Furnace 3 - Death Sentence (5 page)

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.

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?’