Execution (Escape from Furnace, #5)

by Alexander Gordon Smith

That’s what I find hardest to believe about all this—not the truth about Furnace, or the monsters spawned inside the prison, but that Alex’s life was destroyed because he was so desperate to get a new pair of sneakers.

Warden Cross, a man as cruel and as dangerous as the devil himself, a man whose eyes were so full of madness, of hatred, of rancid glee, that meeting them was like watching yourself die a million times over.

I killed the warden—fed him to his own ghastly creations—but in doing so I became something worse. Because that’s what Furnace wanted too—the warden had failed him, and he needed a new general. He wanted me to become his right-hand man. Warden Cross may have lost, but Alfred Furnace had won.

“I refused to forget my name,” I said. And there was no other way of explaining it.

“Tell me what to do,” I said. “I can help.” It is too late, Furnace replied.

“It’s no wonder we’re getting hammered out there. An army filled with this stuff could win any war, full stop.” She paused, lost somewhere in her own imagination, and the way her eyes lit up made my skin crawl. It was a while before she remembered I was there.

It was just too much—the real world and the dream world opposite corners of the same hell. And I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet. I couldn’t, because I knew that he was there. The stranger. Maybe if I couldn’t see him then he wouldn’t be able to see me.

He stood right in front of the boy, his body nothing more than a silhouette, a pit that sucked in the sickly light of the orchard and returned only cold waves of darkness. It was as if the view before me was a photograph, and the shape of the man had been burned out of it—he wasn’t human, he was the absence of humanity.

The stranger didn’t reply. Instead, he reached down toward the pool of blood that had formed beneath Furnace. He didn’t bend; it was as if his arm extended, stretched out like licorice. One finger uncurled from his loose fist, the nail as long as my palm, and he used it to scoop up a nugget of crimson soil. The arm swept back up in a lazy arc, contracting to its former length. A crack opened up in his head and he popped the nugget into it, his entire body shivering with perverse delight.

And then the stranger spoke. Or, rather, communicated, the outline of his face-that-wasn’t-a-face unfolding and refolding like an origami mask. There were no words, but there was meaning.

It pulsed out of him in waves, making the trees and the wind whisper, making the ground rumble and the air above us thunder—the whole orchard becoming a voice that shifted in...

The stranger’s hand dropped away from me. He stepped toward Furnace, cradling the boy’s head against his chest almost tenderly. DO YOU ACCEPT MY GIFT, ALFRED? Furnace’s head lolled against the stranger’s body. He was almost gone. Another minute maybe and death would claim him. I was amazed that he had lasted as long as he had, his body sliced open by his own mother’s blade. You killed my brother, Furnace whispered. I’ll kill you for that. THE ONLY WAY TO KILL ME IS TO ACCEPT MY OFFER. Furnace lifted his head as best he could, his eyes glinting at the thought of retribution. The stranger continued to stroke his hair with his branchlike fingers, the same cooing purr vibrating from his throat.

“Seriously? Hungary?” “No thanks, I’ve just eaten,” Zee replied, that contagious smile back on his face, seeming to make the room twice as big.

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 Donovan, my old cellmate, his smile burning through the terror like sunrise.

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.

And it was with relief rather than sadness that I finally let myself die.

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 toward me, unseen and unheard, but felt in every single fiber 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. It fell, slamming down, pulling me into its churning heart. A moment of terror, followed by an eternity of peace.

This I didn’t have an answer for. What if Simon was right? What if Zee was the key to discovering some kind of antidote to the nectar? What if killing him meant curing every other kid in the world? Would I seriously sacrifice the future of humankind just to save one kid—a kid I hadn’t even known for that long, when it came down to it? Would I trade a billion lives for one? The answer was as inevitable as it was illogical: yes, of course I would. “Yes, but it’s Zee,” I said.

Somebody like Panettierre didn’t deserve to survive this. She was a killer, worse than the rest of them; she was a monster, a Warden Cross in the making. In her head she probably thought she was saving the world, in her heart she wanted power, she wanted the nectar.

Zee walked to her side, slotted his hand into hers and squeezed. She didn’t let go. Another pang of jealousy twinged inside my chest and I thought about how different things might have been if Zee had been the one to change and I was still normal.

I mean, you give more of yourself to laughter than you do to anything, I think.

“I don’t think anyone’s home,” said Zee. I waited for the relief, but instead it was sadness that gripped me. I guess some part of me had hoped they’d still be here, my mom and dad, even though they wouldn’t recognize me now, even though they’d see me as a monster. I just wanted to bury my head in my mother’s chest the way I always did when I hurt myself, feel my dad’s arms around my shoulders. Between them, they had once been able to make everything bad go away. But that had been a long, long time ago.

“You kidding?” replied Zee. “There are thousands. Most are too small to live on, but there are plenty like this one. I saw it on a documentary.” He seemed to disappear into himself for a moment, then his face brightened like he’d just had the best idea ever. “Hey, you think they’ll ever make a documentary about us?” We laughed, quietly. I think we all knew that this one would be our last.

My footsteps rang hollow as I ran down the steps, the echoes seeming to last for far longer than they had any right to—as if the house had been quiet for so many years it didn’t quite know how to handle noise.

Alex, said Furnace, and his words ended the chaos, rooting me back inside the room. His voice was the sound of continents shifting, and yet within it I could also hear the husky, gentle tones of an old man and the higher pitch of a boy, each speaking the same words and yet ever so slightly out of sync. There is no reason to fear me.

I saw the blood that pumped through Furnace, the pure, undiluted power from which nectar had been distilled, and the truth was that I wanted it more than anything else in my life.

Unlike then, though, I was about to be given something far better, something that would turn me into a being of unthinkable power. A being? Furnace said, once again reading my thoughts. You will become nothing less than a god.

It is you because you remembered, he said. Then, with an almighty crack, his head crumbled into itself, his face breaking into a hundred pieces, drifting to the stone like snow and ash. And with his final words I saw the rest of his story, his memories now mine, flooding into me with the last few drops of blood.

Think about what happened to Donovan.” I saw myself in the infirmary, holding a pillow over the face of the thing that had once been Donovan, putting him out of his misery before he could become another of the warden’s soulless guards. I felt a pressure in my chest, one that rose into my throat and sat there like an iron ball.

It was the same sensation I’d had back in the hospital, on the operating table, when I had died. Only this time I wasn’t alone. Of course I wasn’t. How could I be? There were two of us in this body now, me and something ageless, something infinitely wicked, something that never had been, and never could be, human.

He pushed himself from the trees, his face a nightmare collection of indiscernible parts that folded and unfolded into infinity.

This thing, whatever he was, was something that never should have existed, something left over from the darkest moments of creation. He was the opposite of all that was good, of all that was life.

“You’re a prisoner,” I spat. “Inside my head. I’ll never let you out.”

I turned my focus to Furnace’s children—my children. Their minds boiled, ravaged beyond repair, each thought screamed kill, over and over again, a ceaseless command that came from their very blood, that would not let them rest. And yet beneath their fury, in a part of their minds buried so deep that even they no longer knew it existed, I could see the children they had once been, before Furnace had gotten to them, before they had been turned. Those kids had been drowned beneath a lake of nectar, too far gone now to remember their names, to remember their old lives, and yet somehow still holding on. They all called for the same thing. They all called for peace.

“I’m not leaving you,” Zee said, firmer this time. And I could tell he meant every word of it. “You either let me cut you down, and you take your chances, or I’m moving in right here.” “Make that two of us,” said Lucy. “Yeah, we’ll put some paintings up, get a nice sofa or something, there’s room for a bed.” “Two beds,” she added, raising a stern eyebrow. Zee blushed. “Two beds,” he said. “Three beds, really, when Simon turns up again. Either way, make your choice. We stay together, or we leave together, it’s up to you.”

No, it was unraveling. Her jaw sagged, the bones beneath the skin seeming to bend as though they were rubber, her teeth dropping out, clattering to the floor like beads. Something was bubbling through her cheek, as if she had acid in her veins, her flesh fizzing as it fell away. Dark patches were appearing beneath her uniform, the blood seeping through ragged holes in her stomach, in her arms and legs. Her throat had begun to dissolve, her shriek dying out into a wet, gargled moan.

An eternity listening to Zee prattling? I think I’d rather have woken up in hell.

alex says this but zee was like his only reason for living. remember that

“You remember that first day?” Zee asked, his eyes still closed. “The day we arrived in Furnace, in the prison.” “Yeah, of course,” I said, picturing the bus ride, the elevator doors opening onto a nightmare. “Feels like a billion years ago.” He opened one eye in time to see me nodding. “I’m glad I was there,” he said, his words almost unintelligible now. “Seriously?” I asked. “I’m glad I was there. With you.” And then he was gone, snoring gently, his head lolling against Lucy’s.

So maybe I am just a little bit hero. I guess a little bit hero is enough. A little bit hero is all anyone really needs to be.

I was never perfect, I was a hell of a long way from perfect, but it feels good to be me again. I think I can be happy with me now.