Furnace 5 - Execution (30 page)

I sent out a message, a clarion call to arms. And I heard their answer, a battle cry that rose up from every last one of my soldiers. They would never stop fighting, and neither would I.

I had made a promise to Furnace. I would see his creations win this war, eradicate every inferior being so that we could start again, so that we could create a world of equals; a world populated only by the children of the nectar; a world where the wickedness of human nature would be no more. It would be our planet, for us alone, a Fatherland for the Soldiers of Furnace.

It would be a paradise.

I don’t know how many people I saw die, how many I killed. Thousands? Tens of thousands? A million?

The parade of slaughter was endless, waves of berserkers working together under my command, unleashing the full force of their fury against my enemies. It was as if I was watching countless television screens at once, hundreds of acts of violence packed into every second, each one as personal as if I had committed it myself – which, in a way, I had.

More than anything else it reminded me of the screening room in the prison, watching reel after reel of film showing humankind’s worst sins against its own species. Only instead of having to spend days tied to that chair, my eyelids pinned, I was seeing it all in an instant, every beat of my heart containing enough horror for a hundred hours of film.

And the truth was, I was enjoying it.

My anger was so overwhelming that I almost lost myself to it completely. Every time I felt a berserker or a blacksuit or even a rat die, my thirst for revenge became
more insatiable. These were my children, and seeing the darkness, the abyss inside my head where they had once been, was unbearable. Every time a soldier was torn apart, though, I howled with laughter, delighted that there would be one less human to stand in our way.

Even though my mind existed in my troops there must still have been a part of me inside the chamber back on the island, because I realised that I wasn’t alone. My friends had arrived, and I saw myself through Simon’s eyes – an impossible creature whose gaze blazed down on them. If it wasn’t for the fact that one of my arms was a blade, and that Lucy’s silver necklace glittered past the collar of my shirt, I wouldn’t have recognised myself.

‘Alex?’ said Zee, stepping forward, his face warped by sadness, tears rolling down his cheeks. The wheezers in the room moved to intercept them but I held them back. ‘What have they done to you? Where’s Furnace?’

I looked at the bundle of desiccated flesh and broken bone to my side that had once been Alfred Furnace. Without the stranger’s blood inside him time had quickly caught up with his corpse, reducing it to little more than ash. Clumps of it crumbled from the straps that had held him, drifting lazily to the floor. Only where his body had been plugged with tubes and wires, anchoring his flesh in place, did he still resemble anything human.

‘
He is dead
,’ I said, and my voice didn’t seem to come from my throat, but from all around me, as if the entire room was speaking. My friends took a step back, their jaws dropping. ‘
I killed him
.’

Even as I spoke I was still fighting, commanding the berserkers and the blacksuits in battle. It felt as though I was living a thousand lives at the same time. I was still hunting for Panettierre, but with only a single set of eyes left on the island I wasn’t having any luck. Hopefully she was already dead, killed during the massacre in the mansion.

‘But what happened to you?’ Zee asked. A wave of annoyance passed over me at the sound of his voice, the whine of a fly. There was no time for this. I wanted to order the wheezers to attack, to take care of Zee and Lucy. They were enemies, after all. Humans. Or maybe I could delve into Simon’s thoughts, force him to kill his own friends. Manipulating him would be as easy as breathing.

Something held me back, the knowledge that I had shared a life with these people. But the memories of them were leaking from me, driven out by the stranger’s blood. That life seemed like an age ago, so distant now that I couldn’t believe it had actually happened. The past was no longer important.

‘
It was the only way
,’ I answered, the walls and the floor trembling at the sound of my voice. ‘
To kill him I had to take his blood
.’

Zee shook his head, swallowing his fear and walking closer. He stopped right in front of me.

‘You’re not him, Alex,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’

‘We need to get out of here, before those things find out where we are,’ said Lucy.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ replied Simon, looking nervously at the wheezers. ‘Alex is controlling them all.’

‘Is that true?’ Zee asked. ‘Are you doing this?’

My remaining berserker on the island was hunting down the last of the soldiers, a few of the survivors trying to hide in the forest. One threw himself over the cliff, preferring to die by his own hand than be killed by his enemies. Another used his final breaths to fire a rocket, the missile missing the berserker and hitting the east wing of the mansion. We could all feel the explosion down in the chamber, the impact causing Furnace’s remains to disintegrate further. Brick dust rained down from the vaulted ceiling and Zee wiped it from his eyes.

‘
His powers are now my powers
,’ I replied. ‘
His war is now my war
.’

Zee looked at the others, appalled, but they had no help to give him.

‘You have to stop this,’ Zee said, turning back to face me. ‘This isn’t right. Furnace was the enemy, his creatures, the wheezers, the suits, they said they were on your side but they’re not. Think about it, Alex. Remember the prison, remember your old life. If you do this then there’s no going back, not for any of us. We’ll all die.’

‘
I cannot die
,’ I said, feeling the stranger’s blood surge through me. It would keep me alive for centuries, long after the last human had been devoured by worms. The thought of it made my pulse quicken, but there was something else, something bad at the back of my head, something that the blood wouldn’t let me make any sense of.

‘You
can
die,’ said Lucy, walking to Zee’s side. ‘Maybe not your body, but the real you can die.’ She stood on her tiptoes, placing her hand on my chest, over my heart. ‘
This
can die.’

I tried to ignore her words, my mind back inside my creatures, urging them to destroy.

‘Alex?’ Zee again, pulling me back into the chamber. ‘Please, make it stop.’

‘
Why?
’ I demanded. ‘
Why let the humans live? You know as well as I do that they will use the nectar, they will create demons of their own. Sooner or later this world will end; there is too much evil in humanity for it to survive. It is better for their occupation to finish now, with us as the victors. That way, when the new dawn breaks, when the new Fatherland rises, there will be no more war. When only the strong exist, when we are all Soldiers of Furnace, who will be left to fight?
’

‘That isn’t you talking,’ Zee said. ‘It’s Furnace. He’s still there, somewhere inside you. He’s making you say this.’

‘
No
,’ I replied. ‘
Furnace is dead. There is only me
.’

Furnace
was
dead, there was no doubt about that. These were my words, my thoughts, weren’t they? I struggled to put them into some kind of order, but the thunder of the stranger’s blood was just too loud.

‘You remember the prison?’ Zee went on.

His words sparked memories, him and me inside an elevator being carried to the bowels of the earth, making a promise to each other that we would find a way out.

‘You remember Donovan?’

Of course, how could I forget him? I could see him now, sitting beside me on my bunk, his laughter echoing out over the yard, making me feel like maybe I could survive inside, that this didn’t have to be the end. I could hear it, that laughter, infinitely different from my own, because it had been so human.

‘You remember our jobs, the chipping, the laundry?’ Zee said.

‘The stink,’ Simon added. And I could see myself, Donovan and Zee sitting in the canteen, Zee’s face a portrait of utter disgust as he described having to clean the toilets –
well next time you do it can you try to miss the seat
. I shook my head, attempting to chase the images away. They weren’t important, none of it was important. How could it be? I wasn’t even that kid any more, I wasn’t Alex Sawyer, I was a god laying the foundations for a new race.

‘You remember slop?’ Zee went on, his voice cutting through the storm. ‘The leftovers we had to eat. And Monty’s meal, that time he cooked for me and you and D in the kitchen?’

I could see it as if I was back there, scoffing down that heavenly stew of beef and peppers and tomatoes, the best meal I think I had ever had. I remembered how Donovan had cried, because it had been so long since he’d last tasted real food. The memory bled into another, me and D standing in the kitchen having an argument, him stuffing a glove full of rancid chicken and throwing it at me. That’s what had given me the inspiration to get out, the idea of filling the gloves with gas and using
them to blow the floor in the chipping room.

‘And Toby,’ Zee said. ‘You saved him from killing himself.’

He had been going to jump, and I had stopped him by telling him about the plan. In the end he had died during the escape, the heat of the explosion ravaging his body and the merciless cold of the river finishing him off. But he had still been free. Each memory seemed to multiply, other thoughts blossoming from them like a flower in bloom. I saw us standing on the lip of the hole, the rock still smoking, the river raging beneath us, our own personal expressway out of Furnace. I saw myself smiling as I jumped, not caring if I died, only that I had beaten the prison.

Zee was looking at Simon, urging him to help.

‘Solitary,’ the bigger boy said. ‘You remember the first time I pulled you out of your cell, you broke my nose?’

With a head-butt, because I had thought he was a rat.

‘When we talked to each other by banging our toilets,’ Zeeadded, and incredibly he was grinning. ‘That time we played I Spy, even though we couldn’t see anything.’

Donkeys, I had guessed, and dog crap.

‘Playing paper-scissors-stone to see who’d be bait for the rats,’ said Simon, snorting a laugh. ‘And stealing all that equipment. Like we really thought we’d be able to use scalpels as climbing gear. We almost made it, though, didn’t we, climbing the chimney. If that bastard Cross hadn’t lit the incinerator then we’d have been home free.’

‘Yeah, Cross,’ spat Zee, his grin vanishing. ‘The warden, don’t forget about him, Alex.’

I couldn’t, even if I’d tried, his devil’s face appearing before me now. I remembered the first time I’d seen him, walking out of the vault door with his sick entourage of blacksuits, skinless dogs and wheezers. I couldn’t meet his eyes, nobody could. Every time I tried it was as if I had been plunged into a pool of black water, all the joy and happiness in the world stripped away. I knew now why those eyes had seemed like vortexes in his head, why none of us could meet them. He’d consumed so much nectar that he had the stranger’s blood inside him – not much, just enough to make him far older than he had any right to be, enough to strip away all but the semblance of humanity.

He had been chosen to become Furnace’s heir. It might have been him here instead of me, hooked up to this machine, commanding his troops to kill. The thought of us as brothers, joined by the same blood, by the same murderous desire, made me sick.

‘You know how much we hated him,’ said Zee. ‘Everything he did to us – the blood watch, the wheezers. Think about what happened to Monty, turned into a freak, then into a blacksuit. Think about what happened to Donovan.’

I saw myself in the infirmary, holding a pillow over the face of the thing that had once been Donovan, putting him out of his misery before he could become another of the warden’s soulless guards. I felt a pressure in my chest, one which rose into my throat and sat there like an iron ball.

‘Think about what happened to
you
,’ Zee went on,
touching my arm, the blade. ‘The warden, Furnace, they tore you apart and tried to make you a monster. Think how hard you fought it back then. You wouldn’t let them take you. You got us out of there, you saved us all.’

I didn’t want to see the memories but there was no stopping them. I
had
hated the warden, more than anything else on earth. I hated what he had done to me, to my friends. I had hated Alfred Furnace too, the man who sat in the shadows, who orchestrated the madness. That’s why I had vowed to kill him, wasn’t it? So that this would all end. Not so that I could take over. It was all too confusing, I couldn’t make sense of any of it while the stranger’s blood still churned.

‘Think back, think about when we were inside the prison,’ said Zee, relentless. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted this, you would have killed yourself rather than become like him.’

And I
was
like him. I was the force behind the darkness, the mind behind the chaos. I was the very thing that I had despised so passionately.
I was Alfred Furnace
.