Read Furnace 3 - Death Sentence for Free Online Page B

What use was language when you faced the monsters of the world?
    I growled again, this time using every last drop of air in my lungs. It rose in pitch like a jet engine, so loud that I heard the scalpels on the tray beside me tremble against one another. It felt good, and I unleashed another, a devil’s roar which blasted from the room and chased its own echoes down the corridor. I opened my mouth for a third but my lungs were starved of air and all I could produce was a weak groan and a string of spit which trickled from my mouth.
    ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’ said a voice from the door. The warden was standing there, half in and half out of the room. He wore that same empty smile, like the painted face of a Punch doll, but I could sense the pride emanating from him. I still had no words, but he didn’t wait for a reply. ‘To feel the power growing from your pain, to feel your body become something nature never could have made.’
    He ducked out of the door and I heard him bark an order. By the time he looked back at me I could make out the slap of booted feet on rock behind him.
    ‘I can sense that hunger for strength in you, more than most. I can smell it. The world will pay for what it has done to you. Together we will make it suffer.’
    He must have noticed the gleam in my eye as my imagination gave life to his thoughts. The warden nodded at me, then stood to one side as a pair of blacksuits marched in, one wheeling a gurney. They gently unfastened the buckles that held me, lifting my body onto the wheeled stretcher. As they did so I caught a glimpse of my legs, like two tree trunks wrapped in crimson gauze. The pain still radiated from them but I relished it because it meant they were a part of me.
    ‘They’ve done a good job,’ the warden went on, gently smoothing down the bandages. ‘These will heal up in no time.’
    My arms , I tried to say, coughing up another snarl.
    ‘Patience,’ the warden said, obviously delighted. ‘The rest will come in time. Too much, too soon, and you won’t be able to cope. Your body is young enough to handle the nectar, the surgery. But your genes are only so flexible. And you don’t want to find out what happens when they’re pushed to the point of meltdown.’
    The blacksuits began to wheel me out of the room, and as I passed the warden he rested a cool, dry palm on my forehead.
    ‘Rest, and dream of darkness,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long.’
    He lifted his hand but I could still feel the coldweight of his fingers as I was pushed out of the door and down the corridor.

    I heard the infirmary long before we reached it. Something was screaming inside, not in pain but in anger. The sound was loud enough to make my ears ring as the suits pushed my gurney through the plastic slats.
    I tilted my head to get a better look, saw the curtains of one of the cubicles billow as vague shapes wrestled inside. There was another scream, then the dull thump of a fist on flesh.
    ‘Number 195 again,’ growled one of the blacksuits by my side, running over to the cubicle and disappearing inside. The other guard wheeled me across the stone floor, muttering something under his breath. It was as he was preparing to lift me from the gurney that all hell broke loose.
    Another scream blasted from behind the curtain, this one followed by a blacksuit crashing back through it. He tripped over his feet and spun through the air, a delicate double helix of dark blood spiralling from his nose. He hit the floor hard, racked with spasms that made him resemble an overturned beetle fighting to right itself.
    Swearing, my blacksuit porter dropped me back onto the gurney and raced across the room so fast that he was just a charcoal smudge against the row of white curtains. But he didn’t even have a chance to enter the cubicle before an arm of solid muscle punched its way out, catching him on the jaw and snapping his headround with a crack that could have been the earth splitting. He dropped like