Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

‘But why did you-’

The rain-swept sky exploded as a second Dragonfly swung in over the scene with all weapons pods opened. Deep, dark scars wound their way back along the gunship, smoke trailing from the port engine.

‘Hunter, this is Brand, do you copy, over?’ Emily. She wouldn’t know if he was alive or the filling in a body-bag buttie.

‘Panic’s over, Lieutenant.’ He turned and beamed at Jo and her ridiculously colourful suit. ‘DS Cameron saved the day. They were just muggers. Can you believe it? Muggers.’ He started to laugh again and didn’t stop until they’d snapped a blocker into his neck.

The hospital’s busy in the run-up to lunch: lots of things going on, people trying to clear their desks before noon. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing about the hospital like busy, busy bees. No one paying attention to anyone else. Always the best time to get things done.

She takes a good look around before hauling the trolley out of the storeroom and into the corridor. Body-bags would be too suspicious-they don’t let halfheads push dead people around-but general-purpose refuse sacks are another matter entirely. You just have to cut the dearly departed into smaller bits.

She pulls the door shut behind her and trundles along the corridor to the incinerator. It’s been six years since she last needed it: Gordon Waugh. She’d kept the furnace door open that time, turning the heat down so it wouldn’t instantly reduce his mangled corpse to ash…smiling as Gordon hissed and crackled in the flames. That night she’d gone out and had a huge plate of roast pork.

But she doesn’t have time for fun now. So she just throws the eight heavy refuse sacks into the furnace and cranks the heat up full. Soon there is nothing left. Bye-bye Kris, bye-bye Norman.

Dr Westfield waves, then abandons the trolley in favour of a mop and wheely-bucket, pushing it in front of her like a bag lady pushing a shopping cart full of empty plastics. Focusing on the soapy water as if it’s the only thing in the world.

The service elevator is crowded-just as she expected it to be. Four doctors, three interns, and a nurse. They move over, just enough to let her in without actually acknowledging her existence. Even though two of them used to work with her every day…Back when she was a human being.

Dr Stephen Bexley-the one with the salt and pepper beard, reading a patient’s chart on his datapad-even went to the trial. He wept as she took the court through the list of names, telling them exactly what she’d done to their bodies, both before and after death. It was the post-mortem activities that seemed to upset Stephen most of all. Once upon a time he’d claimed to be her friend. Now he doesn’t even recognize her.

Poor Stephen.

His face is much the same as it’s always been: leathery, hook-nosed and bearded. He’s got a lot more hair than he had at the trial-cloneplants, the saviour of balding men. Did he get one of his minions to perform the procedure, or do it himself? Always the perfectionist. Always the huge ego.

The floors pass and one by one the others leave until she is alone in the lift with Stephen. Oblivious to her presence he works one of his delicate surgeon’s fingers up that huge, hooked nose. Round and round and round he digs, before dragging something out and peering at it.

She closes her eyes and does not watch him eating what he has found.

The lift shudders to a halt and she waits for him to leave the car first-just like a good halfhead should-then follows him out into a cluttered reception area. The walls are peppered with inspirational posters, pictures of happy, smiling children, thank you letters, news clips and awards. The cloneplant ward of Glasgow Royal is one of the best in the world. And Dr Stephen Bexley is it’s grand vizier.

The security guard checks Stephen’s ID, running it through the scanner as if he were a potential terrorist instead of the head of the department. Only when the reader plinks ‘ALL CLEAR’ does the guard smile and ask him how his wife and children are.

He has a family now. A new head of hair, a pregnant wife, and children. How sweet. That makes things a lot easier.

Stephen shares a few pleasantries with the guard, then walks through the doors. No one bothers to check the ID of the halfhead with the mop and the bucket, she just shuffles past into the depths of the cloneplant lab.

It’s bigger than she remembers it. The equipment in here is all new to her, but she’s a fast learner. She mops the floor, up and down between the rows of work benches, nice and slow, watching what the technicians are doing. The first stage seems easy enough: place patient samples in a sequencer to fabricate stem cells. The next bit is harder: working out how to direct the growth. There will probably be stored procedures in the system to get the results she wants, but she needs enough time to find the proper commands. So she keeps on mopping until the lunch bell goes and they all bustle off to sample the canteen’s deep-fried delights.

They’ll be back in forty minutes: she has to work fast.

Getting the sample for the sequencer isn’t easy. She needs good, healthy tissue. There’s no way she can scrape cells out of her cheek, or her oesophagus; so she peels a strip, five millimetres wide and ten millimetres long, from her abdomen with a fresh blade. It’s not a deep wound, but it stings and bleeds more than she expects. She presses a handful of sterile wadding over the wound, stopping the worst of it. A small sacrifice to get her real face back. To be herself again.

Should have taken a tin of skinpaint from the storeroom, but she never expected to get this far so soon. Ah well: carpe diem .

With her free hand she slips the rectangle of flesh into a fresh crucible-a circle of complicated plastics and electrics sealing off a bag of growth medium. She snaps the top back on, slides the whole thing into the sequencer and sets it in motion. From here on everything is automated; all she has to do is tell the system what she wants the cells to grow into.

Which is more complicated than it looked.

She’s still searching for the right commands when people start returning from lunch: she can hear them chatting in the reception area, dragging their heels, not wanting to get back to work too quickly.

The sequence has to be in here somewhere…

Her left leg starts to tremble.

Where the hell is the damn sequence?

Bees and broken glass.

The door clicks open and the staff drift in, heading for their work areas.

Time to give up. Come back later. Don’t take any risks.

She tabs through the command list as quickly as she can, speed reading from one file to the next.

Someone sits down at the next bench along, talking into his finger: ‘Yeah, no, a pint sounds great…’

A sequence flickers up on her monitor, every last cell division worked out in perfect detail. It’s a lot more tissue than she needs, but she doesn’t have time to search for something else.

‘Hey, what’s that damn halfheid doin’ tae ma desk?’ The voice is rough, coming from the other end of the room.

The man sitting at the next bench looks up at the noise and then glances at her.

It’s just enough time to peel the wadding off her bleeding stomach and pretend to polish the desktop with it.

‘Cleaning,’ says the man. ‘What’d you think it was doing, Rob, reading your pornmail?’

They laugh, and Rob blushes. ‘Shut up.’

She stabs the button, downloading the instruction sequence into the crucible.

‘What’s all the hilarity about?’ Dr Stephen Bexley stands at the front of the room, running a hand through his new hair.

‘Rob thinks the halfhead’s reading his dirty emails.’ More laughter.