Furnace 5 - Execution (2 page)

And more creatures howled from the rooftops, beasts of impossible size and strength, their bodies warped and their minds broken. The berserkers earned their name well, pouncing on those terrified humans like demons greeting the damned at the gates of the underworld – rending, tearing, devouring.

It was an army the likes of which the world had never seen, and commanding it was a man whose laughter rang in my ears, a man whose dark presence drove every single one of the freaks below, a man whose vision of the world was nothing but fury.

Alfred Furnace.

He was the person I had come here to kill, the creature I thought I had seen in my visions – a beast that sat on the peak of his kingdom and watched the old world purged by the new dawn. But that creature hadn’t been Furnace, it had been
me
– changed beyond recognition by the battles which had torn me apart, and the nectar that patched me back together. I understood now why I’d had to come here, why I’d had to fight the warden, why I’d had to change.

Because it was the only way I could ever hope to beat Furnace.

Far below, something exploded, the detonation causing the entire roof of the building to shake. The enormous radio antenna fixed to the peak of the tower snapped free with a whip crack, slicing through the air as it cartwheeled earthwards, vanishing into a pillar of smoke. There was a second blast, followed by third, louder than the first two put together, and this time a section of the spire caved inwards, swallowed up by an inferno that raged just under the roof. I backed off to the edge, trying to snatch in clean air, trying to work out a way to escape.

But there was none. The spire was circled by a wall of fire, hot enough to melt the reinforced steel skeleton of
the tower. The skyscrapers around me were too far away to reach, even with my newfound strength and speed. There was only one way out, and although I had the nectar inside me – the new nectar, a million times more powerful than the old – I wouldn’t survive a fifty-storey fall, no way.

Panic was beginning to claw its way through the rush, the sting of the fire on my warped skin making it all too clear how painful it would be to die up here. I used what remained of my left arm – the short blade which jutted from my elbow still growing as the nectar worked on it – to wave the smoke away from my face, the sword-like right to feel my way along the sloped side of the spire.

The jets that had attacked the tower were long gone, their job done. There were other things in the sky, though: black helicopters that hovered like falcons, shaded windscreens all facing this way, watching as I was condemned to the flames. It brought back a distant memory of standing in front of a jury, being judged guilty of a crime I didn’t commit, and sentenced to a living death. It was another life, another
person’s
life. I wasn’t that boy any longer. I was something so much more.

I stood, ignoring the vertigo that made the city spin beneath me, and I held up the blade of my right hand, spitting out another choked roar of hatred.

‘You can’t kill me!’ I screamed when my breath had recovered, knowing that nobody in the helicopters would be able to hear me. ‘I won’t let you!’

Another explosion, this time out in the city. Black smoke churned upwards from a petrol station, so dark and so dense that it looked like a granite mountain pushing its way out of the earth. Two of the choppers broke away, banking gracefully. I caught a glimpse of shadowed faces behind the tinted glass, and through the open door of one of the birds was a cannon. They continued to rise, heading this way, heading for me.

I backed off, using the smoke from the tower to shield myself. But as I did so I heard that voice in my mind, a whisper that was at the same time a shout, louder even than the howl of the wind and the thunder of the flames.

Let them take you
, said Alfred Furnace, speaking through the nectar. I slapped my ruined left hand against my head, trying to knock his tainted voice away. He’d had his filthy fingers inside my skull right from the start, from the moment we first made our break from the tunnels beneath the prison, taunting me, manipulating me, controlling me with the ease of a puppet master pulling the strings of a marionette.

I still didn’t know why he had taken such an interest in me, why he had led me to the tower just to fight the warden, why he had given me those last, vital words of encouragement that had enabled me to defeat his general, and why he wanted me to stand at his right hand as he ushered in his new kingdom. It didn’t make any sense.

‘No,’ I growled, speaking to him this time. ‘I won’t listen to you. I’m going to find you, and end you.’

You’re going to die
, the voice replied, a bone-rattling
hiss.
And all our work will be for nothing. Let them take you, and I promise you will find answers to the last of your questions.

The two choppers were approaching fast. They reached the level of the tower and held their position twenty metres or so away from me, their blades causing the smoke to dance in sweeping, majestic plumes. I wondered what I looked like to the people inside – more nightmare than human, two asymmetric jagged blades for arms and eyes like churning vortexes. I knew the terror that my new body must have inspired, and it made me feel good, made me feel powerful, made me feel like I could crush those soldiers, all of them, and take control of the world.

I could hear Furnace’s laughter, but even the knowledge that I was acting the way he wanted me to didn’t dull the sharp edge of excitement that wormed through my thoughts.

One of the choppers swung round, the open side hatch facing me. Through the burning air it took on a shimmering, surreal quality, but I could still make out the machine gun inside, pointing right this way.

‘Come on,’ I bellowed. I’d been shot before and survived. There was nothing they could do that could kill me. Let them try, and I’d show them what true power was. ‘Come on!’

By the time the cannon opened fire I was already on the move, throwing myself further up the spire, a cloak of smoke draped over me. I waited for the hammer of bullets against the roof, the storm of shrapnel, but all I
heard was a dull clank. I turned as the chopper was rising again, using its rotors to blow away my cover. And I was just in time to see the gunner cut loose a rope and load in another.

It wasn’t a cannon at all, it was a grappling gun.

He fired, catching me off guard. I tried to jump out of the way but a sliver of steel punched through my gut, dragging a black rope after it. It pinged off the concrete spire, opening like an umbrella. I grabbed at the rope, but with blades for hands I couldn’t get purchase. The grappling hook that had sliced through me slammed into my back, the prongs holding it there, and before I even knew what was happening I was wrenched off the tower.

The universe came apart, the sky and the ground becoming one endless blur as I spun through the air, my stomach lurching so hard that for a second I thought it had left my body completely. I realised I was screaming, or at least as much of a scream as my air-starved lungs could manage. Then the line went taut, the grappling claw fixed into my flesh, and I swung beneath that chopper like a fish on a hook.

They began to reel me in and I was powerless to stop them. The only thing I could do was try to cut the line, but that would mean falling to my death. The other chopper was too far away to reach, arcing away as I watched, heading for the ground. The bird above me did the same, the world tilting sickeningly once again as we plummeted earthwards. The tower flashed by beside me, every window haemorrhaging smoke, massive craters in its side where the missiles had hit,
the entire building groaning like a mythical beast brought down by spears and arrows.

I’d wait, bide my time until they pulled me close enough. Then I’d strike, too fast and too strong for them to stop. I ran my eyes up the black cord that rose from my stomach, then focused on the bottom of the chopper, the bird getting bigger as I drew close. I’d be there in seconds.

A shape appeared from the hatch, a soldier leaning out over me, a harness holding him in place. He had a gun in his hands, and he aimed down the sights for no more than a second before pulling the trigger.

Something thudded into my arm, no more painful than a nettle sting. I glanced at it, a growl already spilling from between my lips. It wasn’t a bullet. It looked more like a feather, a red plume sticking out just below my shoulder. The soldier fired again, and again, and again, a crimson forest sprouting over my torso and my neck.

Smoke began to cloud my vision. Except I knew it wasn’t smoke. It wasn’t nectar either. It was something else, a creeping darkness that cut off the relentless glow of the sun, which blotted out the city, which left only the grinning face of the soldier as he was pulled back inside the helicopter.

Let them take you
, Furnace’s voice again, and even this was muted by the unbelievable, inescapable tiredness that had settled into my thoughts, into my bones.
You will have your chance for revenge, I promise you that
.

Then the last scraps of daylight sputtered out like candles, and the world was no more.

My dreams led me to a place of infinite quiet.

I stood in a forest, nothing but trees in every direction. Their gnarled trunks grew into finger-like branches that twisted and entwined overhead, so many of them that they almost blotted out the twilight sky above. Only a sliver of cold moonlight made it through, and by its silver touch I saw piles of rotting fruit on the damp ground. Apples, thousands, black-eyed crows picking at them as if they were corpses, worms wriggling through the decomposing flesh.

Not a forest, then. An orchard.

I knew this place. I had seen it before; not like this, but carved from stone. It was the orchard that had been replicated at the top of Furnace’s tower block, the one I had just been pulled from. Except back in that penthouse there had been a sculpture of a boy nailed to a trunk, the young Alfred Furnace, his stomach cut open. I scanned the trees before me – stretching off like an army of skeletons – but could see no sign of him.

I tried to turn around but my head was locked, my
body paralysed as so often happens in dreams. Panic rose from my stomach like vomit but I forced myself to swallow it back down.
It’s only a dream
, I told myself, even though I knew it was something more than that.

The blanket of silence that cradled the orchard was so immense that it was almost a sound in its own right, a mute roar that I could feel against my ears as though I was deep underwater. The leafless branches swayed in the breeze, the birds fought and flapped between their feastings, but they made no noise. I couldn’t even hear my own breath, or feel my pulse.

It was the fire that alerted me to their presence. The deep velvet shadows between the trees began to flicker gently, a ghostly dance of light and dark against the bark. Those forms gradually solidified into shapes that marched through the orchard, a procession of men and women, all holding flaming torches. Their clothes were like something from an old movie, the sort of thing peasants might have worn hundreds of years ago. Their faces were contorted with emotion – maybe fear, maybe anger, maybe both. And they held those torches against the encroaching night as if they were the only thing that stood between them and the devil.

They marched before me, from right to left, and it was only when they were directly in front of me that I noticed two other figures in the crowd. Both were being carried – one on a wooden board, a wreath on his motionless stomach, the other struggling and screaming between two hulking men, his hands and feet bound. I recognised the second kid immediately, even though his
grief-filled face was the exact opposite of the calm expression worn by the carving in the penthouse.

It was Alfred Furnace, and he was no older than me.

Several of the mob seemed to scour the area before settling on a large tree to my left. They ran towards it, planting their torches in the wet soil and ushering the rest of the group forward. The two men threw Furnace to the floor and the boy tried to squirm away, burrowing into the ground as if he could tunnel his way to safety. One of the women used a knife to cut open the twine around his wrists and ankles, but before he could make a run for it the men had hoisted him up again. They spun him round and one of them lashed out, slapping him across the cheek. There was still no sound, but my imagination was happy to provide one.

I wanted to step out, to try and stop what was happening. I knew the boy was Furnace, but the way he cried for help, tears streaming down his filthy cheeks, his skinny arms held out towards a non-existent saviour – those weren’t the actions of a crazed psychopath, they were those of a terrified child. My body was still locked tight, however. I may as well have been one of the trees in the orchard, rooted to the ground and held fast by the branches of my brothers.

The biggest of the men lifted the boy against the tree, pinning him there while more of the crowd surged forwards. Two women grabbed one of Furnace’s arms, bending it back around the trunk, while another put a huge iron nail against his palm. All I could do as they struck the first blow was close my eyes.