Curiosity more than anything else made me approach. The sculpture was of a man, maybe in his forties or fifties, dressed in a suit and wearing glasses. He looked like an ordinary guy, a neatly trimmed moustache and beard, his hands clasped behind his back, if anything slightly weedy. There was no name, just a quote: FEAR SETS US FREE.
‘Alfred Furnace,’ I said, my voice amplified against the quiet. The man looked nothing like the creature in my vision, but then again I looked nothing like the kid I’d once been. Nectar did that to you. I was tempted to tear the statue off its plinth and launch it over the street, but I didn’t. The coast was clear, no guards or berserkers in sight, and there was nothing like the sound of rending metal to blow your cover. I settled for a threat, staring the man right in the eye and saying, ‘You can’t have me.’
The statue didn’t reply and I walked away with an absurd sense of victory.
Ahead lay the doors of the tower, four of them lined up along the front of the building, all the size of a house. The one on the right was open. There were no blacksuits on guard duty, no berserkers tethered by the entrance ready to tear intruders to pieces, just that black portal which seemed to beckon me inside. I could feel eyes on me, though. I knew I was being watched by the way my skin crawled, the flesh of my back and arms creeping as though thick with insects. I shuddered as I walked up the small flight of steps that led to the doors, trying to keep the fear from my face.
Not that I could hide anything from Furnace. If he could see inside my head then he knew that despite my calm exterior I was well and truly bricking it.
The doors seemed to get bigger as I got closer, and as I walked beneath the jutting bulk of the tower I could feel the immense weight of glass and concrete over my head. It cut out the sunlight and plunged the world into shadow. It was just like being underground again, the world on my shoulders, pinning me down.
And that wasn’t the only thing that reminded me of Furnace Penitentiary. As I reached the doors – two massive bronze plates pulled back against the wall – I saw a plinth above them. At first I thought it said GUILTY, like the one over the entrance to the prison. But my mind was playing tricks on me. It said SAVED. I took a step back, staring at the other three plinths above the doors to my left.
‘THEY – ARE – ALL – SAVED,’ I read aloud, the words reminding me of the desk in the warden’s office, the pictures of the kids who had been torn apart and turned into freaks. ‘Saved, my ass,’ I muttered. I walked up to the door and even though it was open I couldn’t really see what lay inside, as if by stepping over that threshold I was passing through a portal, entering another world. It was the nerves more than anything else that made me speak, my words muted by the sheer, overwhelming size of the building. ‘Come on, then, you sick freak. Let’s do this.’
I lifted my arm, fear forcing the nectar to churn, powering up like a jet engine, making my body sing. I flexed my fingers, the blades making a noise like scissors as they snapped open and closed. And those extra digits, the weird whips of nectar, danced back and forth as if they were excited.
They should be. What came next would be a battle to the death.
I didn’t look back. I was too scared to. If I’d taken one last gaze at the sunlight, at the glorious day which sat at my back, then I might have lost my courage, I might have turned tail and bolted. I kept my head forward, my jaw clenched so tight it felt as though my teeth might snap, my arm held out like a sword, trembling as it sliced apart the shadows of the doorway, opening up the darkness as I stepped inside.
Outside the tower the world had been deserted, as though somebody had turned it upside down and tipped everybody out.
Within the cool dusk of the interior it was a different story.
I heard the blacksuits before I saw them, that same deep, rolling laughter greeting me the moment I entered. My silver eyes burned, probing the shadows to make out a large, open lobby supported by pillars. Dead ahead was a reception desk, and behind it were three guards, all holding shotguns and all wearing the same red bands on their arms – those black Furnace logos against a white circle seemingly the brightest things in the room. These were Furnace’s soldiers, not the warden’s.
There were more figures to my left and right, standing by the pillars and aiming their weapons at me. I tensed, ready to fight, but they showed no sign of attacking. What had I expected? I was one of them, after all, as the blacksuit in the burger joint had told me.
‘So,’ said one of the guards behind the desk. ‘You came.’
‘We knew you would,’ said another, their voices throbbing around the lobby, reverberating off the marble floor and walls so much that they didn’t sound real. The whole thing felt like a dream.
‘We knew you’d choose this,’ said the first guard, and then they were all laughing again, that sound making the nectar inside me boil.
‘I’m going to kill him,’ I shouted, but my own words carried no echo, falling dead at the blacksuits’ feet and sounding strangely hollow. More laughter, then the first blacksuit lifted his gun, using it to point behind him.
‘We know,’ he said. ‘He’s up there, top floor. He’s waiting for you. You won’t be able to access the penthouse without an elevator key, so take it up to fifty and walk from there.’
‘Furnace?’ I asked, wondering when the trap would be sprung, when the guards would start shooting. But they didn’t even seem tense, leaning against the pillars or resting on the reception desk as if this was their day off. ‘You know they’l be coming for you,’ I spat, fear growing into anger. ‘The army. They know you guys are behind this now.’
The blacksuit shrugged then shook his gun, gesturing towards the bank of elevators that sat behind the desk.
‘He’s waiting,’ he repeated. ‘Penthouse.’
I began to walk, if only to get away from this burgeoning nightmare. I gave the desk a wide berth, still wary of the blacksuits, their eyes glinting. I felt like an antelope tiptoeing through a pride of lions, knowing that at any minute it will feel teeth in its throat. But still the attack didn’t come.
There were six elevators here, three on either side of the lobby. And on the wall between them was another bronze sculpture – not a statue, this time, but a two-dimensional image fixed to the marble. It showed an army of marching blacksuits, all wearing armbands, row after row stretching back into a gleaming city. The lead soldier held a flag, that same emblem of three circles joined by lines, and his face was filled with such pride that once again I felt a spark of excitement burrow up from inside me.
I tore my eyes away from the sculpture, taking one look over my shoulder to see the blacksuits – the real ones – standing by the desk, all watching me. They know, I thought, seeing the recognition in their faces. They know how I feel.
I ran, almost stumbled, to the only elevator that was open, hitting the button to close the doors. But they didn’t close quickly enough to mute the sweeping thunder of laughter that chased me, or the final words from a blacksuit that squeezed in just before they met. Words spoken sincerely. Words that I couldn’t quite believe.
‘Good luck, Alex.’
The Petrified Orchard
There were buttons beside the door, brass circles labelled SB at the bottom to P at the top with the floor numbers in between. P must have stood for Penthouse, and there was a keyhole next to it. I almost had my finger on 50 when I thought better of it, pressing 45 instead. I didn’t honestly know what was waiting for me up there. Maybe if I got out early I’d have a better idea of what lay inside the tower, maybe I’d stand a better chance of taking Furnace by surprise.
I sensed a shape behind me, spinning round to see my reflection staring back from the elevator’s mirrored wall.
My stomach lurched as the lift began its journey, producing nothing more than a gentle hum as it soared up the backbone of the tower. While it moved I studied myself, feeling the bile rise once again as I tried to make sense of what was happening to me. My right arm was as big as a leg, knotted wit
h muscle and studded with veins. It was still coated with nectar, shining black like a beetle caught in the moonlight. When I swung it from side to side it moved with undeniable power, my hand cutting the air with a ‘swish’, making the elevator rock.
The virus had spread more than I’d let myself believe. My neck was now a mess of bruises and blisters, the skin pushed out into gross folds, reminding me of the fungus you sometimes see growing on tree trunks. The right side of my face was puffed-up almost beyond recognition. Almost. Somewhere there, past the swelling, past the scars, past the silver, I could see myself, the boy I’d once been. But there was almost nothing of him left, outside or in.
There was a dial above the elevator doors and I glanced at its reflection, noticing that we were about halfway up and rising fast. I lifted my hoodie – the material so torn and burned that it almost crumbled away at my touch – and looked at what lay beneath. There was none of my own skin left over my stomach and chest, just a lumpy mass of blistered hide that looked as if it had been charbroiled. I tapped it with my good hand. It felt like kevlar.
I was gripped by panic, wanted more than anything else to tear off this impostor’s skin, to flay the flesh from my bones just so I wouldn’t have to feel its filthy touch. But I closed my eyes, gripped the handrail and tried to breathe – in, out; in, out – as deeply as I could, until the moment passed. I felt the elevator slow, a soft chime announcing that we’d reached the forty-fifth floor. I waited until I heard the doors part before opening my eyes and turning round, my heart thrumming in my throat as I gave up the safety of the elevator for the unknown tower beyond.
I found myself in a corridor, dimly lit and carpeted. It could have been any office block in any city except for the scars that covered the white walls, craters and canyons gouged into the plasterwork, and at one point a hole punched clean through. The floor was stained with black footprints. No two were exactly alike, and none were human.
I turned left, heading towards the hole in the wall. Sunlight peeked through it, pooling on the carpet in the corner almost nervously. Dust hung in the golden trail, specks of light that reminded me of the swirling galaxies in nectar – the warden’s nectar, that was, the old nectar, nectar that felt familiar now, almost safe. I ran a hand through it, causing the particles to scatter. Then I put my face to the hole and peered through.
Cages. A huge room full of them. All empty.
I stood up, walking a little further down to a door. It was solid steel, at least a foot thick, and hung off its hinges, reminding me of the vault door back in the bowels of Furnace. The metal was scratched and dented just like that one had been, and for the same reason too.
I replayed the events in my head: the cages being opened, the rats or berserkers or whatever the hell had been locked in here stampeding out, smashing through the door as though it was paper, storming down the hallways, down the stairs and out onto the streets beyond. How many of them? A hundred? A thousand? They’d been here all this time, waiting for Furnace’s command, waiting for the war to begin.
No wonder the city had fallen so hard and so fast.
I paced the rest of the corridor, a dozen more rooms like this one, all empty. Eventually I found the door to the stairs, also ripped from its frame. Inside the stairwell there were bodies – rats, two of them, their necks stretched like they were plasticine figures, silver eyes open in a snapshot of their final moments. I guessed they’d toppled in the chaos, crushed beneath a thousand pounding feet. Even though they must have been dead for hours, I could still see the heat rising from them, turning the air to a dreamlike haze that shimmered upwards, pointing the way.
I leapt up the steps, swinging round the corner then doubling back on myself again until I reached the next level. A quick glance through the door told me all I needed to know – more rooms, more cages – and it was the same on forty-seven, the mess up here even worse. I made my way up to the next floor, expecting to see the same thing, but when I pushed my way into the corridor I knew I shouldn’t have let my guard down.
There was a wheezer standing there, less than three metres away. Only somehow it was different from the ones I’d seen in the prison. Its head was bald, its skin the colour and texture of old porridge, the eyes like black pockmarks buried deep in the flesh of its face. But its gas mask wasn’t sewn in place, the contraption shining like it was brand new. Its clothes, too, showed no sign of age, as if it had been dressed only that morning. It wore the same armband as the blacksuits, the red and black insignia over its leather overcoat making the creep look like a Nazi Gestapo officer.
I noticed all this in less than a second, then terror took over. I might have been bigger than the wheezers now, stronger, but they still scared the living crap out of me. Just looking at the freak brought back the pain of surgery, the way they’d patched my body together while stripping my mind apart. I fell back through the doors and almost lost my balance at the top of the stairs before noticing that the wheezer was retreating too, staggering away down the corridor so fast that it was in danger of tripping over its own feet.
It’s scared, I realised, the thought giving me a thrill of sadistic pleasure. It’s scared of me.
I chased it, more from curiosity than anything else. I’d never seen a wheezer show any kind of emotion – except panic, the time that Zee and Simon and I had killed one in the infirmary. It flapped against the wall, taking those great big unsteady bird steps, its piggy eyes blinking, or trying to, anyway – its eyelids were like those of a burn victim, too shrivelled to cover the bulging black pupils beneath.
It reached the first door and fell through it. Literally fell, crashing onto its back so hard that its booted feet bounced up. I laughed, I couldn’t help it, the noise fuelled not by humour but by disbelief and anger and the sickly sweet thought of revenge. I ran through the door, ready to put the monster out of its misery. And I was so intent on murder that I didn’t notice the other figures until it was almost too late.
The door opened into a huge room, bigger than the infirmary back in Furnace although decked out in a similar way, lined with beds. The windows here had been tinted so heavily that barely any natural light found its way in. Red lamps swung from the ceiling, and in their hellish glow the room seemed to squirm and thrash and writhe.
Wheezers. Dozens of them.
The creature at my feet scrabbled away on its back, pushing itself into the folds of its brothers who lifted it up and cradled it. They all looked at me with those fearful insect eyes, the wheeze of their collective breathing almost deafening, a couple even uttering those gargled, screeching cries that I had come to fear so much in Furnace. What was worse, though, was the relentless flap of their eyes as they blinked at me, a noise so constant and so wet that it was like liquid. I backed out of the room, the confusion almost too much, making the tower spin around me, making the floor and the ceiling seem to switch places.
It didn’t make any sense. None of it made any sense.
I retreated back to the stairs while I still could, but not before noticing the other doors that lined the corridor, red light splashing out from inside and the same awful, endless chorus of wheezes. I ran, climbing the steps as fast as I could, skipping the next level, and the next, only stopping when I saw ‘Penthouse’ stencilled by the door. I crashed against it, sucking in air that seemed to contain no oxygen, only the cold, dead exhalations of the wheezers.
What next? My mind screamed at me. What next?
I had no answers, and my frustration cycloned inside me, becoming anger, then rage, then a pure white fury that drove me through those doors and into the arms of Alfred Furnace.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find up here, on the top floor of Furnace’s tower, but it wasn’t this.
There were no corridors, no warren of rooms and hallways packed with cages and wheezers. There was just one immense space covering almost the entire width and breadth of the building, the stairway and lift shaft right in the middle of it. A bare oak floor stretched in ev
ery direction to walls of red glass which towered right the way to the ceiling ten metres or so overhead. Sunshine poured through those windows, turned into a bloodlight so thick and rich it made me feel as if I could drown up here.
The tinted glass drenched the space in shadows, but I could make out shapes silhouetted against all four walls, dotted seemingly at random around the room. It took me a while to realise that they were trees, maybe fourteen or fifteen of them. I held my breath, listening for any sign of life, but other than my own racing heartbeat, there was silence.
I took a step forward, heading for the nearest tree, my arm held out in front of me, ready to strike at the first thing that moved. But those dark shapes remained motionless, as calm as if they had been carved in stone.
And that’s exactly what they were, I realised when I was close enough to touch them, an orchard of rock. There was nothing else up here – at least nothing I could make out in the sulking red gloom – no furniture, no equipment, the floor dominated solely by these bizarre decorations.
I moved to the next tree, its gnarled and twisted trunk reminding me of the bodies of the berserkers. There were no leaves on these sculptures, just barren limbs raised like a forest of skinny arms, knotted with each other into a web of sinew and bone which almost completely covered the ceiling. I reached out and touched it, the rock as warm as human skin and pulsing almost as if it had a heartbeat. I knew it was my imagination, but it still creeped me out.
Not half as much, however, as what I saw next.
I crossed the room diagonally, reaching the next tree. I almost dismissed it, thinking it was the same as the others, until I caught sight of what was nailed to the trunk.
It was a body, a man’s, stripped naked, his modesty preserved by an apron of coiled guts that spilled from his stomach. The bark of the tree was scarred and blackened, as if it had been on fire. And the man too seemed as though he had been burned. Yet his face was strangely serene, gazing out over the penthouse with the look of a loving father watching a sleeping child. I studied the figure. On closer examination I saw that he was much younger than I’d first thought, not much more than a kid, little older than me. But I’d seen that face before, an older version of it, on the bronze statue outside the tower. I knew who this person was.