Fugitives 4 by Alexander Gordon Smith

Author:Alexander Gordon Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-11-29T01:58:54+00:00

Burnt Offerings

I never thought there would be a time when I wished myself back in Furnace.

But as I knelt on the floor and watched that crowd approach, fear and desperation turning their faces into cruel masks, as I stared at the man who held me at gunpoint, knowing he would shoot me dead if I so much as moved, I found myself wishing just that.

It wasn’t that I would be safer in the prison. Of course not – these men and women were just that: men and women. They were weaker than me, slower than me.

They were nowhere near as dangerous as the rats and the berserkers that had stalked the tunnels beneath general population. They were nowhere near as wicked as the wheezers and their filthy blades. And they’d have al run screaming, or dropped dead from heart failure, if they’d so much as glimpsed the warden.

No, it was something else that made me pray for Furnace, pray to be back in my cel. Because down there, so deep that no amount of screaming would ever reach the surface, I had a memory of the world as a place where good things could happen.

Even though we were buried alive I could stil imagine life up here, people going about their business, smiling, laughing. Even though there was a smal corner of the earth that was rotting away in madness and bloodshed, life stil went on above us, it would always go on.

Now, however, nowhere was safe. There were no more smiles up here, no more laughter. That dead core was spreading outwards, infecting everything. It had only been a few hours and already these people were broken beyond repair. They’d had a glimpse of hel outside their window and their sanity had been snapped in two as easily as a dry twig. And they hadn’t seen the half of it, not yet. What would they do when they finaly set forth from this cathedral and saw the streets running red, the monsters that were treading this city into bone dust?

It suddenly stuck me how easy this would be for Alfred Furnace, if what he had said was true. Al he had to do was rock this one city to its knees and the cancer of fear would spread. The world would crumble al by itself.

‘Secure them,’ the priest was saying as he strode forward. He stepped over the kid on the floor, the boy’s face resembling a rough carving in mahogany, lumps like woody knots bleeding black sap. The man with glasses hunched over him, glancing at us with an apologetic expression. I knew that look, the one that said he was on our side but too afraid to do anything about it. I’d worn it enough times. ‘Fetch the lamps.’

Simon grunted, started walking towards the priest, but the old man with the gun lifted it towards the ceiling and fired again. I heard the bulet ricochet off the stone, scraps raining down over the pews.

The kid on the floor reacted to the shot, his eyes snapping open, bottomless pits devoid of colour.

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