And it wasn’t long before my mental defences were stripped away completely. One by one the clips of film tore through the air and into my head, pushing out all other thoughts. I fought to hold on to my name, to the memories that had returned when I’d seen Gary, and what he’d become. But the nectar was a black tar pasted over my old life, onto which the images on screen stuck like feathers. No scrap of memory was spared. Everywhere I looked I saw only aggression, only anger, only death.
And if there is nothing left of you but darkness, how can you not become a monster?
When you’re seeing things that aren’t there, there is no line between being awake and being asleep. I looked down, saw that the leather straps were now loose, and knew I must be dreaming. My suspicions were confirmed when I stumbled to the door and opened it up onto hell.
At first I thought I was outside, but before the elation could rise higher than my stomach I knew it was an illusion. Ahead of me, stretching to a horizon lost in darkness, was a muddy field. Above it, where the sky should have been, roiled a ceiling of smoke the colour of dried blood, and so thick it could have been made of rock.
The wet earth was littered with forms that might once have been human, like a graveyard where the dead have floated to the surface. Scattered at uneven intervals were huge craters, some half filled with water like stagnant ponds. Even as I watched, something fell from the heaving sky, exploding into a ball of burning colour as it struck the earth. Dark water fell, carrying with it a heavy hail of rock and bone.
By the time the light from the fireball had sputtered out I saw the shapes in the mud start to move. They were crawling forward in slow motion, and past the filth that covered them head to toe I made out uniforms of worn cloth, round metal helmets and belts laden with equipment. Each of the writhing forms gripped a rifle in one bony hand, holding it up towards the distant horizon, towards a hidden enemy.
Another explosion rocked the earth a stone’s throw away, pumping more smoke into the glowering sky. Silhouetted against the flames were three figures who marched across the mud without missing a single step. Each was dressed in a leather trench coat, a gas mask strapped to his face. Two held a stretcher between them, the third scanned the ground with beady eyes, like a vulture looking for flesh.
They stopped by a shape in the dirt, close enough for me to see a boy there. His uniform was in tatters, mud disguising the wounds that had been opened up beneath. He looked up at the stretcher and I thought he would be relieved to see it, happy at the thought of leaving this carnage.
But when he saw the men who carried it, their wheezes audible even over the distant sound of gunfire and the patter of falling shrapnel, he began to scream.
I’m not injured, I can fight! came his voice, and even though I didn’t understand his language I knew what he said. The men didn’t reply, simply laid the stretcher on the ground and started to peel the boy from his casket of wet earth. He fought, yet despite his claims he was too weak to stop them. Seconds later he was strapped in place and the men in gas masks were carrying him into the darkness. I watched them go, saw the red bands strapped to their arms, the swastikas blazoned there.
And then they were gone, the boy’s shrieks the last thing to fade as he was carried off – taken to somewhere far worse than this landscape of madness and mud.
I don’t remember leaving the screening room, although I must have done because the next time I woke I could feel the same pain in my arms as I had done in my legs. I looked past my shoulders to see two slabs of meat, so immense that the bloody bandages wrapped around them were threatening to split.
I flexed my new muscles, enjoying the strength I could feel there behind the pain. These weren’t the sort of limbs used to cover your face as you curled into a ball, bleating, they were the limbs of someone who struck fear into his enemies, the arms of a survivor, a killer.
Blinking out the haze of sleep, I swung my head round to see that I was back in my cubicle in the infirmary. Instead of a bed, however, I was lying almost upright inside a metal coffin tipped back against the wall. Welded into the dark steel were thick chains which secured my arms, legs and chest. I knew without even trying that I wouldn’t stand a chance of breaking out of them, despite my new strength.
Something about the sarcophagus rang a distant bell in my memory, but the poison – still dripping into my veins from the IV bags beside me – was plastered over every thought and the nagging doubt soon popped like a bubble in tar. I tried thinking back to my dream, back to anything that had happened before I woke, but the same impenetrable darkness covered it all.
‘It isn’t taking …’ The voice was faint but close, maybe from the next compartment over. I let my head swing to the side, tried to make out the whispered words. ‘Double his feed, and if nothing happens, send him to the incinerator. I’m not willing to waste any more nectar on a lost cause.’
There was a muffled response, but even if I had been able to make out a word it was masked by a wheeze. I heard a curtain open and close, followed by footsteps. Then the white wall in front of me peeled apart to reveal the warden’s face. For a second I caught his eye and suddenly I was back in the screening room, a sick procession of morbid images splashing across my retinas. I looked away and the world reasserted itself.
‘You’re awake,’ he said, pushing into the compartment. I didn’t look up to see if he was smiling or not and he made no effort to approach.‘For a while there I wasn’t sure you’d make it. They filled you with more nectar than I thought was possible. I wonder … do you know who you are?’
I pushed into the shadows of my mind looking for a response, but the truth was the warden’s question didn’t make any sense. I was me, and I was being made better, and that’s all there ever had been. I shook my head, each movement slow and exaggerated.
‘What about a name?’ the warden asked. ‘Do you have one?’
Again I fought the confusion, trying to understand what he might mean. I knew what a name was, of course, but as for mine … Surely I had never needed one, because I had just been born. And in this world, where force was everything, what good was a name? Why did you need a word to identify you when you could define yourself with strength? I shook my head again.
‘Good, good,’ the warden said. ‘You got there in the end. It’s a positive sign. The ones who fight the most take more work, but when you fall you fall hard. How are your arms?’
They hurt, I wanted to say, although my mouth refused to shape the words and instead they spilled out as one long, low groan.
‘They look strong,’ the warden went on. ‘They’re healing already. You know, an operation like that would kill the healthiest adult, even if he were an athlete, or a soldier. Even if he had been pumped full of nectar. Human genetics truly is a miracle. If you could only see what you were becoming.’
I knew what I was becoming. Stronger, faster, better. I didn’t need to see it when I could feel it in every fibre, in every burning nerve.
‘One more procedure,’ came the voice, all smoke and steel. ‘The most difficult but the most rewarding. One more operation and the transformation will be complete. Then we’ll give you a little test to see how far you’ve come.’
I watched his legs turn and move towards the curtain, but he paused before leaving.
‘And to make sure there’s no going back.’
INTRUDERS
I waited for that final procedure with murder on my mind.
Strapped upright in my metal coffin, the screams and wheezes of the infirmary around me, all I could think about was breaking free of my chains and unleashing my new-found strength. Nobody would be safe because I was the predator and they were my prey. Blood would spill, and it would not be mine.
Whenever I had the energy I would test my muscles, feeling the power that lay in the swollen flesh. I didn’t know what they had done to me – whether it was my own body which had grown, sprouting coiled tendons of steel under the skin, or whether somebody else’s tissue had been grafte
d to mine. It didn’t matter. All I knew was that I now possessed a raw might that could tear the world to pieces if it wanted.
A picture floated into my head of a boy – the same boy I sometimes saw in my dreams. He was pale, his arms and legs like twigs, his ribs showing even through his prison overalls. A distant part of me, buried deep beneath a lake of poison, knew that somehow I had once been this boy. But the only emotion this knowledge produced was nausea.
How could I have ever let myself be so weak? So pathetic? The scrawny ghost that pleaded silently in my head was not fit for life. He did not deserve it. That’s why he had died, so that I could be born. The child was gone, his name was gone. All that existed was me, the beast that had grown from his corpse.
I let the growled laughter come, hearing the deep pulses reverberate from the stone like thunder. Nobody would ever disrespect me again. Nobody would ever bully me, or lift a finger against me.
Distant words distracted me from my fantasies and I let my heavy head swing round. Sobs and choked cries were heard frequently in the infirmary, but words were rare. Especially hissed, urgent commands like these. I listened out for the clack of the warden’s shoes, the breath of a wheezer, but other than the wavelike symphony of whispers rising and falling there was nothing.
‘… hurry …’ I made out, the sound of metal scraping against metal. ‘Come on … Cut the other one.’
There was a scuffling sound, the slap of leather on stone, then the patter of footsteps. I felt my heartbeat quicken, the nectar coming to life in my veins. I gripped the chains that held me, tried to force them from their steel casings. I didn’t know what was going on out there, all I knew was that I wanted to be part of it. The metal squealed in protest but held tight.
‘Where are the others?’ one of the voices said.
‘There’s no time!’
‘Just find them …’
More footsteps over panicked breaths, then the sound of curtains being pulled back. The noises grew closer until it seemed as though they were right next door.
‘You okay? Quick, cut the straps.’
A slurred response, followed by the grating of a serrated blade through leather. I heard more words that I couldn’t make out, then something pale and wraith-like pushed its way past the screen to the side of me. I snapped my head round and opened my mouth, letting loose a guttural growl that sent the face skittering back into the next compartment.
Seconds later it returned, and there were two more with it. I knew them, although at the same time they were complete strangers. The first was half boy and half beast, one arm grotesquely muscled the same way mine were. His silver eyes were wide in disbelief and he shook his head as though I was a nightmare that had visited him in the flesh. The two kids standing next to him were tiny by comparison, and they looked unmarked.
‘Jesus,’ said one, smoothing a hand through his hair. He had turned three shades paler in the time he’d been standing there.
‘We’ve got to go,’ said the smallest kid. ‘Wheezers’ll be back any minute.’
‘Is that him?’ said the freak with the giant arm. The other kid walked forward and I wrenched at my chains again, growling at him. He had no right to look at me the way he was doing now, as if I deserved pity. He was the weak one, they all were. Weak and incomplete. If I could escape I’d show them what strength was. I’d show them power.
All three seemed to recoil at the sound of my growl, but they didn’t leave.
‘Simon, what do we do?’ said the youngest. ‘Can we get him out?’
‘No,’ answered the bigger kid. ‘He’s too far gone. Look at him, for Christ’s sake. I’ve never seen that much nectar hooked into the vein.’
‘We can’t leave him,’ said the third boy. I studied his face and was surprised to see that every trace of weakness had gone. His expression was set in stone, a look of fierce determination, and it sent chills down my spine. I knew that look. I knew it because I had worn it once. A memory swam through the nectar like a whale trying to breach the surface of a frozen sea. I couldn’t grasp it, but I knew that I’d been in this situation before. Only … Only it had been different.
The kid vanished into the next cubicle and returned a second later with something in his hands. I couldn’t quite twist my head round far enough to see what it was, but somehow I knew.
It was a pillow.
‘What are you doing?’ said the small kid. ‘You’re not going to …’
‘Ozzie, shut up,’ snapped the one they called Simon. ‘It’s the only thing we can do. He’s gone.’
The boy with the pillow took a step forward and I felt the terror wash through me. I thrashed against my chains but they were solid steel fingers that held me tight. Opening my mouth, I screamed at him, the sound like the roar of a jet engine. But he didn’t stop, didn’t take his eyes from mine.
‘Alex, are you in there?’ he asked. ‘Because if you are then you have to let me know, right now.’
I growled again, throwing my entire body at him in the hope that my bonds would snap. There was nothing called Alex here, there was just me, and I was going to kill the child in front of me. I was going to kill them all. I was the powerful one, the predator. They were nothing but loose skin on bone, not even worthy of being prey. I felt my face split open at the thought, my grin like the sneer of a lion that knows it is about to feast.
‘Jesus, Zee, hurry up. I can hear them coming.’
Zee. I knew the word, the name, although I couldn’t think from where. It floated before me like silk in water, surrounded by thoughts and images I could make no sense of. I had almost grasped one – the kid called Zee in a lift, alongside me and two others, being carried down into the guts of the earth – but by the time it had taken shape I felt the pillow on my face.
I almost laughed at the thought that I could be killed by such a pathetic weapon. Then I tried to draw breath and my lungs stayed empty. I bucked, snapping my head back and forth, but the kid must have had all his weight on my face because the pillow didn’t shift.
‘I’m sorry,’ I heard him say. ‘Forgive me, Alex.’
I struggled to draw breath, feeling the panic radiate from my starved lungs. All the pillow gave me was dust and the stench of sickness. If I could just get an arm free then I’d stand a chance, I could kill him before he killed me.
‘Oh God, they’re here,’ said one of the others, his words accompanied by a familiar wheeze which swept in from the back of the infirmary. I tried to scream again, to draw the gas mask’s attention, but with nothing behind it my cry was silent. I felt the pillow press with greater insistency, heard the boys argue amongst themselves as the dry wheezes grew closer. Even with the cloth against my face I could feel the edges of my vision growing darker, the sounds fading like I had cotton wool in my ears.
‘It’s too late.’ The voice pushed through the numbness in my brain, and all of a sudden the darkness was ripped away. I found myself staring into the twisted face of a wheezer. It had one gnarled hand wrapped around Simon’s throat and the other held the scruff of Zee’s neck. The smallest kid was curled up in a ball on the floor screaming the same three words over and over. ‘It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.’
And it was. Even as the boys fought to free themselves the blacksuits ran into the infirmary, fierce silver eyes aiming down their shotgun barrels. They flew into the cubicle like a dark tornado, the butts of their guns causing the boys to fall like pins. It was over before I could draw in my first stuttered breath.
‘Get them back to their beds,’ a blacksuit said, wiping the blood from his gun before using it to point to Simon and Zee.
Before anyone could move, the sound of the warden’s shoes drifted up from the back of the room. The blacksuits straightened, their faces steeled against the storm that was coming.
‘What now?’ came his voice. He appeared at the open curtains of my cubicle and I turned away before I could meet his eye. ‘Is a little order around here too much to ask for? Go on
, get them back before the feed is damaged too much. And that kid, find out how he got in, and if there are any more of them out there. When I asked for the perimeter to be secured I meant just that.’
I felt his glare scuttling up from Ozzie to me like a spider.
‘What about Number 208?’ he asked, his voice directed at me.
‘I think they were trying to kill him,’ replied one of the blacksuits. ‘Same way they killed Number 191.’
‘Any damage?’ This time it was a wheezer that responded, although there were no words in its gargled purr. The warden stepped forward. ‘Find out if there’s brain damage. I don’t know how long he went without oxygen. He looks weaker than he did.’
My fury had lifted my head before I even knew what I was doing. Weaker? Even the warden had no right to call me that. I met his eyes, felt the world peeling away like wallpaper, felt the cold touch of death in the swollen pits of his pupils. But I didn’t look away. I held his gaze until it felt as though my soul had been pulled out of me, and the devil’s breath had taken its place. Only then, when every last drop of strength had been drained, did I let my head drop.
‘Well, I take it back,’ he said. ‘Not weaker at all, just angrier. Good, good. You’ll soon have a chance to get even.’
I heard him stand to one side while the blacksuits hauled their catch from the floor. Even though I didn’t have the energy to move I caught a glimpse of the kid called Ozzie as he was dragged away. His eyes were distant and unfocused, his mouth silently shaping those same three words. Then a giant hand engulfed his head and he was lifted out of my line of sight.
‘Once you’ve done interrogating the intruder, take him to the chamber.’The warden’s voice grew fainter as he walked away, but I could still make out what he was saying. ‘As soon as Number 208 has had his final procedure we can try him out on the child, see just how powerful that anger makes him.’
Furnace 3 - Death Sentence Page 5