Furnace 3 - Death Sentence by Alexander Gordon Smith Read Free Book Online

a sack of bricks, the light fading fast from his silver eyes.
    I sat up, the anger in my blood extinguished by fear. From behind the curtain came another scream, but this time its pitch was lower. I heard something tear, like a wing being pulled from a cooked chicken, and a splash of red bloomed on the white material.
    Behind the trails of colour that dripped slowly towards the floor I could see the silhouette of a hulking shape stagger forward. It reached out and pulled the curtain to one side, revealing something surely too large, too misshapen to be a face. Eyes like polished coins blinked into focus, dropping to the blacksuits on the floor then slowly grinding up to look at me.
    And with that look something came flooding back. I knew it, recognised the cold, soulless touch of that gaze. In my head I saw a boy who had once terrified me far more than any wheezer, a kid who had taken lives with the casual ease of a wrestler snapping matchsticks.
    Gary Owens.
    There were shouts from outside the infirmary, the thunder of boots on stone. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature in front of me. It pushed its way through the curtain and I saw a body of knotted flesh, muscles sprouting from muscles like a gnarled oak tree, all barely held together by a coat of stitched skin. Even as I watched, something seemed to swell beneath its flesh, its arms bulging outwards as though they were being pressure fed with water.
    A cavern of darkness opened up in the centre of its face, freeing another hellish scream. Even as it ended, the creature was bounding towards me, the very rock shaking with the sheer strength of it.
    Panic took over, propelling me from the gurney before I could even think about what I was doing. I hit the ground prepared to run, but as soon as I landed the pain clawed up my new legs and into my spine. I sprawled across the cold stone, barely even finding the strength to look over my shoulder, to face my death.
    The creature swiped out at the gurney with a giant hand, sending it flying across the room. Then it was on me, fingers like hot iron around my chest. It picked me up as though I weighed nothing, drawing me close to the pit of its mouth.
    It was as if the fear purged the nectar from my blood, pure adrenaline stripping the poison from my arteries. As I hung from the creature’s fists the heavy curtain across my mind was pulled back and I remembered who I was, and where I had come from. And with that knowledge came language.
    ‘Gary,’ I wheezed, the word nothing but breath. I sucked in more air, tried again. ‘Gary, remember your name.’
    The creature paused, its platinum eyes swimming in and out of focus like a blind man learning to see. Its breath came in short, ragged bursts, each one carrying the stench of decay from inside it.
    ‘Gary,’ I repeated. ‘Gary Owens. It’s your name.’
    The hammered footsteps reached a crescendo as theblacksuits poured into the room. The creature looked up and screamed again, blasting me with so much rancid breath that I gagged. I felt its fingers tighten, felt my ribs bend under the pressure. Black spots began to appear in the corners of my vision, as in a photograph held over a match.
    The first shot caused the creature to spin back. Its arm jerked and I found myself airborne, crashing down onto my shoulder before rolling into a curtain. I looked up, trying to make sense of the cartwheeling room, saw the creature take another shotgun round to its chest. The flesh erupted, but it might as well have been stung by a bee, and with a roar of defiance it charged towards the guards.
    This time they were prepared. The nearest suit fired his weapon again, taking out the creature’s legs. Another two ran forward with a pole topped with a hoop that danced and sparked with electricity. Before the freak that had once been Gary could get back up the wire was looped around its neck, its skin rippling as the charge pulsed into its body. After a couple of attempts to rise, the