Furnace 5 - Execution (6 page)

And then it hit me: my thoughts turned to fire, every cell of my body reawakened. I roared, the noise rocking the room, sending the scientists flying back like skittles. Only Panettierre stood her ground, her eyes burning as if they were reflecting the flames inside me.

‘Keep watching those readings,’ she barked. ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’

My roar subsided into a growl, a throbbing purr that settled in my throat. I tugged at my hand, knowing how easily I could slice through the woman in front of me, through all of them, with my bladed fingers. And I would have, too. If I’d been free, I’d have killed them all where they stood.

‘There, there,’ Panettierre said to me. ‘Hush, now; be brave. There’s no reason to get upset. This will all be over very soon.’ Then, to somebody else. ‘Oh my God, it’s working, look.’

I pushed against her fingers, seeing the scalpel wound already clotting with hardening nectar. I didn’t see what the big deal was, I’d recovered from far worse injuries
than that. But the scientists were obviously impressed as they were practically fighting each other to get a closer look.

‘Fairhurst, get a sample of that,’ Panettierre said, prodding the scab with her gloved finger. I tried another growl but what little nectar had been pumped into my system was already used up. Somebody shoved his way to the front, using another scalpel to slice off a section of the clotted wound before scampering off with his prize. ‘You seeing that?’ Panettierre went on. ‘Readings are off the chart. His temperature is going on for fifty-eight degrees
centigrade
.’

They busied themselves around me for what seemed like for ever, measuring, gauging, prodding. All I could do was lie there, hoping that they were telling me the truth, that they were looking for a cure. I don’t know how much later it was that Panettierre lifted the scalpel again, holding it a few centimetres away from the first hole she’d made.

‘Just a few more of these,’ she said. ‘We need to do this because we have to understand how you work, we have to unlock the truth of your genetic mutations. You must realise that if we can’t, if we fail, then the country will fall.’

I protested, but even as the words tumbled from my mouth her blade was slicing into my skin, parting it as if it were paper.

‘Don’t be a baby, Alex,’ she said. ‘I know you’re braver than this. Just grit your teeth and it will be over in a minute.’

But it wasn’t. I don’t know how long it went on for, my consciousness flowing in and out like the tide on a moonless night. It could have been hours, it felt like days. The scientists came and went, anonymous behind their masks. Only Panettierre stayed, cutting hole after hole then fixing them up with a droplet of nectar. Each time she’d whisper comforting words into my ear, stroking my brow. But her eyes never met mine. They never left the canvas of ravaged skin laid out in front of her.

At some point I lost the strength to keep my head up and it fell to the side. Past the churning ocean of gas masks I made out the blacksuit on the table beside me. He hadn’t been dead after all, because he stared back, his eyes more lead than silver, a trail of black blood leaking from his lips down over his cheek.

I didn’t look away, and neither did he. We just lay there, watching each other. We were enemies, yes, but right now we were bound by the same horror, the same powerlessness, the same fear. We all were, everything in this room – the blacksuits, the rats, the berserkers, and me. We were enemies, but I had never felt closer to them. We were enemies, but we were brothers with a common goal.

We had to get out of here.

It was night by the time they finished with me. The skylights had darkened into eyes which peered inside like observers at an autopsy.

I had been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours now, each tiny dose of nectar rebooting my system for just a few seconds. Every time I fell into sleep the orchard rose up around me, trees sprouting from the floor, branches coiling up over my bed like the tentacles of some sea monster. Then I’d blink and be back in the hospital, Panettierre slicing away while her doctors stared goggle-eyed. But I knew the dream was still there, awaiting my return. I couldn’t hide from it for ever.

At some point the blacksuit next to me died. I watched it happen, saw the spark in his eyes sputter, flare brightly for a fraction of a second, and then fade. A while later some soldiers cut his body loose from the table and dragged it away, I guessed to an incinerator somewhere. It was shortly afterwards that Panettierre threw her scalpel into a dish and wiped her nectar-encrusted hands on her white overalls.

‘I think we’re done here,’ she wheezed through her gas mask. ‘Send the results to my quarters, I need to double-check them.’ The scientists began to drift away until only the colonel remained. She rested a hand on the table and wiped her other arm over her mask, feigning mopping the sweat from her brow. ‘Phew,’ she said to me. ‘That was tough. But you’ve done well, Alex. We’ve learned a great deal today, about you and the disease inside you. Are you feeling okay?’

I didn’t need to see my body to know what it looked like – pockmarked with fresh wounds, craters in my skin, like the surface of the moon. When she saw I wasn’t going to answer she carried on.

‘The nectar, it’s astonishing,’ she said. ‘It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s almost – I don’t know – intelligent, the way it targets wounds. Like a supercharged clotting agent, only more than that too. It functions so much more efficiently than blood, carrying twenty, maybe thirty times as much oxygen. And it makes your physiology go haywire, seems to act like a neurological drug, numbing emotional transmissions, fear, any kind of reason.’ She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe the words coming out of her own mouth. ‘It’s no wonder we’re getting hammered out there. An army filled with this stuff could win any war, full stop.’

She paused, lost somewhere in her own imagination, and the way her eyes lit up made my skin crawl. It was a while before she remembered I was there.

‘But there’s so much left to do before we truly
understand what this liquid is. It’s quite unpredictable. For instance, why does it affect different people differently, turning some into psychotic, mindless killers, the ones you call rats, and others into monsters? I mean those berserkers have completely changed, there’s nothing human in them any more. And how come some of you can talk, the ones in suits?’

She looked at me as if expecting to be enlightened, only waiting for a second or two before continuing her barrage of questions.

‘And what about you? You seem to be somewhere in between. You have the body of a monster, a berserker, and yet you seem to have the mind of a normal teenager. It really doesn’t make much sense. Do you remember anything about this? Did the warden explain it?’

My life in the prison seemed so long ago now that even if the warden had told me the full truth about the nectar I doubt I could have remembered it.

‘Well, no matter,’ she said. ‘I can understand why you’re too tired to speak. It’s been a long day. But it’s not quite over yet, I’m afraid. There’s a little something we need you to do for us. It won’t take long, and then you can sleep, I promise.’

She nodded to somebody behind me and I heard an engine start up, the sound of gears crunching, the whine of an approaching vehicle. Panettierre stood to one side as a small forklift truck wheeled into view, its prongs sliding under my table. There was a jolt as it was lifted off the floor, the room spinning like a fairground ride.

‘Don’t worry, Alex,’ came Panettierre’s voice. She
walked along beside me as the truck carted me across the room, heading for a large loading door. Dozens of creatures watched us pass from the operating tables, their constant motion as they thrashed and bucked making me feel like I was on a boat sailing across an ocean of wounded flesh. ‘It shouldn’t be dangerous, not for you. We just need to see how the nectar works in a … I guess you’d call it a combat situation.’

I didn’t have time to ask her what she meant. A couple of soldiers pulled open the loading door and the truck passed through it into a canvas tunnel which concealed the night sky for the fifty-metre journey across a concrete yard to a second brick building. We crawled towards it, entering through a wide door.

At first I thought it was another white-tiled operating theatre, like the one I’d been in moments ago. Then I noticed the massive pit in the floor. No, not a pit, a
pool
. It was a swimming pool, only all of the water had been drained away. It was surrounded by a metal cage, its sides parallel with the edges of the pool. I peered through those shining bars as the forklift carried me closer, almost expecting to see a pair of cage fighters, as if this were some bizarre TV game show. But all I saw was a sloped floor rising out of a crimson swamp, as if somebody had been trying to fill the pool with blood. There were soldiers and scientists surrounding the cage, all in gas masks, too many of them to count.

My guts began to twist, and I wondered if I should be trying to get loose, trying to escape. But I stayed quiet and I stayed still. Instinct told me that I’d need to save
what little strength I had for whatever was about to happen.

‘Put him straight in,’ Panettierre shouted. ‘Prep the others.’

A door in the side of the cage slid open and the forklift eased me forward until I was dangling over the deep end. To either side of me there was a roar as two chainsaws started up in stereo. I heard somebody barking out a countdown and then I was bathed in sparks, the whole room lighting up. Before I could make sense of what was going on, the coils of shipping wire around me loosened, the forklift lurched and I found myself falling. I landed in a pile of something soft and wet, my operating table striking the floor next to me, splintering the tiles. There was a crunch overhead as the cage door grated shut and I looked up in time to see the doctors crowd around it, Panettierre pushing to the front.

I managed to lift myself onto my haunches, but that was as far as I could go. When I attempted to stand up the whole room cartwheeled, my legs too weak to hold me. I crouched, trying to haul in a breath, my whole body trembling with the effort. I realised that I was dressed in a flimsy surgical gown, needles and sensor pads still plastered all over my skin.

‘Can you hear me down there, Alex?’ said Panettierre. ‘Those pads on you, they’ll tell us all we need to know, you don’t have to worry about any of that. All we’re asking you to do is help us out a little. Will you do that?’

Something howled, a banshee’s cry that echoed off the tiled walls, scraping down my spine.

‘Stand well away,’ I heard somebody say. ‘Dump it straight in.’

Another forklift truck rolled into view on the lip of the pool. This one held a cage, and cramped inside it was a berserker. It wasn’t like any I had seen to date, its body made up of yellow-white skin that was knotted and warped as though carved from solid bone. Its skull was huge and cone shaped, arching back like a cycling helmet. I’d seen pictures of African tribes who bound their skulls to make them long and pointy, and this reminded me of them. The creature’s forehead jutted so far forward that its face was cast into shadow, and only when it arched its back did I get a good look at it.

Its eyes, nose and mouth were clustered right in the middle of its head, squished together like the punched-in features of a cartoon figure hit with a frying pan. I didn’t see how a face like that could still function, but it must have done because the berserker turned its eyes in my direction, sniffing the air, a tiny tongue poking from the pencil-sharpener hole of its mouth, licking at non-existent lips.

The berserker’s cage was pushed right up against the door above me, and in a single motion both hatches were slid open. The creature leapt down into the pool, causing a crimson tsunami. I scrabbled back, adrenaline making the most of what little nectar was left in my system. The berserker didn’t attack, just cocked its head as if trying to get a good look at me with its under-developed eyes. This close I could see they were lumpy and off-white, like fried eggs with their yolks broken.

The forklift truck wheeled back, beeping, but as soon as it had gone another appeared, also holding a cage. This one contained something else, smaller but wilder. A rat. I thought for a moment that the clothes it wore – drenched in a bib of black blood – were prison overalls. But I was wrong. It was wearing beige combats, and when it moved something glittered around its neck.

Dog tags.

The rat hacked and slashed at the bars, so hard that its fingers were torn and bloody, its nails long gone. But it didn’t care. Of course it didn’t. It was mindless, emotionless, just a vehicle of flesh controlled by the nectar inside, nectar which gushed from its distended jaws.

Once more the cage was pushed up against the metal fence around the pool, the two hatches sliding open as one. In the blink of an eye the rat was out, swinging onto the inside of the pool cage like a monkey at the zoo. The scientists fell away, but one was too slow. The rat reached through a gap and grabbed his mask, wrenching him forward so hard that his head bounced off the metal. A dozen arms wrapped themselves around the injured scientist, pulling him away before the rat could inflict further damage.