Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

She steps out from behind the bins and joins the line-up. She doesn’t look up at the sign that says ‘GLASGOW ROYAL INFIRMARY’-that would be suspicious. Halfheads don’t take any interest in their surroundings.

She’s slightly dirtier than the others, and her jumpsuit smells, but the bored orderly in green and white doesn’t seem to notice. He just steers them all in through the service doors and starts handing out the night’s tasks.

It’s been six years since she was last here. This was where they cut her face in half, removed her breasts, stitched up her orifices and burned away her brain, but before that she’d been in and out almost every day. That’s how she knows she’ll be safe.

She worked here, hunted here. She knows this building, knows where to get what she needs.

The intravenous nutrients they give to coma patients are almost the same as the ones they use for halfheads. It won’t give her quite as much energy, but she can always take supplements. All she has to do is get to the central store.

When the orderly turns his back she disappears, taking a mop and wheely-bucket with her for camouflage. No one sees halfheads anyway: they’re invisible.

She works her way into the bowels of the building, pushing the bucket ahead of her.

Little has changed down here: the walls are still two-tone institution green; everything still smells of stale sweat, rotting cauliflower, and cheap detergent. There are miles of these little corridors, winding their way through the earth. Laundry, Waste Disposal, Protein Recycling, Incinerators…

Her broken glass memory brings up a face: Gordon Waugh. Long hair, high forehead, piercings. He’d screamed and begged when she’d beaten him, mewled as she’d slid the knife into his belly, popped and crackled when she dumped him in the furnace…

Strange. She can see all that, sharp and clear and perfect, but she can’t even remember her own name.

She stops outside a door marked, ‘AUTOMATED STORE: NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS’. The securilock looks new. She reaches out and strokes the buttons lightly with her fingertips, feeling them bump beneath her touch like stiff grey nipples. The display says ‘ENTER PASSCODE’.

Passcode.

She pauses for a moment. Listening.

A pair of thick Fife accents are arguing somewhere off in the subterranean corridors. The air management system rumbles. The plumbing gurgles and clanks. Other than that, she is alone.

Perhaps she should go looking for someone? Someone on their own. ‘Persuade’ them to give her the code. Slice them up nice and thin, peel back their skin like…

She closes her eyes, shudders. The bees are back, loud and insistent. Hungry.

There are drugs in the store that will help control them. Help her think more clearly.

But first she has to get that code.

A sound from down the corridor: the voices from Fife are getting closer. She jerks upright, looking for somewhere to hide. And then remembers what she is: nobody sees half-heads. As the two men turn the corner, all she has to do is pick up her mop and push it back and forth across the floor.

‘No it wasn’t .’

‘Yes it was !’

‘It can’t have been. The peritoneal cavity just isn’t big enough for a whole melon!’

‘It is !’ They walk right past her.

When their singsong voices fade into the distance, she lets the mop fall to the floor and squats down in front of the securilock again.

Frowns at the keypad. Fingers twitching.

She can feel half-remembered shapes-not numbers or letters, but a pattern of motion. A memory written in muscle and bone. Shutting her eyes she places her fingertips against the buttons and lets them find their own way through the combination.

There is a soft ping and she opens her eyes. The display has changed from ‘ENTER PASSCODE’ to ‘CODE ACCEPTED’. They haven’t deleted her old access code. Sloppy.

She steps inside and closes the door behind her.

The room stretches out beneath the building, a vast forest of shelving and racks disappearing into the distance. Automated pickers glide between the aisles, fetching and carrying everything needed to run one of the world’s biggest hospitals. The metal arms load their cargo into the many dumb waiters that pepper the cavernous room, a ballet of steel and medical supplies, played out to the soft click and hum of machinery. It is beautiful.

Human intervention is not required down here: machines stock the shelves from a subterranean shuttle station, machines check the stock levels, and machines carry the supplies up to the wards and the operating theatres and the mortuary and the canteen.

A beautiful mechanical world where she is the only living thing.

It takes almost an hour to find the coma ward nutrient pouches, perched in the far corner, between acres of toilet paper and racks of skinglue. She rips open a box, pulls out one of the flattened jellyfish shapes, and pops the seal, watching as the bag swells with all the things she needs to survive. It will take a minute or two for the mixture to settle and clear and she spends the time digging out an intravenous line to attach to the socket in her arm.

As the liquid trickles into her veins, the dull ache at the back of her head begins to lift, the tightness in her throat lessens, her stomach stops growling-even though she hasn’t actually eaten anything. She closes her eyes and drifts for a moment. Happy.

Grabbing another pack from the pile, she clambers up a wall of toilet paper and makes a little nest for herself beneath the coolant fan. Surrounded by a protective wall of extra-soft quilted tissue she slips the new pack into place and settles down to sleep. For the first time in six years, she is comfortable. Safe.

There are many things that still need to be done, but for now she is content just to rest.

‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

Will peered out from beneath his VR headset. Lieutenant Brand was lounging against the reconstruction suite wall, wearing another grey jumpsuit-urban concrete-coloured camouflage. Only this time she didn’t have her bra on show.

‘I’m not hiding.’

‘Bollocks you’re not. You’ve been down here all morning, looking like something off the History Channel. Headset and gloves: you’re such a sodding luddite. Why can’t you get a jackpoint like normal people?’

Will stuck two fingers up at her.

She shrugged, sighed, then pointed at the room’s terminal. The chunky evidence cartridge with the scans from flat 47122 was plugged into it, chugging and creaking as the computer interpreted the data into three dimensions. ‘That your mystery room?’

‘Want to take a look and tell me what you think?’

She unspooled a lead from the wall; breathed on the little gold connector; polished it against her sleeve; checked it was clean; then felt for the socket in the back of her head with her other hand, freezing just before she clicked the jack into place. ‘You spring for lunch afterwards?’

Will nodded. ‘Deal.’

He was as good as his word. Thirty minutes later they were sitting in the cafeteria, eating stovies. They’d been over the deep scan readings, the narrow band and the subsonics; they’d even run simulations to track the order of events. None of which explained why flat 47-122 looked so different before and after.

‘So,’ he speared a little chunk of cloned lamb from the mound of stodgy potato and onion on his plate, ‘what do you think?’

‘We have to go back. If that place was redecorated the way you said it was-’

‘And it was .’

‘Then something frinky’s going on.’

He looked at her. ‘“Frinky”?’

‘Not my fault you’re stuck in a time warp.’