Free Furnace 5 - Execution by Alexander Gordon Smith

with.
    ‘Good to have you back, Alex,’ he said. ‘I was getting worried. You looked like you were about to die in your sleep.’
    ‘I was dreaming,’ I muttered, shaking my head, trying to wake up, to work out what was going on. ‘What are you doing here?’
    Zee’s smile wavered.
    ‘Is that any way to speak to your best buddy?’ heasked, and then the smile fell away completely. He glanced over his shoulder, the cell door shut, then he looked up at a camera on the wall, pointing right at us. ‘Let’s see if I can make you a bit more comfortable.’ He stood and bent over me, straightening my gown, his back to the camera. When he spoke next it was in a whisper. ‘They’re listening, so don’t say anything that they won’t – you know, won’t like.’ I started to protest but he cut me off. ‘This place is messed up, big time. It’s almost as bad as Furnace, only these guys don’t know what they’re doing. The only reason you’re alive is because you can still talk. But that won’t save you for long.’
    He sat back, his voice returning to normal.
    ‘There, that’s better. I told them that you’d listen to me, that you’d tell us how to find the people behind the invasion.’
    ‘But I don’t—’
    ‘You don’t remember, I know,’ Zee interrupted. ‘But it will come back to you, right?’ He winked at me, nodding furiously. ‘If they’re patient for a few more days then it will come back to you.’
    I took the hint, returning his nod with one of my own. Zee seemed to relax, crashing back in his chair. There was a moment of quiet, filled only by the growl of a truck’s engine from outside the window and the distant whump of helicopter blades. He flicked another look at the door, leaning in and lowering his voice again.
    ‘I told them everything, all about the prison, what was going on there. They believed me. Not that theyhad a choice. I mean, they’re losing this war, getting torn to pieces. The only thing they won’t accept is the stuff about Alfred Furnace. They think whoever built the prison is somebody else, somebody using his name.’
    I told Zee about the nightmare, the words falling from me in clumps like rotten fruit dropping from the branch, sounding even more insane than they had in my dream. Zee sat there patiently, his head cocked.
    ‘It is Furnace,’ I said when I’d finished. They say the child is father to the man, and if anyone could have spawned the monster behind the prison, the creature whose dark thoughts blossomed in my head, it was that kid.
    ‘I know,’ Zee said. ‘I heard him too, remember. The phone in the warden’s office.’ He shuddered so hard his chair rattled. ‘But there’s a problem. They’ve looked into it and the only Alfred Furnace they can find was born, like, in the eighteenth century or something. In Hungary.’
    ‘What?’ I asked, thinking of the orchard, wondering if that’s where it was. I couldn’t even picture where Hungary was on a map. ‘Seriously? Hungary?’
    ‘No thanks, I’ve just eaten,’ Zee replied, that contagious smile back on his face, seeming to make the room twice as big. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I tell you he was born over three hundred years ago and it’s the Hungary bit you don’t believe?’
    I could see what he meant, but it made perfect sense to me. I mean, if the warden had fought in the Second World War he had to have been well over a hundred, and it made sense that his boss was even older. What wasa century or two when you had nectar in your veins? I shrugged as best I could and Zee carried on.
    ‘Impostor or not, Alfred Furnace is the only lead they have. They’ve dug up loads of stuff about him – this is military intelligence we’re talking about, and not just ours, either, the whole world is joining in. There’s not much about his early life, but apparently by the turn of the century – the nineteenth, that is – he had come into a vast amount of money, set himself up as a