Fugitives

  I spluttered, the noise half laugh and half sob. I may not have been able to remember my parents’ faces but I had never forgotten the way they had condemned me, the way my mum had turned away after the court hearing, the way they had forgotten me. I had no doubt that if I stepped through my kitchen door they’d welcome me with tight smiles and a hushed call to the police. Zee seemed to read my mind.

  ‘Well, mine would. You could come too; they’d like you.’

  The last few words were so quiet they were almost unrecognisable. Zee’s chin slowly dropped until it hit his chest, his breathing growing heavier and steadier.

  ‘Dream on, Zee,’ I said gently. ‘We’re on our own now.’

  I lifted a hand and rested it on his shoulder, shaking him gently. We couldn’t afford to sleep. The moment we let down our guard was the moment we put ourselves back in the warden’s hands.

  ‘Zee,’ I said more loudly. ‘Zee, stay awake.’

  I gripped him harder, feeling the jutting ridge of his shoulder blade beneath the skin. It was rising and falling with each breath, but after three or four it stopped, trembling weakly for a second before lying still. I waited for him to inhale, my heart in my throat, but he sat there scrunched against the pillar as still and silent as a corpse. I rolled onto my knees before him, both of my hands on his shoulders, shaking hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

  ‘Zee!’ I was shouting now. ‘Jesus, wake up! Zee? What’s wrong.’

  His head lurched up like a puppet’s, eyes locked onto mine. Only they weren’t Zee’s eyes, they were empty sockets in his head. No, not empty … They were full of darkness, not just shadow but something heavy and substantial that thrashed and spilled inside them like they were two cups of oil. I looked at Zee and felt as though all the goodness in the world had been extinguished. It was like meeting the warden’s gaze, only infinitely worse. No, these eyes belonged to someone else. Something else. Something unspeakably evil. I don’t know how I could be sure, but I was.

  These eyes belonged to Alfred Furnace.

  ‘Alex,’ the thing that was once Zee screamed, words blasted from the red-raw tunnel of its throat, ‘I AM COMING FOR YOU!’

  Then it was grabbing me, shaking me relentlessly, my head banging against the wall, my teeth clacking together, screaming my name over and over and over—

  ‘Alex! Alex, wake up!’

  My eyes opened and for a moment all I could see was those oil-slick eyes gaping at me. I blinked, and the two versions of Zee’s face overlapped, as though he was wearing a cheap Halloween mask that had slipped. One more blink and he snapped back to normal, his expression one of concern. His hands were around my collar and he was shaking me, hard enough to bounce my head off the pillar. When he saw that I’d come to he let go, rocking back on his heels.

  ‘Thought we’d lost you for a minute there,’ he said.

  I staggered to my feet, trying to rub some of the confusion from my head. I could have just fallen asleep, the vision a nightmare. But I knew better. Furnace had been inside my head. Somehow he had peeled open my mind with filthy fingers and seeded his thoughts there. I slapped my cheek a couple of times, then yawned twice, the rush of oxygen to my brain brightening the room.

  ‘Where’s Simon?’ I said, knowing that the only way I was going to stay awake was by keeping upright. ‘We’d better get moving.’

  I didn’t wait for a response, shuffling across the smooth floor towards menswear. Simon was lost in the middle of it, almost buried by a pile of clothes. He was smoothing down the front of a black designer hoodie.

  ‘Fatties’ department is just over there,’ he said, peeking out of the cotton folds and nodding to one side.

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered, squeezing between the overstuffed rails. My mind must still have been pretty fragile, because it almost shattered when I crossed an aisle and saw a shape loom up beside me. I turned to see a blacksuit there, decked in torn overalls but his cold silver eyes glinting. I fell back against a table laden with jeans, my hands darting up defensively. The blacksuit’s did the same, and it was only when I waved at it, the hulking brute imitating my actions, that I recognised my reflection.

  It was the first time I had seen myself properly since my surgery. Of course deep down I’d known what the warden had done to me. I knew that he’d torn me open and stuffed me with somebody else’s flesh, making me bigger, stronger, faster. But when I saw myself in my own imagination I still saw me, the skinny kid I’d been when I entered the prison.

  That … that thing in the mirror – its torso massive, its limbs bulging so much they looked like they would burst, its skin lined with black veins, and those eyes … It was a monster. It was Frankenstein’s repulsive creation, bruises and blemishes beaten into every square inch, scars criss-crossing like roads on a map. It couldn’t be me. It just couldn’t.

  But it was.

  I groaned, the noise boiling up from my stomach. I held my giant hands up in front of my face so I wouldn’t see the tears, then I scurried shamefully away from the mirror.

  Focus, I told myself. You have to focus or you’re not getting out of here.

  Ahead was a shelf full of carefully folded tracksuit trousers and I rummaged through them, wiping my blurred eyes until I could make out the size. I pulled out an XXXL, sending the rest crumpling to the floor. They were tight but comfortable enough. A minute or so later and I was also wearing a massive black hooded sweatshirt and a brand-new pair of size-14 Nikes. I felt a little better being free of my Furnace stripes, but I still avoided the full-length mirrors as I made my way back to the electronics department.

  Simon was leaning against the same pillar as I had been earlier, trying on a gold watch he had found. Zee had also got himself some new kit – a pair of dark blue jeans and a brown T-shirt. He had a black beanie on his head and a parka draped over his shoulders. He looked over when he heard me coming and smiled at my hoodie.

  ‘Nice touch,’ he said. I frowned, looking down to see a bright yellow smiley face plastered across my chest. I wasn’t quite sure how I had failed to notice it when I’d plucked the thing off the shelf. I thought about taking it off but I just couldn’t be bothered. Besides, if a guy couldn’t wear a smiley when he’d just got out of prison then when could he?

  ‘How are things out there?’ I asked, nodding at the televisions.

  ‘Bad,’ said Zee. ‘Looks like the army are on the way, the coastguard too. They’re bringing in everyone they can to round us up. Take a look at this, though.’ He pointed at a smaller television which was showing CNN. ‘Wait for it, hang on … There.’

  Just to recap on this latest story, said the anchorman, his finger pressed to his ear. There have been reports of some kind of … animal loose in the city. This footage from close to the prison shows what looks like a large dog … The picture on the screen flicked to a CCTV clip of something huge and beetle-black darting down an alleyway. It was on screen for less than a second, the image too grainy to make out any detail other than four long legs. I knew what it was, though, and it was no dog, not even one of the warden’s skinless beasts.

  ‘The berserker,’ I whispered to myself, my injuries seeming to throb even more painfully as I remembered the battle I’d had with it, a fight that had almost killed me. If that thing was loose then we needed to be careful; there was no way I could face it again, even with its injuries.

  I studied the array of screens in front of me to see whether there was anything else about the berserker, but the other channels only wanted to talk about the breakout. On one they were interviewing a politician, the man half asleep. On another they were showing a blueprint of Furnace that I knew from just glancing at it was completely wrong. I turned to the next, the largest television in the display. It was another aerial shot, obviously being filmed live from one of the choppers. There was no prison in view, just a bunch of narrow streets and shops, plus another building that looked much larger than the rest. There was a round glass dome in the roof and a shaft of light beamed
up from it like an emergency flare.

  The helicopter was so low that we could see through the dome to the shop beyond, and a bank of flickering television screens against which three hunched forms were silhouetted. I watched one of those figures turn and wave, a slight delay between Zee’s action and its digital echo.

  ‘We’re on the telly,’ he said as we all stared in disbelief at the vast dome over our heads.

  Then the glass exploded, armed police dropping on ropes like spiders scuttling in for the kill.

  Found

  There were four of them, SWAT plastered over their body armour, and they had landed in a heartbeat.

  ‘Lighting up!’

  One of the cops pulled a grenade from his belt and lobbed it towards us. It rolled across the floor like a baseball, rebounding off one of the television stands and coming to rest less than a metre from my feet. I closed my eyes, waiting for it to explode, to blow me into smithereens. For a ludicrous second my heart lifted as I realised I didn’t have to run any more, I didn’t have to hide. I could just let life slip away, drop into a comforting nothingness where there were no police, no monsters, no me.

  But it didn’t explode. There was a rush of light so bright that it seared through my eyelids and burned into the flesh of my brain. At the same time a sharp crack of noise seemed to reduce my eardrums to pulp. The world disintegrated, spinning furiously as my senses were ravaged. I tried to move but it was like running inside a spinning globe – every step cartwheeling me into oblivion. Before I knew it I felt myself thump into something, sprawling onto the ground.

  All around me, barely audible over the ringing in my ears, were voices. I recognised Zee and Simon’s cries, their desperate shouts. Past them were the barked orders of the descending SWAT team – ‘Show yourselves now! Move to the centre of the floor! Keep your hands visible at all times! We will use deadly force!’ – and the sound of guns being cocked. If I didn’t do something fast then in less than a minute we’d be cuffed and carted back behind bars.

  And even if we weren’t taken back to the burning ruins of Furnace, we’d still be the warden’s prisoners again. And I’d rather die than have to face his fury.

  I forced myself to open my eyes and saw a world smudged with smears of dirty light. I pushed myself off the floor, discovering that I had landed on one of the flat-screens. Incredibly, it was still working, the picture an aerial shot that made me feel as if I was flying over the city. Without thinking, I hefted the heavy TV set in both hands as I stood, swinging it like a massive Frisbee.

  I didn’t have time to aim, but luck was on my side. The cops were out of menswear and moving purposefully towards electronics. Each was wearing some sort of protective goggles, the green-tipped lenses making them look like robots. They saw my makeshift missile too late. It sailed through sportswear, hitting one of the cops in the chest and sending him somersaulting back the way he’d come.

  In the split second it took for the rest of the team to respond I had grabbed another television, hurling this one in the same direction. The cops scattered, one firing a wild burst from his sub-machine gun which reduced a nearby mannequin to plastic splinters. I threw another one for good measure, the screen shattering into a million pieces as it thumped into a shelf, then turned and fled.

  There was no sign of Simon, but Zee was taking shelter behind the remaining televisions. I hefted him up like a parent would a child, gripping him tight under my arm. He clutched me as hard as his skinny arms were able, trying not to scream as we charged towards the window overlooking the main concourse. Behind me I heard the dull pop of silenced guns, like somebody playing with bubble wrap. Something whispered past my ear, so hot that it felt ice cold, and up ahead I saw ragged holes punch themselves into the window.

  ‘Take him down!’ somebody yelled, and suddenly the air was alive with bullets as the SWAT team unleashed their full force. But I was running too fast for them to get a bead on me, the world a blur as I zig-zagged among the café tables and lunged at the glass. At the last minute I did my best to curl myself into a ball, using a hand to shield my face and my body to protect Zee.

  ‘Alex, you can’t—!’ was all he had time to say before we hit. The glass detonated outwards as we crashed through it. My stomach lurched as we dropped, surrounded by multicoloured glinting shards that would have been pretty if they hadn’t been so lethal. The window was only a single storey above the first-floor walkway but I staggered as I landed, Zee slipping from my grip and falling into the pool of glass that had formed around us. I grabbed him by the collar, hoisting him up before he could start complaining and dragging him out into the mall. There was no sign of the inmates we’d seen earlier.

  ‘What now?’ he yelled, finding his feet and shrugging off my grip. ‘Where’s Simon?’

  I glanced back up at the window, now nothing but a vast mouth filled with broken teeth of glass. A figure popped up, silhouetted by the harsh store lights, and I thought at first it might be him. Then the shape rested its gun on the ledge and began to fire. It was joined a second later by another, the floor around us suddenly shredded by bullets. I retreated against the grilles that covered Harvey’s entrance, directly beneath the window, Zee on my tail. The SWAT team didn’t have a direct line on us here but it didn’t stop them trying, a curtain of lead dropping down in front of us like a waterfall.

  ‘We need to get down there,’ Zee shouted over the thunder. He wasn’t stupid enough to try and point – he’d have lost his finger in seconds – but he nodded over the balcony to the ground floor of the mall below.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. One of the bullets ricocheted off a chunk of stone and smashed through the window beside me, leaving a neat hole the size of a large coin. Zee looked as if he was about to speak when something big and heavy landed beside us with a crack. To my surprise it was one of the SWAT team. The man looked as though he had hit head first and he wasn’t moving.

  The sound of gunfire continued but the cops had switched their attention to something inside the building. A machine gun clattered to the floor, still smoking, followed by a pair of goggles.

  ‘What the hell?’ Zee asked. ‘Come on, let’s go while we can.’

  I didn’t argue, leaping out across the walkway. The floor beneath me was broken, bullet casings everywhere, as treacherous as ball bearings. But I kept my balance and ran to the balcony rail.

  Behind us the shooting had stopped, and I peeked over my shoulder to see two shadowed figures wrestling in the window. One had a huge arm locked around the other’s throat, his body bent, and framed in the arch it made me think of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Simon gave the cop a shove, the man’s body twisting through the air and landing next to that of its teammate. Then he clambered through the broken glass and jumped to the floor, brushing his hands with satisfaction.

  ‘Thanks for the help, guys,’ he said. I noticed that there was black blood dripping from a wound in his shoulder and pointed it out to him. He just shrugged. ‘One of the pigs got me but I showed ’em.’

  ‘What happened?’ Zee asked, reaching out with a curious finger and prodding Simon’s wound. The bigger boy flinched and brushed Zee’s hand away.

  ‘They were so busy chasing you they never even saw me coming,’ he explained, looking at the scarred and stretched skin of his mutated arm. ‘They aren’t ready for us, you know. These guys haven’t seen anything like us before. We’re bigger than them and faster, too. I guess sometimes it pays to be a freak.’

  He dashed over to where the machine gun lay, lifting it up and fumbling with it until the magazine popped out. He peered at the bullets inside, then slapped it clumsily back in, holding the weapon to his chest.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should get back into the service corridors before they send reinforcements; they won’t be able to find us down there. We can sneak out round the back.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Zee said, shaking his head. ‘There’s a better way.’

  He ran along the walkway towards an escalator, bounding
down the motionless steps. I couldn’t be bothered with the extra walk and grabbed the balcony rail, vaulting it with as much grace as I could manage, landing on the ground floor. There was a muffled grunt as Simon dropped next to me, his smaller hand massaging the wound in his shoulder. Zee propelled himself off the bottom step and sprinted to the display of cars in the large plaza that formed the centre of the mall. They were arranged around a flower-shaped fountain, the water reflecting the quiet light onto their shiny silver skins and making them look like fish.

  ‘Nice,’ said Simon, running his hand over the bonnet of the nearest car – a squat, square SUV. ‘Now all we need is a driving instructor.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Zee said. He walked to a display stand on the other side of the fountain, and I followed to see him kicking out at a padlock. He looked up at me imploringly and I grabbed the bolted doors, bending them open as though they were made of tin foil. Behind them was a series of pegs on which hung dozens of keys. Zee selected one and aimed it behind him, pushing the remote-locking button. A small hatchback came alive, beeping softly and flashing its indicators. He stood and began to walk towards it, but I stopped him.

  ‘That thing won’t get us five feet if they start firing on it,’ I said. I pointed towards a massive 4x4 that sat close by, its ribbed bonnet mounted with bull bars and promising a monstrous engine beneath. ‘We should take the Humvee.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ added Simon. ‘And I call shotgun.’

  ‘No way,’ I moaned as Zee flicked through the keys, the air alive with artificial birdsong.

  ‘Sorry, Alex, the shotgun rule is solid – right, Zee?’

  Zee selected a key fob and pressed it, bringing the Humvee to life with an unsubtle grunt of its horn. He looked at me and nodded.

  ‘Afraid so,’ he said. ‘There are few rules in life that can’t be broken, but shotgun is one of them. You’re in the back.’

  I grumbled my way to the car, yanking open the rear door and pulling myself up onto the leather. Zee hopped into the driver’s seat and Simon clambered next to him with a smug grin. I don’t know why we were acting like kids. I mean, the mall was surrounded by armed police and we were now officially cop killers. But we were still alive, and now we had wheels. In the grand scheme of life, things weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been.