Halfhead

5

It started out as a faint crack, like the sound an ice cube makes dropped into warm water. Then another. And another. Then the sound changed, grew deeper, got closer. Gunfire echoed down from the floors above, and Rhodes’ voice crackled in Will’s earpiece:

‘…repeat, we have hostiles!’

No: this wasn’t fair! He’d been careful. They were heading home!

Sergeant Nairn punched up the power on his Thrummer and shouted: ‘Dickson, Wright, get your arses back here on the double!’

They all sprinted for the broken escalator. Nairn jumped onto the ramp, his Thrummer searching for targets. ‘Talk to me Rhodes, what the hell’s going on up there?’

‘…Fifteen, maybe more. Automatic projectile weapons; I think I see a Zinger.’ The harsh burr of a Thrummer tore through the air. ‘Orders?’

Nairn looked at Will and waited.

‘We…It…’

‘Sir, I hate to hassle you, but now would be a good fucking time.’

‘But we…’ Deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

‘Fine.’ Nairn hit his throat mike again. ‘Rhodes, you are cleared for deadly force. I want everything neutralized and-’

‘No!’ Will grabbed the sergeant’s arm. ‘We’ve had two cases of VR syndrome on this floor in one week, probably hundreds more we don’t know about. You have to keep any contact to a minimum or this whole place will explode.’

‘Oh Jesus…’ Nairn swallowed, hard. ‘Rhodes-disregard last order, non-lethal force only.’

‘Sarge? Have you gone off your fuckin’-’

‘Shut up and do what you’re told. People: we need dust-off and we need it now!’ He charged up the ramp, with privates Dickson and Wright hurrying after him, leaving Will, DS Cameron and the SOC team behind.

Angry noises filtered up from the floors below: it didn’t matter that the scanners had been turned off and packed way, it would take time for the building’s local network to reboot. Sherman House was suffering from VR withdrawal. And if the residents couldn’t have computer-generated death and destruction, they could always have the real thing.

‘Erm…’ Beaton shifted from foot to foot. ‘Not meaning to be funny or anything, sir, but shouldn’t we be getting the hell out of here?’

Stein fiddled with the Field Zapper at his hip. The SOC team only carried small arms-anything bigger would have made manoeuvring the scanning equipment impossible. He was flicking the power switch on and off, on and off, never quite allowing it to get fully charged. Eyes darting up and down the corridor. Licking his top lip. The sound of gunfire was getting louder. ‘It’s going to be OK, right? No problem…’

Will pushed them towards the ramp. ‘I’ll take point; DS Cameron, you’re back door.’

She nodded, a faint sheen of perspiration speckling her brow. The bag of severed halfheads swung as she spun round to face back down the ramp, making her stagger. There was no way she could provide covering fire carrying a sack full of heads and Will told her so.

‘We can’t just leave them, they’re evidence!’

‘OK, fine…give them here. I’ll take-’

A soft ‘phfwoom’ sounded from the floor above and suddenly the entire corridor was bathed in flickering orange light. Then a sheet of flame exploded down the ramp.

‘GET DOWN!’

Will leapt, bouncing off the wall and twisting on the rebound to land behind the escalator, putting its bulk between himself and the fireball. Stein wasn’t so lucky. He was still straining with the scanning equipment when the blaze caught him. Beaton cowered on the other side of the scanner as the fire rushed past; leaving her unscathed while her colleague burned.

Stein staggered off the ramp, his hair and clothes ablaze, screaming.

Will tore off his own jacket and dived on top of him, smothering the flames. Stein’s thrashing body gradually fell still.

The bitter tang of smoke filled the air, and the corridor’s sprinklers finally kicked in, bathing the hallway with lukewarm, stale water.

‘Damn it!’ Will flipped Stein over onto his back and felt for a pulse. The trooper’s face was scarlet and swollen, blackened in places, the skin split open on his cheeks and forehead, wisps of steam drifting up into the ineffective drizzle. There was a faint tremor beneath Will’s fingers, but Stein wasn’t breathing.

‘Is he dead?’

Will looked around to see DS Cameron struggling to her feet. The back of her bright-green suit was burnt, crackling and flaking as she moved. Her meticulous asymmetric bun was ruined: from the nape of her neck up, her hair was tattered and crisped, angry red skin showing through underneath. She was shaking.

More gunshots. Closer now.

Go back to Sherman House, Will. It’ll be good for you, Will. Will it bollocks.

He waved DS Cameron over. ‘Get him into the apartment.’

She stood, looking down at Stein’s roasted body, her face grey and smudged with soot. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he.’

‘He will be if you don’t stop fucking about!’ The corridor was getting darker as the flames on the floor above guttered out in the artificial rain. ‘Move it!’

DS Cameron gritted her teeth, grabbed a handful of Stein’s baked-on jumpsuit, and dragged him back towards flat 47126, swearing all the way. Will scrambled up the escalator ramp, helping Beaton manhandle the SOC gear down onto the soaking carpet. They hauled the heavy metal canister along the corridor, following DS Cameron into Allan Brown’s flat.

Will slammed the front door shut behind them, and keyed his throat-mike.

‘Sergeant Nairn? What’s going on up there?’

The signal was crackly, the older man’s voice breathless and worried: ‘Escalator’s impassable. Some spragger’s brought down the ramp.’ Will could hear gunshots, like small pops of static between the words. The jarring roar of Dickson’s Bull Thrummer drowned out what was said next, but when the noise died down Nairn was saying, ‘…concussion, and Floyd’s been shot in the shoulder. We’re laying down covering fire, trying to keep the wee bastards’ heads down. Can you make the stairs?’

Will watched Private Beaton clamber on top of Stein, rip open his chitin, and start chest compressions.

‘Don’t you dare die on me, Dick. You hear me?’ Keeping a steady rhythm on top of his heart. ‘Don’t you fucking dare…’

DS Cameron had her lips clamped over Stein’s mouth, forcing breath into his lungs. There was no way they could carry him up all the way up to the roof and keep him alive at the same time.

‘Negative. We need another option.’

‘We can’t get down to you. Not without a lot of dead bodies.’

And then the violence would spread and spread until the whole bloody building went up. Will swore.

DS Cameron shouted across the room, ‘We’re losing him!’

‘What do you want us to do?’

Outside in the corridor, the gunfire was getting louder. The locals were coming.

Plan. Need a plan.

Will scanned the room: he had two Network troopers-one on the verge of death-a traumatized Bluecoat, and a knackered set of scanning equipment. And none of the evidence they’d just risked their lives to collect.

‘Where’s the bag of halfheads?’

‘Sir? What should we do?’

‘Shut up and let me think!’

He stuck his head out into the corridor: the evidence bag lay against the wall by the escalator ramp. He was halfway down the hall before he realized what he was doing and by that time it was too late to turn back.

The wall lights were overflowing with stale water, casting wriggling snakes of dim light as Will splashed past. Now that the fire was out, the sprinklers were little more than an incontinent dribble. They’d probably done more damage to the building than the flames had.

He slithered to a halt by the escalator, grabbed the discarded evidence bag and hefted it over his shoulder-staggering under the weight. He peered up the ramp. Half way up, it came to an abrupt end, dirty orange rebar sticking out of the fractured foamcrete. Sergeant Nairn was right: there was no way anyone could jump that gap. Not without a body-wire…

‘Fuck.’ It was like a kick in the goolies, but it was the only option.

He reached up with trembling fingers and clicked on his throat-mike, trying to keep his voice steady: ‘Lieutenant Brand, I need you to get that Dragonfly airborne.’

‘Forget it. We’re not leaving you behind!’

‘Just do what you’re bloody well told, for once.’ There was something rectangular and half-melted at Will’s feet: Stein’s Field Zapper-the one he’d kept fiddling with-its plastic casing blistered and cracked. As Will bent down to pick it up, the building went ominously silent.

Not good. Definitely not good.

Will splashed his way back down the corridor, lugging the heavy bag of severed heads. ‘I want that gunship outside apartment one twenty-six, forty-seventh floor-drop out five bodywires and a cargo net. We’re going for hard D.’

‘From inside a building? Are you mad?’

‘If you’ve got any better ideas, let’s hear them, because I’m all out.’ His earpiece went silent. And then,

‘Nairn, get your team back to the ship. Pickup in forty-five seconds.’ Static burst across the signal as the Dragonfly’s engines went to full power. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Will.’

Struggling along the gloomy, waterlogged corridor Will hoped so too.

He was almost at the flat’s front door when a hard crack sounded behind him. A plume of water danced at his feet. Another shot and the bag on his back jumped, throwing him forward. Will just managed to stay on his feet as more bullets tore into the walls around him, sending out puffs of paint and shredded plasticboard.

He scrambled into the flat and slammed the door shut.

‘We’ve got company!’ He heaved the bag of heads into the middle of the room. ‘Get Stein ready to move. Beaton, clip his bodyharness to yours, I don’t want him bashing his brains out on the window frame. Cameron,’ he pointed at the broad strips of black plastic blocking out the world, ‘tear that crap down.’

She grabbed a corner and tugged. Light flooded into the room.

Will turned Stein’s burnt Field Zapper over in his hands. The battery lights were still winking away merrily to themselves: with any luck it wouldn’t short out and electrocute him.

‘Where the hell’s that damn Dragonfly?’

Right on cue the sunlight disappeared again. The flat’s windows rattled in their frames as Lieutenant Brand’s gunship twisted in the air, dipping its nose down to expose the double drop bay doors in its belly.

A single bullet thudded into the apartment door, ripping a hole straight through it and into the tiny hall. And then another one. And another.

‘That’s as close as you get!’

Will pulled up his Whomper and thumbed the trigger. The assault rifle kicked in his hands-its bark deafening in the confines of the filthy lounge-and the front door tore itself apart. One moment it was there, and the next it was a hail of sizzling plastic, pattering down on the threadbare carpet. He slung the Whomper over his shoulder and powered up Stein’s Field Zapper. The weapon’s lights flickered then died.

‘Fuck.’ He thumped it against the wall. Shook it. Tried again.

A tatty, ginger-haired figure leapt into the gap where the door used to be.

She was big-boned rather than fat, dressed in the same eclectic, colourful rags they’d seen this morning. Tribal scars twisted across her pale skin, pulling at the corners of her ice-green eyes. She was carrying an old F24, virtually an antique, and as she brought it up, a smile split her face. Teeth filed to points.

Will shot her.

The arc from Stein’s Field Zapper caught her in the chest, throwing her back into the sodden corridor. Stepping forward, Will pointed the weapon at the waterlogged carpet and held the trigger down.

A chorus of shrieks and squeals erupted in the hall as the blue lightning danced down the corridor. Then there was the sound of bodies hitting the floor. And then silence. Will didn’t risk sticking his head out to check the results: someone might have been wearing insulated boots.

DS Cameron forced the lounge window open. Debris leapt into the air, dancing and spinning in the hot backwash from the Dragonfly’s engines, like angry, paper seagulls.

Sergeant Nairn dropped from the ship’s belly, a cluster of body wires reeling out behind him. He grabbed at the open window with both hands and DS Cameron lunged forwards, dragging him into the room. Before his feet could even touch the carpet, gunfire was clanging off the ship’s hull: a Network Dragonfly made a big and inviting target.

Something bellowed from the floor above and the whole craft lurched.

‘Come on people, get a move on: we can’t hang around here all bloody afternoon!’

Will helped Nairn clip on Stein and Beaton’s bodywires while DS Cameron wrapped another set of wires through the handles on the scanning canister, finishing them off with a huge, in elegant knot. The bag of heads went into the cargo net.

That just left Will and the Detective Sergeant.

As they struggled into their harnesses a tubular canister bounced in through the door and landed on the grubby carpet-little red lights chasing each other round and round the ends.

‘Oh shit…’ Will punched his throat-mike and braced himself. ‘Hard D. Now!’

The Dragonfly leapt away from the building, yanking them out of the living room window. The scanning canister caught the frame side on, glass and twisted aluminium spraying everywhere. Someone screamed, the sound whipped away as the gunship rolled into a tight turn, accelerating hard.

The explosion tore Allan Brown’s apartment to shreds.

The sun hangs in the dirty blue sky like a jewelled furnace. It’s blurred around the edge, a faint shimmer of chemical fog that grows thicker as she watches. The wind must have shifted, bringing with it the firestacks’ industrial perfume.

She’s been wandering the streets for hours, drifting through her own personal smog. Faces swim in and out of focus: colleagues, patients, victims…

Something flashes overhead and she turns to watch it roar across the sky. Small figures dangle beneath it, slowly being drawn up into its belly. The shape is familiar, haunting: like a bad dream only half remembered. But right now everything is like that.

She doesn’t even know who she is.

Her stomach rumbles and she flinches, startled by the sound. It’s been six years since she’s felt anything as profound as hunger. She knows this because one of the city’s big, floating Scrubbers carries a flickering advert with today’s date.

Six years.

Six years since she’s been able to feel anything at all.

Hunger. Love. Anger. Pleasure. Revenge. Lust. Pain. Seven perfect words, much hotter than a mere ball of burning gas ninety-three-million miles away. Pretty words: shiny like the blade of a knife.

She drifts on, ignoring everything but the growing hollow in her belly, unable to do anything about it; she can’t feed herself, they saw to that on the operating table.

Six years of intravenous nourishment. Nil by mouth.

They took it all away…

But she’s going to get it back. Oh yes. She’s going to get it all back.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’ Private Dickson straddled Stein’s scorched body in the darkened drop bay, pumping away at his heart. Every time she said ‘breathe’ Private Rhodes pinched Stein’s nose and blew into his mouth. Then they would wait for his lungs to deflate and the whole pattern would repeat again.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Sergeant Nairn was up to his armpits in the resuscitation unit mounted on the drop bay wall. Cables snaked out from it, lying in coils at his feet, little sparks fizzling away in the depths of the circuit boards, adding the smell of hot plastic to the harsh tang of burnt hair and burnt flesh.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Beaton sat on the mesh floor of her cubicle, head back, face pale, clutching her left wrist where it had caught the flat’s windowsill on the way out. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Stein since they’d laid him out on the central walkway like a fish for filleting.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will lurched back along the walkway to where Private Floyd was slumped against the bulkhead. The drop bay was baking hot, but Floyd was shivering, his forehead glassy with cold sweat. The front of his battle dress glistened with blood, but at least his heart was still beating.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will knelt in front of him and peeled away the sticky fabric surrounding the wound. When Sergeant Nairn said the trooper had been shot, Will had expected some sort of flesh wound, not a gaping hole. It looked as if someone had welded a dozen nails onto the business end of a sledgehammer and then pounded merry hell out of Floyd’s shoulder.

‘What on earth did you stand in front of? A truck?’

Floyd hissed a couple of short breaths through clenched teeth, then tried for a smile. ‘Think it was an old…old P-Seven-Fifty.’

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

Will dug into the small first-aid locker at the side of the cubicle and pulled out a handful of blockers. He snapped three of the small, plastic ampoules into the injured man’s neck, waiting for them to take effect before popping the cap off a tin of skinpaint.

‘How’s…how’s Stein?’

‘Something’s wrong with the crash kit: no oxygen, no EKG, no defib. Nothing.’ He gave the tin a shake, then sprayed thick, pink mist into the wound.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: fucking breathe damn you!’

The paint bubbled where it touched raw flesh, sealing the ruptured veins, bridging the gap between the tattered muscles. It didn’t look very pretty, but at least it would hold Floyd’s shoulder together till they reached Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

The trooper blinked. ‘Woah…’ Then a broad, lazy smile stretched his face wide. Three blockers had probably been a bit much, but Will didn’t really care-and from the look of things, neither did Private Floyd.

‘You going to be OK?’

Floyd just beamed-so Will left him to it, lurching back up the drop bay.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

‘What’s our ETA?’ Detective Sergeant Cameron stood holding onto the edges of her booth, staring down at Stein’s pale body. Trembling.

‘Two, maybe three minutes.’

She nodded. Cleared her throat.

‘How you doing?’

‘Is he…’ She took one hand off the railing and ran it across her soot-smeared cheek. ‘I don’t get it. I mean, one minute it was all fine and the next it was…everywhere. We didn’t even do anything. They just…’ She shuddered.

Will gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘You did OK back there.’

She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Is that what it’s like in the Network? Everyone wants to kill you?’

‘Look: why don’t you give Nairn a hand with the crash kit? You cracked that securilock in ten seconds flat, maybe you can get it going too.’

DS Cameron nodded. Wiped a hand across her eyes. Took a deep breath. Marched over to the tangled mass of wires and levered Sergeant Nairn out of the way.

One minute later she’d got the machinery working.

Two minutes after that, Private Richard Stein was dead.

The hours all melt into one another, slipping by, carrying her along with them. Sunset paints the horizon with violent red. The sky is bleeding just for her. One by one the city’s streetlights flicker on, a Mexican wave of sodium fireflies as the day slowly dies, their light giving the greasy city an unhealthy yellow pallor.

A garishly painted Roadhugger hisses to a halt beside her. She ignores it, just keeps trudging along the baked pavement. And then the voices start:

‘Jeeeesus, would you look at the state of it! That blood?’

‘Some bugger must’ve cut it. Disnae matter, just shove it in the back with the others.’

Rough hands grab her shoulders, but she’s too tired to resist. They haul open the back doors and bundle her into an empty bay. Then paw at her flesh.

‘Cannae see any wounds,’ says a man who looks like a ruptured pig. His face is fleshy and bloated, a thin fringe of hair outlining the uppermost of his many chins. ‘Think we should take it straight tae the hospital?’

‘Bugger that. Only got another six to pick up and then I’m aff home for the night. Let them worry about it back at the depot.’

Pig-Man frowns. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood here Harry, what if someone’s chibbed it? What if it dies?’

‘If it dies, it dies. It’s just a fuckin’ halfhead! Who cares?’

Pig-Man is quiet for a moment, then he sniffs. ‘Yeah, suppose you’re right.’ He pulls the restraining bar down, clambers back out into the night, and slams the door. Then waves through the window at them, sharing a joke with his ugly friend as they walk back around to the cab.

The engine starts and she lurches against the bar, blinking. Light-headed. Hungry. Sharp and broken. Bees and broken glass.

She needs to take her medication. Or someone will-get-hurt.

Another lurch, and one of the halfheads stumbles. They’re all around her: freakish faces devoid of thought or emotion. The rancid smell of their sweat is everywhere. Bluebottles and dead birds. The one in the next bay is staring off into the middle distance, the barcode tattooed over its left eye fresh and sharp. A new convert to the ranks of the living dead.

She reaches up and touches her own forehead, trying to feel the tattoo she knows will be inked into her own skin. The colours faded, the edges blurred after all these years.

It holds the key to everything she is and was. It holds her name.

The Roadhugger grumbles from stop to stop, and each time the back door opens, Pig-Man pushes another halfhead into an empty compartment. It doesn’t seem to worry him that his cargo was human once. That they were shiny things with dreams and feelings. Because that doesn’t matter any more: their brains have been burned away. They’re just lumps of barely sentient meat to be used as slaves. Walking, mutilated, orange-boilersuited reminders that crime doesn’t pay.

Or rather, that getting caught doesn’t pay.

Caught by a man in a dark-blue suit, with a jagged scar on his face. The scar would be invisible after all these years, but the face would be the same. A little older. Maybe a little more grey in the hair…Would his screams still sound the same?

The Roadhugger stops outside a large, featureless, concrete building, then the vehicle slowly judders backward towards an open loading bay. Beeping.

She knows this place: she’s seen it every morning and every night for the last six years. A sign on the wall, in cheerful orange and blue, reads: ‘SERVICES, UNIT 47 EAST. H-HEADS: LOADING AND UNLOADING’.

They will clean her and feed her and give her a place to rest until morning. She is home.

There will be plenty of time for revenge later.