Solitary

  “Have you seen Donovan?” I asked. “Is he still here?”

  “I don’t know,” Zee replied, pulling his arms free from the severed straps and rubbing the ugly welts that had formed. “We can’t see anything with these screens. I think so, though. I mean, I don’t know why he wouldn’t be.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, walking out into the aisle.

  “You can’t release him,” said Simon as he continued to saw through Zee’s restraints. “He’s too far gone.”

  I hung my head, thinking about the last time I’d seen Donovan in solitary confinement, and what the hallucination had said to me.

  You don’t have to free me to save me.

  “I know,” I said, but I was the only one who heard it. I walked down the row, three cubicles, then peered past the screen. The metal sarcophagus was still there, angled against the wall, the IV stand in place now with four bags of nightmare black hooked up to it. The tubes ran the liquid death into the arms and neck of a creature that couldn’t have been Donovan, but was.

  He was monstrous, both in size and in appearance. All his limbs were now grotesquely deformed, the muscles like hunks of meat beneath greasy pastry. His neck was a mess of tendons as taut as steel cables, and perched on top was a shapeless face, all jaw and roughly hewn cheekbones decorated with half-healed scars. His silver eyes watched me enter with no sign of recognition. With no sign of anything human.

  “Donovan,” was the only word that slipped from my lips. His mouth split open, tombstone teeth flashing in the muted light. I thought about the first time I’d seen him smile, up in our cells on the day I’d arrived at Furnace. And all the times since, a beam of sunshine that more than once was the only thing that had stopped me throwing myself off the eighth level of the prison. There was none of that warmth now, no compassion. There was nothing there but the hateful sneer of a blacksuit. And it broke my heart.

  Donovan lurched forward, the chains around his arms and legs and chest squealing as the metal struggled to constrain him. He growled, the noise like a machine lodged in his deformed throat.

  “It’s okay,” I said, unable to hold back the tears anymore. “It’s okay, D, I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  He fought against his chains again, his solid steel casket rocking. The grin was still plastered on his face, his cold eyes promising me nothing but death if he managed to get out.

  I knew what I had to do.

  I crept past the screen into the next compartment, the bed empty and stripped except for the dirty pillow. I picked it up, held it to my chest as I blinked away the tears. Images kept flashing before me, the times I’d spent with Donovan up top in gen pop. The meal we’d had with Monty in the kitchen, the way he’d cried eating the steak. The look on his face when he realized escape wasn’t just a dream. His excitement when we loaded the last of the gloves into the crevice in Room Two, when he’d asked me if we should just go, the night before the blood watch had come and taken him.

  “I’m sorry, D,” I said, the words nothing more than sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

  I walked back to Donovan, barely able to see where I was going through my blurred vision. He started struggling again when he saw me, the growl growing fiercer, breaking up at the end into what sounded like a grating laugh. It was the final straw. That thing before me wasn’t Donovan, not anymore. Everything good about him had been stripped away.

  I pictured him as I wanted to remember him, sitting beside me on my bunk and giggling, slapping my back as his tuneful laughter filled the cell, making my spirits soar.

  You don’t have to free me to save me.

  “I know,” I repeated, reaching up and pushing the pillow against his face. I was sobbing so hard I could barely hold it, his body rocking so wildly that some of the links in his chains stretched out of shape. But they held, and I pushed, howling now as I heard the muffled gasps. I pushed until I felt his body grow still, the tendons in his neck relaxing. I pushed until I felt the mouth beneath the pillow droop, one last dull groan fading into silence. And I kept pushing, because I couldn’t bear to pull the pillow away to see what I’d done.

  “You’re free,” I said. I closed my eyes, saw Donovan as he had been. One last smile, then he faded. “You’re free. You’re free.” And I kept saying it even when I felt the hands on my shoulders pulling me away. I plunged my head into Zee’s neck, feeling his sobs beneath my own. “You’re free. You’re free. You’re free.”

  “We have to go,” said Simon, and I let them both steer me out of the cubicle, the pillow still gripped in my hands.

  I didn’t look back.

  THE INCINERATOR

  WE DIDN’T RUN THIS TIME. Even though the sounds of the blacksuits could be heard over the endless drone of the siren. We walked across the infirmary, somehow knowing we had enough time, that we were going to make it.

  Zee pried the pillow from my hands as we reached the plastic curtain, laying it tenderly on the stone. I know it sounds stupid but I didn’t want to leave it. I couldn’t tell you why.

  “You did the right thing,” Zee said quietly, wiping the tears from his eyes. “He wouldn’t want us standing around weeping. Let’s get out of here. For Donovan.”

  We pressed through the door, the plastic slats like cold fingers on my face. The corridor beyond was deserted, the surgical rooms on either side empty behind their electronic seals. Several more steps and we’d reached the incinerator. The air here was warm, and a jolt of panic ran through me as I pictured us walking in to find the furnace burning, our path out blocked by a wall of fire.

  But when Simon eased down the handle and opened the door, the room beyond was lit only by the cold lights in the ceiling, the incinerator grilles wide open like a welcoming embrace. The bodies had gone, but there were others here now, five of them, watching us with what I could swear was envy. Simon closed the door behind us, cutting off a dog in mid-howl. The blacksuits were close, but they couldn’t stop us. Not now.

  “I hope you’ve got a good reason for being in here,” said Zee, staring into the furnace. “I don’t fancy getting cozy with the dead guys again.”

  “It’s our way out,” I said. “The incinerator, the chimney. It goes all the way up.”

  Zee frowned, then his face blossomed into a smile.

  “You’ve done it again,” he said. “That’s brilliant. Have we got the gear, the climbing stuff?”

  “Nope,” answered Simon, taking a step toward the furnace. “We’re gonna have to do this without help.”

  “Well what are we waiting for?” Zee moved to join him as the sound of shouting rose up behind us. Simon clambered into the oven, then Zee, and I followed, trying not to think about the source of the ashes that clumped around my feet, that danced in the air and collected in my mouth.

  It took a while for us to build the courage to look up. For all we knew there could be a metal grate bolted into the ceiling. The chimney could be a foot wide. The walls could be as smooth as silk.

  But when we did tilt our heads up, our choked sigh of relief echoed back at us from the metal sides of the incinerator. Above us, stretching into darkness, was a vertical tunnel of rough rock maybe a meter and a half in width.

  And coming down it was the unmistakable scent of fresh air.

  We let it fall on us, closing our eyes and imagining spring rain and sea breezes. Okay, it was a mile or so above us and we had no idea if we could actually reach it, but right now that breath of cool wind was all we needed. It was part of a world we thought we’d never see again, never feel, never breathe. It was a link to the surface, the chink in Furnace’s armor. Bathing in that draft we were as good as free.

  “We gonna stand around all day or get the hell out of here?” asked Simon, holding out his mammoth hand. I put my foot in it, grabbing his arm for balance as he hoisted me up to the ceiling of the incinerator. I eased myself into the chimney, running my hands across the rock until I found something I could cling onto.

  “Got it,” I said, my v
oice ringing up the walls as if trying to beat me to the top. I could feel the soot and smoke of dead things against my fingers. “Christ, this thing could do with a wash.”

  My shoulder was killing me where I’d been bitten, but I ignored the pain as best I could, lifting up a leg and bracing it against the wall. The chimney was narrow enough to wedge my body in, back and feet on opposite sides, allowing me to shuffle my way up without the need for handholds every few meters. I inched up painfully slowly, but with every passing hair’s breadth I felt the tension peeling away, the stress and the panic dissolving into smoke and rising up alongside me.

  We were doing it. We were getting out.

  There was a scuffle beneath me as Zee got in, moaning under his breath about how uncomfortable it was. We pushed up a bit more before Simon’s tinny “Mind if I join you?” resonated from the stone.

  “Only if you don’t peek up my skirt,” laughed Zee.

  It was tough going, but every time I felt my legs cramp I just spread them, bracing my arms on either side of the chimney and tilting my neck back to lock myself in place. With no light I couldn’t tell how far we’d climbed, but it must have been fifteen meters or so. Only a few hundred left to go, I thought.

  “I hope neither of you needs to take a whiz while we’re in here,” said Simon. “Not unless you let me overtake you first.”

  I tried not to laugh, knowing it would probably make me lose my grip, plummet back into the furnace. Instead I shifted my body around, climbing in the conventional way for a while in an attempt to use some different muscles. It was as I was scanning the wall for any hint of a grip, impossible in the smothering gloom, that I noticed something up ahead. It looked like a flash of silver, so small it barely registered in my vision. I blinked the sweat from my tear-ravaged eyes, tried to focus on it.

  A silver penny, unblinking. It was a rat. It had to be. How the hell had it got in here? It didn’t matter. Right now we were stuck in a narrow pipe with it, and there was no other way to go except down.

  I was about to warn the others when something in my head clicked. For a second I didn’t understand it, or maybe I just didn’t believe it. But the more I stared at that pinpoint of silver the more difficult it was to deny it.

  “Do you see that?” I said.

  “What?” asked Zee. “I can’t see anything, your butt’s in the way.”

  “That,” I said, gripping the wall tight so they could look up past me. “That dot.”

  “Dot?” mumbled Simon from farther down. “You going crazy?”

  “No way,” interrupted Zee. “Is that…?”

  “It can’t be,” added Simon.

  “But it is,” I said, imagining its warmth on my skin even though I knew it was impossible from this distance. “It’s daylight.”

  We were so busy cheering that none of us noticed the change in the chimney, the thickening of the air. I coughed, thinking it was just the exertion of the climb. But then Simon spluttered too, Zee’s whoops of delight becoming a rattle. I opened my mouth but no oxygen flowed in, only an acrid cloud that lined my windpipe. I coughed again, this time convinced I’d hacked up a lung.

  “Oh no,” said Simon. I didn’t need to look down to know what he was talking about, but I did anyway. I could make out the silhouettes of the two boys beneath me, squirming against the wall as they tried to escape the growing flames.

  The incinerator had been lit.

  I tried to double my speed, tried to scramble up the rock to outrun the smoke. It was pointless. I didn’t know whether the blacksuits had discovered our escape or whether it was just another of the cruel twists of fate that Furnace was so, so good at, but there was no way we could go on.

  I heard Simon coughing again, too many times for him to have been able to draw a breath. Zee was wheezing like one of the gas masks, his fingers grasping at my legs for support. But I had none to give. With another racking splutter I felt my grip on the wall come loose. I tried to wedge my back against the rock but I was spasming too much, the smoke in my lungs, in my eyes.

  There wasn’t even enough air for me to curse the blacksuits, curse the warden, curse our crappy luck, curse God. The smoke was in my head now, a pungent cloud even darker and filthier than the chimney. I knew I was passing out, knew I couldn’t hold on any longer.

  I took one last look at the speck of daylight, keeping my eyes open even though they burned. Then I was falling, thumping into Zee, our tangled limbs hitting Simon, all of us plummeting toward the fire below.

  At least it will be quick, was the last thing I thought. At least we’ll be free. And I wondered if Donovan would be there, wherever we were going.

  But we weren’t that lucky. It wasn’t quick. We weren’t free. I don’t remember hitting the inferno, the pain too much for my body to register. I could hear the shouts, though, the cries of the blacksuits, the shudder of the furnace as it was shut down. I could feel their hands on me, dragging me out, slapping my skin where the flames had taken root.

  And I could see the warden, his soulless eyes making me wish I had burned to death. My vision went before my hearing, and I could hear him laugh—wild, lunatic cackles of delight. When they faded, his voice was just as terrifying, penetrating the darkness inside my head.

  “My my, look what the rats dragged in. Get them into surgery, prep the wheezers. We can still use them.”

  Then my hearing went too, my senses deserting me in the face of what was to come. I prayed for death, prayed to be taken away, prayed for somebody to free me the same way I had freed Donovan. But even as I felt myself being carried through the door I knew that death wouldn’t come for me here, not now. It wouldn’t dare.

  Because the true horror of Furnace was about to begin.

  WELCOME BACK, OLD FRIEND.

  I thought I heard the tunnel walls laughing as I was carried through them—deep chuckles that could have been distant earthquakes. Somewhere inside I knew it must have been the echo of the blacksuits, but the injuries in my mind were just as bad as the ones on my skin and reality was a distant memory. I was living inside a nightmare now, a place where Furnace was a creature that howled with delight as we were pulled back into its belly, dragged to the infirmary.

  Every atom of my being was in agony. God knows how badly I’d been burned when I’d hit the incinerator flames. I would have opened my eyes to see if I’d been barbecued, but they wouldn’t obey. I would have lifted a hand to check that I still had my eyes, but I couldn’t find the strength. I would have screamed, but there was barely enough air in my smoke-ravaged lungs to breathe.

  So instead I tried to shut down my brain. Tried to forget that I’d ever been alive. Tried to flood my body with absence—a black tide that would douse the pain in my flesh. Maybe if I could do that then death would sneak in, snatch me up right from under their noses. It worked for the fraction of a second until I heard the voice.

  “Oh no you don’t, Alex,” the warden hissed, snapping me back into my body. “Death can’t have what belongs to me.” The whisper grew louder, accompanied by wicked shrieks I knew all too well. “Get those wheezers to work. We haven’t got long. And find me an IV, now!”

  I was lowered onto something that should have been soft but which felt like acid against my burned skin. I tried once more to leave my head. Maybe if I could just escape my skull for an instant, then death would take me, carry me up through the rock toward that sliver of daylight I had glimpsed only minutes ago.

  Then I felt the needle in my arm, and something cold rushed into my veins. I knew exactly what it was, I’d seen it before on Gary, on Donovan—a drip full of evil, not quite black, not quite silver, with specks of starlight floating in its dark weight. It was the warden’s poison, the stuff that turned you into a monster.

  I tried to fight it, to buck my body until the needle came out, but the pain was too great and I could feel the leather straps holding me tight against the infirmary bed. The panic grew like a living thing in my chest and I made one last mental effort t
o escape, to leave my flesh behind and vanish like smoke. But the liquid nightmare flowed into me like molten lead, filling my veins and arteries and weighing me down. And it’s impossible to escape anything when the chains are inside you.

  It was only a matter of seconds before it reached my brain. To my surprise it numbed the agony. I felt the same way I had years ago—a lifetime ago—when I’d broken my wrist and the doctors had given me morphine. It was like I was no longer connected to anything physical, like my mind was free.

  I should have known better than to hope. For a blissful instant I felt nothing, then the floodgates opened and something far worse than physical pain burst into my head.

  This time I managed to scream.

  * * *

  IT WAS AS IF THE WARDEN had ridden into my mind on the wave of poison, because I could swear his voice came from inside my skull.

  It’s over, he said, the sound of him causing rotten images to sprout from the shadows in my head. I saw something that looked like flyblown meat, something else that could have been a dead dog, there for only a second before evaporating. The warden continued: Everything you ever were, everything you are now, and everything you ever wanted to be, it’s over.

  I wanted to argue, wanted to open my mouth and tell him he was wrong, but his words were like maggots burrowing into the flesh of my brain. They gorged and grew fat on his dry laughter, revealing visions so horrific that I couldn’t bear to make sense of them.

  There is nothing to be gained in fighting. What flows inside you now is far more powerful than that fallacy you call a soul. Let it take you, for without it you are nothing.

  “I am something … I am Alex…” I tried to say, but even inside my own head his voice was stronger than mine.

  You are nothing, you can be nothing. Surrender yourself and be done. You were never Alex Sawyer, because Alex Sawyer never existed.

  “You’re wrong. I’m…” I began, but my words were so weak I could barely hear them. He cut me off with another laugh, and this time when he spoke his voice was like fingers sliding into my brain.