Read Furnace 5 - Execution for Free Online

I glanced at my left, seeing that the nectar was still at work there. The stump of my left hand had split into three stub-like protrusions. They weren’t fingers, not recognisably anyway. They looked more like the shoots of a plant jutting from the charred flesh. Eachwas no longer than a big toe, but when I wiggled them they all moved.
    It didn’t make any sense. Had the nectar been trying to grow me a new hand? Could it do that? Why hadn’t it happened with my right arm? There were too many questions and none of them had answers. The transformation must have started when I was unconscious, before they drained the nectar from me. Maybe the nectar behaved differently when you were asleep, when you weren’t in the middle of a fight for your life.
    I tried to get a better look, but it was hopeless. I felt like the boy from my dream, Alfred Furnace, trussed up and left to bleed out. It was as though my body had been drained almost to the point of death and I was now running on fumes. The blackened, nectar-filled veins beneath my skin were nowhere to be seen, and my flesh had paled to a sickly grey colour. There was only a trickle of blood left inside me, just enough to keep my heart pumping. Every beat of my pulse felt like it might be the last.
    I turned my head, trying to make sense of the room I was in. All around me was chaos. Rows of tables like the one I was on extended in every direction. There must have been a hundred or more. Half were occupied, mostly by rats dressed in the tattered remains of their prison overalls. There was nothing left in them of the children they had once been – before they had been contaminated with Furnace’s new nectar. They thrashed against their restraints, their blackshot eyes full of hatred, hunger, so hungry for blood that their teeth gnawed attheir own lips and tongues, pools of poison spilling beneath them.
    I heard a guttural bark and swung my head round to look at the far side of the room. Chained to the wall was a berserker. It stood head and shoulders over the soldiers around it, its rage radiating from it in waves of heat but its face that of a child. Like me, like all of us, it was bound tight, mummified in a cocoon of shipping wire. The only thing it had to defend itself with was its voice.
    On the table next to me was another figure, a blacksuit, although he was no longer wearing the uniform of his master. Scalpel handles rose up from his bare chest, dozens of them, like a miniature graveyard. He looked as though he was out cold, maybe dead, his unblinking silver eyes staring at the skylights above him through which sunlight dripped like honey.
    I turned my attention away from the freaks to the other people in the room, the ones who weren’t tied up. There must have been thirty of them. A few were dressed in black combat suits and armed with machine guns, but most were wearing long white coats or surgeons’ gowns. And it was these men and women, not the monsters, who filled me with fear, who made me want to rip away my restraints and run.
    Because they all had gas masks on.
    A few of the scientists were monitoring machines whose blinking displays painted the walls with light. Others walked amongst the forklift trucks lined up against one side of the room or supervised transparentvats of bubbling black fluid, burning red stars sparkling in their depths. Tubes stretched out from these vats, connected to several of the rats, pumping them dry, leaving nothing but husks. Most of the gas-masked scientists, though, moved between the tables, surgical equipment gripped in their gloved hands, their eyes bright behind misted visors.
    I sensed movement above me and I realised the room had an observation balcony, a narrow, glass-walled walkway that ran around all four sides. There were more people up there watching, wearing a mix of suits and military uniforms – not camouflage, but dress gear that bristled with medals and insignias. The phrase ‘top brass’ popped into my head from