Furnace 3 - Death Sentence by Alexander Gordon Smith

Author:Alexander Gordon Smith [Alexander Gordon Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571272563
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2010-04-16T07:00:00+00:00

A PLAN

When we finally managed to drag our eyes away from the bank of CCTV monitors we realised they were actually the least useful thing in the room.

‘Oh man,’ said Zee, his hushed tone one of awe. ‘Oh man oh man oh man. If the warden was here right now I think I’d kiss him.’

He walked towards the right-hand side of the room where a glass and steel cabinet held a selection of weapons that would have made a terrorist blush. Zee reached in and pulled out a shotgun, his skinny arms obviously struggling with its weight. He held it to his shoulder, swinging it wildly around the room.

‘Take it easy, kid,’ yelled Simon, ducking down and shielding his face with his mammoth arm. ‘I don’t want no pepper shot in my ass.’

‘It probably isn’t even loaded,’ Zee replied, resting the barrel of the huge gun over one arm while he prodded the various clips and clasps that ran along its length. Still eyeing him nervously, Simon walked to another cabinet next to the first and I saw him slide something long and metallic into his pocket.

I left him to it, turning my attention to the wall opposite. Set in a recess, framed in glass and wood, was a blueprint of the prison, every corridor and room laid out in a three-dimensional network of fine white lines. Even in miniature the place looked huge, the Black Fort on the surface just a speck when compared with the monstrous leviathan than lurked beneath it. The tip of the nightmare iceberg that was Furnace.

And we were right at the bottom.

‘You are here,’ I muttered to myself, running my finger down the spider web of lines until I found the room we were in. I had to crouch to see it, the warden’s quarters the size of a grain of sweetcorn almost lost in the bulk of what lay overhead. I let my finger trail back upwards, through the endless layers of gen pop, rising to the surface, to freedom.

‘Somehow I don’t think it’s gonna be that easy,’ said Simon from behind my shoulder. ‘You see any way out on there?’

I returned to my starting point, focusing hard on the blueprint. I knew that the prison’s underbelly was a warren of tunnels, wards and storerooms, but I’d had no idea how complex it truly was until now. They spilled out in every direction, seemingly at random, like the roots of a tree. But none of them led anywhere except right back where they started.

‘Those two doors were the only way out into the caves,’ I said, pointing to the place on the map where the tunnel we’d just been in ended, and another on the north side. Both doors had been scored over with a red X. ‘But even if we’d found a way through then we’d have just been stuck out there in the dark. There is no way to the surface from there, remember? The steeple was our best bet, and that failed.

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