Furnace 5 - Execution (16 page)

‘Even if you have to risk your life for them?’ I asked. He spluttered, waving the thought away with his bigger arm.

‘You kidding? We’ve broken out of the world’s worst prison, killed the warden, fought his berserkers and lived, taken on the army and won. How much more dangerous can it get? Compared to all that I bet Furnace is a total pussy. Let’s find him and get this over with.’

It was impossible to resist his enthusiasm, and before he’d even finished speaking the four of us were laughing.

‘A total pussy, eh?’ I said, my chest heaving. I wondered if Furnace was listening in on the conversation the way he often seemed to, wondered what he thought of the insult. I was tempted to ask him, but I didn’t dare. Our laughter was just a rowing boat floating on a lake of fear, ready to be sucked under at any time. The thought of meeting him still terrified me, made worse by what I’d seen in my visions – the boy with the stranger’s blood. I settled for saying, ‘I hope you’re right.’

‘I’m right,’ said Simon. ‘I can feel it. He’ll cack his pants when he sees us, when he sees what you can do with his berserkers.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lucy, giggling. ‘He’d better have plenty of bog roll, wherever he is.’

And then we were howling, so much that I almost couldn’t stand upright, so much that we didn’t even
notice that the blacksuit had started the truck’s engine until he pulled it up next to us. He peered out the window, one eyebrow raised, and the sight of him staring at us like a stern parent made the laughter come even harder, until I was doubled over and thinking I’d never be able to take a breath again. I leant against the side of the truck, wheezing, the tears rolling down my cheeks, the berserkers watching us with intense curiosity, uttering bizarre, chuckle-like grunts of their own.

I don’t know how much later it was that we managed to collect ourselves, climbing inside next to the blacksuit. I pulled myself into the passenger seat, only just able to fold my mutated body into the space, my head scraping the ceiling. I reached down, flicked a lever and rolled the seat backwards, earning a yelp from Zee as he, Lucy and Simon climbed onto the rear seat.

‘Leave me some room,’ Zee squawked. ‘I’m being crushed.’

‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘You’ve only got little legs.’

But his muttering didn’t stop, and with a sigh I reached down again, fiddling with the seat until it finally jolted forward a few centimetres. It almost had us all in stitches again.

‘You comfy?’ asked the blacksuit with more than a little sarcasm.

‘I think so,’ I said. The laughter had left me utterly exhausted, more so than the fighting, more than the fear and the anger. It wasn’t surprising, really. I mean you give more of yourself to laughter than you do to anything, I think. I looked out of the windscreen, the overcast city
hanging in front of us, so dark it seemed as if somebody had drawn a blind down over the truck. ‘So where are we heading?’

The blacksuit just looked at me.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘How the hell should I know?’ he said eventually. ‘You’re in charge. You’re the one he’s been talking to. He hasn’t told you where he wants you?’

He had, I realised. He was telling me right now in the throbbing pain that sat smack bang in the middle of my forehead, that leash tugging on the flesh of my brain, pulling me forward.

‘Head south, through the city,’ I said.

‘You sure?’ the suit asked, putting the truck in gear and gunning the engine.

An image flashed up, coating reality like a layer of grime – an island, waves crashing against its cliffs – there for less than a second, then gone. And if I hadn’t been certain before I’d seen that, I definitely was afterwards.

‘I’m sure,’ I said, blinking the echoes of the image away. ‘South. The coast. That’s where Furnace is.’

And I knew something else too, something just as impossible, and yet just as undeniable.

‘He’s waiting for us.’

The city was a place of ghosts and dead things, and we drove through it in silence.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through the filthy glass of the truck’s windows. It was as if every living thing had been sucked from the streets and the buildings, leaving an empty shell, a dried husk that withered and crumbled in every direction. We headed south on the motorway, towards the heart of the city, the suburbs on either side of us deserted. Then the tower blocks began to drift out of the smog, some of them still on fire. They stood like flaming torches, their pillars of smoke like the bars of a cage which imprisoned the city.

The two berserkers kept pace with the truck, even though we were travelling at over fifty miles an hour along the short stretches of road that were clear. They thundered along on all fours – or all threes, in the case of the one with the missing arm – occasionally vanishing from sight every time they caught a whiff of something that might be alive, but always catching up with us.

We had to slow down the further in we got, the
streets littered with cars and corpses. Most of the buildings here had burned out completely, looking like blackened stumps of teeth coming loose from the concrete. I recognised some of them, or at least I thought I did. Most were just shadows of what they’d once been.

The ground was scorched, still radiating heat, so much of it that I thought we were in danger of spontaneously combusting. The smell was the worst thing, though, a mixture of burning rubber, superheated concrete and the unmistakable rancid tang of decaying meat. It clawed its way down my throat, a fist inside my guts. If I’d had anything inside me I would have puked.

The truck was big enough to shunt most of the stationary cars out of our way. When we came across something bigger I called in the berserkers, commanding them to clear a path. It was difficult, and they didn’t always seem to want to – as if the only orders they found easy to follow were the ones that involved bloodshed. But with a little patience they managed to obey, even working together to shift a massive oil tanker out of the road.

‘Might even be able to house-train them,’ said Zee as we watched the gleaming metal cylinder bounce down a hill, shedding gasoline as it thumped into the side of an office block. It detonated a few minutes after we started moving again, the shockwave shunting us along the street. I looked at the fireball in the rear-view mirror, wondering whether there was anyone else left alive to see it.

‘This can’t be real,’ said Lucy as the truck roared into
what I vaguely remembered as being the theatre district. The vast stone obelisk outside the doors of the underground station here had been sheared clean in half and now lay over the main road. We slowed to a crawl, and we were almost level with it before I realised that there were corpses propped along its length like dolls on a shelf. ‘I was here like three weeks ago. With my mum. We came to see
Grease Revival
. Feels like, I don’t know, a million years ago. Now I don’t even know if she’s …’

She put a hand to her mouth, screwing her eyes shut. She wasn’t crying, though. It looked like she’d done enough of that. There probably weren’t any tears left in any of us. Or so I thought.

‘Your mum will be okay,’ Zee said. ‘We’ll find her.’

Lucy ignored him, leaning forward and grabbing the back of the driver’s seat, spitting her words at the blacksuit as we drew level with the enormous pillar.

‘You like what you see?’ she demanded. ‘Is this what you signed up for? Look at those people. Look at them!’

He did, turning his head and studying the bodies, their unblinking eyes reminding me of crows along a telephone wire. And when he laughed, a deep grumbling chuckle the same volume and pitch as the truck’s engine, Lucy lashed out, slapping him around the head again and again, screaming at him. The truck lurched as he tried to bat her away, both Zee and Simon having to force her back into her seat.

‘Better keep her under control,’ the suit said, pushing down on the pedal and turning right at a junction. ‘Unless she wants to end up dead out there too.’

There was something in his voice, though, not quite a tremor but close – and when he turned the next corner I noticed that he was gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned the colour of old parchment.

‘Bastard,’ hissed Lucy from the back, her fists landing in her lap. ‘You’ll get yours. We won’t always need you, you know.’

It was only a few minutes later that we saw our first rat. It came out of nowhere, launching itself over a pile of rubble and hitting the side of the truck so hard that it bounced off, sprawling on its ass like an upturned bug. It didn’t seem like it could remember how to get up, and we all watched it squirm and wriggle as the blacksuit drove us on. The image of the rat’s face, though, stayed with me long after it had disappeared from sight – a girl, no older than ten, one of her pigtails still in place and her red-rimmed glasses hanging round her neck on a cord.

There were others here too, their dark eyes watching us from the gutted buildings. A couple more attacked, but they were weak and slow and the berserkers quickly put them out of their misery. I realised that they must have already been close to death, or they would have left this place long ago, following Furnace’s clarion call as he ordered them to spread out, to attack new towns and new cities.

Or maybe they hadn’t moved on because some part of them remembered being happy in the city, because deep inside them, past the overpowering strength of the nectar, they remembered who they were. Not for the
first time I thought how unbearably cruel it was that the nectar only worked on kids, that adults were spared its power. I watched the faces of Furnace’s children stiffen once the berserkers had finished with them, prayed to a god I didn’t believe in that they were going somewhere good.

By the time we reached Monument Bridge the smoke-paled sun was disappearing behind the handful of skyscrapers that still remained. The blacksuit flicked on the truck’s lights, painting the ruined city in an eerie, flickering glow, like the ghosts of the dead were rising from the steaming tarmac. He kept the same slow but steady speed as we drove over it, the thrum of the tyres changing pitch. Beneath us the river was as black as tar, but there were things moving in the water, bloated shapes bobbing up and down with the tide.

‘Stop here a minute,’ I said to the suit. He mumbled something but he obeyed, pulling the truck to a halt in the middle of the bridge. I struggled to unlock the door, my new fingers not quite up to such a delicate task, eventually managing to swing it open. I walked to the barrier and peered over the edge.

‘What is it?’ said Zee, running to my side. ‘We probably shouldn’t stop here. It’s not …’ And then he looked down and the words dried up in his throat.

The river was swollen with corpses, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, all floating slowly under the bridge like logs. The ranks of the dead were so thick that I could barely make out any of the river’s surface, their flesh and tattered clothes rippling in cruel imitation of
water. Countless gulls and other birds sat on the bodies, riding their portable feasts downstream – their screams so loud, so much like human cries, that for a terrifying moment I thought the dead were calling out to us.

‘There’s so many of them,’ Zee whispered. ‘How can this have happened?’

I shook my head. There was no answer I could give. I turned away, my shoulders slumped, but Zee grabbed my arm and pointed at something in the water.

‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Down there, look.’

I followed his finger, struggling to make out what he meant. Then I saw it, a shape pushing itself up between two corpses, a body the colour of wet bone, two spider-like arms jutting up, wrapping themselves around what had once been a woman in a red dress, lazily pulling the body beneath the water. The creature’s head was the last thing to submerge, and it seemed to gaze up at us through wide eyes blackened by nectar. Then it was gone, the bloated dead filling the space where it had been.

‘Was that a berserker?’ Zee asked, pulling his army jacket tight around his throat. ‘They’re in the water too?’

I walked back to the truck, my brain trying to simultaneously make sense of and forget what I’d just seen. Lucy and Simon were peering out the window, looking at me expectantly.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said before they could ask. ‘Forget it. Let’s move.’

I jumped back into the truck, slamming the door. The blacksuit had kept the engine idling, and when Zee
had clambered in he set off again. The headlights were bright, but the smoke muted their glare, like we were driving through fog. Then the near-invisible sun finally dipped below the horizon and night fell instantly, as if somebody had flicked a switch. I realised that none of the street lights were working. Outside the truck the berserkers howled to each other, and there were other noises too, distant shrieks and calls, creatures celebrating the darkness. The city was obviously less deserted than I’d first thought.

‘Which way now?’ the blacksuit said when we reached the end of the bridge, stopping at a set of traffic lights even though they showed no colour.

‘Keep heading south,’ I replied, thinking about the island.