Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

The whole thing was cooked from fingertips to elbow. No way that was healthy.

He whipped off his belt and wrapped it around her bicep, hauling it as tight as he could. It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.

‘Don’t you worry, hen,’ he told her. ‘We’ll kill the fuckin’ lot of them.’

The passageway ran straight for about a hundred yards and so did Will, the Thrummer held out in front of him like a battering ram. He smashed through a security door at the end of the corridor and burst back out into the shuttle station, twenty yards down from the main doors.

The platform was still shrouded in heavy clouds of ionized dust from when Cat had decimated the power lines. The dirty white outline of a parked shuttle was just visible in the gloom, it’s tail lights blurry red balls in the fog.

‘Ken!’ Will made sure his new Thrummer was powered up and ready. ‘Where are you, you little bastard?’

Something moved in the murk and Will pushed the Thrummer’s trigger, whipping the dust into a frenzy. It blasted a hole straight through the cloud to the main entrance, tearing the double doors apart, making the fog there even thicker.

‘It’s OK, Ken, you can come out now. I’m not going to hurt you!’

The shuttle doors hissed open. The lights inside the car flickered on, and Will could just make out the a blurry shape frantically punching something into the destinator. As the car began to lurch forward Will pulled the Thrummer into his shoulder and stepped to the edge of the platform.

‘Oh no you bloody don’t!’

The assault rifle shivered in his hands, then let out a deafening howl-ripping into the shuttle’s rear end, turning a big chunk of machinery into crackling powder. But the shuttle was already on its way, building up speed as it powered away from the platform. It listed hard to one side and slipped off the maglev track, still accelerating. The nose dug a groove out of the tunnel wall and ricocheted back, twisting as it bounced over the guide rail and ploughed into the concrete on the other side. It scraped along in a shower of hot-metal sparks, shrieking against the wall.

The tunnel turned right, but the dying shuttle didn’t; momentum spent, it ground to a halt. The safeties finally kicked in and shut the whole thing down, leaving the car’s lights clicking on and off in emergency-warning orange. Darkness. Orange. Darkness. Orange.

Will walked to the edge of the platform and dropped down to the tracks, the Thrummer’s lightsight a solid bar of green in the dust.

Behind him he could hear Brian staggering through onto the platform. ‘Holy mother of shite…Will?’ He had Jo slung over his shoulder, her face covered with a thin film of dust and sweat.

‘He’s mine, Brian, understand?’

‘You don’t have to do this.’ Brian climbed carefully down to the tunnel floor. ‘I’ll slit the wee bastard like an envelope if you want me to. No one’ll ever know.’

‘I will.’

They marched towards the crashed shuttle, bathed in the on-again, off-again light of the warning beacons. Ken was inside, struggling with the door catch. A long gash snaked down one side of his face, spilling dark red onto his collar, saturating his shirt. With a final heave he hauled the doors open and fell out onto the tunnel floor.

They watched him struggle to his knees and then his feet.

Will powered down the Thrummer and handed it to Brian.

Brian frowned. ‘You sure this is a good idea?’

‘You don’t shoot him, you got that? You don’t shoot him unless he kills me and tries to get away. Then you blow his fucking head off.’

They could hear Ken talking to himself as he lurched away from the wrecked shuttle car. ‘No, no, no…’ One hand was clutched to his chest, the other held out against the wall, trying to hold himself upright. ‘Aw Jesus no.’ He slipped and fell sideways, bouncing off the wall as he slithered to the tunnel floor. ‘Why’d the old bastard have to do that? Aw Jesus!’

‘PEITAI!’ Will picked his way through the wreckage. ‘Told you I’d track you down.’

‘Why?’ Ken looked up as Will closed the gap. ‘Why’d he have to do it?’

‘Stand up, you piece of shit. Stand up or I swear I’ll kick you to death where you sit.’

Ken held his hand out for Will to see. Shards of glass glittered in his palm and through the breast pocket of his torn jacket.

He let out a weird, high-pitched laugh. ‘I’m already dead…’

It’s darker in the observation room: the light that bleeds in from the interrogation suite does little to banish the gloom, nor do the flickering monitors. There are no heartbeats or brainwaves for them to register; instead they twitch away to themselves, displaying nothing but static.

Pretty.

She steps into the centre of the room and sniffs: old leather, and bitter-almond aftershave, she can smell it even over the stink of ionized glass. The old man has been here.

She lets the Bull Thrummer drift around the room, looking for a target.

The place is empty, but it hasn’t been that way for long: the door at the end is still drifting shut. She sidles over and nudges it open with her foot.

Outside a corridor runs left to right with a pair of lab-coated women crouching at the furthest end, looking nervous and flustered, picking up printouts strewn across the floor-as if someone has run past and knocked them flying.

She’s so glad she decided not to kill Hunter when she saw him outside the hospital. If she had, she wouldn’t be here right now. And this is much, much more fun. William Hunter will kill Ken Peitai for her and then, after she’s caught up with her old friend Tokumu Kikan and given him his present, she’ll pay Mr Hunter a house call and say thank you in person.

She laughs and sprints down the corridor, past the scrabbling scientists, and on to the end of the passageway, following the trail of destruction and bitter-almond.

The old man is running for his life. She is so looking forward to seeing him again.

Ken shuddered and twitched. Red spittle frothed at the corners of his mouth, his hands flapped and skittered, the little shards of glass sparkling in the palm of his right hand.

‘What’s the wee bugger shooglin’ about like that for?’

Will frowned. ‘No idea.’

Ken’s head snapped back, smacking off the tunnel wall with a resounding thunk. Slowly the trembling eased and he slumped into himself. Not moving.

‘He snuffed it?’

Will took a step back and said, ‘Lets find out.’ He kicked the sagging figure in the chest as hard as he could. Ken bounced back against the wall and then slid gracelessly to the floor.

Brian spat a long, phlegmy, gob onto the back of Ken’s motionless head. ‘And there was me lookin’ forward to seein’ you beat seven shades of shite out of him.’

‘Damn it.’ Will kicked him again for luck.

Nothing.

Dead or unconscious. Either way, he wasn’t fighting back.

Will reached up and keyed his throat-mike. ‘Lieutenant Brand, this is Hunter. Where’s your team?’

‘Sherman House. Where the hell are you? We’ve searched the whole lower floor and we can’t find an entrance to that damn lab.’

‘We were on the forty-seventh floor when they zapped us, and we woke up in the lab. Easiest way to get us down here would be the lifts.’

‘Floyd, get that lift console jimmied open.’ Emily’s voice was curt and businesslike. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can.’

‘Thanks I-’ But the connection was dead. She’d cut him off. ‘Great.’

Brian gently lowered Jo to the tunnel floor, then fumbled about in his pack for a med-kit. ‘We need tae get her to the hospital. Her arm’s fucked, and Christ knows what they’ve pumped her full of.’