Halfhead

by Stuart B. MacBride

  Then he went looking for Alastair Middleton. It didn’t take long when you knew which databases to hack into.

  The halfhead didn’t even look up as Will walked up to him and stood watching yet another bit of sodden rubbish disappear into the bin. There was something almost peaceful about halfheads. Something timeless and serene. There was never any rush. They had nothing left to worry about.

  ‘Afternoon, Alastair,’ said Will, shifting his grip on the carrier bag with his shopping in it. ‘Long time no see.’

  If Alastair Middleton heard him, he didn’t give any sign, just went on picking up the trash and depositing it in his little buggy.

  ‘Been thinking about you a lot over the last couple of days. Your old mentor’s dead. Did you know?’

  Alastair didn’t say anything, but then again he couldn’t: his mind and lower jaw had been taken away long ago.

  ‘Got burned to death in a Roadhugger that crashed. Just like that. No more Dr Fiona Westfield.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Don’t suppose that means an awful lot to you though, does it? She just used you the same way she used everyone else: wound you up and let you go.’

  Water ran down the truncated features and dripped off the exposed upper teeth, making the thing that had once been Alastair Middleton glisten.

  ‘You know, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been kinder to kill you when I had the chance: boil your chest away just like you did to Janet. What do you think? You happy as you are? No longer a menace to society?’

  A group of about a dozen schoolgirls—all of them clearly stoned out of their heads—staggered across the square, giggling and tittering in their long red cloats. Will watched them jump from puddle to puddle, shrieking with the joy of being young and off their faces.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said when they’d gone. ‘Just wanted you to know she was dead.’

  Will didn’t wait for a reply—there wasn’t any point—he turned his back and squelched his way to the nearest shuttle station.

  Brian and Jo would be in the pub by now, having the traditional booze-up to celebrate catching their bad guy. And God knew Will could do with celebrating something.

  There was no sign of the pickup team in the Dog and Diode, so Will dragged out his mobile and called Brian’s. No response, so he tried him at home.

  The little screen crackled and fizzed for a bit before Brian’s face swam into focus. Will was on his best behaviour. Didn’t even obscure the camera.

  ‘Brian, how…God you look terrible!’

  Agent Alexander’s face was pale and baggy, his eyes bloodshot, his nose red. He sighed. ‘Will.’ That was it, no niceties, no hello, no merry banter.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus, Brian, what happened?’

  He rubbed at his eyes. ‘You don’t want to know. And I really don’t want to talk about it.’ He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’m sorry Will. I’ll…I’ll talk to you later. I can’t do this right now.’

  Someone appeared at his shoulder and Will recognized James’s voice as he wrapped Brian up in a hug. ‘Shhhh…Come on. Let it go. It’s all right.’

  Then the connection went dead.

  Will frowned at the flashing ‘CALL TERMINATED’ icon. It wasn’t like Brian to let things get to him. Not like that.

  Will called the West George Street Bluecoat station. A harassed-sounding sergeant told him he could go screw himself if he thought they were going to hand out a DS’s private number to some wanker in a pub, before slamming the cut-off switch. Will was left with the ‘CALL TERMINATED’ icon again.

  He could always dig Jo’s number out of the Bluecoats records when he got home. And anyway, he had a plastic of wine and a pizza delivery menu waiting for him. Who could ask for more?

  She pushes the datapad away and stretches. It’s taken her most of the day, but she now has addresses for all her remaining children. Surprisingly, most of them live in the same place. Three stay out in the lower suburbs, but the other eighteen are all bundled up, nice and snug, in Monstrosity Square. Strange that fate made them gravitate together like that. Strange, but convenient—visiting them will be nice and easy.

  She’ll have to get herself a little insurance first. Pick up a few choice items from one of her weapons caches. Wouldn’t do to fall prey to her own children. That would be too ironic.

  Dr Westfield rolls out of her nest and drops to the supply room floor. Sadly, no one’s come to visit since Kris and her friend. No one to see the excellent job she’s done cleaning away the evidence. But that’s probably just as well: they might wonder about the two jars, resting against the back wall, full of preserving fluid and body parts. She likes to take them down from their shelf and dance around the room with them. Hold them up to the light and watch as it flickers and dances between the strings of flesh. Pop open the lids and…

  She stops, one hand on the lid, one on the cool plastic container. She just had to open them. Her case files should have been locked tight. Passwords. Encryption.

  The jar drops from her hands. It hits the concrete floor and bounces, spilling eyes and testicles and ovaries in an explosion of bitter-smelling liquid. Bouncing back up from the floor, it spins, spraying out the last of the preserving fluid, before sinking back to dance and skitter to a halt at her feet.

  She shouldn’t have been able to just open up the Harbinger files. She’d erased all open versions when that Network bastard came snooping. Everything else was hidden. Stored. Compressed. Booby-trapped. The only way those files would be accessible was if someone had unlocked and disarmed them. And she sure as hell didn’t do it.

  Someone has been tampering with her work. Someone has been meddling.

  Someone is going to pay.

  The front door bleeped at him, and Will put down his keyboard and stretched. The twinges were back, but he only had a couple of blockers left and wasn’t going to waste them. Instead he took another sip of wine and slouched through to the hall to pay the DinoPizza delivery girl for his twelve-inch CheatMeat feast.

  He stuffed a slice into his mouth, settled back on the couch and pulled the terminal closer. Hacking into the government network didn’t take long—their security was a joke. If he weren’t in the habit of using it to sneak into other, more suspicious, systems he would have said something. The main Bluecoat computers weren’t any better, and he spent a couple of minutes skimming their arrest records to see if any names would leap out at him. They didn’t. So he pushed on—through the firewall surrounding their personnel files—and called up Detective Sergeant Josephine Cameron’s record.

  Most of it he’d seen before, but he read through it again: commendations, verbal warnings, an impressive enough arrest list. Three applications for transfer to the Network. He’d not seen those in her public file. No wonder she’d jumped at the chance to act as liaison officer, it was a back door into the service for her. Three or four knock-backs weren’t unusual; the Network liked to make sure new agents really wanted to be there.

  Her disciplinary record wasn’t too bad—the most recent entry was over two years old, so it looked as if she’d learned to play the game. Politics: the bane of law enforcement agencies everywhere. It wasn’t enough to be good at your job, you also had to be sensitive to the machinations of your sup eriors.

  Will took another bite of pizza. It was getting cold, the cloned pepperoni greasy, the cheese beginning to congeal.

  He moved on to her personal details: address, mother’s maiden name, height, weight and home number. He punched it into the phone and settled back on the couch, only remembering at the last minute she wouldn’t be able to see anything because he’d killed the camera.

  ‘Damn.’ Never mind, it was too late to do anything about it now.

  It rang and rang and rang and rang. In the end the answerphone clicked on and he was confronted with a pre-recorded DS Cameron telling him that she wasn’t able to come to the phone right now, but if he felt like it, and didn
’t expect an answer anytime soon, he could leave a message after the beep. Will hung up.

  He washed a chunk of pizza crust down with a mouthful of wine. Just because no one wanted to talk to him, it didn’t mean he couldn’t find out what happened today. If Jo had submitted any paperwork it would be filed on the Bluecoat mainframe. He dragged the case reference out of her day log and went hunting.

  He was almost there when the doorbell went. Twice in one evening, something of a record.

  Cursing, he shut the screen down, slipped the keyboard back under the coffee table, then answered the door.

  He barely recognized the woman on his doorstep. There was no sign of the trademark eye-melters she normally wore, instead DS Cameron was clad in sombre blues and greys. Freed from its usual asymmetric bun, her hair hung round her face like a mourning veil, hiding her eyes, curling in round her cheeks in tight, black curls. There was a lot more of it than he’d suspected.

  He smiled at her. ‘Hi.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  Will tried again. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Can I come in?’ Jo’s voice was thick and a little slurred. Not much, not falling-down-pissed-as-a-fart, just enough to let Will know that she’d been drinking.

  ‘Em…Yeah, of course.’

  She followed him through to the lounge. ‘Got your address out the files.’

  Will frowned. ‘My address is in the public files?’

  She shook her head and a small smile flickered across her lips. ‘Nope.’

  So she’d been up to the same thing he had.

  ‘You want something to drink? Got some cold pizza I could reheat.’

  ‘Drink’s good.’

  He popped a couple of tumblers out of the cleaner and onto the countertop; somehow Will got the feeling this wasn’t an occasion for wine. A generous glug of whisky was accompanied by the briefest splash of water.

  Jo took a deep sip and rolled it around her mouth. Her eyes were pink and swollen, just like Brian’s had been.

  They sat side by side on the settee making stilted small talk. The weather, Will’s bruises, the view from his apartment…When the change of subject came, Jo’s voice faltered.

  ‘We found Jillian Kilgour,’ she said into her glass.

  Will settled back and waited for her to tell it, but she didn’t. Instead she bit down on her bottom lip and her shoulders started to tremble. There was no noise at first, just a gentle rocking back and forth and then the tears started. They balled up in the corners of her eyes like tiny fists and rolled down her coffee-coloured cheeks. Then she dragged in a ragged breath and bit down again. Will placed his glass on the coffee table and put his arms round her shoulders.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said as she buried her face in the crook of his neck. ‘It’s OK.’

  He held her until she had no tears left.

  The mess is all cleaned away, mopped and polished until there is no sign of spilled preserving fluid or body parts.

  Broken glass and bees. Filling the storeroom with their incessant, sharp-edged buzzing.

  Someone has been in her files.

  Some bastard has been interfering with her work.

  For a moment she comes close to exploding; it would feel very good to start smashing things. But she can’t do that. The storeroom’s internal sensors will notice that much destruction, someone will be sent down to investigate. She can do nothing to draw attention to herself. Nothing.

  So she sits on the edge of a pile of surgical gowns and seethes. Someone has hacked into her Harbinger files. Someone has been rifling though her research. Someone…

  She stops and looks at the monster reflected in the polished steel of the central unit. Only one person has ever managed to get into her files. A long purple scar winds its way across the left-hand side of his face. He wears a dark-blue suit.

  Dr Westfield scowls at the datapad in her hand—the open Harbinger files. He should have known better. She won’t let him get away with it a second time.

  Her fingers dance over the datapad, accessing the Network admissions sheet for the last three days and there he is. Three broken ribs, cranial trauma—nothing too serious—and a follow-up appointment made for four thirty tomorrow. The bastard will be right here in this very building…

  She closes her eyes. If she goes after him now she risks everything. With trembling fingers she snaps an ampoule of her medicine into the soft skin at the nape of her neck.

  Calm washes through her on a chemical tide.

  Soon her cloneplant will be ready and Stephen will make her whole again.

  She’ll be whole again and Assistant Section Director William Scott Hunter will begin his new, painful life.

  She calls up his personal information and copies down his home address.

  They’ll spend some quality time together. Just the two of them and a scalpel, a bone hammer, needles, blades, screams, blood. His lovely face…Death is fast and permanent. But with the right treatment, The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit can suffer for years.

  She picks a dissection blade from a pack of twelve. It feels nice in her hand, comfortable, heavy, shiny. Mutilating him will be therapeutic. And she has always known the benefits of good therapy.

  18

  Jo was sleeping with her mouth open, lips pouted, showing off a glimpse of teeth and the soft pink tip of her tongue. Will picked his head up off the pillow and watched her breathing. Slow and gentle. The first time had been wild and furious, the second a lot gentler.

  She hadn’t told him what had happened that afternoon.

  He pulled his arm out from under her head and Jo shifted, making herself comfortable. Will pulled the duvet up, tucking her in so that only her face showed, framed by an explosion of curly black hair. Then he leant forward and planted a soft kiss on the end of her nose. She wrinkled it and brushed the back of her hand across her face as he slipped out of the bed and into the lounge.

  Outside, the rain continued to pound the city into submission. It drummed against the glass, danced on the balcony, wrapped itself around the world for as far as he could see. Low black clouds, laced with reflected sodium-yellow, blanketed his world. Ten thirty on a Saturday night—even with the heating turned up full blast he was overwhelmed by the urge to shiver.

  Will picked a tumbler from the coffee table and poured himself another small whisky. Wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go tomorrow. The liquid went down smooth and warm, worked its magic, soothed away the chill.

  The terminal was still on—he’d only switched off the screen—so, pushing the discarded socks, pants, and trousers to oneside, he pulled the keyboard onto the coffee table and went back to reading Jo’s notes. She didn’t want to talk about it and he wasn’t going to force her. But he wasn’t prepared to let it go.

  Jo’s files were impressively tidy, she even had live footage—captured from Sergeant Nairn’s headset as they went in—all cross-referenced and annotated.

  Will spilt the screen and let the footage play on one side as he sifted through the background notes.

  Colin Mitchell: twenty-seven, single, no family. He’d had three lots of psychiatric treatment, two for arson and one for assault, even did a short stretch in the Tin.

  On the right hand side of the screen the picture crackled with static. That would be the Dragonfly landing. And suddenly the ship’s drop bay was full of green light as weapons came online.

  It was too dark for Will to make out anyone’s face as they leapt out into the rain, but he recognized the voices. Sergeant Nairn’s hands popped into view, holding a powered-up Thrummer.

  Three years ago Colin Mitchell invites a young woman back to his small flat on the lower south side and gets her stoned on Mouse. When she’s unconscious Colin removes her clothes and ties her to a chair. Then he masturbates over the back of her head. That’s it. No other sexual contact.

  When the woman wakes up she kicks up hell and calls the Bluecoats. Colin gets seven months in the Tin for indecent assault and illegal imprisonment, and anot
her round of therapy.

  Will watched two figures jog down the corridor, one holding a Bull Thrummer—that would be Dickson, she was the only one cleared to operate siege weaponry—and another with a Whomper. They counted off the doors as they went, until Dickson flattened herself against the wall and made a fist. The one with the Whomper took the other side of the door and gave the same gesture. Nairn nodded and Will got a good view of the hall carpet before the apartment door was kicked in.

  The psychological notes on Colin Mitchell were a lot more comprehensive than Will had expected, and he skimmed through them as Nairn and his troops slunk from room to room, weapons at the ready. Their lightsights cast a ghostly green glow across the walls.

  Social dysfunction, brief flirtation with VR syndrome during the riots—nothing unusual in that, half the city went down with the damn thing—but mostly Colin’s problems seemed to stem from a general sense of dislocation. The people around him had nothing to do with his life, they were just shadows, they weren’t real.

  There was a spare bedroom, towards the rear of the property, the window boarded up, leaving the room in darkness. A dozen cleaned skulls sat on a shelf against the back wall, the bone covered with engraved squiggles. They’d been hollowed out, just like the Kilgours’. You could tell by the way the lightsights shone through the empty sockets and onto the wall behind.

  Mitchell’s mother and father had been in therapy, getting treatment for alcoholism and anger management. Referred on by social workers…Will’s breath caught in his throat. Their therapist was Dr Fiona Westfield.

  He gulped down the whisky and poured himself another.

  No big deal. It was a surprise, that’s all. Hadn’t been expecting to see her name like that.

  Bloody woman was like the bogeyman, even dead she still had the power to make his skin crawl.

  Will settled back in front of the computer.

  Colin Mitchell’s parents never wanted kids, resented the little brat, blamed him for ruining their lives, used that as an excuse to repeatedly beat the hell out of him. During one therapy session the mother claimed her husband was sexually abusing the boy, but there was no evidence. She retracted the statement later, said it was just the drink talking.