Halfhead

by Stuart B. MacBride

  Will had to admit Ken sounded as if he meant it. As if he believed every word he was saying. But Will had dealt with lying wee shites before. ‘What about Allan Brown? He was killing for years: how come you never stopped him? You’re up there monitoring the whole place and he’s out butchering halfheads.’

  Ken’s smile slipped a bit. ‘We’re not perfect OK? Like I said: we don’t got cameras in all the flats yet.’

  ‘He’s been at it for over five years, Ken. You telling me you didn’t notice anything?’

  The smile disappeared all together. ‘Listen, all I know is the VRs turned America from a superpower into a third world fuckin’ country. I ain’t gonna sit back and let that happen here. Not again. Will, I’m tellin’ you: this gets out we’re all in for a whole world of hurt.’ Ken stared at him. ‘You gotta understand, man: we’re doin’ what we gotta do. I’m asking you to be one of the Good Guys and just leave it alone. Let it drop. We’ll go on lookin’ for a cure and you and your team can go on doin’ what you do. No one needs to get hurt, OK?’

  No one needs to get hurt? The little shite had just threatened him. Will had a sudden urge to kick Ken’s backside up and down the gaming hall. But instead he stuck out his hand and said, ‘One of the Good Guys.’

  Ken beamed ‘OK!’ They shook hands. ‘Well, gotta go. There’s this kingdom needs saving from a fire-breathing Dragon and a buncha Goblins. You have a nice day.’

  Will said, ‘Thanks,’ but he was thinking about twisting Ken’s head round until his neck went pop.

  She’s so excited she can barely stand still. The operating theatre will be ready in just over eight hours. Eight hours. How can she possibly wait that long without bursting?

  The automated storeroom gleams like a brand-new pin. She’s polished and mopped and dusted and scrubbed—anything to make the day go faster. Kill the time…

  Deep inside her, a need is growing. A need to kill more than time.

  She’s taken her medicine today, twice the normal dosage, but the need won’t go away. It’s the excitement; it makes her body tremble.

  Eight hours to go.

  Eight hours…

  She walks round and round the store, straightening the piles of surgirags and skinglue and sharps and sheets and disposals and everything else a large modern hospital needs. She has counted each and every sheet in the pile, every box of nutrient and she still can’t rest.

  There has to be a release. There has to be a release soon, or she won’t be able to think straight. And if she can’t think straight she’ll start making mistakes. And if she makes mistakes she’ll be caught.

  Justification.

  She stops pacing and closes her eyes, pleased with herself.

  If she doesn’t kill something, she’ll be caught.

  She grabs a fresh blade from a pack and slips it into her orange and black jumpsuit. This is the last day she will ever wear this nasty polyester uniform. After tonight she’ll be back to her elegant best. Perhaps, once the swelling goes down, she’ll stroll down Sauchiehall Street and burn a hole in someone’s bank account. That will be nice. A manicure and a facial and a lovely lunch down at the Green. What could be better?

  Then afterwards she’ll pay Assistant Section Director William Hunter a visit and congratulate him on his promotion.

  Dr Westfield pops some supplies in the bottom of her wheely-bucket and saunters off towards the exit. There are a lot of people in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, many of whom will live to a ripe old age. And one who isn’t going to live to see tomorrow.

  As the storeroom door slides closed behind her she wonders who it will be.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Jo appeared in the Comlab Six canteen where Will was busy nursing a half litre of imported lager and a foul mood. She stood in front of his table, hands on hips, hair hanging slightly damp round her face. On her it looked good.

  ‘Nothing.’ Will forced a smile. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  DS Cameron raised an eyebrow. ‘Bollocks, nothing’s wrong. I’ve interviewed thieves and murderers remember? I know a lie when I hear one.’ She dumped her kitbag on the table and sank down into the seat opposite. ‘Spill the beans.’

  ‘Honestly, there’s nothing—’

  ‘William Hunter, if you expect dinner, dancing or anything else this evening you’ll come clean. Understand?’

  ‘“Anything else”?’ This time the smile was genuine. ‘And just what did you have in mind?’

  ‘Talk.’

  After a moment’s silence he nodded and said, ‘I bumped into an old friend when you were getting changed. Told me to keep my nose out of the PsychTech files, told me to stop digging for information on him and his boss. Said if I played nice, “no one would have to get hurt”.’

  ‘He threatened you?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘But you’re a Network Assistant Director!’

  Will just shrugged.

  Jo frowned. ‘Why the hell would someone care if you went rooting about in a defunct, debunked, psychology programme that died years ago?’

  ‘No idea.’ Will stood. ‘I’ve got to go see Doc Morrison at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in forty minutes. Would be a shame if I accidentally hacked into the PsychTech files while I was there. Want to tag along?’

  ‘Just how dangerous is this “old friend” of yours?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

  Jo hauled on her jacket. ‘What we waiting for then?’

  She walks through the wards like a diner examining the menu. There are so many to choose from: some that no one will miss, others that will leave a family in mourning. Some are young, some are old and none of them look as if they’re going to put up much of a struggle. She likes that best of all. This is no time to take any unnecessary risks. A quick, clean kill and then a little bit of postmortem fun. She’s not due in surgery till half eleven: she can take her time with the remains.

  But first she has to get them downstairs.

  The dumb-waiters are no good, they’re only designed to transport things up from the automated storeroom, not down. Being inside one when it collapses into the wall and starts its rapid descent back to the basement would be…messy. Nothing left to play with. Nothing but mush and a few broken bones. Where’s the fun in that?

  She pulls her mop from its bucket and spreads some disinfectant over the floor. It’s a mundane task, but it helps her think. When she has her real life back, whether it’s in the New Republic or Asia Major or even the Colonies, she’s going to have the cleanest home in town.

  In the next bed a small child cries. It can’t be much more than four or five years old: too small to be any real sport, though it would just about fit in her bucket if she snapped its arms and legs. But its head would stick out of the top, someone would see…

  She drifts through to a more grown-up ward.

  There are a few other halfheads working the room. One manoeuvres a floor-polisher back and forth across the scuffed terrazzo; another pushes a disposal buggy from one bed to the next, picking up the patients’ wastepaper baskets and emptying them into the big box on wheels. She stops for a moment to watch him—or her—work. Pick up the bin, tip it into the buggy, put the bin back. A nice un demanding job, just the thing for a surgically edited mass murderer. Or rapist. Or hedge-fund manager. Or whatever it was the thing in the orange jumpsuit had done to deserve half its face being cut off.

  A nice big buggy, just the right size to take a fully grown adult. Perfect.

  She crosses to the end bed. The man lying beneath the crumpled white blanket is wearing stripy pyjamas and a VR headset. His hands are above the covers, so whatever fantasies he’s living out can’t be too rude.

  Dr Westfield takes a look up and down the ward: no one is watching. So she goes up to the curtain, grabs it and walks it round until the bed is hidden from view. The man doesn’t even look up.

  His name is Liam Holdstock and—according to the case notes that flicker across her datapad—he has an infected liver. Be
tter not eat it…And then she remembers she hasn’t got a mouth to eat it with. Not yet anyway.

  Seven and a half hours and counting.

  She balls her right hand into a fist, then taps Liam on the shoulder.

  ‘Whatta hell d’you want?’ he grumbles, still buried in his little computer game. ‘Can you no’ see I’m busy. Jesus, hiv youse lot nithin better tae dae wi’ yer time than bug me?’

  She taps him again, enjoying herself as the moment stretches out.

  ‘What? Jesus-effin-Christ. Can ye no’—’ He pulls up the side of his headset and peers out. He frowns, slack mouth hanging open. There’s no one there, just some stupid halfhead. ‘Aw, fer fucksake,’ he says at last. For a brief second he glances up at her and his flabby face breaks into a smile. ‘Aye, an’ you can fuck aff as weil, y’bucktoothed wee bast—’

  She hits him across the bridge of the nose, breaking it. Blood pours down his face. His hands come up, palms open and facing out. Classic defence posture. But she’s not playing that game today. She grabs the clock from his bedside cabinet and smashes it over his head. He goes limp.

  For a minute she just looks at him lying there, not moving, and then she reaches forward and feels for a pulse. And there it is. She hasn’t hit him too hard; he’ll survive the trip downstairs. But not what waits for him there.

  Right on cue, the halfhead with the disposal buggy pushes through the curtain, looking for Liam Holdstock’s bin. She takes the buggy and steers the lobotomized slave to the other side of the bed, where she presses her mop handle into its hands, then pushes it back out into the ward.

  Liam’s heavier than he looks and getting him into the buggy isn’t easy, but she manages it, forcing him down into the basket. She doesn’t want him making any sound on their little trip down to the storeroom so she pulls a tube of skinglue from her pocket and with quick, economical movements draws a line of surgical adhesive on both his lips, then presses them together. He looks funny like that, as if he’s forgotten to put his teeth in. Just to be safe she runs a spiral of the same glue onto both of his palms and slaps them over his ears. Hear no evil, speak no evil, but he’ll be able to see and feel everything.

  Emptying Liam’s wastepaper basket over his head she pushes her way through the curtain. The halfhead is still standing there, frowning at the mop in its hands. She has confused its little brain. It was emptying bins, but now it’s mopping floors. Sooner or later its training will kick in. She doesn’t have to worry about it.

  Which is just as well, because she’s got an appointment in the basement with a man who isn’t going to enjoy the next few hours even half as much as she is.

  Will and Jo squelched their way through Glasgow Royal Infirm ary’s lobby, en route to the private Network wards, a good half hour early for Will’s follow-up appointment with Doc Morrison.

  On the thirteenth floor he led the way through security, then down the corridor to the doctors’ consulting rooms. Doc Morrison wasn’t in, so Will slipped in behind her desk, powered up her computer, and asked Jo to keep an eye on the door.

  ‘Right,’ he said, hacking his way into the hospital network. ‘Let’s see what the little gimp was so keen to hide…’ He entered ‘KEN PEITAI’ and ‘TOMUKU KIKAN’ into a stealth engine and sent it off to look at every single record on the hospital servers. They weren’t listed in PsychTech—he’d checked before leaving the house this morning—but they were bound to be somewhere, and the hospital’s systems were the only ones Will hadn’t broken into yesterday. Ninety percent of them weren’t accessible from outside the building.

  Only the rattle of the air conditioning and the hum of the doctor’s terminal broke the silence.

  Jo stood with her back against the wall, arms crossed, face working its way round a frown. ‘Will,’ she said at last, ‘when we were in your house this morning I noticed all these pictures of a woman…’

  So that was it.

  Not exactly a conversation he’d been looking forward to.

  ‘It’s…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Her name’s Janet. We were married.’ He closed his eyes; this was even harder than he’d thought. ‘She…she died six years ago.’

  ‘You still miss her.’

  ‘I…’ He couldn’t look her in the eye. Sigh. ‘Yes, I still miss her.’ Six years. Six whole fucking years and he still couldn’t let go.

  ‘I see.’

  Silence settled back over the room like a shroud.

  Fucking useless blubbery BASTARD!

  Liam is spread out on the concrete floor with hardly a mark on him, dead. He barely lasted ten minutes.

  Useless fuck.

  She stops pacing up and down the storeroom to kick him in the face. Hard.

  He bounces: flopping like a great, flaccid rag doll. It didn’t say on his chart that he had a heart condition.

  She kicks him again, smearing his nose over his waxy features.

  If they don’t put things like that on the chart, how is she supposed to operate?

  This time she stamps on his face with her heel, again and again and again—useless—bastarding—fuck—until the whole front of his skull caves in.

  There are still seven hours on the clock and she’s got nothing to keep her busy but getting rid of fat Liam’s disgusting corpse. This is so unfair. All she wanted was a little distraction to while away the time, was that so much to ask? Was it?

  Something to make the fucking bees shut up.

  Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  She stops when she realizes that all she’s doing is making a bigger mess for herself to clean up. Liam’s head looks like an old cushion, and all the stuffing is leaking out over the storeroom floor. She steps away from the body and breathes deeply, in and out through her nose, not the little vent glued into her throat.

  Calm.

  This is all just temporary. Just make-work. Killing time till the operation, nothing more.

  Calm down. Deep breaths. Deep breaths and calm, cool thoughts.

  Useless bastard.

  Grabbing a drip stand from a nearby rack she beats at his chest until one of the wheels breaks off and the sharp edge punctures his flesh.

  Seven hours to go. Just seven hours. She can make it, she can. All she needs to do is clear her mind.

  The drip stand rattles and clanks as she drops it to the floor.

  Calm, cool thoughts. Calm, cool thoughts.

  She snaps yet another shot of medicine into her neck and sinks down against a stack of internal thermometers.

  Calm, cool thoughts.

  She’ll need to wrap the body in something, then she’ll have to clean the floor. Get rid of the evidence. Something deep inside her likes that. Mopping and scrubbing will be therapeutic, calming. Then she can throw the body back into the disposal buggy and wheel it down to the incinerator.

  Calm, cool thoughts.

  But inside she burns. She wanted a release—deserved one—and Liam didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. She needs to let off steam. She needs it. Even with three shots of medicine in her she can’t sit still.

  Bees and broken glass.

  Dr Westfield looks from the battered corpse of worthless Liam to the clock on the wall. It’s just after four: nearly seven and a half hours to go. She can’t last that long. She just can’t.

  A shudder runs down her spine. The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit has to come back to the hospital at half past four: she read about the appointment in his medical records. She has half an hour to clean stupid Liam away before the man responsible for all this shit arrives in the building.

  She was going to save William Hunter for later, for when she’s all fixed up and can taste his fear and his blood, but she needs something now. And William Hunter will do nicely. Escort him back down to her storeroom-operating theatre and give him the worst seven hours of his life.

  21

  The Network has its own private floor of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Different from the rest of the building, its walls are thicker, its floors are reinforced, its ce
iling covered with shielding. Troopers stand guard at the main bank of elevators; anyone without a pass is escorted off the thirteenth floor at the point of a Whomper. But she walks right past them as if they weren’t even there.

  She wanders slowly around the private reception area, picking up the wastepaper baskets and emptying them into her buggy. Fat, useless Liam is just another layer of ash in the hospital furnace, the storeroom is nice and clean, and she still has ten minutes before The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit arrives for his appointment. Ten minutes to find out where he’ll be going. Ten minutes to get into position. Ten minutes to decide what she’s going to do to him.

  So many beautiful options…

  Her medicine makes little stars twinkle at the edge of her vision, the world fizzing on chemical ripples. The base of her neck is sore from repeated injections. She’s had far more than the recommended daily dose.

  The buggy creaks as she pushes it through the double doors, following the orange line. The place is quiet, but then four twenty on a Sunday afternoon is hardly peak time. She passes wards, scanners, and operating theatres. The consultation rooms are at the end of a short corridor.

  There’s a waiting area in the middle of the room—comfy chairs, pot plants, a coffee machine—and treatment rooms down either side. Each one with a display screen next to it, listing the doctor’s name and upcoming appointments.

  There’s no one around to see her checking the screens for William Hunter’s name. She finds it down at the end of the row.

  Seven minutes. His appointment is in seven minutes.

  Perfect. All she has to do is wait in the little room. She’s not worried about the doctor already being there—doctors die just as easily as everyone else. And when William Hunter turns up she’ll wait till he’s not looking, then use the injector in her pocket to pump him full of sedatives. Heave him into the buggy, just like useless Liam. Only when she gets him down to the storeroom he’ll last a lot, lot longer.

  Mmm…

  Her hand freezes on the doorknob; there are voices inside the consulting room. She frowns at the display, checking. No one should be in there—it’s reserved for The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit. How dare they! How dare they get in the way! And then the voices say something that makes her flinch.