Furnace 3 - Death Sentence by Alexander Gordon Smith

me to see a boy there. His uniform was in tatters, mud disguising the wounds that had been opened up beneath. He looked up at the stretcher and I thought he would be relieved to see it, happy at the thought of leaving this carnage.
    But when he saw the men who carried it, their wheezes audible even over the distant sound of gunfire and the patter of falling shrapnel, he began to scream.
    I’m not injured, I can fight! came his voice, and even though I didn’t understand his language I knew what he said. The men didn’t reply, simply laid the stretcher on the ground and started to peel the boy from his casket of wet earth. He fought, yet despite his claims he wastoo weak to stop them. Seconds later he was strapped in place and the men in gas masks were carrying him into the darkness. I watched them go, saw the red bands strapped to their arms, the swastikas blazoned there.
    And then they were gone, the boy’s shrieks the last thing to fade as he was carried off – taken to somewhere far worse than this landscape of madness and mud.

    I don’t remember leaving the screening room, although I must have done because the next time I woke I could feel the same pain in my arms as I had done in my legs. I looked past my shoulders to see two slabs of meat, so immense that the bloody bandages wrapped around them were threatening to split.
    I flexed my new muscles, enjoying the strength I could feel there behind the pain. These weren’t the sort of limbs used to cover your face as you curled into a ball, bleating, they were the limbs of someone who struck fear into his enemies, the arms of a survivor, a killer.
    Blinking out the haze of sleep, I swung my head round to see that I was back in my cubicle in the infirmary. Instead of a bed, however, I was lying almost upright inside a metal coffin tipped back against the wall. Welded into the dark steel were thick chains which secured my arms, legs and chest. I knew without even trying that I wouldn’t stand a chance of breaking out of them, despite my new strength.
    Something about the sarcophagus rang a distant bellin my memory, but the poison – still dripping into my veins from the IV bags beside me – was plastered over every thought and the nagging doubt soon popped like a bubble in tar. I tried thinking back to my dream, back to anything that had happened before I woke, but the same impenetrable darkness covered it all.
    ‘It isn’t taking …’ The voice was faint but close, maybe from the next compartment over. I let my head swing to the side, tried to make out the whispered words. ‘Double his feed, and if nothing happens, send him to the incinerator. I’m not willing to waste any more nectar on a lost cause.’
    There was a muffled response, but even if I had been able to make out a word it was masked by a wheeze. I heard a curtain open and close, followed by footsteps. Then the white wall in front of me peeled apart to reveal the warden’s face. For a second I caught his eye and suddenly I was back in the screening room, a sick procession of morbid images splashing across my retinas. I looked away and the world reasserted itself.
    ‘You’re awake,’ he said, pushing into the compartment. I didn’t look up to see if he was smiling or not and he made no effort to approach.‘For a while there I wasn’t sure you’d make it. They filled you with more nectar than I thought was possible. I wonder … do you know who you are?’
    I pushed into the shadows of my mind looking for a response, but the truth was the warden’s question didn’t make any sense. I was me, and I was being made better,and that’s all there ever had been. I shook my head, each movement slow and exaggerated.
    ‘What about a name?’ the warden asked. ‘Do you have one?’
    Again I fought the confusion, trying to understand what he might mean. I knew what a name was, of course, but as for mine … Surely I had never needed one, because I had just been born. And in this world, where force was