Furnace 3 - Death Sentence (4 page)

FLESH

They came for me while I was sleeping.

I opened my eyes to see the illuminated ceiling flow past above me like a river of molten rock, the gurney rattling against the stone floor. There was a flap of plastic as I was wheeled through the slats that marked the exit from the infirmary, towards the operating theatres, the rooms where the wheezers worked their sick magic. I felt no fear, even though I knew where I was going.

And why.

I heard the staccato song of an electronic lock, followed by the hiss of the door sliding open. A chorus of wheezes fluttered from the room ahead as the surgeons inside greeted my arrival. I didn’t have to look up to picture their faces, the rusted gas masks sewn into their decaying flesh, the gleam in those black, piggy eyes. I felt my skin crawl at the thought of them, but I ignored the sensation. After all, it wouldn’t be my skin for much longer. I’d soon be a new man, far stronger, iron muscles wrapped in a jacket of steel.

My head lolled to one side as the blacksuits hoisted me onto the operating table and I saw the warden stride into the room. He beamed at me – an expression I was getting used to – and walked over.

‘Good, good,’ he muttered. ‘No fights, no protests. You know this is the right thing.’

He glanced up and I followed his line of sight to see three wheezers preparing equipment, the light reflected from the scalpels and bone saws dancing across the red walls. The tools all looked familiar, but I couldn’t think from where. For a fleeting moment I saw myself climbing, hammers and pins in the rock, but the image couldn’t anchor itself and soon fell away.

‘Run a test,’ the warden said to one of the wheezers. ‘Then start on his legs.’

He looked at me once more and smiled, but the way his mouth twisted upwards made me think of hunger rather than affection. Then the view was blocked by a blacksuit, the hulking figure strapping my torso to the table and fixing my head into a brace. The guard checked over his shoulder, and from the click of shoes I knew he was watching the warden leave. He looked back at the last buckle, giving it a tug to make sure it was secure, then bent down and put his mouth to my ear.

‘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.