‘Do it,’ he whispered, and I watched in horror as the creature opened its mouth and sank its blunt teeth into the flesh of the warden’s throat. The man flinched, panicking for the briefest moment before the nectar flooded into the wound, and then he was laughing, howling as he held the berserker’s head in place. Seconds later he pushed it away, the creature’s jaws slipping free with the sucking grunt of a kitchen plunger.
‘I am ready to take my place in the new kingdom,’ the warden shouted, speaking not to me but to the room. Bubbles of nectar popped from his lips with each word.
He clamped a hand to the wound, the skin already hardening there. Then he stabbed the knife into the side of the berserker – right in the fleshy socket of its armpit, ruby-flecked nectar cascading onto the floor. The berserker raised its head and bayed at the ceiling, but it didn’t move, it didn’t try to escape. It stood there as patiently as a mother feeding her cubs, the warden’s face buried beneath its arm as he furiously gulped down the poison.
He was right. Nobody in the world had consumed more of Furnace’s poison than him. The new nectar would hit him hard, like an evolutionary sledgehammer, and his body was ready for it.
I charged towards him, knowing I had to get him away from the berserker before he began to change. But when he tore his face away from the wound, his mouth hanging open too wide and black veins bulging beneath his skin, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.
It was already too late.
Vendetta
I threw myself at the warden, knowing that if I was quick then I could kill him while he was still changing, before he reached his full strength. The blade of my hand glinted in the crimson light as though it was already covered with blood, the strands of nectar flattened against my skin as I prepared to thrust the living weapon into the warden’s chest.
The berserker was too quick. It saw me coming, using one hand to shove the warden out of the way and the other to grab my arm. It may have been half-drained of the poison that fuelled it, but it was still freakishly strong, gripping me so hard I thought my bones were going to snap. It studied me with those childlike eyes, cocking its head the way a five-year-old might before crushing a bug. Then it swung its body round, ripping me off the floor and sending me rolling across the room.
I dug my blade into the floor, grinding to a halt in time to see the berserker bounding towards me. I launched myself at the oncoming freak, meeting it head-on. Something cracked, although I wasn’t sure if it was inside it or me. Its momentum was greater, and it shunted me back, crushing me against the wall of the elevator. One fist wrapped itself round my throat, the other firing at my head. I only just managed to weave out of the way, the hooked claw ploughing right through plaster and concrete and denting the metal casing of the elevator beyond.
I lashed out with my mutated arm, aiming for the wound in its side. It saw what I was doing, letting go of me and batting my arm away hard enough to send me skittering over the floor into one of the trees. No sooner had I recovered my balance than it was on me again, spirals of black saliva trailing from its open mouth as it cannoned in for the kill.
The nectar inside me reacted, its cold intelligence steering my hands to the tree beside me and snapping off one of the man-sized branches. I don’t know how much that slab of stone weighed and yet I swung it as easily as if it had been made of polystyrene, aiming at the berserker. The stone bat slammed into the creature’s face, exploding into rubble and sending it somersaulting back the way it had come, flipping end over end half a dozen times before rolling to a halt.
It groaned feebly, gripping its head with one bony hand, its other arm broken and limp beneath it. It attempted to get up, its body racked with tremors, but it never got the chance. In a heartbeat I was across the room, and with a cry of rage I thrust my mutated hand into the hole in its side.
It slid in like a knife through cooked chicken, buried to my elbow. I could feel the nectar at work in there, beating against my fingers as it rushed to patch up the berserker’s ruptured organs, the torn muscle. Then those strands of flesh on my wrist began to spin, ever faster, turning like the blades inside a blender, until all that was left inside that creature’s chest was soup.
Behind me, something began to clap. Big, heavy slaps that sounded more like pistol shots.
I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to see what was waiting for me there. But I didn’t have a choice. I got to my feet, shaking snaking ribbons of entrails from my arm, and turned to face the warden.
I don’t really know what I’d been expecting. I thought he might have grown, his flesh ballooning out grotesquely like a berserker’s, unrecognisable. But he didn’t seem to have changed much at all.
Or had he? I was finding it difficult to focus on him, as though his body was surrounded by a dense cloud of fog. No, it was more as if light couldn’t grip him properly, like it just slipped off, leaving a distorted, shifting mosaic of darkness, almost as if I was viewing him through patterned glass. I squinted, seeing the same suit, the same face, only they were different. His limbs seemed too long, his body strangely distended, like an evening shadow. My sense of perspective was shot – it was impossible to tell whether he was the same size and close, or much taller and further away.
Pain fireballed in the middle of my head, white noise that could have been the warden’s laughter. And suddenly he was right there in front of me, towering over me, his entire body flickering like he was being projected onto thin air. I could see the nectar pulsing beneath his skin, so much of it in his veins that it seemed as if he was crawling with flies, his entire body alive with them.
I thrust my bladed hand towards the warden’s chest but his body seemed to blink out of the way. He was still laughing, that endless hiss. From his pocket of shimmering shadow I made out two eyes, black pennies that bored into me with such malevolent glee that it took my breath away.
‘I pity you, boy,’ the warden said, each syllable a hammer blow. ‘You could have stood with us, helped usher in the Fatherland.’ Once again his shifting form seemed to balloon into the space before my eyes, and once again my clumsy strike swept through thin air. A knife-edge of fear cut through the nectar, carried on the warden’s words. ‘But now, after everything, you will die.’
I didn’t see him move, and yet something crunched into my ribs and the world came apart. I soared, splintering a canopy of stone branches before hitting the wall of the elevator hard enough to crack it. I picked myself up from the floor, shaking off the plaster dust and preparing to retaliate. But the warden had vanished.
‘Do you see?’ his voice seemed to come from thin air, impossible to pinpoint. ‘Do you see now that I can keep my house in order?’
I swung round, my breath stuck in my throat, my heart pounding so hard it seemed as though the entire room was reverberating with its pulse. I couldn’t see the warden anywhere.
‘Do you see?’ he repeated. I looked frantically to my side, trying to make sense of the shadows behind the trees. Had that been him? That shimmer of darkness?
‘Do you see?’ and this time the words were a whisper fed right into my ear. I turned too late, saw his grinning face so close it was almost pressed against my own, his breath a putrid cloth held over my mouth. Before I could react he had struck me again, blasting me across the room as though I’d been fired from a cannon. I rolled head first through another stone tree, leaving a trail of dust and debris, and this time, even through the roar of the nectar, there was pain.
I struggled up, spinning wildly, hoping my blade would catch him. But once again he seemed to have spirited into nothing. I willed the nectar to keep me strong, yet it seemed to be waning, as if even it was afraid of what the warden had become. I growled, more from fear than from anger, then started to run – if I could get to the stairs then at least he’d have nowhere to hide.
‘I don’t think so.’ The warden flashed up before me, his sick smile seeming to hang like the yellow crescent of the moon. I felt a hand arou
nd my neck, lifting me off the floor, carrying me backwards. I flailed against it but with no air in my lungs my strikes were pathetic, those of a child. ‘There is no running,’ the warden went on, spitting the words at me. His strides grew faster and faster, my body swinging from his fist like a rag doll. ‘Not any more. Not for you.’
I sensed the window behind me, instinct forcing me to tuck my head against my chest as best I could with the warden’s hand there. He punched me right through it, glass detonating against my back, and suddenly I was suspended fifty-one storeys above the ground, only his grip keeping me from spilling to the distant streets. Even though the wind howled in my ears I could still hear his laughter, relentless, unending. I tried to reach the wall with my feet but there was nothing to grip, tried to snatch in a breath but my windpipe was crushed. My brain fired off black sparks that scarred my vision, my whole body screaming.
The warden’s face was framed in the broken glass of the window, still human and yet somehow not. His mouth was too large, his eyes as big as fifty-pence pieces, and the leathery flesh of his face seemed to be drooping, as if he was finally shedding the mask he had worn for so long. I saw my hands – the one that was my own and the obsidian blade, slapping powerlessly at the arm that held me. The warden just stared at me, wearing his nightmare smile, the one that had terrified me so much back in the prison only now a million times worse.
I wondered how I ever thought I could have beaten him.
But you can beat him. The words cut through the wind, cut through the dry hiss of the warden’s chuckles, so clear that I thought it had come from me. You must.
The warden’s fingers squeezed ever tighter, compressing my throat. The vision in one of my eyes flickered like a broken television before snapping off completely.
There was a ringing sound, like a machine whose gears have been jammed, so loud that it seemed to be coming from everywhere around me. Only I knew it was inside my head. It was the sound of me dying.
‘To think, you actually believed you were stronger than me,’ the warden said. ‘But you’re just a boy. You were always just a boy.’
You’re more than that, came the voice. My voice? One last-ditch attempt by my brain to keep me alive? Look at you. Look at what you have become. At what you are still becoming. You are much more than the child you once were.
The hallucination I’d seen in the funeral parlour flashed before my eyes, my body the way it had been before the wheezers took their knives to me – weak, pathetic. I was more than that, so much more.
‘Any last words?’ the warden asked. ‘Dr Furnace is watching, you know. He’s listening. Do you have anything to say for yourself?’
Even if there had been words there was no air to fuel them. And yet somewhere inside my mind that voice spoke again.
Tell him, it said, a whisper as loud as a bomb. Tell him his time is over.
I opened my mouth, spitting blood onto the warden’s sleeve, my lungs on fire. I stopped trying to fight him, letting my arms hang loosely by my sides. His grin seemed to widen even further, as though it had stretched right off the edges of his face.
‘You …’ I mouthed, the words carrying no sound. The warden cocked his head and I felt his grip relaxing, allowing a sliver of air into my lungs to fuel my final words – the warden’s one last gift to me. ‘Your time …’ I hissed, a lurching wheeze as I fought to finish, ‘is over.’
His lips tightened, locking the lunatic smile away, but still those eyes burned.
‘Who told you to say that?’ he demanded. I didn’t answer, even though I knew. That voice in my head was his. It was Alfred Furnace’s. And I saw understanding blossom in the warden’s expression even as it spoke again.
Now kill him.
The warden released his grip, my stomach lurching as gravity took me. I punched out, my bladed hand sliding into the warden’s shoulder. I could feel those strands of nectar splay out like the prongs of a grappling hook, locking the limb in his flesh and bone, halting my descent. For a second I thought we were both going to fall, then the warden braced himself against the windowsill, his face warped from the effort of rooting us in place.
‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t do this to me!’
He reached out, punching me, but my hand was stuck fast. With a cry of rage he grabbed my head and pulled me back into the tower. The nectar responded, the strands flattening and allowing me to wrench my blade free. I thrust it forward again, feeling it burrow into the warden’s stomach with a sound like scissors cutting meat. In a heartbeat I had stabbed him twice more, a river of red-flecked nectar spilling from each wound. His body was growing weaker, slower, as its life force drained away, no longer shimmering but becoming solid. It was becoming more human.
‘I won’t let you,’ he said, the words gargled. I felt the pressure on my head grow, crushing it, forcing me to the floor. He slammed his body on top of me, a coil of guts hanging down from the wounds in his stomach, pulsing black. Then he was hitting me, again and again, his strikes impossibly fast, impossibly strong, pummelling me into the wood, all the while screaming those same words: ‘I won’t let you! I won’t let you!’
He threw himself off me for long enough to rip a stone branch from one of the trees. Before I could find the strength to get up he was towering over me, holding it above his head like a spear. He didn’t pause to speak, just thrust it into my chest. I felt ribs snap, organs shunted to the side by the shaft of stone before it pierced the floor, pinning me like a bug.
I cried out, looking down to see the nectar pouring out of me – a pool of dark, gold-flecked liquid spreading under my back – like rats deserting a sinking ship.
I thrust my hand into the warden’s arm, into his chest, into his face, but he didn’t even flinch. I thrashed even harder, knowing that it was useless, knowing that I was about to die, that the last sound I would hear was the warden’s guttural laughter.
‘Alex!’
I wondered if I had imagined the call. My brain was sparking on and off, the penthouse replaced by images of my childhood, flashing scenes from the prison, seemingly random events from my life splashed over reality as the synapses in my brain misfired. But the warden obviously heard it too, for his mangled face snapped round, those too-wide eyes blinking furiously at a figure on the other side of the room.
Simon, red-faced and sweat-drenched from climbing the stairs.
I sliced my hand up again, catching the warden just below his throat. He teetered back, hands to his neck, and with another cry of pain I gripped the stone branch and pulled. It was embedded deep in the oak boards but I had just enough strength left to tear it free, sliding it out of my chest and using it like a crutch to help me to my feet.
‘Alex, Jesus, you okay?’ Simon said, rooted to the spot, his expression one of disbelief. I didn’t blame him, the warden and I – mutated into freaks, beaten halfway into oblivion, leaking nectar everywhere – must have painted one hell of a picture.
The warden growled at Simon, the wound in his neck already sealed by a shining coat of nectar. Then he turned his attention back to me. But not before I’d seen Simon begin to run, the grenade belts around his shoulders clinking and one of the explosives gripped in his white-knuckled hand.
I started running too, both of us converging on the suited freak in the middle of the penthouse. He lashed out and I ducked under his arm, plunging my blade into his stomach once again, all the way up to my shoulder. I heard him gasp, felt his fingers on me as he fought to pull me loose. But he had bigger problems. I looked up, saw Simon clinging onto the warden’s back, his arm swinging round like a basketballer’s as he slam dunked the grenade into the man’s distended, gaping, blood-rimmed mouth.
The warden coughed, trying to spit the explosive loose. I pushed Simon away, as hard as I could, sending him sprawling over the floor. Then I pressed my good hand over the warden’s lips, holding the grenade there, praying that it would be over quickly, praying that it would take us both.
The warden ha
d time for a single, gargled roar. Then the grenade went off.
It ripped away one entire side of his face, his cheek and his eye blowing outwards in a wet explosion. I had time to notice that my left arm was missing from the elbow down as the warden staggered backwards, his hands held up to his ruined head, the remaining eyeball staring at me in disbelief.
But he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even close.
I hobbled over the floor after him. The world was fading fast, like a computer game switched off mid-scene. I was dying. There were too many injuries for even the nectar to repair. The old nectar, that was. There was only one way to finish this. There was only one way to beat him, and only one way to save myself.
The warden hit the remains of a tree and toppled over. I reached him in a flash, throwing myself onto his chest.
His mouth was a mess, but I saw it there, the nectar. It sparkled up at me from the tattered remains of his throat, pumping from the arteries that were already beginning to mend themselves, tiny crimson eyes almost willing me to consume it. I didn’t wait. I couldn’t wait. I could feel the life draining out of me, spurting from the stump of my arm, from the matching holes in the front and back of my chest. If I didn’t act then the warden would recover, and he’d finish this. It had to be now.
I leant forward, put my lips against the warden’s ruined face.
Then I began to drink.
Lost
It was like swallowing liquid fire. As though I was an engine that had been on the verge of guttering out but had suddenly been pumped full of fuel. The nectar splashed down my throat, quenching a thirst that had been raging unnoticed in every cell of my body. I didn’t think about the horror of what I was doing, the fact that I was supping blood from the severed neck of the warden – blood that he, in turn, had drawn from a berserker. I just drank, letting the nectar fill me from head to toe; drank until it felt as if my entire body was burning, as if I could have brought down this tower with a single blow; drank until my vision sparked back on, picking out every single thing in immaculate detail; drank until my lungs were screaming for air and my stomach felt as though it was about to split.