Halfhead

20

Will looked back over his shoulder and watched the city burn. The air was misty with evaporated flesh: soft pink clouds drifting gently to the ground, leaving a faint slick of human cells on anything they touched. He turned his attention away from the funeral pyres and palls of thick, greasy smoke and examined the Whomper in his hands. It was less than half full; whatever Jo was going to do she’d have to do it soon.

The barricade he was hiding behind rocked under another onslaught. Chips of smoking concrete rained down all around him. The noise was deafening. Over in the distance, through the fog of skin and bone, he could just make out Jo’s outline, hiding behind the wreckage of a school bus. The vehicle looked as if it had been put through a mangle, and Jo didn’t look much better. Her jumpsuit was stained and scorched, the middle section slashed almost in half, exposing swollen, burnt flesh.

She looked back at him, their eyes meeting over the barrel of her Crackling Gun. For a moment Will just crouched there, not moving, then the man standing next to him exploded.

The gun in Jo’s hands howled.

They were running out of time.

He vaulted the barricade, and sprinted across the war-torn street, trying not to get his head blown off. The pavement buckled beneath his feet as he ran towards the dark-red troop carrier, chunks of concrete shattering all around as the gunners tried to kill him.

Jo’s Crackling Gun howled again, her siege weapon carving bite-sized chunks of metal out of the carrier’s hull. Will slithered to a halt, skidding on a patch of someone as he drew level with the craft. He snatched up his Whomper and turned the driver’s head into a green-grey stain on the vehicle’s roof.

The passenger snatched up something shiny and pointed, like an electric squid, lights twinkling along its length. Will didn’t wait to see what it did, just turned the Whomper on him and thumbed the trigger, spreading him all over the inside of the cab. He didn’t even have time to scream.

Comlab’s computer-generated fantasies always made Will feel vaguely uncomfortable. Here it was OK to kill anything you liked and, as he jumped about the game ring like a lunatic, he couldn’t escape the feeling that it was all just a little bit too real. As if the boundaries between what was, and what wasn’t, didn’t apply here. But that didn’t stop him playing.

Will leaned back against the dispenser, totally knackered. Sweat ran down his back and pooled in his unders; he never wore the right thing to play in the game rings. Jo was a lot more sensible: she’d ditched her day clothes and slipped into an all-in-one that clung like a second skin. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, a thick red line marking where the headset had sat. But she was smiling.

He ran a hand over his face, then wiped his damp hands on his trousers. ‘How did we do?’

Jo gulped her plastic of fizzy down. ‘Not bad,’ she said, suppressing a belch. ‘Not the highest score ever, but we kicked some serious Martian arse.’

‘Glad you came?’

She rubbed at her forehead. ‘Been years since I had to wear a headset. Forgot how much it throws you off. Full immersion is a hell of a lot easier. Less sweaty too.’ Jo looked at him for a moment. ‘You really don’t have a jack point? On an Assistant Director’s salary?’

‘Yeah…Sorry about that.’

‘Nah, it was fun. Kinda nostalgic.’ She reached up and touched his cheek, then grimaced. ‘Urgh…You’re sopping!’ She backed off towards the female locker rooms. ‘I’m going to shower and change. If you weren’t such a mincehead, Mr “Outside Clothes Will Be Fine”, you could do the same.’

‘Blah, blah, blah. I’ll see you in the cafeteria, OK?’

‘Try not to stink the place out.’ She stepped closer and for a moment Will though she was going to kiss him. Then something happened and she changed the movement into a smile instead, turned, and disappeared through the locker-room door.

They’d been like that all afternoon; as if last night had never happened and they were back to acting like nervous teenagers. It was driving him mad.

Slinging his new jacket over his damp shoulder Will went for a stroll through the gaming hall to cool down a bit. The place was mobbed, as usual: the last shift of gamers milling around, talking over their latest adventure, even though they’d only finished playing it five minutes ago; the next shift plugged in and ready to go. As he walked around he watched them logging on. It was one of the funniest bits for him, over a thousand people, standing in wide, elevated rings eight feet across, doing the hand jive: hitting buttons only they could see. Loading up pre-saved characters and scenarios so they could get on with the violence and the sex.

Slowly the noise level began to rise as the games got underway; the players staggering around the game rings waving invisible swords/rocket launchers/Whompers/dildos. Each ring had a little viewing screen hooked up next to the command ports and Will paused from time to time, looking in to see what was going on. You could tell when people were playing ‘pink disks’ because the screens were blank while the people in the middle of the ring got on with whatever filth took their fancy.

‘You like to watch?’

The fake mid-Atlantic accent made Will freeze. He took a second to plaster a smile on his face, then turned to see Ken Peitai standing behind him, leaning back against a game ring. He was dressed in one of those lounging robes they wore in the deep-immersion suites, where you didn’t need a headset to experience the best in Virtual Reality, you just stuck a wire in the back of your head.

‘Ken, good to see you.’ That was a lie.

How did the sinister little turd know he was…The homing beacons, that’s how-buried under Will’s skin. Out of sight and out of mind.

Ken smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling as if he actually meant it. He swept a hand around, indicating the room full of gamers. ‘One of my few vices: I like to save the world every now and then. What about you?’

‘Just finished: Red Conquest.’

‘Great stuff. How did you do?’ The smile got bigger. Look at me, I’m so friendly and approachable…For a murdering bastard.

‘Not bad. We saved Aberdeen, but Dundee’s a write-off.’

Ken sighed. ‘Too bad, I kinda like all the casinos. All that razzmatazz, yeah?’

There was an awkward silence.

‘You know, Will…I can call you Will can’t I?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, just took Will by the arm and began to walk. ‘Great. I know you were interested in what we were doing at Sherman House-’

‘Excellent project.’ Will laid it on thick. ‘I can’t think of anything more important than preventing another round of Virtual Riots.’

‘Thanks. We’ve gotta keep it all so hush-hush, no one ever gets any good feedback. I’ll tell the team you said that, though.’ He flashed the same smile again. ‘They’re gonna be thrilled. Anyway, Will, I told you all about the project, but you never told us anything about yourself.’

‘No. I was a bit tied up at the time.’

Ken laughed a lot harder than was strictly necessary. ‘“Tied up at the time.” I like it! “Tied up.” Ha!…But seriously, what are you guys in the Network up to these days?’

The greasy little bastard was actually trying to weasel information out of him. ‘Well, you know what it’s like at Network HQ: there’s always so much going on.’

‘Yeah, all those guys and gals, running round, keeping us all safe. What about you, though? You working on anything juicy?’

‘Just having a couple of days off.’

‘Right, right. I heard on the grapevine that you’d caught someone for that hole in the head thing. Good work. Fast. You gotta be proud of your people for getting the guy that quick.’

‘Yes.’ Will was finding it more and more difficult to smile back. Colin Mitchell had been caught less than twenty-four hours ago, and Ken Peitai already knew about it.

‘Can I be frank, Will? Can I? Good.’ Ken stopped. They were by the west exit. Outside the double glass doors the rain hammered against the concrete forecourt, sparkling in the spotlights as it leapt back into the air.

‘You know, Will…’ Ken sounded as if he were picking his words very carefully. ‘The funny thing about national secur ity is how some of the weirdest things turn out to be sensitive information.’ He paused as if waiting to see if Will got it. ‘Sometimes it’s the silliest little things, things that don’t seem at all connected, that can cause real big problems further down the road. But you know that, right? You deal with sensitive stuff all the time.’

He punched Will on the arm and winked: all mates together.

Jumped-up little shite.

‘So what I’m saying is I know, and you know there’s nothing wrong with you pokin’ about in the PsychTech files or searching for a bit of info on me and my boss. Don’t blame you at all: after what happened you’re bound to be interested, right? But there’s a couple of guys upstairs who know a lot more about the big picture than I ever will and they’re worried something’s gonna get out that’ll jeopardize what we’re trying to do over at Sherman House.’ He shrugged. ‘Seems daft to me, but what do I know?’

He obviously knew Will had been going through the PsychTech database. Just like he knew they’d caught Mitchell…Will wondered if he went back to Network HQ right now and played the SOC recording of Mitchell’s flat, would he see little grey blobs of no data in the corners?

‘If you work for the Ministry for Change, Ken, why are you worried about national security?’

Ken’s smile faltered a little, but he rode it out like a pro: ‘Hey, ain’t we all concerned about the security of our nation in these troubled times?’

Will stared at him and said nothing.

‘Look, Will, I know you got your suspicions. Hell, be surprised if you didn’t. But we’re on the same side here. We…’ Ken’s eyes did a quick sweep of the gaming hall. ‘Your mate the pathologist, he found chemical residue in Allan Brown and Kevin McEwan’s brains, right?’

So he’d been right-they were monitoring his phone. No point lying about it then. ‘He thinks they’ve been injected with something that gives them VR syndrome.’

Ken sagged back against the double doors. ‘I know how it looks, but…’ He stopped and took a deep breath. ‘Will, what I’m gonna tell you can’t go any further. I mean it, man: this stuff is like code-black, OK?’

‘Tell me.’

‘OK.’ Ken lowered his voice. ‘Look, you’re right, we are infecting controlled groups with something that makes them act like they’ve got VR syndrome.’ He held up his hands. ‘I know, I know, it’s a crappy thing to have to do, but we got no choice. We don’t know what started the last set of Virtual Riots. We can’t study it in the wild. And we can’t afford to sit about with our thumbs up our asses waiting for the next outbreak to come along.’

He looked away. ‘I gotta tell you, I hate this. I hate pumpin’ our own guys full of shit and watchin’ them go off their heads, but it’s the only way we’re gonna find a cure before it comes back again. You know how many people died last time?’

Will did, but he kept his mouth shut.

‘Three million. Three million Scottish citizens died. Worldwide the total was like, what: fifty, sixty million?’

‘So you’re giving our own people VR.’

‘Will, we infect controlled groups and keep them under real close observation. We work on what’s goin’ to keep them alive and sane. We work on ways to diffuse the triggers before they occur. We tried using simulations and computer models but it wasn’t working, there’s something about the way the diseased population interacts, a kinda feedback loop you can only see in the wild. Makes the condition a hell of a lot worse.’ He shook his head. ‘All that stuff I told you when I showed you around was the God’s honest truth: we’re doin’ our best and we’re gettin’ there. Next time it happens we’re gonna be ready. We’re not gonna sit back and watch another three million poor bastards die.’

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 post-mortem 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. Better 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 waste-paper 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.