Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

Emily announced that the kitchen was full of the same fake grime, but Will wasn’t really listening. He’d positioned himself in the middle of the room, just where the SOC team’s scanning equipment would have sat. The computer reconstruction was full of holes, blobs of no data, and as he stood there he got the nasty feeling he knew why. The blobs hid the upper corners of the room, just where you’d put surveillance equipment if you wanted to keep an eye on the flat’s occupants.

‘This gets weirder,’ said Emily emerging from the kitchen, ‘there are damp patches under the sink and they’ve been printed on too. Inside a cupboard! Who in their right minds…What are you doing?’

‘Give me a leg up.’

Emily braced herself into the corner, hoisting him up as if he was barely there.

Will peered at the join between the walls and the ceiling. It looked normal enough, but then it would, wouldn’t it? Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out Brian’s Palm Thrummer, twisted the little canister open, and set it on minimum. It burred in his hand, numbing his fingertips as he carefully stripped the upper layers of wallpaper and plasticboard away, turning them into a cloud of grey dust that billowed out into the room.

There was something in there…

Will took a deep breath and blew, clearing the fog away. Two sonic probes and a small jammer were bolted into a little metal box, mounted behind the plasticboard. The whole array was lit up: the probes grumbling away to themselves as they recorded him and everything else in the room.

‘Shit!’ Will leapt to the ground. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now!’ He grabbed Emily and hauled her towards the door.

‘What the hell’s got into you?’

‘How long have we been in here?’ He pulled back his tatty rag sleeve and glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes. Shit, shit, shit !’

Will slammed the door of the apartment behind them, and hurried down the corridor, back towards the lifts, muttering all the way. ‘Come on, come on…’

‘Where are we going?’

They rounded the corner just as the lift doors pinged opening. The car was full, and standing right at the front was the big-boned woman with the red hair and tribal scars.

‘Fuck!’ Will snatched at Emily’s sleeve, stopping her in her tracks. ‘When I say, run for it.’ Two steps back and the lifts were hidden from view. ‘Run!’

They almost made it.

There’s no sign of the man whose name adorns the diplomas on the office wall, but just in case he turns up she locks the door before powering up the terminal on his desk. The same code that worked on the storeroom door gets her through the system’s security check.

She calls up the hospital’s patient database and punches in the reference code the reader gave her: SH-O/D-10286.

The machine chugs away to itself for almost three minutes, searching through the millions of people held on the system. And then the result comes back. ‘ACCESS RESTRICTED. FOR MORE DETAILS CONTACT SERVICES-OFFENDER MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT’

She has an almost overwhelming urge to grab the monitor and smash it against the wall. And then she realizes that this is how the system is supposed to work. Halfheads are non-people. Nothing is allowed to connect the lobotomized slave to the crimes they committed. Nothing for anyone to idolize or respect.

She sits back in the doctor’s mock-leather chair and scowls at the screen.

But it’s her name.

HER FUCKING NAME.

If anyone has the right to know what it is, it’s her.

Deep-calming-breaths.

They haven’t deleted her user ID from the system, maybe there’s another way to find out who she is…?

She calls up the email program and enters the same pass-code again.

‘WELCOME DOCTOR FIONA WESTFIELD. YOU HAVE NO NEW MESSAGES.’

Doctor Fiona Westfield.

She frowns. She’d expected everything to come flooding back, but it doesn’t.

She puts the name into the patient database and this time the screen fills with information. Everything is here. The details of her halfheading: the attendees, the surgeon-just reading his name makes her shudder-case notes on the bladder infection she’d contracted as a result of a poorly sterilized catheter.

And a photograph: her at a conference receiving an award. She reaches out and caresses the screen. Long blonde hair, little button nose, sparkly blue eyes. Her face. She wants her face back so badly it hurts .

The hospital system has been a busy little bee, automatic ally finding links to a potted biography, cross-references to her trial, post mortems on her victims…

Beautiful, beautiful pictures of torn abdomens and ragged flesh.

The images spark things inside her head: memories and thoughts from a time when she was a real person. Before they hacked her jaw away. Before she became a monster.

But as she reads she knows that’s not true.

She has always been a monster.

His head falls back, eyes closed, shuddering, breathing hard. Sweat running down his naked back. With a final thrust everything goes bright and sharp…Oh God…Yes…And then he falls forward, panting, feeling wonderful. Feeling spent. Feeling happy.

Over on the bed-held nice and tight by all those chains and straps-the birthday girl stares at him. She’s still wearing a little badge saying: ‘I AM 18’, even though it’s not really her birthday any more. She stopped sobbing fifteen minutes ago, now she just trembles, whimpering something over and over behind the gag.

He doesn’t say anything, because she wouldn’t understand. No one ever understands.

Sometimes it makes him cry, but not today: today is a day for celebration. That’s why he’s let her watch.

He slips himself free, patting the other woman on the head as he does so. The lucky soul is almost gone-one eye swollen and bloodshot, a string of dribble hanging from her slack mouth. He’s filled her up with as much life as he can, and soon the angels will come and take her to their bosoms. Another soul that he has saved.

He smiles and winks at the birthday girl, tucked up all nice and cosy on the bed. It’ll be her turn soon enough. He’s got more than enough life to go round.

Will groaned. He shifted his weight, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt quite so much, but he could barely move. Cramp lurched up and down his body, pausing every now and then to kick him in the kidneys.

He prised one eye open. Bright light. Pain. It felt as if someone was ramming a red-hot poker into the socket. ‘Fuck…’ It was like the worst hangover he’d ever had. He closed his eye again.

Someone slapped him. Hard enough to fill his mouth with the taste of blood.

Will coughed, retched, spat a mouthful of hot copper down his own front.

Slowly the room lurched into focus. A wall of muscle was standing over him, dressed in a grey-black jumpsuit. The kind with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves.

‘Aye.’ The bruiser was rubbing his right hand, talking into a throat-mike. ‘That’s ‘em baith conscious now. Ye’d better let Himself know.’

‘So, you’re not dead then.’

Will inched his head around, slow and careful, just in case it fell off. Emily was strapped into an interrogation chair next to him, still dressed in her eclectic-tatters outfit. A fresh bruise covered her left cheek, her lip was swollen, and her expression was murderous.

‘Where are we?’ It came out as a croak.

‘No idea. By the time I woke up we were in here. The restraints weren’t as good as these ones…’ she flexed against the straps, going nowhere. ‘But they learned fast.’

Will swore. Winced. Then looked around the room, trying to figure out what the hell they were going to do now.