It was only a few minutes later that we saw our first rat. It came out of nowhere, launching itself over a pile of rubble and hitting the side of the truck so hard that it bounced off, sprawling on its ass like an upturned bug. It didn’t seem like it could remember how to get up, and we all watched it squirm and wriggle as the blacksuit drove us on. The image of the rat’s face, though, stayed with me long after it had disappeared from sight – a girl, no older than ten, one of her pigtails still in place and her red-rimmed glasses hanging round her neck on a cord.
There were others here too, their dark eyes watching us from the gutted buildings. A couple more attacked, but they were weak and slow and the berserkers quickly put them out of their misery. I realised that they must have already been close to death, or they would have left this place long ago, following Furnace’s clarion call as he ordered them to spread out, to attack new towns and new cities.
Or maybe they hadn’t moved on because some part of them remembered being happy in the city, because deep inside them, past the overpowering strength of the nectar, they remembered who they were. Not for the first time I thought how unbearably cruel it was that the nectar only worked on kids, that adults were spared its power. I watched the faces of Furnace’s children stiffen once the berserkers had finished with them, prayed to a god I didn’t believe in that they were going somewhere good.
By the time we reached Monument Bridge the smoke-paled sun was disappearing behind the handful of skyscrapers that still remained. The blacksuit flicked on the truck’s lights, painting the ruined city in an eerie, flickering glow, like the ghosts of the dead were rising from the steaming tarmac. He kept the same slow but steady speed as we drove over it, the thrum of the tyres changing pitch. Beneath us the river was as black as tar, but there were things moving in the water, bloated shapes bobbing up and down with the tide.
‘Stop here a minute,’ I said to the suit. He mumbled something but he obeyed, pulling the truck to a halt in the middle of the bridge. I struggled to unlock the door, my new fingers not quite up to such a delicate task, eventually managing to swing it open. I walked to the barrier and peered over the edge.
‘What is it?’ said Zee, running to my side. ‘We probably shouldn’t stop here. It’s not …’ And then he looked down and the words dried up in his throat.
The river was swollen with corpses, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, all floating slowly under the bridge like logs. The ranks of the dead were so thick that I could barely make out any of the river’s surface, their flesh and tattered clothes rippling in cruel imitation of water. Countless gulls and other birds sat on the bodies, riding their portable feasts downstream – their screams so loud, so much like human cries, that for a terrifying moment I thought the dead were calling out to us.
‘There’s so many of them,’ Zee whispered. ‘How can this have happened?’
I shook my head. There was no answer I could give. I turned away, my shoulders slumped, but Zee grabbed my arm and pointed at something in the water.
‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Down there, look.’
I followed his finger, struggling to make out what he meant. Then I saw it, a shape pushing itself up between two corpses, a body the colour of wet bone, two spider-like arms jutting up, wrapping themselves around what had once been a woman in a red dress, lazily pulling the body beneath the water. The creature’s head was the last thing to submerge, and it seemed to gaze up at us through wide eyes blackened by nectar. Then it was gone, the bloated dead filling the space where it had been.
‘Was that a berserker?’ Zee asked, pulling his army jacket tight around his throat. ‘They’re in the water too?’
I walked back to the truck, my brain trying to simultaneously make sense of and forget what I’d just seen. Lucy and Simon were peering out the window, looking at me expectantly.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said before they could ask. ‘Forget it. Let’s move.’
I jumped back into the truck, slamming the door. The blacksuit had kept the engine idling, and when Zee had clambered in he set off again. The headlights were bright, but the smoke muted their glare, like we were driving through fog. Then the near-invisible sun finally dipped below the horizon and night fell instantly, as if somebody had flicked a switch. I realised that none of the street lights were working. Outside the truck the berserkers howled to each other, and there were other noises too, distant shrieks and calls, creatures celebrating the darkness. The city was obviously less deserted than I’d first thought.
‘Which way now?’ the blacksuit said when we reached the end of the bridge, stopping at a set of traffic lights even though they showed no colour.
‘Keep heading south,’ I replied, thinking about the island.
‘Is it safe to be out here in the dark?’ Lucy asked, sitting forward. ‘Maybe we should find a place to take cover.’
It was so gloomy that it looked as if the world outside the truck’s windscreen had been erased. The blacksuit squinted into it, gently revving the truck’s engine. Something shrieked, the noise dropping down from above. I pictured the buildings here, the rats that crawled inside, waiting to pounce. The suit must have been thinking the same thing because he nodded.
‘Let’s just get out of the city,’ he said. ‘It will be safer on the other side.’
He pushed us forward, around the hulking shell of a tank which loomed up in the middle of the street, taking a road that angled diagonally to our left. One of the berserkers that was escorting us – the minotaur lookfalike – shot off to the side, its giant fists flailing at a shape there, but I couldn’t see what it was.
‘How come the rats still attack us?’ I asked the blacksuit.
‘Because their brains have turned to mush,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘They’re Furnace’s version of a biological weapon, a short-term measure to overwhelm and subdue the enemy. Their sole thought is violence, to attack, to bite, to spread the nectar into their victims.’
‘Like a virus,’ I said.
‘Yeah, like a virus. They don’t care who they infect. Adults will die, because the nectar can’t take with them. It eats them from the inside out. Most kids will turn into other rats, but some will go beyond that.’
‘Berserkers.’
The suit nodded, picking up speed as the roads began to clear. The noise of the engine rattled the whole truck and I had to lean in to hear what he said next.
‘The ones we can catch in time, that we can programme, operate on, will become blacksuits. But there aren’t too many of those yet, there’s been no time. This is phase one, shock and awe. These rats aren’t designed to live very long, a few days, a week at most, then the nectar dries out. Some of them can keep going for longer, if they remember to feed, and if they can work out that drinking more nectar keeps them alive. That’s unlikely, though. That much nectar pumped into them so quickly, it ravages them, snaps their mind clean in half. They won’t even know they’re still alive.’
‘But they’re just kids,’ I said, unable to believe what I was hearing, even though I’d already known that was the truth. ‘Like me, like you.’
‘They’re nothing like me,’ he growled. ‘They’re not even animals, they’re weapons. You don’t feel sympathy for a bullet once it’s been fired from a gun, so why feel any for a rat once it’s served its purpose? Only the chosen few get to become blacksuits.’
‘Don’t you remember anything from your life, though?’ I asked. ‘From before you were turned.’
The blacksuit flashed me a warning look, his eyes like sharpened steel.
‘I had no life before the tower,’ he said. He must have been one of Furnace’s soldiers, not the warden’s, turned in the tower in the city, the one that had been destroyed with me almost still in it. ‘Furnace is my father. That’s where the elite forces were created, not like Cross’s pathetic half-breed spawn inside the prison.’ He returned his attention to the wheel. ‘Which is why I’m so surprised that Furnace has chosen you, a prisoner – not qu
ite blacksuit, not quite berserker, not quite anything.’
We swung onto the southbound motorway, using the hard shoulder to avoid the cars and vans that had been abandoned on the main carriageway. Something about this road was familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not that I really had fingers.
‘So why does he want me?’ I said, watching the speedometer smoothly circle the dial, taking us up to sixty. The blacksuit shrugged, opening his mouth as if he was about to spit, hacking up words instead.
‘Beats me. Maybe it’s because you’re such a freak. Usually when people get to berserker size they lose their minds, and you haven’t. You’re a failure, and maybe he wants to see you for himself, learn from his mistakes, before he puts you down.’
‘He’s not going to get to do that,’ I said.
The blacksuit smiled, the gleam of his teeth and his eyes brighter than anything outside the windscreen.
‘Yeah, you tell yourself that.’
I felt something squirming in my gut, but I wasn’t sure whether it was anger or fear or a combination of both. I swallowed hard, trying to bury the sensation before it could fire up the nectar again. I could feel the poison in my veins but it didn’t show any sign of waking. Either that or I was getting better at controlling it. Something flashed by outside, a green sign, and without knowing quite why I said, ‘Take the slip road.’
The blacksuit pulled off the motorway, accelerating up a hill and blasting onto a roundabout, taking the exit that I pointed to. The pain in my forehead shifted to my temple, telling me I was going the wrong way. Somebody shouted something from the back seat and I had to turn around, asking them to repeat it.
‘I said, where are we?’ yelled Simon.
I wasn’t quite sure, but something was telling me to go this way. Not Furnace but something different, some other indefinable instinct that made me direct the blacksuit down a long, sweeping residential road, past a row of shops and over a second, smaller roundabout.
‘Somewhere safe,’ I said eventually. ‘Somewhere we can spend the night.’
‘But where?’ Simon asked again.
We turned right, houses on both sides but no sign of life anywhere other than the occasional hungry-looking cat watching us from the shadows. I guided the blacksuit down three more roads, each shorter and narrower than the last, and it was only when we pulled into a street packed tight with semi-detached houses that the memories came flooding back. They cut through the constant white noise of the nectar, the way they always seemed to eventually, and I finally understood where I had brought us.
The truck pulled to a halt right outside it, almost bumper to bumper with the little blue car I knew so well, the one I had named Humphrey when I was eight. Next to it was a tiny garden, untidy but packed with spring blooms, a cobblestone path leading up to the front door. It stood open, welcoming me back.
‘It’s my house,’ I said, turning to face them, tears in my eyes. ‘I’m home.’
Home
The blacksuit found a torch in the truck for Zee and Lucy to use, though the full moon made it almost redundant. I looked at the house, bathed in a soft silver glow. It was just as I remembered it, only not. As though somebody had studied my memories and used them to create a replica of my house, getting it almost perfect but messing up the small things, the details.
The garden was too overgrown, the grass ankle length. It had been one thing my dad had always insisted on, keeping the small patch of green in good shape so the neighbours wouldn’t complain. A memory floated to the surface, so painful that it might have been barbed – me as a kid, half my age now, helping him and my mum plant the rose bush that still sat by the low wall against the street, the one time they hadn’t told me off for getting mud on my trousers.
The thought made me feel like I’d been punched in the solar plexus and I had to fight to stop from doubling over. I suddenly wondered what good could come from being here. Maybe we should just get back into the truck and keep driving, find somewhere else to take shelter. But Zee and Lucy were already at the front door, peering inside.
I followed cautiously, taking in more of those flawed details. A couple of the windows had been smashed, a pool of glass lying in the flower bed. Through the holes I could see that the curtain pole in the front room had been pulled out of the wall, lying diagonally and concealing the interior with rumpled velvet drapes. Another memory cut through the surface of my brain, the way my mum would draw those curtains every night at dusk, the smell of the dust wafting through the living room as we sat down to eat dinner in front of the telly.
‘I don’t think anyone’s home,’ said Zee. I waited for the relief, but instead it was sadness that gripped me. I guess some part of me had hoped they’d still be here, my mum and dad, even though they wouldn’t recognise me now, even though they’d see me as a monster. I just wanted to bury my head in my mother’s chest the way I always did when I hurt myself, feel my dad’s arms around my shoulders. Between them, they had once been able to make everything bad go away.
But that had been a long, long time ago.
‘You sure you want to go in?’ Lucy asked me as I approached the door. She reached out and touched my arm with her fingertips, leaving them there for a moment. ‘You don’t know what you might find.’
‘It’s okay,’ I lied. ‘Let’s just get out of the street before something sees us.’
Zee and Lucy entered first, torchlight cutting through the gloom. I walked after them, having to stoop under the doorframe that I had once struggled to touch on my tiptoes. The door itself had been forced open, the wood split by a crowbar, flecks of red paint like dried blood on the welcome mat. Burglars, probably, I thought, trying to ignore the irony. Whoever it had been was long gone, though. I could sense that the house was empty the moment I stepped inside, the air cool and still, undisturbed.
But then I took a breath, and the house was suddenly full. It was the smells, ones I never thought I’d experience again, reawakening the child inside me, like they’d been left here to help me remember, like they’d been left here so I could imagine my mum and dad back into existence: the wax from my dad’s Barbour jacket, hanging on a hook in the hall, reminding me of holidays in the country, clambering over stone walls and traipsing through muddy fields; incense from the bathroom, because my mum had always insisted we lit it after we’d done our business; the herbs in the kitchen, the scent of basil filling the house with memories of the times I’d helped her cook, pulling off the leaves and smelling them on my fingers for the rest of the day.
And dewberry, stronger than anything else, so strong and so fresh it could have been ebbing from the very structure of the house. My mum had worn it every day, some kind of moisturiser or something, and I’d never really noticed the fragrance before now. With that smell she was there, they were both there, standing in the hallway, smiling at me in a way they hadn’t done since I became a criminal, since I broke their hearts.
I clamped my eyes shut, holding the image there, praying, praying, praying that if I willed it enough, if I really believed it, that all of this would go away. Maybe I could open my eyes and they’d really be there, I’d never have stolen that twenty quid all those years ago, never have broken into that house with Toby, never have been buried alive in Furnace Penitentiary. I could just wake up and be that kid again, the one who helped his mum cook and his dad plant rose bushes and who just wanted to learn magic tricks.
Please, I said to them, and I’m not sure if the words were spoken out loud or just in my head. Please let me come back. I’m sorry, you know I am. I don’t look like me any more but I still am, it’s still me. Please, Mum, I just want to come home.
It was too much, my stomach churning and my head spinning. My grief was like an engine inside me roaring to life, tears rolling down my cheeks, my body racked by great, heaving, bitter-sweet sobs.
My mum and dad held out their hands to me, and I fell towards them, feeling like I could shed this body, step out of it like a crab from its she
ll, walk right back into my old life.
There was a crash, a tearing sound, and I opened my eyes to see that my bladed hand had slashed through the coats in the hall, knocking over the telephone table and sending the glass key bowl flying. The shot of adrenaline rocked me, and I looked back at my dad, ready to apologise, to say it was an accident, to say I’d pay for a new one.
But they were gone, of course. The engine of my grief stalled and I stood there, in the hall, blinking away the tears, my mouth hanging open, feeling like I had been wrung dry, every last iota of strength squeezed from my pores.
I felt a hand on my arm, looked down to see Zee there, moisture pearled in his eyes. He was biting his bottom lip, trying to hold back his own emotions, but he still managed a half-smile. I realised everybody else was watching me sadly. Even the blacksuit seemed to have run out of cruel remarks.
‘Come on,’ Zee said, his voice cracking. ‘Let’s find you a place to sit down before you fall down.’
I didn’t answer, just let him guide me through the door to the left into our small sitting room. I knew what to expect this time, trying to build a wall against my senses, but I could still feel the memories there, hammering on it, demanding to come in. I collapsed onto the sofa, my arm splayed halfway across the floor, and I just sat there trying not to think, trying not to exist, trying not to breathe in the smells, those ghostly echoes, the last thing that remained of my mum and dad.
I don’t know how much later it was that I started to come round, drifting out of my exhaustion to see that I was alone in the night-filled sitting room. I could hear voices coming from somewhere, though, and with no little effort I managed to push myself from the sofa to try to find them.
Gentle firelight flickered from the kitchen, and I stumbled towards it to see Zee, Simon and Lucy inside. They were sitting around the breakfast table, the candles between them drenching the room in warmth. They looked up when they heard me enter, welcoming me with a parade of sympathetic smiles. They all looked exhausted, and I wondered if they’d been talking about their own homes, their own families.