Halfhead

by Stuart B. MacBride

  ‘WOULD YOU LIKE THAT, STEPHEN?‘

  The sobbing is louder than ever, his grimace opening up the smooth edges of the wound, making it bleed.

  ‘MUMMY’S HEAD IN A BOX.‘

  But he’s stopped listening; he’s lost in his world of despair. He’s just sentenced his wife and her unborn child to death, and that’s something he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life. Dr Westfield glances back to the clock again. Which will last exactly eighteen minutes, give or take thirty seconds. She wants to be out of here in plenty of time to avoid the rush and prying eyes.

  Speaking of eyes…

  She climbs up onto the operating table, straddling Stephen’s groin. With gentle, rhythmic motions she rocks back and forth, trying to get an erection out of him, but he isn’t playing. Shame. But never mind: she’s got something that’ll take his mind off his poor dead wife.

  She twists the top off a tube of skinglue and runs a thin line along the top and bottom lids of both his eyes. With gentle fingers she pulls them open and sticks them down. He looks like a startled cartoon character.

  She leans forward and tries to lick his right eyeball, but her tongue is too unruly, too swollen to comply, and all that comes out is a stream of spittle. It spirals down onto his cornea and pools in the deep red folds underneath. Her left hand reaches out and plucks the surgeon’s wand from its holder. With a hot buzz it comes online and she eases the hair trigger back and forth, feeling for the right level. She wants this to be nice and gentle.

  ‘Yyyyy hvvvvvv awwwwways hddddddd boooooffflllll eyyyyyyyssssssssss.’

  The wand’s nozzle comes to rest over the pupil of Stephen’s left eye and she opens her mouth slightly, trying not to pull the muscles too hard. She takes a breath: it tastes of antiseptic and recycled air and Stephen’s sweat.

  Her finger caresses the trigger.

  Now the air tastes of eye.

  23

  ‘Sometimes, William, I think you’re hell-bent on destroying your career.’ Director SmithHamilton made a big show of massaging her temples. Her office was nice and warm, in contrast to the day outside, rain hammering against her panoramic window. ‘Do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do than run around cleaning up after you?’

  Will kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Why must you always be so difficult, William? Why must you always cause trouble?’

  ‘At no point did I contradict any of your standing orders. You said to steer clear of Sherman House and that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘Then why did I have Ken Peitai on the phone this morning telling me how much he enjoyed your little chat yesterday? Oh he was full of lovely words about you William, “what a solid agent he is”, “fine head on his shoulders”, “credit to the Network”.’

  That didn’t make any sense—why would the slimy little bastard call the Director with a glowing character reference? ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m confused: did Mr Peitai complain about any aspect of my behaviour?’

  She scowled at him from under the razor-sharp edge of her fringe. ‘No, but Governor Clark did. Again!’ Director SmithHamilton sank back into her executive chair and went into the head massaging routine again. ‘Why were you speaking to him at all? I told you to stay away from Sherman House!’

  ‘I did!’ Getting irate wasn’t going to help, so Will took a deep breath and tried to sound reasonable. ‘I was at Comlab Six on a teambuilding exercise with DS Cameron when Mr Peitai approached me. He told me to stop digging for information on him, his boss and the PsychTech programme. Said it was a matter of national security.’

  ‘National security?’ Her mouth stretched into a thin line, turned down at the edges.

  ‘I managed to get into Glasgow Royal Infirmary’s main computers and—’

  ‘William! What have I told you about unauthorized data access!’

  ‘Peitai and his boss both worked at the hospital six years ago: Kikan was a halfheader, Peitai was a PsychTech datamonkey. Whatever they’re up to, it’s got something to do with the PsychTech programme. I’ve got profilers and analysts going over the files and—’

  ‘I’ve told you time and time again not to go traipsing around in other people’s computers without my express permission! Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve got us into?’

  ‘Turns out Alastair Middleton wasn’t the only killer Doctor Westfield built. I’ve got proof that—’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ She settled back in her chair, arms tightly crossed across her chest. ‘Now we get to it.’

  Will pulled a datablock from his pocket and slapped it down on Director SmithHamilton’s desk.

  ‘These are the files I got out of the PsychTech programme. They prove Colin Mitchell was another one of her ‘little projects’, and so was Allan Brown. All three of them turned into killers by that murdering bitch. She—’

  ‘This is all about you getting revenge isn’t it?’

  ‘What? No. Peitai and Kikan are—’

  ‘Don’t think I can’t see the connection. Doctor Westfield scrubs toilets at Sherman House, so you can’t stay away. One of your own people gets killed because of your obsession—don’t interrupt—and even though you’re told not to go back again, you do. Then you go gallivanting off looking for files from the project she was in charge of and Detective Sergeant Cameron suffers severe head injuries!’

  She slammed a hand down on the desktop, making the holo of Mars jiggle. ‘And now Services tell me you were running around yesterday trying to arrest halfheads. Halfheads! And you sit there trying to justify your bizarre behaviour with a spurious tale about some big conspiracy!’

  ‘That’s not true! Peitai and Kikan—’

  ‘Work for some very important people, and I won’t have you interfering with their project!’

  Will played his last card: ‘They’re giving people VR syndrome.’

  Her eyes widened. She hadn’t been suspecting that. No matter how much political pressure she was under, Director SmithHamilton still knew right from wrong. Hopefully.

  She sat there with her mouth hanging open for a moment, staring at him. ‘You have proof?’

  Will nodded. ‘We’ve got two corpses in the mortuary, both with traces of a chemical residue in their brains. It mimics the effects of the syndrome perfectly. George has sent samples off for analysis.’

  She leaned across her desk and picked up the datablock with the PsychTech files in it, turning it over in her hands. ‘I don’t like this, William. I don’t like this one little bit. You should have informed me right from the very start. How dare you go behind my back and set up a major investigation without my knowledge!’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Your behaviour has gone rapidly downhill ever since Doctor Westfield died. I checked with our counsellors, you haven’t made an appointment with any of them!’

  ‘I didn’t think it would be—’

  ‘You will go back to your office and make an appointment for a week of extended therapy sessions.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Or you can go downstairs and clear out your desk. Your choice.’

  Silence.

  Then Will said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘You will then make yourself useful and go supervise your team! Agent Alexander has one of the poorest clear-up rates I’ve ever seen. It’s supposed to be your job to make him produce results.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Shape up, Mr Hunter. Shape up or you’ll find yourself looking for something else to fill your day. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Now get out of my sight.’

  She sits in her toilet-paper nest, examining her lovely new face in a stolen mirror. The skin’s swollen and puffy, black and blue, but to her it’s beautiful. Dr Stephen Bexley—God rest his tortured soul—really was a genius. Before his unexpected, messy, painful death.

  The bruises will disappear within twenty-four hours, as long as she keeps taking the post-operative drugs. The
swelling will take a little longer. It makes her face lumpy and bumpy, as if she’s stuffed her skin with half-chewed fruit gums.

  Her long blonde hair is still sticky and matted, clinging to her head like strangled string. She can’t wash it till this evening when the skinpaint has fully cured; the last thing she wants is for her new face to start melting.

  The handful of blockers she snapped into her neck after getting rid of Stephen’s body have left her blissfully relaxed, but she longs to get away from this dungeon, with its racks of bedpans and piles of plastic sheets. She wants to feel sunlight on her new face.

  She slides out onto the storeroom floor and peels off Stephen’s old surgical gown. He doesn’t need it anymore: he’s all burned away.

  The clothes Kris wasn’t wearing when she and her boyfriend were caught in flagrante delicto are clean and disinfected: washed by hand in the little sink. The lacy confectionary pretending to be Kris’s undergarments is a bit cheap and tarty for Dr Westfield’s tastes, but she slips into them anyway. The bra hangs on her, its cups empty and sad. She hasn’t got breasts any more, just a pair of U-shaped scars where the surgeon hacked them off—de-sexing her so no one would be tempted to live out their filthy fantasies by screwing a serial killer. She cheers the bra up with a few handfuls of toilet paper. The panties are slightly more disturbing: her catheter makes a tiny tent in the front, like a little erection. As soon as she’s taken care of business here she’ll go somewhere new and book herself some more surgery. She will be a woman again.

  Dr Westfield pulls on Kris’s green trousers, T-shirt and white trainers. They make her look like an intern, but there’s nothing she can do about that. So she throws the white labcoat over her shoulders and examines her reflection again.

  Her new face makes her look…odd, unfamiliar. It’s not just the swelling, or her old nose—it’s the bottom jaw. She hasn’t had one for six miserable, brain-dead years. Carefully she pulls back her top lip and exposes her teeth. That’s what she’s used to, that hideous parody of a human face.

  She slips her new credit cards into her pocket—Kris, her dead boyfriend, and Stephen won’t be needing them any longer—along with one or two medical supplies that’ll come in handy later. Then Doctor Fiona Westfield says goodbye to the storeroom that’s been her home for the last five days.

  She doesn’t look back.

  Will stood in the rain with his collar turned up and his mouth turned down. On the other side of the ‘CRIME SCENE’ tape half a dozen of Glasgow’s finest were slowly picking their way through a mountain of rubbish skulking beneath the Kinning Park flyover.

  Agent Brian Alexander was knee-deep in filth, directing the search with all the joy of someone who’s just found a jobbie in his bathtub. Will ducked under the yellow-and-black tape, trying not to think about what he’d just stood in. It was brown and it squelched, and that was more than he really wanted to know.

  ‘Why is it,’ he asked, dragging his shoe along the side of a pile of sodden paper, ‘that you always end up with cases like this, Brian?’

  Brian grunted. ‘Because the Bitch Queen hates my guts, that’s why. I mean look at this!’ He waved a fat arm at the vast pile of rain-soaked garbage. ‘Why does this need real people? I could’ve grabbed a bunch of halfheads to grub about in the shite, but no! That would be too easy. What we want is some poor Network bastards up to their knees in pish!’

  Will stood with his back to the wind, watching a Behemoth from Dis-Com-Lein drift across the leaden skies towards Glasgow Central, and wondering what the cloned publishing executive he’d slept with all those years ago was doing now. Probably not wading through stinking mounds of garbage.

  At least here, under the expressway, they got a little shelter from the rain. All they really had to worry about was the dirt, the germs, and the disease-carrying vermin.

  Will pointed at the team going through the unofficial landfill site. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Two Bluecoats, missing since Friday.’ Brian dug his hands into his pockets. ‘Station commander didn’t do anythin’ about it till Saturday afternoon. Says he’s no’ got enough manpower to do a proper search. Tosser. He finally gets round to tellin’ us about it and we have to fight him all bloody weekend to get their coffin dodgers turned on. He says they’re only used as a last resort. Like PC Douglas and MacDonald’re out there eatin’ chip butties and skoofin’ Irn-Bru!’ Brian sniffed back a drop hanging on the end of his nose and spat it out into the rubbish heap. ‘Anyway, we broadcast their ident codes first thing this morning and bingo. Both signals are comin’ from this pile of shite under the expressway. So now here we are, diggin’ through it by hand, lookin’ for them.’

  Will nodded, looking out over the mound of mouldering debris. ‘How come there aren’t any Bluecoats helping?’

  Brian grunted again. ‘Station commander couldn’t spare any. Can you believe it? No’ even to look for his own people! Unbe-fuckin’-lievable.’

  Will had to agree.

  They walked the perimeter of the rubbish heap, Brian bemoaning his fate and Will making distracted soothing noises, not really listening. He was going over the chewing out he’d got from Director SmithHamilton instead. She’d taken what was pretty damning evidence and dismissed it out of hand. It wasn’t like her at all.

  And she had the cheek to say he was the one acting irrationally.

  ‘You know,’ he said, watching a Network trooper in a filthy grey jumpsuit digging through a multicoloured pile of trash. ‘Director SmithHamilton thinks I should go get some therapy. Thinks I’ve got “issues”.’

  ‘There’s a fuckin’ shock. You’ve no’ really been the same since that cow Westfield turned up burnt tae a crisp. I mean I’m no’ surprised: what with her deid and all the shite goin’ on at Sherman House…’

  ‘Don’t you start.’

  ‘Look, you’re only babysittin’ me today cos Her Majesty tore a strip off your arse.’ He turned and poked Will in the shoulder. ‘She used to think the sun shone out that very hole. People are beginnin’ to think you’re a born-again bamheid.’

  Will laughed. ‘You know something? They might be right.’

  Something crackled and sniffed in his ear followed by George’s voice: ‘Will, Brian, is that you? Hello? Hello?’

  ‘You don’t have to shout George, we can hear you.’

  Brian’s response was a bit more to the point: ‘Quiet down ya snotty wee bastard!’

  ‘Oops, sorry. I’ve got some bad news…and some worse news. The labs have lost the samples I sent them.’

  ‘Soddin’ hell, that’s just bloody typical.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Will, ‘we’ve still got the original bodies right? We can just take more samples and—’

  ‘That’s the worse news.’ A loud sniff rattled their eardrums. ‘Services came by while I was out at a meeting and picked up the wrong bodies—they were meant to take the two jumpers we scraped up last week—but they took the Sherman House ones instead. They’ve gone to the great barbecue in the sky. I only found out when I went to get another slice of brain to send off.’

  ‘Tell me we still have the SOC recordings!’

  ‘Oh…I didn’t check. You want me to?’

  ‘Please.’

  The pathologist’s voice clicked off and Brian shook his head. ‘They’ll be gone too, you know that don’t you?’ He spat another glob of phlegm onto the garbage at his feet. ‘We’re fucked: we’ve got no evidence left.’

  ‘We’ve got one last bit, but I don’t know how it fits in yet.’

  Brian raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Peitai wanted me to keep my nose out of the PsychTech files, so I went digging. I’ve got a team going through everything I downloaded, looking for something that implicates the weasely little shite. Something we can use.’ He gave that same bitter laugh again. ‘Not that Her Royal Highness will do anything about it—Governor Clark’s been on the phone again. They’re putting serious pressure on her to bury the whole thing
.’

  ‘Shite…So what we goin’ to do?’

  Will looked up at the mountain of rubbish. ‘Keep digging.’

  The apartment used to belong to an unmarried man. He said he liked nursery rhymes, so she cut off his tail with a carving knife; other than that she can’t remember much about him. The rooms are tidy and ordered—unlike some of her other places—and a small layer of dust covers the surfaces, but a quick once round with a damp cloth will put that right.

  She drops her shopping bags on the couch and lowers herself into an armchair. What a lovely day. She’s managed to max out all three credit cards in the space of an hour and a half. The lovely Kris, her boyfriend Norman, and good old Doctor Bexley have bought her more comfort than she’s known in six years. Kris’s cheap, lacy underwear is gone, replaced by the finest silk, the toilet paper padding replaced with soft pink cashmere. It’s vain and silly, but it makes her feel good to have breasts again, even if they’re only make-believe.

  And she has bought herself a little treat. She pulls a small glass jar from one of the bags. It was expensive—even by her standards—but definitely worth it. She twists open the top and breathes in the rich, earthy scent. Savours it. Then dips a finger into the sticky liquid, coating her skin like amber. Real honey from real bees. Like the ones in her head. Rare and exquisite. Decadent. It tastes of summer: sweet, warm, and wide, the flavour almost overpowering after all this time without a mouth.

  She allows herself two more dips, then screws the jar shut again and unlaces her brand-new, slender-heeled boots. God…that’s better. For years she’s worn nothing but utility footwear; she deserves to be pampered. Even if it does result in blisters and sore feet. A good soak in the tub will help, but before she can run a bath she has a little matter to attend to.

  Stephen’s wife is in the bathroom, surgi-taped into a black plastic body-bag with just her face showing. Dr Westfield leans into the tub and looks at her. She’s almost angelic, up to her prefrontal lobes in sedatives, but the effect is somewhat spoiled by the large chunk of scalp missing from the top of her head—the wound covered in a layer of skinpaint to stop it oozingred everywhere. The nutrient pouches plugged into her arms are almost empty; this evening she’ll start to dehydrate and after that death won’t be far away. After all, she’s pregnant. She’ll be dying for two.