Francesca Haig - The Fire Sermon

My hands were shaking, too. I’d thought the tanks had been vivid in my visions, but seeing them like this was worse. The tubes that violated the bodies, emerging at the mouth and the wrist. Tubes like puppet strings, suspending the bodies from the top of the tanks. If I could get out, if I could spread the word, surely even most Alphas would be horrified at this? And if I could indeed count on my visions, then somewhere outside was the island, where I might find those who would believe me, even help me.

Making the horror all the more uncanny was the weird orderliness of the scene: the neatly laid-out rows of tanks; the perfect accord of the chests rising and falling to the machine’s perpetual lullaby. Despite the variety of deformations on display in the tanks, there was a ghastly uniformity about their comatose state. I walked along the row, paused, leant my face against the glass of a tank, letting myself be calmed by the pulsing semi-darkness.

A shudder ran through the glass, shocking me back into alertness. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a face, pressed against the glass on which I was leaning. The boy who had drifted to the front of his tank had eerily pale skin, his veins clearly outlined. His light brown hair floated up from his head, and his mouth was partly open around the tube. Only one thing disturbed the near-stillness of the tableau: his eyes, wide open and alert.

I jumped back, my small cry lost almost immediately in the thick dampness and rhythmic hum of the room. Averting my eyes from the boy’s stare, I looked down, but seeing that, like the others, he was naked, I fixed my eyes determinedly on his face. Despite his brand, his thin face reminded me of Zach. Later, I wondered whether that was why the boy had seemed so familiar.

I grasped at the thought that his open eyes must be empty, that they couldn’t possibly signify consciousness. Some of the other tanked figures had open eyes, but they were no less absent for it. I stepped slightly to the side. If his eyes hadn’t followed me I might have continued, all the way back to the door at the far end of the room, and beyond. Part of me was disappointed when I saw his dark eyes track my progress. At the same time, I knew that having witnessed that small movement of his eyes was a promise that I couldn’t break.

The tank’s lid seemed to be its only entry point, at least three feet above my head. At that level a platform ran around the wall, reached by a ladder at the far corner of the room. I took several steps towards it, then looked frantically behind me to try to reassure the boy that I wasn’t leaving. In the gloom it was already too late – he’d become a blur in the tank. I ran, counting tanks as I went, and trying not to think about their occupants, or about the empty tank that I passed at the end of the row. Climbing the ladder, I cringed at the sound my footsteps unleashed on the metal steps. On the ledge I counted my way back along the tanks. At the twelfth tank I reached over for the metal handle and found that the lid lifted to the side without resistance.

From above I could barely make out his drifting hair, now two feet below me. As I leaned down over the tank, the fluid smelled repulsively sweet. With my face turned up, away from the saccharine stench, I reached into the warm liquid, groped around, grasped something solid and gave a tentative tug. There was a slight resistance before what I was grasping came away in my hand. For an awful instant I imagined his fluid-soaked body somehow falling apart in my hands, but when I looked down I was both relieved and horrified to find that I was holding a pliable rubber tube. When I sought out his face I saw that the tube was now stripped from his mouth.

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