I frowned, shrugging imperceptibly beneath my restraints. The ache in my head was growing. There was a clatter from outside, the door squeaking as it opened to admit two armed guards and a wiry, redheaded man in a suit.
‘That’s your time up,’ said the man. Zee looked from him to me, reaching out and squeezing my arm as he got to his feet.
‘But they’re still looking for Furnace, right?’ I said.
‘I think they’ve given it up as a dead end,’ he said. ‘I told you, they only care about the nectar. And they care about the nectar because they want it for themselves.’
‘For themselves? I asked. ‘What do you mean? Why do they want it?’
Zee shook his head sadly.
‘Because they’re going to create an army of their own.’
Holding On
The door slammed shut, the lock mechanisms sliding into place, leaving me more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.
It was worse than when I’d been in solitary confinement, miles of rock in every direction except one and a massive steel hatch over that. Even though there was a shaft of pure sunlight blazing into the room, even though I could hear birdsong from somewhere outside, even though I knew there were people all around me, I felt truly and utterly isolated.
At least back in the prison, buried beneath the ground with the blacksuits and rats and wheezers, it had been a clear case of us and them. We were the good guys, the warden and his freaks were the villains. But here I had no idea what was going on. These soldiers, these scientists, they were supposed to be on our side. We should have been working together to try and find Furnace and bring down his army.
Instead, I was a prisoner again, bound in chains and locked in a cell. Not only that, I was a specimen, too; just a hunk of meat for them to cut open and study. The warden had butchered me, but the truth was he had wanted to patch me up again, make me better than I had been before. Here they would murder me and call it science. And if Zee was right then they weren’t going to kill me in order to find a cure. They weren’t even going to kill me to work out a way of stopping Furnace’s freaks.
No, they were going to kill me so that they could create monsters of their own.
I pictured what would happen if the world’s militaries got hold of the nectar, if they started to use it on the youngest of their soldiers. All those kids pumped full of poison, driven insane, turned into killing machines. It would be like hell on earth, tens of thousands of rats unleashed on the battlefield, tearing each other – and everyone else – to shreds. The generals, the politicians, they’d think they could control it, harness its power, but they’d be wrong. They’d bring about the destruction of the world far more quickly than Alfred Furnace ever could.
Maybe that was Furnace’s plan all along. Maybe he knew the army would capture some of his rats, his berserkers, that they’d discover the nectar. And it didn’t take an evil genius to work out that they’d try to use it. Human nature was human nature. If that happened, if the nectar became an official weapon of war, then Furnace could sit back and watch the world’s superpowers do his work for him.
I tugged at my restraints, frustration bubbling through my veins, every muscle silently screaming. The chair rattled, but the shipping wire didn’t budge. I studied the IV bag that was feeding blood into me. If it was having any effect I couldn’t feel it, other than the aching sense of weakness that sat over my whole body. Blood wouldn’t keep me alive. Quite the opposite.
Death wasn’t an option, though. Not now, not yet. Even though the thought of falling into an endless, dreamless sleep was almost too wonderful to resist. There was too much to do. If the army didn’t believe Furnace was alive, if they weren’t going after him, then I had to do it myself. I’d made a promise. I would find him, and I would kill him. Then I would have the rest of eternity to sleep.
I flexed the stubs of my left hand, those charred fingers opening and closing. It looked monstrous, but at least the nectar was trying to repair me, studying the blueprint of my genes and building me a new limb. Why was I growing fingers this time when before I’d grown a blade? Perhaps the nectar possessed some intelligence, giving me what would be of most use to me. Before, when I’d lost my right arm on the car-park roof, I’d been mid-combat – fighting tooth and nail with the blacksuits and the helicopters which rained fire from overhead. Back then a blade was exactly what I needed, a weapon when I was defenceless.
Now, though, I wasn’t in immediate danger – not the same life-and-death kind anyway. Maybe the nectar sensed that what I needed most now wasn’t a weapon but a tool, a hand. True, it wasn’t exactly perfect; I’d never play the piano again, but I’d never been able to play the piano anyway. Still, I might just be able to hold a cup of tea.
If I ever got out of here alive.
I heard an engine start up outside the window, accelerating out of earshot. I wondered where exactly I was. It was a hospital that was being used as a military base, or a military base that was being used as a hospital, that was as much as I knew. Either way, that meant hundreds of soldiers, all armed with machine guns, plus helicopters, trucks, probably even tanks. But compared to Furnace Penitentiary this place might as well have been a nursing home for the elderly with walls made of polystyrene and fences woven from silk. I was above ground, after all, and those soldiers were only human – nine pints of blood wrapped in paper-thin skin, so fragile and so breakable that it was almost a joke.
I took a deep breath, tried to relax my cramped muscles. Then I looked at the camera, its red light blinking, and thought about the men and women watching me, thought about how easily I could tear through them. All I needed to do was get out of these restraints and find another dose of nectar, then not even the elite forces of the world could stand in my way.
In the quiet of the room I wasn’t sure whether it was my own imagination or the voice of Alfred Furnace which whispered to me – a breath which seemed to reverberate around my mind like the echoes of an explosion, making that shifting pain beat ever harder:
I can help you do that, Alex.
I sat in that room like a statue, the minutes grinding past, each hour a vast gulf of time in which I drowned in boredom. There was no clock in here, but the shadows of the bars on the window drifted lazily across the wall in front of me, trekking from left to right in what felt like a week. I couldn’t even talk to Zee by banging on my toilet – the way I had back in solitary. All I could do was watch those shadows while the anger smouldered inside me.
Only without the nectar those flames wouldn’t take; I might as well have tried to start a campfire with wet wood.
With nobody to talk to, even Furnace’s voice would have been welcome, but after that brief message he seemed to have faded as well. I guess with hardly any nectar in my system it was harder for him to communicate with me. Or maybe he wasn’t interested in me any more. Panettierre had told me that I would die here, sooner or later, so why would he bother with me? I still didn’t truly know why he was interested in me – whether he wanted me dead, or as his right-hand man – but either way I was useless to him right now.
The thought of Furnace woke the memory of my dreams, the orchard bulging to the surface of my thoughts like a whale breaching the ocean. Had he really shown me that, or had it just been a hallucination caused by the lack of nectar? It had seemed so real. But if it was real then what was that thing, the stranger? And why did he have nectar for blood? Images and explanations churned in my head, too fast and too muddled to make any sense of. I watched the shadow moving imperceptibly but inexorably, the passage of the sun the only certainty in my life.
At some point – it must have been towards the end of the day because the shadow had grown, pooling in the corners of the room – Panettierre came to talk to me. She looked tired, her skin like grey wax, massive bags under her eyes. She didn’t look at me, just walked to the machines by my chair, studying read-outs, tapping buttons. It was only after ten minutes or more that she turned round.
‘An
y luck with those memories?’ she asked, and even though she spoke through a smile her eyes were carved from stone. ‘We’re running out of time here.’
She watched me shake my head, her gaze dropping to my hands.
‘We thought reintroducing human blood into your system might counter, maybe even reverse, the effects of the nectar, but that was a dead end. Your immune system has improved, but otherwise the readings are exactly the same as before. Do you feel any different?’
‘Weaker,’ I managed.
‘Did Warden Cross ever tell you what was in the nectar?’ she went on.
‘He said it came from the war,’ I replied, trying to remember what the warden had told me back in the prison. There were only scraps, half-thoughts that didn’t make sense. ‘The Second World War. From men, people who were scared. He told me it came from them.’
‘That was a lie,’ Panettierre said. ‘Either he was trying to deceive you or he didn’t know the truth himself.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. She looked at the monitors beside my chair, then back at me. It took a while for her to respond.
‘What I mean is that whatever the nectar is, it isn’t human. It has never been human.’
‘How can it not—’ she cut me off by raising her hand, taking a few steps towards my chair.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t matter?’ I spat back.
‘Not to you.’
She rested the same hand on my forehead, stroking my hair with her thumb.
‘Alex, we’re going to need to take a look inside you,’ she said softly. Panic surged up my throat like vomit and I tried to move my hands, my legs, my body, anything. She held my head firmly but gently, hushing me the way a mother would an upset child.
‘I’ll tell you who’s behind this,’ I said. ‘I remember now, I can tell you everything, where to find them, honestly I can.’
She stared at me, seeing right through my lies. Her other hand appeared, holding a syringe gun, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
‘We appreciate everything you’ve done, we really do,’ she said. ‘When this is over, when we win this thing, the world will honour you, it will know your name. You’ll be a hero. But for now, we really don’t have a choice. I’m so sorry.’
‘Wait!’ I shouted, then the gun was against my throat. There was a soft hiss and a sharp pain, and once again I was falling into that ocean of darkness, velvet waves washing over me, pulling me under. ‘Please, don’t …’
‘You’re going to a good place,’ she said, her words like rancid candy. I realised that hers was the last voice I would ever hear, the last face I would ever see, and for reasons I couldn’t explain that seemed a million times worse than dying in Furnace with the warden watching over me. ‘A place for brave boys, boys like you who have saved us all.’
I fought it, but her hand – that thumb still stroking back and forth, back and forth – pushed me under the waters of unconsciousness, holding me there until my vision began to fade, until I felt I couldn’t breathe.
‘We all love you, Alex,’ words spoken from the other side of time. ‘Now there will be no more nightmares, no more pain. And I need you to understand something, something very important.’ She smiled, but there was genuine sadness in her eyes. ‘I need you to understand that you helped us win this war. I need you to understand that you won’t have died for nothing.’
She lifted her hand but I could still feel the weight of her fingers there as she spoke one final, terrifying word:
‘Goodnight.’
My body gave way to the tranquilliser straight away, but my mind fought it for as long as it could.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of images and memories thundered through my head, a stampede that was so jumbled and so fast I could barely make any sense of it. It was as if my brain knew that death was waiting for me, that it wanted one last chance to help me remember my life before the darkness came to claim me – the same way a candle will often flare up in a final gasp before guttering out completely.
I saw the boy I once was, on the field at school kicking a football, not a single worry in his head; saw him again, stealing twenty quid from a kid’s wallet, a kid called Daniel Richards. This time I screamed for him not to do it, but memories aren’t like life, you’ve already made your choices, they’re set in stone. There is absolutely nothing on earth you can do to change them.
More visions: all the times I broke the law, all the times I hurt people, dozens of them, each one like a slap in the face, until there I was in the elevator travelling down to Furnace Penitentiary. That was the day the boy called Alex Sawyer truly died.
My senses must still have been alert, because even buried beneath those memories I was aware of movement, the rattle of my chair as I was wheeled somewhere. I could hear voices, too, Panettierre speaking with others. I couldn’t follow what they were saying, but I could make out the odd scrap – spinal fluid … cell count … start with his heart. And was that laughter which echoed around me?
The flood of memories pushed the sound away, sluicing through my head with so much force I thought my mind would break. My life inside the prison, every day seemingly played out in full – the beatings, the despair, the terror. But it wasn’t all bad. I saw Donovan, my old cellmate, his smile burning through the terror like sunrise. Zee too, the three of us inside our cell giggling like madmen.
It vanished as quickly as it appeared, swamped by everything else that had happened since: blowing up the floor of the chipping room, thrown inside solitary, meeting Simon, trying to scale the steeple and then the incinerator, the operations to turn me into a blacksuit, the warden’s soulless smile, taking revenge on the people who had left me to die in the orchard …
Even in my unconscious state, so close to death, I knew that wasn’t quite right. Surely that wasn’t one of my memories … And yet I could see it as clearly as if it was happening to me right now. I ran through the trees, faster than the animals that fought to get out of my way, faster even than the crows that soared overhead. I tore over fields, through rivers, crops wilting in my shadow, the ground splitting, the earth vomiting out the remains of dead things, a trail of rot and decay in my wake.
Then I was entering a village, the houses little more than wooden huts, smoke rising from crude chimneys. There were animals here, cows and pigs, all of which tried to tear loose from their ropes, white-eyed with terror, when they saw me coming. The people, too, ran from me as if their nightmares had come to life. And they were right. I was a nightmare made flesh. I pounced amongst them like a fox amongst chickens, ripping, rending, biting, punching, breaking, feasting until the air was heavy with scarlet mist and not a single man, woman or child remained alive.
In my memory I studied my reflection in a puddle of steaming blood, trying to remember if that was my face, if this had been real, if it had been part of my life. The boy there was my age, he had been accused of a crime he didn’t commit, sentenced to death. And now he was full of rage and full of nectar. Yes, that was my story, wasn’t it? That was me. It had to be.
Past the visions I felt myself lifted onto a bed, straps tightening around my arms, legs and chest. There was the sting of another needle and for an instant my heart lifted, expecting the rush of nectar. But the shot just pulled me closer to death, dragging me deeper into the void. There were more voices, sounding urgent, but I wasn’t sure if they were from real life or my dream.
Even the rush of memories was fading now, the images losing their colour and their brightness. I fought to keep hold of them, trying to focus on one – any one – because I realised it would be my last.
It took me a while to identify it: back inside Furnace, Donovan in front of me, dead, and a pillow in my hands. No, wait, I was crouched in the village, bodies cooling all around me, cradling the corpse of my brother József. The two memories flicked back and forth, merging, blending, weaving together into a scene that I had never witnessed before yet which felt so utterly familiar.
Somewhere close by I heard the whine of an electric saw, then the words Crack him open. There were protests, shouts maybe, something else going on, but it didn’t make any difference to me. I buried myself in the memory, or the illusion, whatever it was. I tried to sink deep inside it, as if by doing so I could fall right out of this life into that one.
The person who was Donovan, and yet who was also my brother, opened his eyes. Then he spoke to me.
Hold on, he said. Just hold on for a little while longer.
‘I can’t,’ I said, or didn’t say.
Try.
It was no good. I felt something running down my chest, the sensation like ice cubes on my skin. And this last memory began to strobe on and off, fragmenting a little each time, drifting apart.
Please, said the boy, no longer visible in the maelstrom. Just hold on.
But it was all too much. I inhaled, the air thick with the scent of my own blood. And it was with relief rather than sadness that I finally let myself die.
Death
It was just as I expected it to be, only somehow different. I could feel my brain shutting down, turning off the various pieces of my mind the way a pilot flicks switches in a plane after landing. First to go were my senses, what little was left of them. The memories were next, every last one, as if somebody was holding a giant eraser to my past, rubbing it into dust, stripping away everything that had ever made me who I was. Eventually, all that remained was a single thought – a billion actions and dreams and emotions all leading up to this final cluster of unspoken words:
It doesn’t hurt.
Then death was there. More than anything else it felt as though I was on a beach at night, a vast black tidal wave blasting towards me, unseen and unheard, but felt in every single fibre of my being. It seemed to make the whole universe groan as it towered overhead, so powerful it could shake the stars from the sky.