We did, trying not to look at the dead wheezer as we passed it. The cries were still flowing into the room and I expected to see more of the gas masks lurching in at any moment. Christ, wheezers in front of us, blacksuits and their dogs behind us. We were as dead as all the other kids buckled down in their beds in the infirmary.
Part of me wanted to stop, wanted to just wait here for the blacksuits. I mean, they were scary, but at least you could talk to them. Whatever the wheezers were, it was something age-old and rotten, the kind of evil you could never bargain with.
And we were running right toward them.
Simon reached the doorway, this too covered with a curtain of plastic strips. He didn’t hesitate, just threw himself into it and disappeared with a flap. Swearing under my breath, I lowered my head and pushed through, feeling Zee’s breath on my neck as he followed.
I should have kept my eyes forward, but you know what it’s like when you’re running, when you’re terrified, and you’re convinced there’s something right behind you. I stopped, peered back through the dirty plastic, saw the blacksuits pile in through the door opposite—one, three, seven, all scanning the room for the wheezer that had screamed and for whatever had attacked it.
But the dogs already knew. Two sets of silver eyes blazed right through the curtain at us, and when the creatures howled I knew it was because they had our scent in their muzzles.
I realized Zee and Simon were still running and I sprinted after them. We were in another long corridor, which thankfully was empty, although I knew from the screams that echoed off the blood-red walls that the wheezers were close. I didn’t realize how close until we passed the first of several rooms hewn out of the rock.
Inside, sealed by a thick Plexiglas door and protected by an electrical lock that looked far too modern for Furnace, was a small operating theater. And in the room, midway through a procedure, was a wheezer. It had its filthy hands in a figure laid out on a steel table, a boy whose eyes were closed but whose peeled chest rose up and down slowly.
I staggered past the door, knowing that if I didn’t start running then it would be me on that table, me being dissected then put back together like a kit model.
I barely noticed the other rooms to my left and right, each with the same electrical door. Most were empty, but some had wheezers inside, their raisin eyes too engrossed in their specimens to notice us run past.
“Where are we going?” I heard Zee hiss, he and Simon still hurling themselves forward up ahead.
“I don’t know,” Simon answered. “I’ve never been this deep before, no one has. At least, no one who has survived.”
They stopped at a junction, giving me a chance to catch up.
“Which way?” asked Zee.
“Didn’t you just hear me?” the kid snapped. “I don’t know.” He glanced right, then straight ahead, then took off to the left.
“The screams are coming from that way!” Zee said, stretching out a hand after him. But Simon was gone, the muscles beneath his warped skin visible as he pounded down the corridor. Zee turned to me. “What do we do?”
“Just go,” I shouted, taking off after him. The passage kinked up ahead and I heard Simon swear when he looked around the corner, throwing himself back against the wall.
“Wheezers,” was all he said.
I ducked down, knowing that the blacksuits and the dogs would burst in behind us at any moment, and inched my head around the corner.
There must have been thirty of them, packed into the long corridor and coming this way, called by the scream of their dying comrade.
I fell, scrambled up again, and ran back to the junction. Something in my fried mind told me that if the left-hand turn led to the wheezers’ quarters then the right-hand turn was probably a dead end too. I hit the crossroads and swung left, darting down a short corridor that ended in a metal door.
A howl behind us, the shout of the blacksuits. I grabbed the handle, prayed that it wasn’t locked. Then the latch lifted, the door creaked, and swung open, and I wished that it had been.
Before us was a charnel house. I thought at first that I was looking at more red stone walls, rougher than the others we’d passed and decorated with strips of torn clothing. Only it wasn’t rocks that lined either side of the large room, stacked in piles as tall as I was.
It was corpses.
IN HIDING
THE SOUNDS BEHIND US were getting louder, the blacksuits and the dogs and the wheezers closing in. I don’t think I could have brought myself to enter the room if Simon hadn’t shoved us forward, pushing me and Zee into the meat locker before stepping in himself and closing the door quietly behind him.
I realized I was shaking, my whole body trembling uncontrollably. I couldn’t figure out which emotion was causing it. There was fear, yes, and disbelief. But there was anger too, surging up from my gut like molten rock, making my blood feel like it was on fire.
How could they do this? How could they get away with it?
I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t stop myself. Most of the bodies were rats, deformed limbs and faces that looked wild and vicious even in death. Their silver eyes were open and staring blankly into the room, and I could almost forget that they had once been human, been kids like me and Zee.
Almost.
It was less easy to pretend with the other bodies scattered around. I saw pale limbs, untouched by the wheezers’ scalpels, the hint of a cheek or a tuft of mousy brown hair. Specimens was the only word that came to mind. These were the ones that had gone wrong, that had been dumped.
The emotion flared for a moment, then it dulled, leaving me numb. I know why—if it hadn’t, then my mind would have shattered right there, broken into pieces so small and so damaged it could never have been put back together.
I caught sight of a suit and frowned. In one corner, half buried under the bodies of a couple of smaller corpses, was one of the guards. His jacket had been torn open, the shirt stained black. He must have died fighting the rats, I realized. I didn’t quite know why, but there was something even worse about the way he’d been discarded here by his own people than there was about the other dead. What kind of monsters would do that?
Then again, the blacksuits were just more specimens, and if they died they were no more useful to the warden than the kids they’d once been.
“It’s the incinerator,” said Simon, the sound of his voice startling me after the stunned silence. I’d been so busy looking at the corpses that littered the floor that I hadn’t noticed the hulking metal doors on the other side of the room. They were open, an enormous crematorium oven visible behind them with walls smoked black and a thick carpet of ashes. “This is where they burn them.”
“No,” said Zee, echoing my own thoughts. “They can’t. It’s just … wrong.”
“Is there anything about this place that isn’t?” replied Simon softly.
A muffled bark from the doorway reminded us of the freaks on our tail and we all looked left and right for a way out. But the room only had one door and an incinerator.
“We’ve got to hide,” I said, hearing the thump of boots on rock getting closer against a backdrop of angry screams from the wheezers. Nobody knew where we were, but it wouldn’t take them long if they opened the door and spotted us standing like statues in the middle of the room.
“Where?” asked Simon, looking at the incinerator. “I’m not getting in there. What if they turn it on?”
I scanned the room. There was nowhere else. Not unless …
“The bodies,” I said, my voice so weak it barely left my mouth.
Simon and Zee were shaking their heads, but the noises outside were growing in volume every second. I walked toward a corner of the room, my body still shaking but my mind blank, all the emotional receptors switched off. There were five or six corpses here, all rats, slumped over each other and motionless like a tableau of some grotesque wrestling match. I reached out, grabbed an exposed arm, then immediately pulled back.
&n
bsp; The body was still warm. Not just warm, it was hot.
I checked for a pulse but there was nothing. I scanned the pile. None of the creatures were breathing, their chests all locked tight. I heard a shout from behind the door, the noise of approaching feet. Taking a deep breath, and trying to ignore the smell, I grabbed the arm again and pulled the corpse away from the wall. Then I lowered a foot into the gap I’d made, nestling myself down between the other bodies.
I let the topmost cadaver fall back on me, its dead weight pushing my head uncomfortably to the side. Fortunately there were no flies this deep beneath the surface, but the stench of decay was so pungent I could almost see it rising like a heat mirage off the crumbling flesh.
There was a choked cry from across the room and I peered through the gap between an arm and a foot to see both Simon and Zee clambering into their own hiding places. I wasn’t sure who had made the noise but they were both sobbing gently as they pulled scraps of clothing or stiff limbs over themselves.
The latch clicked, a mournful creak filling the room as the door swung open. I heard the soft growl of a dog, followed instantly by a whine of protest.
“Get in there,” said a blacksuit. There was more whimpering, as if the dog was reluctant to proceed. I didn’t blame it; its animal instincts must have sensed the death in this place from the other side of the infirmary, warning it to stay away. I realized it had probably followed our scent here, but I knew the corpses would shield us from the dogs’ noses as well as they would hide us from the blacksuits’ eyes.
“I’ll do it,” said another voice, just as loud and just as deep. A dark shape strode into the room, although from the angle I was crouched in I could only make out a pair of suited legs and polished boots. I closed my eyes, tried to stay as still as humanly possible. Any minute now I was going to feel a powerful hand on my shoulder, wrenching me out and tossing me to the dogs or into the incinerator.
But after a few seconds the guard turned and disappeared back through the door.
“Rats must have bolted back out of the compound before we arrived,” I heard him say as the door swung shut. “Can’t have got far; see if the dogs can pick up the scent from outside. And get those wheezers back to their cells.”
* * *
IT WAS ZEE WHO ESCAPED FIRST, pushing his way free and gasping for air. I waited a moment, too scared to move in case the blacksuits came back, but there was no more sound from outside, not even the wail of a wheezer. I pushed upward with my legs, the corpses resisting for a moment before tumbling loose. I stepped from the coffin of rotting flesh, walking to the center of the room where the three of us stood for a minute in silence, trying not to think about what we’d just done.
“We have to get you back to solitary before they realize you’re gone,” Simon said eventually. “They obviously think the rats are to blame. And if they suspect the rats have started breaking into the infirmary then security is going to double.” He swore, stamping his foot. “We don’t even have any of the stuff we came for.”
“How will we get back?” asked Zee. “Won’t there be wheezers and blacksuits everywhere?”
“Sounds like the suits have gone off on a rat hunt,” Simon answered, brushing his hands down his body as if trying to rub off some invisible mess. I felt itchy all over as well, like death was contagious. “There might be one or two but we’ll have to take that chance. We can’t stay here.”
The thought of stepping through that door, coming face-to-face with the wheezers again, turned my legs to water. But Simon was right. What was the alternative? Sit around until they fired up the incinerator?
I realized nobody was moving and steeled myself, walking back to the door. Putting my ear to the warm metal revealed no sound from outside, and with my pulse drumming in my ears I lifted the latch and eased it open.
A wheezer was making its way down the corridor beyond, but it had its back to us. It took a couple of steps then stopped, its body shaking wildly, its head snapping back and forth like it was having a fit. Then it reached one of the electronic doors and vanished.
I willed my legs to work and it seemed to take a mammoth effort to make that first step. But once I’d started moving, momentum took over. We flew down the corridor, the Plexiglas doors flashing by on both sides. I didn’t look inside, knowing that if I did I’d see a wheezer gazing out, ready to sound the alarm. But nothing happened, and we’d almost reached the door that led back into the infirmary when I heard Simon call out softly. By the time I’d turned he had disappeared into one of the operating theaters, and I would have assumed he’d been pulled in if Zee wasn’t standing relatively calmly half in and half out of the doorway.
Cursing, I doubled back, peered inside to see that it was empty. Simon was standing over a trolley snatching up suture clamps and bone pins. He’d already slung a coil of surgical tubing over his shoulder.
“Take what you can,” he said, and Zee and I responded without thinking. I grabbed hold of a hammer with a hooked end, pulled another length of thick rubber hose from a rack on the wall. There wasn’t anything else on the trolley that looked remotely useful for climbing, so I headed back to the door and out into the passageway.
In the room opposite a wheezer was standing over a metal table, scalpel held in one unsteady hand. I moved on before it noticed me.
Seconds later we were peering through the plastic slats at the back of the infirmary, wondering whether it was good luck that the room ahead was deserted or whether it was a trap. For all we knew there could have been blacksuits behind every set of curtains, shotguns locked and loaded, waiting to gun us down.
But we’d made it this far …
We ran, legs lined with lead, lungs wrinkled up into prunes. We ran, straight down the middle of the room, straight out through the filthy curtain, straight down the corridor beyond. We ran, and by the time we’d hit the junction leading back to the cells and still hadn’t been detected, we were giggling insanely, sheer relief rushing like pure, clear water through our veins.
The hatch locks were still in place; nobody had checked to see if we were there. Zee went in first, then I handed Simon the kit I’d stolen and leaped into the black hole of my cell, too exhausted from what had just happened to even care that I was being buried alive again. It was only when Simon moved to close my hatch that the laughter faded.
“You are coming back, aren’t you?” I said.
But Simon didn’t answer. Instead he let the door close and pushed the lock back into its casing, leaving me alone in the dark with the gut-wrenching fear that we’d never see him again.
DOUBTS
IT WAS AS IF THIS TIME the darkness had weight, substance. It pressed down on me, making my arms and legs and neck feel like they were cased in concrete. I let myself drop, then sat there in the corner of the tiny cell waiting for feeling to return to my limbs.
Part of me couldn’t believe what had just happened. It was easier to think that the whole thing had been in my head, that I’d been stuck here in my cell all this time fighting imaginary enemies. Except I could still feel the wheezer’s grip around my throat, fingertips on my windpipe. I knew that if there were light and a mirror in here I’d be able to see the bruising on my neck, like someone who’d been hanged on the gallows.
My entire body still throbbed, but the pain was a welcome diversion from my thoughts. I shifted on the uncomfortable stone, licked some of the moisture from the wall to quench my thirst. I wondered again whether Simon would return, or whether he’d already be making his way up the steeple.
He hadn’t needed us at all, not really. It was he who had found the rock, who had made the assumption that freedom lay at the top. And he’d probably already thought of using the medical equipment to help him climb it. All he’d wanted from me was reassurance that his plan would work even if I didn’t think it would. He’d gotten that, and there was no other reason for him to come back for us.
The lightless air seemed to thicken, filling up the cell and closing over my m
outh. I choked, tried and failed to draw breath. My lungs burned, a high-pitched whistle began to ring in my ears. But it was just panic. I knew enough to recognize it, and inhaled twice through my nose, breathing out slowly and feeling the oxygen hit my veins like a drug.
Knowing Simon was up there, that he’d be coming back for us, had given us the illusion that we were free. It lessened the power of solitary purely because we weren’t trapped, we weren’t isolated, we weren’t alone. With him gone, however, the cell became a tomb.
And that wasn’t the only reason I felt the panic gnawing at my stomach again. Deep down I knew Simon’s plan wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work.
Yes I’d had the flash of inspiration about the climbing gear, but it had never been serious. I’d been clutching at straws, and only saw it as a real possibility because, well, I was desperate, delusional. Simon too had only gone along with it because he had nothing else. And when reality denies you the tools you need for survival you grab them from wherever you can.
And if we couldn’t get out, then what? We’d probably live, but we wouldn’t be alive, not in the way we were now. We’d become rats who devoured the living, or blacksuits who terrorized them. We’d be demons, the living dead, and the thought was unbearable.
I wished I’d kept that scalpel.
I stared into the darkness, hoping that my brain would conjure up some company—someone, anyone, to help me pull free of this cloud of depression. I saw the strands of silk suspended in the distance, as if there were no walls between them and me, and sure enough they began to coil into a body. But the image wouldn’t solidify, shimmering above the invisible ground like a heat haze.
“Donovan?” I asked the ghost, hoping to see a familiar face. But something in my head wouldn’t let him form. Either I’d forgotten what he really looked like beneath his monstrous new flesh, or I knew he was dead. I called his name again and the figure replied with white noise, the voice lost in static.