Furnace 4 - Fugitives (15 page)

Clear Sight

As soon as the berserker had gone Zee, Simon and Lucy made their way back to the nave. Lucy was staring at me with a mix of fear and suspicion, and I noticed that the boys were doing exactly the same. I lowered myself down onto a pew, looking at my right arm to see the bulging tendons pulsing with nectar. It had swollen so much that it could have belonged to a skinned gorilla. The itch from the bite was spreading down through my chest and my stomach, even as far as my right leg, but I didn’t dare peek beneath my clothes to see what was happening.

Zee came and sat next to me, his head in his hands. It took me a moment to notice he was crying.

‘It’s never going to end, is it?’ he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. I slung my good arm over his shoulders, feeling them heave. Before I knew it I had tears of my own, Zee’s frustration and fury contagious. He lashed out at the pew in front, his bony fists not budging it. ‘It’s never going to end. Not now.’

I wanted to reassure him, calm him, but what could I say?

‘It’s gonna end pretty damn quick if we don’t get out of here,’ Simon said, nodding at the fire. The whole eastern end of the cathedral was blazing, fuelled by the draught that cut between the broken windows. A thick blanket of smoke hovered just above head height, filling the inverted bowl of the dome and dropping steadily closer. I was grateful to it as I wiped my eyes, blaming my tears on the burning air.

‘Why didn’t it kill you?’ Zee asked, looking up at me through red-rimmed eyes. ‘It didn’t even try. What that’s all about?’

‘Maybe it had a crisis of conscience,’ I replied, attempting a smile. ‘Decided it wanted to be a pacifist.’

‘Yeah, because it was real gentle with everyone else,’ Zee retorted. He looked at Lucy, who had made her way from body to body. The ones that hadn’t been savaged beyond recognition, that was. ‘Any survivors?’

‘They’re all dead,’ Lucy said, her hand resting on the throat of a woman for a second before she shook her head. ‘Jesus, they killed everybody.’ She stood, throwing an expression my way almost fierce enough to knock me dead. ‘See what they did? Your friends? They killed everybody!’

‘They didn’t kill her,’ Simon replied, nodding at the security guard who stared unblinking at the ceiling. ‘That was
your
friends.’

Lucy turned her glare on him and Zee stood up, his tears apparently forgotten as he walked between them like a referee. She looked back to me malevolently.

‘That thing treated you like you were its brother.’

‘Look at me,’ I hissed back. ‘I look more like those things every second. Soon I’m gonna look more like them than I do you. In its eyes I
am
its brother.’

‘But the rats by the Metro, they attacked you,’ said Simon.

‘They’re just animals, though,’ I replied. ‘They’re feral. They attack everything, even each other.’ I’d thought the berserkers were mindless killers as well, but they were something far worse. They possessed intelligence – not human intelligence, but they were clever enough to recognise friends from enemies. Clever enough to follow orders. ‘I think Furnace wants me alive for some reason,’ I went on. ‘Maybe he wants us all alive. I don’t know why, though.’

‘So he can kill us himself, probably,’ Simon said. And even though I knew that was far too simple an explanation, I still nodded.

‘Let’s forget it,’ Zee said, swallowing hard. ‘It’s pointless trying to work out what’s going on when none of us have a clue.’ He turned to the cathedral doors, still chained, then looked at the window, the fire now licking at its sill. The flames had also reached the first row of pews, devouring them with relish. He set off towards the northern aisle, taking Lucy’s arm as he went. ‘Come on, I think it’s time for some fresh air.’

I didn’t get up straight away. Part of me just wanted to sit there until the flames consumed me. Surely there was some rule that if you died inside a cathedral then you had to go somewhere good afterwards. It’s not like I believed in heaven or anything, but I’d seen
hell – hell was right outside this building, spreading fast – and anywhere had to be better than that. My arm throbbed, the sensation passing to my fingers, the nectar singing inside me. I was changing, again. And if my suspicions were right, if my worst fears were coming true, then it would be far better to be cremated right here than to find out what I was turning into.

But if I was really part of Furnace’s plan, maybe I could find a way to stop it. Maybe I could find a cure. Reluctantly, as I felt the heat getting closer, I pushed myself up from the pew and followed the others.

Zee walked through an archway into a small anteroom, passing through it to another spiral staircase, this one stretching upward. He set off at a pace.

‘Er, Zee,’ I asked. ‘I know I shouldn’t question your wisdom, but isn’t it a bad idea to go
up
when you’re inside a burning building?’

‘You’re right, Alex,’ he said, and he must have been feeling better because his exhausted laugh echoed up the stairs, emboldened by the stone. ‘You shouldn’t question my wisdom.’

We seemed to go round and round forever, my head growing dizzy with both the rotation and the effort. At one point we passed another arch, which led off into smoke-filled shadows, but Zee ignored it, clomping relentlessly upwards. I don’t know how much later it was that sunlight began to filter into the staircase, and after three more upward loops we stepped out onto a sweeping balcony.

‘Whoa,’ I said, my head still spinning, my eyes screwed almost shut against the blinding light. I made out the cathedral’s dome to my right, rising endlessly, and to my left was a stone balustrade that ran the length of the balcony. It was as tall as I was, but windows had been punched into it at regular intervals, and through them, bathed in gold, was the city. I blinked until I was used to the glare, then walked to the nearest one.

‘Come on,’ Zee said, bracing his hands on top of the stonework and struggling up. ‘There will be emergency access ladders on the roof. View’s better from up here as well.’

‘How do you know?’ Lucy asked, looking reluctant but eventually accepting Zee’s hand.

‘You telling me you never came here with school?’ he asked as he hauled her onto the ledge. ‘We got in so much trouble for climbing up here, detention for a week. But it was worth it.’

I looked at Simon and we shrugged at each other, effortlessly vaulting up to join him. It was solid stone, and wide at the top, which was a relief. But still the sheer drop onto the cathedral roof far below made my stomach clench and my ears ring. I gripped the stone hard, trying not to grimace. Simon had turned a strange colour and I noticed that his eyes were closed.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘Not used to heights,’ he grunted.

I wasn’t either. It had been so long since I’d been above ground at all that being all the way up here didn’t seem real. To see the city opened out before me,
a tapestry of streets and buildings whose every shade was given life by the sun, made me smile so hard my face hurt. I could see for miles, all the way over to the distant hills that bordered the suburbs. The sensation of being so high – almost as far above the ground as we had once been below it – made my heart sing. It was so powerful that it took me a while to make sense of what I saw.

At first I thought I was hallucinating again, Alfred Furnace filling my head with terrifying visions. But this was no nectar-inspired nightmare.

The golden glow came not from the sun but from a thousand fires. The entire city was burning.

‘No way,’ said Zee. ‘This is insane.’

Pillars of smoke rose from every direction, making the city seem like another cathedral whose vast roof was supported by blackened columns. The worst fire was over by the river, where an entire block of office buildings was being consumed. There was no sign of fire engines there, the flames blazing unchecked, spreading fast as they caught the wind. Another inferno was closer, near what I thought was the city library. Luckily the smoke from this one fanned out like a charred canopy, blocking the view into the centre, concealing the skyscrapers there.

‘Why is this happening?’ asked Lucy, her face a mask of calm but her words trembling. ‘Why isn’t the government doing something?’

It looked like the authorities were trying their hardest to contain the situation. At least five or six helicopters could be seen hovering over the streets, military birds
bristling with guns and radio equipment. And from up here I could make out the rattle of trucks and orders bellowed from below. There was gunfire, too, plenty of it, each burst shattering the unreal sense of stillness and distance that we felt up here, perched on the roof of the world.

But there was only so much they could do. Guns were useless against a beast of hardened skin and rippling muscle whose veins flowed with nectar. You could shoot a berserker a hundred times and the chances are it would get back up and keep on coming.

And the rats, these new ones, there could have been hundreds of them. I don’t know how many inmates had been caught, turned, but from what we’d seen already the streets were crawling with freaks that had once been kids.

‘We should just be thankful it’s a Sunday,’ Zee said. ‘And that it’s so early. Imagine if this was a shopping day, at lunchtime, the city would be rammed.’

‘Imagine if it was a school day,’ Lucy added, making us all shiver.

A burst of gunfire rose up from close by, and we craned out over the main body of the cathedral below to see a pack of soldiers advancing across the plaza, taking cover behind an armoured truck. They were all firing across the street that ran parallel to us, at a shape in white overalls that threw itself through a shop window and vanished. The face of the shop exploded into dust as the bullets impacted, and we watched as the soldiers surrounded the building, lobbing in a flash-bang before clambering through the window in pursuit.

‘We should get down there,’ Lucy said. ‘They’ll be able to take us to safety, right?’

Wrong. Seconds later one of the soldiers flew back through the window, rolling across the street spouting a vivid helix of blood. Another followed, tripping onto the pavement and firing wildly into the shop. He ripped a grenade from his belt and lobbed it inside, seeming to forget about the rest of his unit. There was a muffled pop which blew out the remaining windows. We watched, half in amazement, half in horror, as the rat launched itself through the dust with a cat-like pounce, landing on the soldier and going to work with untamed ferocity.

‘Jesus,’ said Zee.

The armoured truck accelerated, the rat too busy with its meal to even notice. Its bumper connected with the creature at what must have been forty miles an hour, carrying it over the plaza and disappearing out of sight behind the cathedral roof below. We all heard the crash, though, and after that nothing but the roar of flames.

‘We have to get out of the city,’ Zee went on. He squinted into the horizon and I followed his line of sight. It took me a while to get my bearings, but when I did I grew so faint and dizzy I almost tumbled right off that ledge.

In the distance, over the river, past a cluster of high-rise flats – one of which was also smoking – past the park whose serpentine lake sparkled in the morning light, out towards the hills, was home. I couldn’t see much from here, of course, the houses a grey smudge,
like the froth of a wave next to the immense ocean of the city. But it was there, somewhere, the house I’d grown up in, the house where my parents lived. If I’d had a telescope and a little more time then I’d have been able to find it.

I wondered if they were there, sat on the worn-out green velvet sofa in the living room, watching the news on the tiny television Mum had won at work in a Christmas raffle. I wondered if they thought I would be trying to get home, trying to find them. And in that instant I wanted nothing more than to do just that, to get home, to sit between their feet on the dusty carpet like I’d done as a kid, my dad ruffling my hair and kicking me playfully with his slippers. They’d accused me and abandoned me like everyone else, but I could forgive them. Right now I
would
forgive them.

‘Alex?’ Zee’s voice broke through the emotion and reality flowed back in. ‘What do you think?’

‘Huh?’ I asked, not knowing what I’d missed.

‘We get down to that truck,’ Lucy repeated. ‘Make a break for Meriton, there’s a police station, a big one. My dad used to work there. It’s a mile away, maybe two, but it’s on the way out of town.’

‘And the truck will have a radio,’ Zee added. ‘We can let somebody know what’s going on. It can’t hurt to try.’

I nodded, but my mind was still elsewhere. I pictured my house, my parents, only now I watched as the plague spread, as the berserkers tore down my street, trailing rats like the Pied Piper, ripping the doors open, pulling apart the people inside, feasting on the warm corpses,
spreading the nectar to the children, all the while their ranks swelling, more of the world decaying beneath their bloodied claws.

The wind gusted, dividing the pillar of smoke that rose from the library, and for a fleeting second I saw the skyscraper beyond, the black monolith whose pyramid spire seemed to beckon in the flickering heat haze. I thought of Furnace’s message, his invitation to be part of his grotesque army. The itch in my arm flared at the thought and I clutched it to my chest again, feeling the skin burn and bulge, slowly changing, becoming something else.