fighting to right itself.

  Swearing, my blacksuit porter dropped me back onto the gurney and raced across the room so fast that he was just a charcoal smudge against the row of white curtains. But he didn’t even have a chance to enter the cubicle before an arm of solid muscle punched its way out, catching him on the jaw and snapping his head round with a crack that could have been the earth splitting. He dropped like a sack of bricks, the light fading fast from his silver eyes.

  I sat up, the anger in my blood extinguished by fear. From behind the curtain came another scream, but this time its pitch was lower. I heard something tear, like a wing being pulled from a cooked chicken, and a splash of red bloomed on the white material.

  Behind the trails of colour that dripped slowly towards the floor I could see the silhouette of a hulking shape stagger forward. It reached out and pulled the curtain to one side, revealing something surely too large, too misshapen to be a face. Eyes like polished coins blinked into focus, dropping to the blacksuits on the floor then slowly grinding up to look at me.

  And with that look something came flooding back. I knew it, recognised the cold, soulless touch of that gaze. In my head I saw a boy who had once terrified me far more than any wheezer, a kid who had taken lives with the casual ease of a wrestler snapping matchsticks.

  Gary Owens.

  There were shouts from outside the infirmary, the thunder of boots on stone. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature in front of me. It pushed its way through the curtain and I saw a body of knotted flesh, muscles sprouting from muscles like a gnarled oak tree, all barely held together by a coat of stitched skin. Even as I watched, something seemed to swell beneath its flesh, its arms bulging outwards as though they were being pressure fed with water.

  A cavern of darkness opened up in the centre of its face, freeing another hellish scream. Even as it ended, the creature was bounding towards me, the very rock shaking with the sheer strength of it.

  Panic took over, propelling me from the gurney before I could even think about what I was doing. I hit the ground prepared to run, but as soon as I landed the pain clawed up my new legs and into my spine. I sprawled across the cold stone, barely even finding the strength to look over my shoulder, to face my death.

  The creature swiped out at the gurney with a giant hand, sending it flying across the room. Then it was on me, fingers like hot iron around my chest. It picked me up as though I weighed nothing, drawing me close to the pit of its mouth.

  It was as if the fear purged the nectar from my blood, pure adrenaline stripping the poison from my arteries. As I hung from the creature’s fists the heavy curtain across my mind was pulled back and I remembered who I was, and where I had come from. And with that knowledge came language.

  ‘Gary,’ I wheezed, the word nothing but breath. I sucked in more air, tried again. ‘Gary, remember your name.’

  The creature paused, its platinum eyes swimming in and out of focus like a blind man learning to see. Its breath came in short, ragged bursts, each one carrying the stench of decay from inside it.

  ‘Gary,’ I repeated. ‘Gary Owens. It’s your name.’

  The hammered footsteps reached a crescendo as the blacksuits poured into the room. The creature looked up and screamed again, blasting me with so much rancid breath that I gagged. I felt its fingers tighten, felt my ribs bend under the pressure. Black spots began to appear in the corners of my vision, as in a photograph held over a match.

  The first shot caused the creature to spin back. Its arm jerked and I found myself airborne, crashing down onto my shoulder before rolling into a curtain. I looked up, trying to make sense of the cartwheeling room, saw the creature take another shotgun round to its chest. The flesh erupted, but it might as well have been stung by a bee, and with a roar of defiance it charged towards the guards.

  This time they were prepared. The nearest suit fired his weapon again, taking out the creature’s legs. Another two ran forward with a pole topped with a hoop that danced and sparked with electricity. Before the freak that had once been Gary could get back up the wire was looped around its neck, its skin rippling as the charge pulsed into its body. After a couple of attempts to rise, the creature let itself drop limply to the floor, its arms twitching uselessly in a pool of its own blood.

  Two of the blacksuits ran to check on their fallen comrades, the shaking of heads as they pressed fingers to necks making it obvious that they wouldn’t ever be getting up. It was only then that they seemed to notice me, the nearest of the guards striding over.

  ‘Leave him.’The words came from the far side of the room, spat out like wormwood. I looked round to see the warden approach, all trace of a smile now scrubbed from his leather face. He loomed over me, and I could feel his eyes bathing me like an icy shower. I cowered before him, shrinking as far into myself as I could while the gooseflesh erupted on my skin.

  ‘What a disappointment,’ he grunted before turning his attention to Gary. Or the thing that had once been Gary. ‘Patch up Number 195. Take him to general population tonight, let him sate his bloodlust on his old cellmate. And when he comes back down, make sure he’s secure.’

  He crouched, and grabbed my chin with smooth fingers.

  ‘I thought you’d left your old life behind,’ he hissed, his eyes black holes that led into the abyss of his soul. ‘If you remember his name then I take it you remember yours. Well, I guess we’ll have to try a little harder to destroy that pathetic mind of yours.’ He used his other hand to ram his finger repeatedly against my temple before dropping me to the floor and standing. ‘Take this maggot back to the screening room. Lock him in there for two days and double his feed.’

  The warden stormed from the room, looking back only once as he reached the main door of the infirmary, screaming at the blacksuits. ‘And get this mess cleaned up!’

  ARMS

  My head was a war zone, memories of an old life that I had almost forgotten battling with the fantasies of power that had threatened to consume me. I fought to make sense of things but the confusion was too great, a seething mass of images and thoughts that threatened to drive me insane.

  ‘My name is Alex,’ I told myself as one blacksuit retrieved my gurney and another lifted me onto it. Even as the words spewed from my lips they made no sense, sounding to my ears like a foreign language, but I knew that I had to keep saying them.‘My name is Alex. My name is Alex. My name is –’

  A gloved hand clamped down on my mouth, so hard that I struggled to breathe. I flailed against it as the guards wheeled me back across the infirmary, but the grip was too powerful.

  ‘One more word from you and we’ll be seeing just how long you last against a shotgun,’ said one of the suits, ducking beneath the plastic strips that led out towards surgery.‘You’ve got some nasty little memories that just won’t go away. Well, they’d better do soon or you’ll end up in there.’

  He gestured towards a steel door at the end of the corridor and I remembered a room full of bodies, and a raging fire. I ignored his warning, tried to speak, but he pressed his hand down until I felt my teeth cut through the back of my lips.

  ‘That’s what happens to the ones who can’t forget,’ the blacksuit continued through his shark’s grin. ‘We burn them along with the other trash.’

  I could still feel the sting of flames on my flesh, the memory of pain enough to make me keep my mouth shut. We swung right at the junction, rattling along the uneven floor until we reached another door. It opened into the same room I’d been locked in before, the one with the screen, and although I panicked at the thought of having my eyes pinned open again I was powerless to stop the suits as they strapped me into the chair.

  ‘If you have to keep one thing in that head of yours then let it be this,
’ growled the giant man as he lifted my eyelid. ‘You’re either one of us, or one of them. And believe me, you don’t want to make the wrong decision.’

  He stood to one side to let a wheezer in, and I felt the sting of the needle once again. This time the nectar poured into me like I was hollow, filling me from toe to forehead with its cloying darkness. My mouth drooped open, a weak cry like that of a dying bird the only protest I could make as the freaks left the room.

  Before I arrived in Furnace, I never would have imagined that there could be so much horror in the world. But here it was, carried from celluloid to screen by flickering light, seemingly every act of senseless violence ever to have been committed. It was a different film from the last: no animals this time, just humans. But the things they did to one another were crimes that not even the lowest beast would inflict upon its enemies.

  Again I tried to close my eyes, to look away, to think about something other than the nightmare unfolding in front of me. But I couldn’t shut my burning eyelids, I couldn’t move my head, and when your worst fears are paraded endlessly before you, how can you force your mind away?

  I don’t know how long I was in there before the images started to seep from the screen, suspended in the air as though I was wearing 3D glasses. It was like the madness of what I was seeing was too much to be contained; it overflowed its origins and polluted everything around it. I knew I was hallucinating, that the nectar was making me see things that weren’t there, but as the punches flew, the guns fired and the bodies fell all around me it was as if I was standing in a hurricane of bloodshed and cruelty, one that battered and blasted against my mind.