Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

Six years.

Six years since she’s been able to feel anything at all.

Hunger. Love. Anger. Pleasure. Revenge. Lust. Pain. Seven perfect words, much hotter than a mere ball of burning gas ninety-three-million miles away. Pretty words: shiny like the blade of a knife.

She drifts on, ignoring everything but the growing hollow in her belly, unable to do anything about it; she can’t feed herself, they saw to that on the operating table.

Six years of intravenous nourishment. Nil by mouth.

They took it all away…

But she’s going to get it back. Oh yes. She’s going to get it all back.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’ Private Dickson straddled Stein’s scorched body in the darkened drop bay, pumping away at his heart. Every time she said ‘breathe’ Private Rhodes pinched Stein’s nose and blew into his mouth. Then they would wait for his lungs to deflate and the whole pattern would repeat again.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Sergeant Nairn was up to his armpits in the resuscitation unit mounted on the drop bay wall. Cables snaked out from it, lying in coils at his feet, little sparks fizzling away in the depths of the circuit boards, adding the smell of hot plastic to the harsh tang of burnt hair and burnt flesh.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Beaton sat on the mesh floor of her cubicle, head back, face pale, clutching her left wrist where it had caught the flat’s windowsill on the way out. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Stein since they’d laid him out on the central walkway like a fish for filleting.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will lurched back along the walkway to where Private Floyd was slumped against the bulkhead. The drop bay was baking hot, but Floyd was shivering, his forehead glassy with cold sweat. The front of his battle dress glistened with blood, but at least his heart was still beating.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will knelt in front of him and peeled away the sticky fabric surrounding the wound. When Sergeant Nairn said the trooper had been shot, Will had expected some sort of flesh wound, not a gaping hole. It looked as if someone had welded a dozen nails onto the business end of a sledgehammer and then pounded merry hell out of Floyd’s shoulder.

‘What on earth did you stand in front of? A truck?’

Floyd hissed a couple of short breaths through clenched teeth, then tried for a smile. ‘Think it was an old…old P-Seven-Fifty.’

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will dug into the small first-aid locker at the side of the cubicle and pulled out a handful of blockers. He snapped three of the small, plastic ampoules into the injured man’s neck, waiting for them to take effect before popping the cap off a tin of skinpaint.

‘How’s…how’s Stein?’

‘Something’s wrong with the crash kit: no oxygen, no EKG, no defib. Nothing.’ He gave the tin a shake, then sprayed thick, pink mist into the wound.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: fucking breathe damn you!’

The paint bubbled where it touched raw flesh, sealing the ruptured veins, bridging the gap between the tattered muscles. It didn’t look very pretty, but at least it would hold Floyd’s shoulder together till they reached Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

The trooper blinked. ‘Woah…’ Then a broad, lazy smile stretched his face wide. Three blockers had probably been a bit much, but Will didn’t really care-and from the look of things, neither did Private Floyd.

‘You going to be OK?’

Floyd just beamed-so Will left him to it, lurching back up the drop bay.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

‘What’s our ETA?’ Detective Sergeant Cameron stood holding onto the edges of her booth, staring down at Stein’s pale body. Trembling.

‘Two, maybe three minutes.’

She nodded. Cleared her throat.

‘How you doing?’

‘Is he…’ She took one hand off the railing and ran it across her soot-smeared cheek. ‘I don’t get it. I mean, one minute it was all fine and the next it was…everywhere. We didn’t even do anything. They just…’ She shuddered.

Will gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘You did OK back there.’

She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Is that what it’s like in the Network? Everyone wants to kill you?’

‘Look: why don’t you give Nairn a hand with the crash kit? You cracked that securilock in ten seconds flat, maybe you can get it going too.’

DS Cameron nodded. Wiped a hand across her eyes. Took a deep breath. Marched over to the tangled mass of wires and levered Sergeant Nairn out of the way.

One minute later she’d got the machinery working.

Two minutes after that, Private Richard Stein was dead.

The hours all melt into one another, slipping by, carrying her along with them. Sunset paints the horizon with violent red. The sky is bleeding just for her. One by one the city’s streetlights flicker on, a Mexican wave of sodium fireflies as the day slowly dies, their light giving the greasy city an unhealthy yellow pallor.

A garishly painted Roadhugger hisses to a halt beside her. She ignores it, just keeps trudging along the baked pavement. And then the voices start:

‘Jeeeesus, would you look at the state of it! That blood?’

‘Some bugger must’ve cut it. Disnae matter, just shove it in the back with the others.’

Rough hands grab her shoulders, but she’s too tired to resist. They haul open the back doors and bundle her into an empty bay. Then paw at her flesh.

‘Cannae see any wounds,’ says a man who looks like a ruptured pig. His face is fleshy and bloated, a thin fringe of hair outlining the uppermost of his many chins. ‘Think we should take it straight tae the hospital?’

‘Bugger that. Only got another six to pick up and then I’m aff home for the night. Let them worry about it back at the depot.’

Pig-Man frowns. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood here Harry, what if someone’s chibbed it? What if it dies?’

‘If it dies, it dies. It’s just a fuckin’ halfhead! Who cares?’

Pig-Man is quiet for a moment, then he sniffs. ‘Yeah, suppose you’re right.’ He pulls the restraining bar down, clambers back out into the night, and slams the door. Then waves through the window at them, sharing a joke with his ugly friend as they walk back around to the cab.

The engine starts and she lurches against the bar, blinking. Light-headed. Hungry. Sharp and broken. Bees and broken glass.

She needs to take her medication. Or someone will-get-hurt.

Another lurch, and one of the halfheads stumbles. They’re all around her: freakish faces devoid of thought or emotion. The rancid smell of their sweat is everywhere. Bluebottles and dead birds. The one in the next bay is staring off into the middle distance, the barcode tattooed over its left eye fresh and sharp. A new convert to the ranks of the living dead.

She reaches up and touches her own forehead, trying to feel the tattoo she knows will be inked into her own skin. The colours faded, the edges blurred after all these years.

It holds the key to everything she is and was. It holds her name.

The Roadhugger grumbles from stop to stop, and each time the back door opens, Pig-Man pushes another halfhead into an empty compartment. It doesn’t seem to worry him that his cargo was human once. That they were shiny things with dreams and feelings. Because that doesn’t matter any more: their brains have been burned away. They’re just lumps of barely sentient meat to be used as slaves. Walking, mutilated, orange-boilersuited reminders that crime doesn’t pay.