I slumped against the wall, my body drained, my arm so heavy that it felt as if it had been stuffed full of rocks. It looked like it, too, the skin stretched over the expanding muscles, rubbing against sharp ridges that could only be bone. Those weird strands of nectar stood up from my wrist, undulating like sea plants. The limb was a mess, and I wanted nothing more than to find a saw and get rid of it, cut it off before whatever was inside could spread. What had Captain Atilio said about the plague in the city? That it was like a severed artery, you had to stem the flow before it bled out. It was the same inside me. If I didn’t stop it now then it would be too late. I would become one of them.
I would become a berserker.
Since the moment my arm had begun to grow I’d suspected as much, but it was the first time I’d admitted it to myself. There was no denying it. The bite wound, the infection, the red-flecked nectar that was somehow spreading inside me. I’d been turned. The knotted limb that hung from my shoulder could have been that of the berserker I’d fought back in the prison, a beetle-black weapon that should have belonged to some nightmare, not to me.
I was distracted by the sound of a door opening further down the car park. Three familiar shapes barged from it, checking the shadows before scampering towards the sun-dappled entrance. I lowered myself into a pool of darkness. It was better that they didn’t see me. They’d stand a better chance of surviving this if I wasn’t with them.
But I guess when you’ve been through so much with somebody, when you’ve travelled to hell and back, when you’ve experienced the very worst of the world, and laughed together even though death is just around the corner, then you share a bond with them, some link that can’t possibly be there and yet somehow still is. Because just as they were running up the slope, vanishing into the golden blur of day, one of the figures stopped and slowly turned.
‘Alex?’ said Zee, his eyes scouring the car park, eventually finding me. I pressed myself further back against the damp concrete, but in a flash he was there, bathing me in a smile. Simon appeared next to him, his own grin a lot less even but welcome all the same.
‘Come on,’ Zee said, offering me his hand. I didn’t accept and he grabbed me by my new arm, yelping at the heat but hanging on, Simon helping him.
‘Glad I’m not the only one who’s lopsided now,’ the bigger boy said. ‘You’re starting to make me look almost normal.’
Together they helped me up, Simon lumping my arm over his shoulders to help me support the weight.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Zee said as we shuffled forward, looking like contestants in some weird three-legged race. Lucy was waiting for us by a pillar, looking at me even more uneasily than she had before. ‘The army’ll blow you to pieces the moment they see you, looking like that.’
We were halfway to the entrance ramp when the stairwell door opened again. This time it was a blacksuit who stumbled out of it, his clothes charred and ripped, the red armband crumpled around his elbow. He was coughing into his sleeve as he made his way towards the light, so fiercely that he didn’t notice us.
‘Yeah, we’ll get out of here,’ I said, lifting my arm off of Simon, glaring at the suit as he struggled up the ramp. ‘But there’s someone I want to have a word with first.’
Information
Ten minutes later I was sitting inside a small burger joint three streets away, peering through the grease-smeared windows as yet another convoy of trucks rattled past. That had been the second one we’d seen since leaving the car park. They were all heading into town, more and more meat for the berserkers and the rats to feast on.
Zee was busy barricading the back door, where we’d broken in, and Lucy was fiddling with her mobile phone, repeatedly slamming it against the counter in frustration. Simon was crouched on the floor over the blacksuit, who was still out cold. We’d tied him up with electrical cords cut from the kitchen appliances.
Getting out of the car park hadn’t thrown up any difficulties. The blacksuit hadn’t even heard me coming, which was no surprise given the number of burns that coated his bare scalp like old jam. A single blow with my new arm had done the trick, then I’d thrown him over my shoulder and followed Zee as he led the way out onto the street.
The helicopters – three of them – had been busy bombarding the upper levels of the car park with more incendiaries, the smoke too thick for them to notice us. There had been troops on the ground, too, a long line of trucks, tanks and infantry approaching from the west. We’d gone the other way, unseen amongst the wreckage of the city, eventually stopping here when the weight of the blacksuit became too much.
‘Well, it won’t keep out anything that really wants to get in,’ came Zee’s voice. ‘But I doubt anyone will notice that we broke the lock. He awake yet?’ I turned away from the window to see Zee walk past one of the half-dozen tables that occupied the living room-sized space, looking down at the blacksuit who was snoring gently. ‘Guess not. You must have hit him pretty hard.’
‘Dammit!’ shouted Lucy, throwing the phone against the wall. ‘It’s just bleep, bleep, bleep every number I try.’
She reached into the neck of her T-shirt, pulling free the small silver medallion she wore. It flashed between her fingers, the brightest thing in the room.
‘Where the hell do we go from here?’ she went on, no anger in her voice now, just exhaustion and despair. She rested her elbows on the counter, dropping her head into her arms. ‘I want to go home. I don’t want to be here any more. I can’t even call my mum to let her know I’m okay.’ She sobbed into her hands, never letting go of the necklace.
‘Did she give you that?’ I asked. She glanced at the necklace for a second as if she’d never seen it before, then stared back at me.
‘What do you care?’ she snapped.
‘Sorry,’ I said, holding up my hands. ‘Just showing an interest.’
‘Well, don’t,’ she said, tucking the medallion away, slumping against the counter again.
Zee put an arm around her shoulder. ‘It will be okay, Lucy,’ he said. ‘I know it will. Things may look bad, but …’
He seemed to run out of things to say.
‘Wow, thanks for the pep talk, Zee,’ said Simon. ‘I feel so much better now.’
I laughed, and it felt good. Even Lucy cracked a smile. But Zee was right; things could have been worse. I’d suffered a few burns running through the fire, but other than that my body seemed to have healed itself completely. The haze of the nectar had cleared in the time it had taken us to walk here, leaving me with only the unpleasant buzz of a headache.
Zee picked up a salt shaker, studying it as if it might give some clue to getting out of the city.
‘So where do we go from here?’ he said, prodding the blacksuit with his foot. He’d pulled off the armband to get a better look at it, the unmistakable logo mounted on red looking more like a Swastika than ever. ‘And why did we lug this numbnuts along with us?’
‘For information,’ I answered.
‘You think he knows a safe route out of town?’ Lucy asked. I shook my head. That wasn’t what I had in mind. Zee replaced the salt shaker, nodding at my arm.
‘Does it hurt?’ he asked. I lifted my hand, the fingers still fused by nectar, fashioned into a lethal point that looked as sharp and as hard as chipped flint. My hand seemed too far away, the arm now half as long again as it had been, knotted and scarred like old wood. I shook my head. It didn’t hurt, not physically, anyway.
There was a grunt from the floor, the blacksuit’s snores becoming a moan.
‘Here he comes,’ Simon said, moving onto his knees ready to hold the guard down if he needed to. The suit’s eyes fluttered open, and in the gloom of the shop they didn’t look silver at all, they looked pale blue, the eyes of a child. Then I saw the memories flood back into the blacksuit’s face and all of a sudden his gaze grew fierce, the cold fire returning to his pupils. He struggled to get up but only succeeded in kicking a table across the room, his bonds holding as he
flapped on the floor like a fish out of water. Simon pushed two hands down on the blacksuit’s chest until the man stopped wriggling.
‘You’re gonna pay for this,’ the suit growled, staring at us all in turn. ‘You’ll pay in pain when they find me.’
‘They won’t find you,’ I replied. ‘Not in one piece, anyway.’
I lifted my arm, flashing the blade of my hand, and his face seemed to melt into itself.
‘You know what’s happening to me,’ I said, a statement not a question. He glanced at my arm and nodded. His hair had been burned off, the blackened remains like a skullcap bobbing up and down with his head. ‘What comes next?’
‘Oh you’ll find out soon enough,’ the blacksuit grinned. ‘When you’re tearing apart your little friends here.’
Simon lashed out, slapping the blacksuit across his face. The guard spat out a mouthful of blood before turning back to me.
‘You can’t run from it,’ he said. ‘You can’t hide. You’ve got berserker blood in you, it’s swimming in those traitorous veins of yours. You can’t even kill yourself, not any more.’ He laughed, the sound filling the small space. ‘Because it’ll bring you back, the nectar. It won’t ever let you go.’
He broke into a coughing fit, black-flecked spittle spraying upwards.
‘How is it doing this?’ I asked, the anger building, fuelled by my fear and confusion. ‘How can I be turning into one of them? It doesn’t make any sense. The warden never said anything about this.’
‘The warden?’ the blacksuit spat, his voice a wheezed laugh. ‘No, that old waste of space doesn’t know the half of it. Cross might think he’s in control, but we answer to one man only, and it isn’t him. What you’re seeing now is something new, something that Furnace has been saving. You notice the difference? This nectar pumps red. It’s a hundred times more powerful than the piss he lets Warden Cross play with. This nectar was designed with much more in mind than changing a bunch of pathetic cons into prison guards.’
‘We know. It’s spreading a plague,’ said Zee.
The blacksuit looked up at him. ‘Oh, it’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘It’s so much worse than that.’ He turned his soulless smile to me. ‘Especially for you, Sawyer.’
‘What’s so special about me?’ I asked. ‘Why does Furnace want me to stay alive? Why haven’t his berserkers tried to kill me?’
The blacksuit shrugged. ‘The only one who can tell you that is Furnace,’ he said. ‘He wants you for something, and trust me, it won’t be something you’ll like. If you ask me it’s because you got the better of Cross, and nobody’s been able to do that before. You’ve made some powerful enemies.’ He coughed blood down the front of his suit. ‘For all I know, Furnace is keeping you just so he can slaughter you personally in his own sweet time.’
I sat back, slamming the wall in frustration. If anything, the blacksuit’s answers had made me even more confused.
Zee tried another tack. ‘It’s not too late,’ he said to the blacksuit. ‘You can still be who you were, do something to end this. I know that inside you’re just a kid, like us. I know what the warden did to you down in Furnace. Help us get out of here and we’ll vouch for you. They’ll grant you immunity. They might even reward you. You can get your old life back.’
The blacksuit’s eyes widened and he started laughing again, the chuckles descending into hacking coughs.
‘You think I come from the prison?’ he asked when he had recovered his breath. ‘That hole?’
I looked at Zee, then at Simon, both of them equally lost. The blacksuit saw our expressions and spat out another laugh.
‘You really have no idea, do you? You’re in so deep and you don’t have a clue. The prison, that was only part of it. A side venture, something to keep Cross busy, to keep his meddling hands out of the way. Only scum come from there, the inferior specimens,’ he spat this last comment at me. ‘Us, we’re purebloods, raised by Furnace himself. Only we are fit to wear the badge.’ His hand rose almost automatically to his arm, to the place where the band had been.
I sat there, my mouth hanging open, unable to believe what I was hearing. All this time I’d thought that the prison, Furnace Penitentiary, had been at the heart of Furnace’s plans, and all this time it had been nothing more than a distraction.
‘So where are you from?’ I asked. ‘What were you?’
‘What I was, was nothing,’ the blacksuit said. ‘What I am is a soldier of the new world. We will burn this country into ashes, and our fire will spread. When we are finished there will be no more weakness in the world, only strength, only power.’
The speech was one I’d heard before, from the warden back in the prison and from Furnace himself, hammered into my skull through the nectar in my veins.
‘But where were you made?’ I asked, stepping forward and angling my mutant hand towards his throat. ‘Where did they turn you?’
‘The tower.’ The answer came from Simon rather than the guard. ‘In the tower. Remember the vision? I’ll bet you anything that’s where this slimy creep was butchered.’
‘And that’s where Furnace is,’ I added. ‘Right?’
The blacksuit merely smirked. It was all the confirmation I needed. I pictured the skyscraper I’d seen in my vision, the horrors I had watched through the windows, the way it had sat there in the middle of the burning city like a throne in the centre of hell, and the beast that howled from the spire as it watched its new kingdom being born.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the suit said. ‘You can’t stop him, not now. Nothing can stop him.’
‘In that case, maybe you won’t mind telling me something,’ I said.
I leant in towards the blacksuit, pressed my razor fingers against his windpipe as I hissed:
‘How do we get inside?’
Burgers
‘If you go to the tower then you’re dead,’ Zee said, long after the echo of my words had faded.
‘I’m already dead,’ I replied, shaking my deformed arm at him. The virus inside me, if that’s what it was, was spreading. I could feel it in my neck, the tendons expanding, something growing beneath the skin like a tumour, making it hard for me to turn my head to the right. ‘Look at me, Zee, I’m already dead. What else can I do?’
‘Come with us,’ he replied. ‘Get out of the city, find the command centre that Atilio was talking about. She said there were brains there, scientists. They’ll be able to help you.’
At this the blacksuit broke into another round of wheezed chuckles. I did my best to ignore him.
‘And what if they can’t?’ I asked. And I didn’t add, or what if they decide they want to cut me up, dissect me bit by bit to find out why I’m changing, to get their hands on the nectar?
Zee shrugged. ‘It’s better than giving yourself up to him. He can get inside your head from halfway across the city; what’s he gonna do when you’re right there next to him? How do you know you won’t get to the tower and find yourself under his control?’
‘Because I’m stronger than that,’ I replied, but I couldn’t look him in the eye while I said it. That’s what worried me more than anything. That I’d get to the tower and fall under Furnace’s spell, that the gut-twisting sense of excitement I felt when I heard his voice – something that surely had to be due to the nectar, not me – would become too powerful. I shook my head to get rid of my fears. ‘It just won’t happen. I’m going to find Furnace and kill him.’
‘Better men than you have tried,’ the blacksuit said. ‘You won’t get anywhere near him.’
‘Yeah? Well, we’ll see about that,’ I spat back, suddenly feeling more like a kid than ever. ‘Now tell us what we need to know. How do we get into the tower?’
‘We?’ mouthed Zee, looking at Simon. But I paid him no attention, focusing on the dull murmur of the blacksuit’s laughter.
‘You don’t need anything from me,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re one of us, you can come and go as you please. That tower is your home, now; one o
f them, anyway. You want to know how to get in? Just walk through the front doors.’
And maybe that was the real reason for what I almost did next. Not that we wanted information, not that we thought he was holding anything back, but because he spoke those last words with relish, that smug smile never leaving his lips, and I hated him for it.
I got as far as lighting up the grill and hauling the blacksuit into the tiny kitchen. And I almost did it, I came so close. It wasn’t even the nectar this time, although it thrashed and surged at the thought of what was to come. No, every person on this planet has darkness inside them, buried so deep that you only know it’s there when your world is coming to an end. Oh, but it’s there. It’s always there.
I didn’t do it, though. I couldn’t. If I had, if I’d pressed that suit’s face against the sizzling metal, then it would have been over. I’d never have found my way back.
And in the end I didn’t need to. He must have sensed the rage boiling in my system because he told us everything we needed to know.
Afterwards he lay beside the smoking grill, slumped on the floor, no more smirks and no more laughter. The four of us sat on the chairs on the other side of the counter, listening to the sound of gunfire and chopper blades from across town.
‘You think he’s telling the truth?’ Simon asked.
I nodded, recalling the way the blacksuit had screamed the words at us when we’d held him over the grill, the heat rising against the burns he’d received in the car park. According to him there were tunnels beneath the tower, designed for carrying equipment and specimens in and out without being seen. None of the tunnels went far – none went to the prison either, which was a relief – and most were linked to shops on nearby streets. He gave us the location of a direct link to the tower basements, a funeral parlour about a mile to the east.
Chances are he was right. I probably would have been able to walk right in through the front doors of that tower. Furnace had invited me, after all. He was expecting me. But that was the problem. If we stood any chance of winning this battle then we had to surprise him. We had to get into the tower and bring it down before he even knew we were there.