E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Smith Escape from Furnace 3: Death Sentence
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27256-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-27256-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Alexander Gordon Smith is the author of the Escape from Furnace series, as well as The Inventors (shortlisted for the Wow Factor competition) and The Inventors and the City of Stolen Souls. He has also written a number of non-fiction books, as well as hundreds of articles for various magazines. He is the founder of Egg Box Publishing, an independent press that promotes talented new writers and poets. He co-owns a production company, Fear Driven Films. He lives in Norwich.
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Even though I was still blind I knew the warden was watching me. I squirmed, like an ant trying to escape a lit match, but the bed held me tight in its leather grip and his only reaction was another hateful laugh.
‘Did you dream?’ he asked, his voice at once distant and whispered in my ear. Part of me was glad that I couldn’t see. It meant I didn’t have to look at his eyes – or the place where his eyes should have been if anybody had been able to meet them. ‘Everybody dreams the first few times.’
I opened my mouth, hoping that some words would tumble out, but it was so dry that my defiance lodged in my throat.
‘Dreams of dark places,’ the warden went on. I could hear the tap of his shoes as he moved around my bed, right to left. Behind that was another sound, a heart monitor matching my own weak pulse beep for beat. I remembered the machines I’d seen by the beds in the infirmary, knew that’s where I was now, just another test subject for Furnace’s bad science. The thought should have terrified me, but the poison in my veins imprisoned my emotions the same way the straps gripped my body.
Again I tried to speak, spitting out a dry husk of a word that even I couldn’t have interpreted. But the warden seemed to know exactly what I meant.
‘Zee? Yes, he is here. And that freak who let you out of your cage. But they, like you, are about to pass from this fitful existence into something far more meaningful. Tell me.’ The bed creaked as the warden sat on the edge of the mattress. ‘Tell me what you saw when you slept.’
Already the dream had drained from my mind, leaving nothing but a residue that sat in my gut like a cannonball. I remembered a trench, bodies buried in the mud, and my own twisted reflection sucked down into the grave. I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to give the warden the satisfaction of an answer, but again he seemed to scoop the thoughts right out of my head.
‘The trench,’ he whispered, the glee in his voice like rancid honey. ‘The fallen army. Fascinating. But then I was expecting no less from you.’ The bed shifted, the rustle of the warden’s suit as he once again continued pacing. ‘That’s twice now you almost escaped. Once, that was impressive.’ For the first time since I’d been caught I heard an edge of anger in the warden’s voice and I pushed myself back into the bed to escape it. But I could sense his face right above mine, his foul breath on my skin. ‘Twice? That was just rude.’
He spoke again and I struggled for a moment to hear what he was saying until I realised it wasn’t directed at me. A wheeze rattled across the room and I felt the panic rise up even through the cloud of poison. The warden spoke a few more whispered words before his voice returned to me.
‘Of course it all seems to have worked out. I have you to thank for leading the vermin to us. We managed to cull quite a few of those rat bastards, and others have been rounded up. You’ll see them again soon. A few of my men perished, and a few more had to be … put down. But we can always make more.’ He laughed, a childish snigger that made my charred skin crawl. ‘Speaking of which, we should get started. The nectar will keep you alive for so long, but only the knife can save you.’
Another wheezed groan cut across the room, followed by one echo, then two. Against the black canvas of my blindness I pictured the creatures staggering towards me, gas masks stitched onto rotting faces, filthy needles strapped to their chests, and scalpels held out to my face. I fought against my restraints until I felt the leather cut my skin, until my muscles cramped, but I was powerless.
‘Don’t fight it,’ the warden said, his voice fading as though he was walking away. ‘It is a new birth.’
Then something cold pressed itself against my mouth, gas choked its way down my throat, and once again I tumbled into oblivion.
This time there was no trench, just a bare room. Lined up facing one wall, on their knees, were six figures. Each had his hands cuffed behind his back and his forehead pressed against the chipped bricks. I couldn’t see their faces but, this being a dream, I knew what they looked like – all boys about my age, their expressions drawn from hunger and stained with tears. They were dressed in dirty cloth overalls that could have been Furnace uniforms except there were only two numbers stencilled on the back of each. The same two numbers: 36. And beneath them, almost unrecognisable against the filth of the fabric, a symbol that sent chills down my spine even in my sleep.
Swastikas. The unmistakable insignia of the Nazis.
‘Who are you?’ I asked them, but nothing escaped my mouth. I shouted the question once more, then screamed it, but the room’s heavy silence remained undisturbed. There was no movement, either, the scene as still as a photograph – until one of the boys started to move. It began as a tremor that made his overalls ripple like water. Then his head started to shake wildly from side to side, his body soon following until he was thrashing wildly against the wall.
Within seconds another of the boys was suffering a similar fit, then a third, until every one of the kids resembled a marionette being jerked by a lunatic puppeteer. Their convulsions became so violent that their hair was torn loose, their skin started to split. Their heads smashed from side to side so quickly that I could no longer make out their faces, each a blur that painted the wall red.
The boy who had first started fitting suddenly stopped, snapping his cuffs as though they were paper. He lurched to his feet and turned, and I saw a face that was right at home here in a nightmare. His skin hung off him in strips, his jaw dislocated and drooping, and his silver eyes blazed into mine with pure, undiluted hatred.
Rats.
The other kids stopped spasming and wrenched their way free from their restraints, leaving bloody handprints on the wall as they stood. I found myself face to face with a line of vermin ready to tear me limb from limb. The fear which made me want to run was also the thing that kept me rooted to the spot, and I could do nothing but watch as they staggered towards me.
Something exploded in my ear, the noise so loud that my heart missed a beat. It came again, the blast of a shot, then again and again as bullets tore through the air and punched into the transformed boys. In a heartbeat the room was full of smoke and the kids were nothing but corpses.
A voice replaced the gunshots, a language I didn’t speak but a tone I could easily understand. I felt the sting of the hot gun barrel against my temple and closed my eyes, praying for silence once again so that I wouldn’t hear the shot that killed me.
When I woke the sensation of being executed was almost real. The front of my face burned as it had when I was lying in the incinerator, a pressure in my eyes that felt like something was trying to crawl into my head. My arms were still locked tight, and there was nothing to stop the panic spewing up from my gut – until I realised that instead of darkness I was bathed in a halo of weak light.
I snatched in a long breath, tried to clamp down on the fear. I blinked, hoping that the fuzzy glow before me would focus into something recognisable. It didn’t, remaining a featureless cloud of milky grey. I scrunched up my face, feeling something tied tight around my head, and suddenly knew what had happened.
When they took off my bandages I would have eyes of cold silver.
I wanted to cry, but the warden’s poison – what had he called it, nectar? – still lay heavy across my thoughts and stopped the emotions breaking free. Even so, the image of myself with the eyes of a blacksuit, of a rat, danced against a backdrop of smoke and shadow and it was all I could do not to scream. I’d rather be blind.
It was the first thing they did to you, I knew that much. I thought back to when I’d gone into the infirmary and found Gary lying in a bed the same way I was now, bandages strapped to his face and dark stains spreading out from his eyes. Next they would butcher my body, my face, stuffing me with muscles until I was big enough to fill one of their black suits. And by that time the nectar would have done its job, destroying my brain just as the scalpels had destroyed my body. Making me one of them.
And all I could do was lie here and dream. Nightmares when I slept, nightmares when I woke.
As if trying to distract me from my thoughts a weak groan fluttered up over the beep of my heart monitor, hanging in the air for a second before dying. Someone else repeated it, closer this time, ending in a choked sob. I opened my mouth, flexed my jaw, took as deep a breath as the pain would let me.
‘Zee?’ I whispered, a word as dry as my throat. I tried again, managed a hiss. ‘Zee?’
The only response I got was a wheezer’s song, a tuneless squeal like a broken engine. There was a shuffle of boots on stone, the clink of needles as it walked my way. I blinked again, the pain a pressure that threatened to crack my skull. Being here was even worse than being locked in the darkness of the hole. At least I knew I was alone there.
‘Zee?’ I said, distress giving strength to my cry. ‘Simon?’
‘Hush.’ The reply was so soft that I wondered if I’d imagined it. Only it came again, close enough to be from the next compartment. ‘Alex, if that’s you you’ve got to stay quiet. They’ll kill you if they hear you talking.’
‘Zee?’ I asked, quieter this...
