I knew what was coming. I clenched my fingers around the bars, praying one last time that something would happen to end this sick and twisted dream. But it was too late. It was over.
"Alex Sawyer, I hereby sentence you to life imprisonment at the Furnace Penitentiary with no possibility of parole. You will be taken from here this afternoon and incarcerated for the remainder of your days."
The resulting wave of cheers and shouts, the banging of the gavel and the roaring in my ears as the truth sank in drowned out the only thing I could think of to say.
"I didn't do it."
I DON'T REMEMBER much else about that day. I have a vague recollection of being dragged from the courtroom by the armed guards, the men in black holding open the door and telling me once again that they'd see me very soon. I couldn't quite remember how to use my legs, so they literally pulled me along the marble-clad corridors, past the crowds with their expressions of hatred and disgust, past my own parents, whose faces I could not make out because they turned away.
I recall only one thing with any clarity. As I was passing a second courtroom the doors flew open to reveal another boy, a similar age to me, being hauled kicking and screaming from inside. He was giving the bailiffs a hard time, his flailing body sending one crashing to the floor and causing the other to reach for his taser. With a flash fifty thousand volts sent the boy hurtling across the corridor, leaving him in a groaning, smoking pile. But even then I could make out his protests and they sent a chill down my spine.
"It wasn't me," he whispered as the men picked him up. "It wasn't me."
For the briefest of seconds our eyes met. It was like looking into a mirror-the fear, the panic, the defiance. I knew instantly that what had happened to me had also happened to him. Our dark fates entwined by the same men, our lives broken by an identical deception.
And then he was gone. I was carried down the corridor, my memories of the moment lessening with each step and fading away completely as I climbed into the truck that would take me to my new home. To the place I would spend the rest of my life. To my own personal hell.
To Furnace.
BURIED ALIVE
I'M BETTING YOU'VE ALL seen some prison films, or watched cop shows where the bad guys get sent to jail. You know what they look like: miles of fences topped with razor wire so sharp it hurts just to look at it; sprawling grounds watched over at all times by million-watt spotlights and towers with guns; lifeless buildings that rise up from the ground like great gray tombstones; tiny windows from which ghostly faces stare at an outside world they can no longer know.
Not Furnace.
Our prison bus took us straight there. Me, the kid who'd been stunned, and two other teenage guys, all as pale as church candles and cowering back into our seats as if somehow we could avoid arriving at our inevitable destination. All the while the police guards shook their shotguns at us and jeered, asking us if we'd seen Furnace on the newscasts, if we knew what it looked like, if we had any idea of the horrors that lay ahead.
I knew. I'd seen Furnace on TV like everybody else. After that summer when so many kids had turned to murder, they made sure that everyone in the country got a good look at the prison. They thought it would make us too scared to break the law, too scared to carry knives and to cut people up for just looking at them the wrong way, too scared to take a human life. Looking around, I guessed they hadn't been too successful.
There had been protesters, of course, the human rights supporters who claimed that locking a child away for life was wrong. But you can only argue with the truth for so long, and that summer when the gangs ran wild and the streets ran red everything changed. Even in the eyes of the liberals we weren't kids anymore, we were killers. All of us.
I used to always think that the waiting was the worst part, but when we rounded a corner and Furnace finally came into sight, I knew I'd rather have stayed on that bus for an eternity than get any closer to the monstrosity ahead.
It was just like on the news: a towering sculpture of dark stone, bent and scarred like it had been burned into existence. The Black Fort, the way in. The windowless building stretched upward, its body merging with a crooked spire that resembled a finger beckoning us forward. Smoke rose from a chimney hidden behind the building, a cloud of poisoned breath waiting to engulf us. All in all it looked more like something from Mordor than a modern prison.
As we neared I could make out some of the details that the news crews had left out. Carved into the cold stone were vast sculptures designed to inspire fear into anybody who saw them-tortured statues, each five meters tall, showing prisoners on the gibbets, hanging from ropes, on guillotines, pleading to executioners, being dragged from loved ones, and, worst of all, a giant head on each corner impaled on a spike. The dead faces watched us, and if I didn't know better I could have sworn their expressions were of pity, their sorrowful eyes wet from the gentle rain that fell.
"Doesn't look so bad," said one of the other boys, his quivering voice betraying his true feelings.
"Well, that ain't the half of it, boyo," replied one of the guards, tapping his shotgun on the window. "That there is Furnace's better side. You know where you're going." He lowered his weapon so it was pointing at the floor. "Down."
He was right, of course. The building ahead was only the entrance, the gateway to the fiery pits below, the mouth that led to the sprawling guts of Furnace, which lay hundreds of meters beneath the ground. I remember when they started building it-I must have been six or seven, a different person-how they'd found a crevice in the rock that seemed to go on forever. They had built the prison inside the hole and plugged the only way out with a fortress. Anyone wanting to dig himself out of this mess only had a couple of miles of solid rock to get through before he was free.
I guess that's when it finally sank in. The thought of being down there, underground, for the rest of my life suddenly hit me like a hammer in the face. I couldn't breathe, my head started to swim, the bile rose in my throat. I sat forward in my seat and stared at the floor, desperately trying to think about something else, something good. But all I could see now were the stains of a hundred other prisoners who had thrown their guts up on confronting the reality of their fate.
I couldn't hold it back. I puked, the mess hitting the seat in front and causing the guard to leap away. I retched a couple more times, then looked up through blurry eyes, expecting a furious reaction. But they were laughing.
"Looks like you win again," said one, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a ten-quid note. "How do you always guess which one is gonna hurl first?"
"When you've been on the job as long as I have," came the reply, "you just know."
There was more, but I couldn't hear it over the sound of the retching and sobbing that echoed back at me from the stained upholstery.
WHEN THE BUS eventually stopped we were herded out like sheep. I felt like I'd thrown up a couple of vital organs as well as the contents of my stomach, and my legs were so wobbly that I thought I was going to collapse when I stood. But as soon as we were outside, the sensation of rain on my face perked me up a little. Well, it did until I remembered that this might be the last time I would ever stand in the rain.
We were right outside the main gate, in a giant cage that gave off a sinister hum and made my head throb whenever I got too close to the bars. I didn't have to know much about physics to guess that it took a hell of an electrical charge to have that effect. The entrance to Furnace was suitably terrifying-two enormous black gates topped with a plinth marked with the word GUILTY. As soon as we were lined up, the gates swung open with a sound not unlike fingernails running down a blackboard, revealing a gray room with nothing in it except two men dressed in black leaning casually against the walls and a nasty-looking gun mounted on the ceiling.