Fugitives by Alexander Gordon Smith

Author:Alexander Gordon Smith [Smith, Alexander Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.