‘Here?’ I asked. The presence of Gary alone was enough to strike terror into me, but the idea that there might be more like him, more killing machines of mutated muscle and uncontrollable fury, was enough to make me want to leap right out of my new suit and cower in the corner. The warden sensed my discomfort and flashed me another crooked smile.
‘No, even this place cannot hold the berserkers. They exist in a far more secure compound. Dr Furnace’s domain. A place you may one day see, if you are lucky.’
I stared at one of the IV bags, saw the darkness inside, and beyond that the golden dust that sparkled like distant galaxies. Even as I watched I felt the nectar in my own blood respond to the sight, fuelling my heart as it beat a little faster, sharpening my senses so that the smells and sights and sounds of the room became almost unbearable. I wrenched my eyes away, focusing on the floor once again until the sense of vertigo had passed.
‘But what is the nectar?’ I asked, if only to hear my own voice. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘It comes from the very worst places of the world,’ the warden said, walking as he talked. ‘And the very best. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. Neither could the wheezers, even if they spoke. Only Dr Furnace knows, because he was the one who discovered it.’
‘Discovered it?’ I started. We passed another screen and he pointed inside. I followed his finger, seeing an operating table beyond. On it, unconscious and twitching in its sleep, was a dog. Half its body had been blown up like rotten fruit, the veins in its skin pumping black as the nectar pulsed through them.
‘Alfred Furnace was there at the beginning.’ The warden laughed that sick laugh again. ‘Well, we all were, but he was the mind who engineered the nectar, who created the first of us. He was the one who discovered that war does not just have to create horrors, but wonders too.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘You’re saying that Furnace created the nectar during a war?’
‘During the war,’ the warden replied.
I shook my head, seeing more images from my dreams: the boys with swastikas on their prison uniforms, the soldiers with the same emblem emblazoned across their jackets. I knew what period in history those sights belonged to, but it was too long ago.
‘That’s impossible,’ I said. The warden’s face split open into a smile that seemed too wide, too gleeful, like a child remembering a seaside holiday.
‘With the nectar, nothing is impossible,’ he replied. ‘It makes the human body a machine of infinite possibilities. Even age has no hold on us with the power of Furnace in our veins.’
I studied the warden’s skin, like old leather, my new eyes letting me see every tiny crack and wrinkle in his face. He seemed ancient, older than time.
‘But,’ I tried again. ‘You can’t have been alive …’
‘I was,’ he said, once again letting his eyes crawl over my face. ‘The nectar was created during the Second World War, and I was there to witness its birth.’
TRUTH
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said when I remembered how to speak. ‘It can’t be.’
‘But it is,’ the warden replied without missing a beat. ‘There is no need for lies and exaggeration when the nectar is involved.’
He began to walk again and my silent bubble of shock burst, letting the chaos of the room back in. I drew back as the creature that had once been Gary stretched out a hand towards me, trying to hear past its nightmare screams to keep hold of my scattered thoughts. The warden looked old, yes, but not old enough to have fought in the Second World War. It would have meant he’d been alive for a century.
‘You more than most should know what it is like to have the nectar inside you,’ the warden went on. ‘Know how it changes you, how it improves you. How does it feel, knowing you will live far longer now than you ever could have dreamed?’
I tried to get my head round the thought but it was impossible. He was right, I had all the evidence I needed to believe him. The nectar had completely changed my body, after all; it had let me shrug off wounds that would have killed a normal person. And it had obviously kept the warden and the wheezers alive for far longer than they had any right to be. Maybe it would make me immortal as well as invulnerable. I smiled at the thought, my shark’s grin imitated by the warden.
And yet the itch still ground itself against the back of my head, the thought that something here wasn’t right.
‘Alfred Furnace discovered a way to harness the nightmares of war, the anger and hatred of the soldiers,’ the warden continued as he strolled further into the madhouse. ‘He was experimenting on troops, ones who had been injured, and those driven insane. You saw this in your dreams too, did you not?’
I remembered the vision of the battlefield, the young soldier lying on the edge of death in the mud, screaming as the men in trench coats and gas masks carried him away. The warden knew my answer without looking at me.
‘He found something in the weakest men, in those who feared death the most. He found something inside them.’
‘The nectar,’ I said. I didn’t understand anything that the warden was saying, but the truth of it sat in my gut, swam in my veins.
‘It was the essence of the nectar,’ the warden corrected. ‘The darkness that lies at the heart of it. Dr Furnace realised he could take that darkness and replicate it artificially. And that’s what led to the nectar.’
The further we walked into the room, and the deeper the warden progressed into his story, the greater the horrors around me became. It was as if his words were so terrible that they morphed the world around us, turning it into a hideous parody of itself.
Past the operating table, half hidden by a bloodstained screen, was another huge cage, this one occupied by two rats who tore at what might once have been a limb – just a few scraps of flesh on dirty bone. Beside this, propped up next to each other like dominoes, were several stiff, pale corpses which didn’t resemble anything human, yet unmistakably still were. Beyond them, on the other side of the room, a wheezer sat on a wooden chair picking the filth from its gloves. It didn’t seem to notice us as we passed, but the figure still made me so nervous that it took a moment for me to realise that the warden was talking.
‘His moment of triumph came when he discovered what happened to the human body when the artificial nectar was introduced. It stripped away all of the weaknesses that plagued the mind. It transformed his subjects into killers, true soldiers, without fear and without remorse; without any emotions, save those from which the nectar was derived – anger, cruelty, and hatred.’
The warden’s speech was growing louder and faster with every word, as though he could barely contain his excitement.
‘And with the weaknesses of the mind now under control, the body could become what it was truly meant to be, could grow to the size and strength that nature intended it. With a little help from the knife, of course. Thanks to Alfred Furnace, mere mortals – those pathetic souls known as men – could become gods.’
He aimed the last word at another cluster of cages piled high against the wall to my right. These all stood empty apart from one, where yet another body pleaded back at me with dead eyes – one silver and the other brown.
‘Not that there weren’t sacrifices to be made,’ the warden said, once again coming to a halt. He locked eyes with the corpse. ‘Dr Furnace soon realised that the adult body couldn’t cope with the nectar, or the surgery. The cells only lasted so long before they literally disintegrated. Only a young body, one that hadn’t fully matured, had the strength to recover. And even then there were those whose bodies rejected the nectar, who died on the operating table.’
‘Or who became rats,’ I added.
‘That’s right. Because there is a fine line between erasing a person’s mental weaknesses, their emotions, and wiping out every last trace of humanity. Too little nectar and they die from the surgery. Too much and they become monsters. Dr Furnace thought he could find the right balance in time to win the war, but
by the time he had perfected the nectar the Allies had taken Berlin and he was forced to flee.’
‘Flee?’ I said, suddenly realising what the warden was saying. ‘Because he was a war criminal, a Nazi war criminal, right?’
I could sense the anger charging up inside the warden, his entire body seeming to swell. But he took a deep breath and the tension dissipated.
‘Dr Furnace was a genius. He managed to do what nature could not. He created a race of beings far superior to humankind. Soldiers who could fight without fear, without pain, without pity.’
‘But –’
‘But nothing,’ the warden spat back. ‘Do you know what it’s like to throw yourself into battle knowing that you are going to die? To see your friends fall by your feet, their heads split wide open, or blown to mist by a mortar shell? Do you?’
He swung round, grabbing my face in his hand before I could turn away. In his eyes I saw his words take life, becoming visions of pain and fear and violence that poured into my head. I fought him but his grip was too strong, and I was forced to relive his horror as he spoke.
‘I do. I was there, in the mud and the excrement and the blood, with a gun that wouldn’t fire because my hands were too cramped to pull the trigger, with a uniform too tight to let me run, with bullets screaming towards me from friend and foe because nobody could see what they were supposed to be shooting at, with the skies opening and bombs falling from it like God crushing insects, with darkness all around us, so deep, so endless that we might as well have been blind, or dead. And the pain when you’re hit, when you feel that sliver of red-hot metal puncture your guts and set fire to your insides, knowing you can’t go on and you can’t go back because your own men will cut your throat for cowardice, knowing that you’re going to die with your face trampled into the dirt so far from home, so far from everything you know.’
He let go of my chin and I snapped my head away, reeling as the last of the images bled from my mind.
‘I was your age when I was forced into war,’ he went on, his tone softer. ‘And I would have died was it not for Dr Furnace. He showed me what it was like to feel no fear, to be a creature of pure power, of unlimited strength. If he’d been allowed to carry on his work then terror would have become a thing of the past. War too, for that matter. Because when the strong inevitably overcame the weak, and the powerless were scrubbed from the face of the earth, then who would be left to fight?’
He set off, entering the final third of the room, and I followed – part of me terrified of hearing the rest of his story, part of me desperate to know what happened next.
‘After the war Dr Furnace came to this country. We all did. And we found a way to carry on his work, continue our research into the nectar.’
‘Why here?’ I asked, somehow managing to find the words. ‘Why a prison?’
‘Why do you think? Where better to replicate the panic, the hatred, the anger of a battlefield than a place like this? A place with no mercy, no sanctuary, where violence lies around every corner, where the powerless are persecuted by the powerful, and where your enemies will kill you simply for the joy of watching you die. Although for many years we tried to accomplish our goals by various means, there was no way of accessing the numbers we needed, and the ages that were so vital. But eventually, when your government finally saw that liberalism was no way to run a country and Furnace Penitentiary opened its doors, we had an unlimited number of subjects to work on, with absolute immunity.’
I felt the room start to spin again, and closed my eyes for a moment to recover my balance. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, yet what else could explain everything that I’d seen here, and everything that had been done to me?
‘And we are close, so close, to what we want to achieve,’ the warden said, steering me to the left to avoid a puddle of blood that rippled out from behind a screen. I couldn’t see past this one, but the gargled cries and dry wheezes beyond let me know what was happening there. ‘There will be another war, a great war, and the world will at last fall to its natural leaders, its supreme race. Survival of the strongest, and a total annihilation of the weak. And you, my friend, you will have the honour of being on the winning side. You will have a place in the new fatherland.’
The warden spoke the last sentence with a pride that seemed to explode from his every pore, and it was impossible not be roused by it. I felt the nectar in my blood burn through my heart, and my mind, carrying with it a hunger for power. I could be one of the chosen few, part of a new race that would scour humanity of everything that stopped it reaching its full potential. With the nectar in our blood, nothing could stand in our way.
And yet as soon as that rush of euphoria passed it left a stain behind it, like the slime trail that follows a slug. It was almost as if there was something wrong with what the warden was saying. But how could there be? What could be wrong with a world in which weakness did not exist? Still the feeling persisted, a familiar churning in my gut that I couldn’t quite place.
As the warden led the way towards a door at the far end of the room I saw a fleeting image of the boy I used to be robbing a house. With it came the rush of easy money followed by the guilt of what I had done – the latter quickly buried out of sight. I didn’t know why, but I was feeling the same thing now, a sickening combination of sweet and sour.
The warden had to flick a chunk of something red and wet from the door handle before wrenching open the huge iron portal.
‘But for every soldier like you, every child of Furnace, who has a place in the new world,’ he went on, walking into another tunnel carved into the rock,‘there must necessarily be those left behind. The nectar does not work on everybody. It seems that some genetic codes are resistant to the darkness inside it, no matter how much you give them. These unfortunate souls can play no part in the war that will follow.’
I wondered why he was telling me this, but then I heard shouts from up ahead, an accent I recognised, and suddenly it became clear. The itch in my skull became a stabbing pain and I faltered, bracing a hand on the wall. The warden heard my ragged breathing and stopped, his smile sliding from his face for an instant before he remembered to pull it back.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked, and I knew from his tone that there was only one answer I could safely give.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a lot to take in.’
‘Indeed it is, indeed it is,’ the warden replied, chewing on the words as though deciding whether to believe them. ‘It will be easier when this is over. Come, follow me.’ He talked as he walked. ‘As I was saying, there are those who can never know the power of Alfred Furnace’s creation. The only purpose they serve is to make us stronger.’
He reached a door, but this one was already open. Inside I could make out the thump of fist on flesh, and I was unsure whether the squirming in my gut came from fear or excitement. There was another shout, followed by booming laughter, and the warden took that as his cue. He grasped my arm and pulled me through.
‘The only purpose they serve is to make us into killers, to help us embrace our destiny.’
The room ahead was small, the rock splashed a deeper shade of red than the corridor we’d just left. Two blacksuits stood in the centre of it, their clenched, swollen fists the same colour as the walls. They were still laughing as the warden continued speaking.
‘The only purpose they serve is to die.’
The blacksuits stood to one side to reveal a boy strapped to a chair. His head drooped against his chest, blood still dripping from his nose, but when he heard us enter he looked up and fixed us with a fierce, defiant stare. I knew him. He was the kid who had tried to kill me, tried to smother me with a pillow. What had his friends called him? Zee? But there was something more, something about him that I couldn’t quite remember. I fought to access the memory, groaning as the agony in my skull grew worse.
The warden held out his hand towards the boy like he was giving me a present.
‘He’s all
yours,’ he said, his teeth glinting in the harsh light. ‘Now kill him.’
RAGE
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The pain in my head was growing. My memories were a dark tide, my mind a floodgate about to buckle under the pressure.
‘Did you hear me?’ the warden said, his voice as sharp and cold as a knife edge. ‘Kill him.’
All eyes in the room were on me – two sets of silver pennies from the blacksuits, which somehow weren’t anywhere near as intense as those that belonged to the kid. He stared up at me from his chair, never blinking, even though tears of blood snaked their way down his cheeks.
But it was the warden’s gaze which filled me with terror. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, knowing that his expression would be one of disdain. I’d seen it before, the times I had failed him during my procedure, and I couldn’t bear to witness his disappointment in me again.
I steeled myself, blacking out my mind and focusing on the job ahead. What was so difficult about this? I had killed before, after all. I had slaughtered the rats, and murdered Ozzie. I was a killer, a soldier. Taking a life meant nothing to me any more.
More pain in my head, like I was trying to put my mind into a gear it simply wouldn’t engage. I screwed my eyes shut, taking a deep breath and hoping that when I opened them again the kid would be gone. Or at least be looking the other way. But when the room swam into focus he was still staring at me, his expression of defiance carved in stone.
‘Go on,’ the boy spat. ‘What are you waiting for? Get it over with, Alex.’
I felt my heart lurch, that last word so close and yet so distant. Before I could grasp why, one of the blacksuits lashed out and caught the kid with a savage blow to the temple. His head snapped back, and for a moment I thought the guard had done my job for me, then the kid’s eyes opened once again, his gaze swinging blindly around the room before finding me.
Furnace 3 - Death Sentence Page 9
