Furnace 5 - Execution Read Online Free Page B

Furnace Foundation, the people who set up the penitentiary, who owned the tower – owned buildings all over the place, actually. But the man? He can’t be alive, Alex. As far as we can tell, Alfred Furnace was born centuries ago.’
    ‘He’s still alive,’ I said. ‘I’ve spoken to him.’ I didn’t even try to explain how.
    ‘No, you’ve spoken to somebody who claims to be Alfred Furnace,’ Panettierre said. ‘And that’s who we’re trying to find.’
    ‘That makes two of us,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you think, you don’t know the truth. I was there, in the prison. This is what they did to me, the warden and his freaks.’ My body was covered up but I knew what it looked like – too big to be mistaken for human any more, puncture wounds all over it from my fight with the warden, and my arms two blades which were sharper than scalpels. ‘Alfred Furnace was behind it all. He was never there but he was in charge, he called the shots. It’s his army in the city, and they won’t stop. He won’t stop, not until the world surrenders itself to him.’ Fury flared, and this time when I flexed my muscles the bindings around my chest creaked. ‘But he didn’t count on me, he didn’t plan on me coming to kill him.’
    I gave up, taking a deep breath to drain away the frustration.
    ‘And I am going to kill him,’ I said, softer this time. ‘Just as soon as I find him.’
    ‘You know where to look?’ asked Panettierre. I shook my head.
    ‘Okay, it’s good to know we’re on the same side,’ she said after a pause. ‘And right now that side is the losing one. Around a third of the Home Battalion is KIA, dead, and we can’t pull in reserves quickly enough. Hell, sixty per cent of our troops are overseas. The emergency services are screwed, and it’s spreading, faster than we can keep track of. It’s already passed the county line, west and north. We’re lucky we’ve got the coast to the east otherwise it would be totally out of our hands. If we don’t find a way of stopping this … this plague, then I give the whole country days, maybe a week, before it’s overwhelmed.’
    She returned her attention to the machines, to one in particular – a large, empty bell jar connected to me with a thick, transparent plastic tube.
    ‘We need to find whoever’s responsible for this,’ she said. ‘And at the moment the person at the top of our hit list is Warden Cross. You know where he is?’
    ‘Dead,’ I said, remembering his ravaged face, one eye blinking at me as the wheezers overwhelmed him. ‘I killed him.’
    Panettierre didn’t say anything, just ran a hand over the jar.
    ‘That gives us one less lead to follow,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘Okay, then tell me about the liquid, the black blood that’s inside you, inside the creatures. What do you call it? Nectar?’
    ‘That’s what Furnace calls it,’ I said, taking it slow,trying to remember what I knew. ‘They never told us what it was, only what it does. It messes with your genes, making you stronger and bigger. And it keeps you alive when you’ve been injured; it can patch up wounds, heal broken bones. It can make you immortal, too. That’s how he’s still alive, Furnace.’ The poison in my blood seemed to know I was talking about it, my pulse quickening as it blasted through my system, an animal waiting to be unleashed. ‘But it’s more than that. It alters your mind, too. Strips away all the weakness. And most people, when it comes down to it, that’s all that’s there underneath – weakness. When that’s gone, when all the pathetic emotions are gone, all that’s left is anger, hatred. That’s what those creatures are – they’re what’s left when you take away everything human.’
    ‘But you’re different,’ Panettierre said. ‘You can talk, you know what’s happened to you. How is that?’
    I tried and failed to shrug my shoulders.
    ‘I refused to forget my name,’ I said. And there was no