Halfhead (13 page)

A frown flits across her face—does she tell her partner there’s someone staring at them, or does she close her eyes again and sink back into the moment?

She makes the wrong choice. ‘Norman?’

Dr Westfield would have let her come before killing her. After all, she’s not a monster. Not
all
the time.

‘Norman!’ The woman slaps her partner on the head and points up towards the nest of toilet paper.

‘Ow, Jesus, Kris! What was that for?’

‘Up there!’ she says, pointing again. ‘Someone’s watching us.’

‘What?’ Norman jumps to his feet and stands there, erection bobbing about like a cheeky pink sausage. ‘Jesus! Oh Jesus!’ He scrambles back into his trousers. ‘I knew we shouldn’t have come down here! Oh Jesus, we’re for it now!’

They’ve been playing doctors and nurses. Now it’s time to play killer and victims.

Dr Westfield slips out of her nest and down to the storeroom floor, spilling toilet rolls everywhere.

The naked woman narrows her eyes. ‘What’s a halfhead doing in here?’

‘Why did I let you talk me into this?’

‘
I
talked you into this?’

‘It’ll go on our permanent records!’

‘Oh really?’ Kris places one hand on her hip and pokes
him in the chest with the other. ‘I didn’t hear you complaining five minutes ago when I was sucking your dick!’

‘I can’t afford to lose this job!’ He drags his shirt over his head and bends to grab his labcoat from the pile of discarded clothes. He doesn’t see the blow that ends Kris’s life, by the time he turns around she’s lying on the concrete floor, a pool of deep, shiny red seeping out from the back of her head.

‘Kris?’ Norman steps forward. Stops. Swallows. ‘Oh Jesus…’

He looks up at Dr Westfield, then down at the bone-hammer in her hand.

His face goes slack and he wets himself.

Calmly she steps over Kris’s body and holds up the stainless steel mallet. Clumps of hair glisten on the striking surface and she pauses for a moment to sniff the delicious coppery smell of fresh blood.

‘Oh Jesus, no…’ Tears sparkle in his big, blue eyes. ‘Please don’t kill me! Please!’ He turns to run, but his feet don’t seem to be working. He stumbles into the stack of disinfectant and goes sprawling across the blood-slicked floor.

‘No, no, Jesus no…’ Norman scrabbles away on his hands and knees, making for the door. She follows him, staying just far enough back to make him think he has a chance. She lets him get as far as the keypad before raising the hammer in her hand.

‘Three, six…three, six…’ He sobs. ‘Oh Jesus, what comes after six?’

He can’t remember the code. He knows this is his only chance of getting out of here alive and he can’t remember the code.

Something warm tingles up and down her body as she watches him struggle. She hasn’t felt this aroused in six long, dark years.

She bounces the bone-hammer off the back of his head,
not hard enough to kill him, just hard enough to stun him for a while. Then she drags his flabby body into the depths of the supply room.

The man in the toilets doesn’t count—she wasn’t in her right mind when she butchered him. The Roadhugger crew were deaths of convenience and the halfheads in the back weren’t alive in the first place, so
they
don’t count. Kris had to die, because two people were too many to control with just a bone hammer, so she doesn’t count either. But there will be plenty of time to enjoy this one. This one counts.

‘It’s going to take a while for the machinery to analyse the data.’ George made horrible noises into his hanky. ‘You want a cup of coffee?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’ Will sat on the edge of the postmortem table, shivering. It was
freezing
in here. George was wrapped up nice and snugly, but Will was as naked as the stiff on the next slab.

He hopped down to the floor. ‘Got a terminal I could use for a minute? Want to check my email.’

George pointed him at the main console, then handed him a cup of coffee and a clean-ish looking labcoat. It wasn’t much, but it was better than getting back into those gaudy tatters with blood all down the front.

Will rattled out a quick burst on the keyboard, then nodded at the little pathologist. ‘Think your connection’s down.’

‘What? It was working fine a minute ago—’

Will slapped a hand over George’s mouth and pointed at the screen.

‘I think I’ve been bugged.’

George read it, curled his top lip, then stared at Will. ‘What?’

Will poked at the keyboard with his free hand.

‘They’re probably listening right now—I want them to think the test results didn’t show anything suspicious. Understand?’

George pulled Will’s hand away and sniffed.

‘You have
got
to be kidding me!’

Will made a grab for the fat little man’s mouth again, but George ducked under his arm. ‘Bloody Internal Services. They’ve probably cut through the cable again.’ His podgy fingers rattled across the keyboard.

‘Might just be temporary paranoia caused by neurological trauma, but if that’s the way you want to play it…?’

Will nodded. That was
exactly
the way he wanted to play it.

Three cups of coffee later George returned with the test results, clutching a palmtop to his chest as if it was a hot water bottle. ‘Other than a couple of torn ligaments and a bit of dehydration you’re going to be fine.’ He handed over the palmtop and Will read the message on the screen:

‘You were right. Two subdermal homing beacons and three listening implants. What do you want me to do?’

Bloody Ken Peitai—rotten little bastard needed taking out and shot. Will tried to force a smile into his voice. ‘Dehydration? Sounds like a good excuse for a pint after work.’ He unfolded the little keyboard.

‘Kill the listening bugs, but leave the homers in place for now. I don’t want them getting suspicious.’

George emptied his nose into his handkerchief. ‘A pint after work?’ He took the pad back. ‘Any chance of it being your round for a change?’

‘The listeners look like standard 397s. Take them ten degrees above body temperature and they short out. A quick injection and a sauna should do it. The homers are more difficult, they’re not like coffin dodgers: they don’t wait for an instruc
tion to transmit. They’re broadcasting your location all the time. There’s one just beneath the subcutaneous fat here.’ He poked Will in the stomach. ‘The other is under your left arm on the wall of the chest. The only way to get rid of them is surgery.’

Not just shot then—Ken Peitai needed castrating.

George blanked the palmtop’s short-term memory. ‘If you’re still sore I can give you a quick injection of muscle relaxants. Then what you want is a sauna and a massage.’

‘Good idea.’

Afterwards Will even bought the first round.

The mop slips and slides across the filthy floor—so much blood for one little man. She dunks the head into the bucket, turning the water a delicate shade of rosy pink. Mop, mop, mop. For some strange reason she enjoys the work. It relaxes her. Mopping, rinsing, mopping, rinsing. Empty the bucket, fill the bucket, add more detergent and then back to mopping and rinsing again.

The dark-red stains gradually lighten and then disappear, leaving shiny, wet concrete that smells of pine.

He was good. Wonderfully soft and yielding. And he screamed so beautifully. She already has her souvenirs floating in a plastic of formaldehyde. Such lovely eyes…

She’ll have to make a little trip to the incinerator later—get rid of Kris and what’s left of Norman—but first she pops the top off an ampoule and snaps her medicine into her neck. It’s good to be back in control again.

And now that the urges are satisfied, she can prepare: she has people to visit. Labs to break into. Tissue samples to culture.

Revenge to take.

Darkness fills the lift shaft like a tumour, pressing against him on all sides, throbbing in time with the drums. Relentless, impenetrable, deafening. Will locks his arms around the rusty maintenance ladder and lets his forehead rest against one of the cool rungs.

What sort of fucking idiot thought this would be a good idea…

He tries to laugh, but it comes out as a strangled, painful noise.

Will grits his teeth, screws his eyes shut, and bounces his forehead off the ladder. Stupid. Thump. Fucking. Thump. Idiot.

How could he let them take Private Alexander?

He opens his eyes—even though there’s no point: he can’t see anything—and stares up into the darkness. Had to be somewhere near the ground floor by now,
surely
. All he has to do is lever open the lift doors on the next level he comes to, find the nearest window, tear off the boarding, smash the glass, jump out and run like Hell.

Freedom.

Get the fuck away from this hellhole asylum.

But he doesn’t. Instead he takes a couple of deep breaths
and continues down the ladder. Feeling his way rung-by-rung deeper into the darkness. Towards the drums.

The going’s a lot easier without Private Alexander’s weight dragging at him. Now the only thing Will has to carry is the Whomper with the dead battery. It might be little more than a high-tech paperweight, but it’ll still scare the shit out of anyone he points it at. Maybe that would be enough?

Sergeant William Hunter—second-class—can’t just run for it, no matter how much he wants to. Not without Private Alexander. He’s come through too much to leave him behind.

Besides, maybe the cannibals have eaten some of the fat bastard by now? At least that’d mean a little less weight for Will to carry.

‘That’s right,’ he tells himself, the words swallowed by the never-ending pounding rhythm. ‘Look on the bright side.’

The clock in the kitchen slowly ticked its way to half past nine. Will sat at the little table, nursing a cup of coffee and a foul mood. His head ached, his back hurt, and his eyes felt as if someone had rubbed broken glass into them. That’s what he got for mixing nightmares with whisky.

He shuddered, then went back to staring out of the window.

He’d already called the office twice that morning and been told politely, but firmly, that he was on compassionate leave and Director Smith-Hamilton had ordered them not to bother him at home. Not even if he begged.

So he watched the rain hammer Glasgow into submission instead. A thick lid of bruise-coloured cloud lay over the city, hiding the sun, trapping everything in glooming twilight.

The view of Kelvingrove Park he and Janet had paid so much for was a miserable mix of grey and green, fifty-seven floors below, the paths marked by flickering sodiums—ribbons of weak, jaundiced light that bobbed and swayed in the downpour. The other tower blocks that lined the park like a thirty-storey picket fence of glass and foamcrete marked the
end of the world, everything beyond that was lost in the storm.

A Hopper sizzled across the sky, engines whipping the rain into spirals and whorls. And then it was gone.

Will got up from the table and rested his forehead against the window. From up here it was easy to believe he was the only person in the whole world.

When the phone rang he jumped, and lukewarm coffee splashed down his front and onto the carpet. ‘Buggering hell…’ He thumped the cup down on the table and stabbed the ‘pickup’ button.

‘What?’

‘Will, is that you?’
The Network pathologist’s face filled the screen on the kitchen wall, then wrinkled into a pinched frown. The image jiggled about as he belted the screen at his end.
‘Bloody thing’s not working.’

‘It’s OK, George.’ Will settled back against the work surface. ‘Camera at my end’s broken.’ Which was true: he’d fried the imaging circuits with a soldering iron. ‘I can see you fine. What can I do for you?’

‘You remember those stiffs I said had VR syndrome?’

Will nodded, before realizing the fat man couldn’t see him. ‘What about them?’

‘I was wrong, that’s what.’
The pathologist scooted closer, until his round, pink face filled the space between the working surface and the spice rack.
‘It’s not VR, it just looks like it.’

‘It’s not…? Then what the hell
is
it?’

‘That’s the scary bit. I found traces of a chemical in both brains. At first I thought it was just crap on the slides, but it’s not.’
He ran a handkerchief under his nose and sniffled.
‘Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s what changed their brain chemistry to look like they had VR.’
He paused, then started hitting the screen again.
‘Will? Will, you still there?’

‘I’m thinking…’

There was good old Ken Peitai looking after a building
full of people with VR syndrome: keeping them safe. Only they didn’t
really
have VR, did they? Someone had pumped them full of chemicals to make them look and act as if they had. And Will’s prime suspect for that was Ken Bloody Peitai.

And if Mr Peitai was quite happy infecting the occupants of Sherman House with fake VR, planting listening bugs and tracking beacons under the skin of a Network ASD, would he have any ethical problem with tapping that same ASD’s phone?

‘Damn it.’ Should have thought of that earlier. ‘Brian, I’m feeling a bit cooped up here, can you meet me in half an hour for coffee or something?’

The pathologist’s face wrinkled.
‘If…em…I suppose so. Where?’

‘Remember where we had that birthday bash for Emily last year?’

‘Oh, the—’

‘That’s the place. See you there.’ Will hit the ‘disconnect’ button before George could give anything away.

He grabbed his coat and took the elevator down to the ground floor. Normally he’d just keep going to the subbasement, hop on the next shuttle, which is exactly why he didn’t do it this time: avoiding the predictable. Anyway, he had half an hour. More than enough time to nip across Kelvin grove Park, cut down Sauchiehall Street and meet George.

Turning his collar up, Will stepped out into the deluge. He was wet through before he’d gone more than half a dozen paces.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all…

The park was even gloomier than it looked from the kitchen window. Only half of the sodiums seemed to be working, the floating globes hissing and steaming in the pounding rain, like little dying suns. Their light a pale golden glow that shimmered back from the wet path.

No one in their right mind went walking through Kelvin-grove Park when the weather was like this. They huddled indoors, plugged into whatever computer-generated rubbish Comlab were pumping through the public channels these days. Or they hopped onboard the shuttlenet, or the nearest bus. What they
didn’t
do was squelch along in the rain, going from one patch of yellowed light to the next.

Will kept on walking.

The city sounds were swallowed up by the downpour. Only the flickering holoverts broke the silence—pseudo celebrities pimping unnecessary products whenever he came within range of the sensors. Some public-spirited individual had vandalized a lot of the emitters, leaving blissful stretches of commercial-free peace.

A half-naked woman crackled into existence as Will passed, asking him if it wasn’t about time he treated himself to a new head of hair.
‘…years younger! You…’
Fzzzzzzzzzz, pop,
‘…fin time for that big date!’

The holo followed him to the edge of the emitter’s range, then she blew him a kiss and vanished back into nothingness.

He followed the winding pathways, not taking the most direct route, just drifting in the general direction of Sauchiehall Street. Plenty of time to spare, and it wasn’t as if he could actually get any wetter. He heard Mrs New Hair fizz back into life as someone else daft enough to be out in this weather passed too close to the sensor.

Three days enforced compassionate leave—what did Director Smith-Hamilton think he was going to do with all that free time? Take up knitting? Put his feet up and let that nasty little bastard Ken…

There was a sound on the path behind him—footsteps, then the unmistakable
click
of a safety catch being disengaged.

…Peitai.

Shit.

He’d been set up. SHIT. How could he be so bloody stupid?
He’d thought he was being unpredictable, taking a walk across the park, instead he’d made a target of himself.

Will kept going, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything, ears straining for some hint of how many were coming for him. But the rain did too good a job of drowning things out.

Trying to look casual, he checked his watch, using the motion to cover a quick glance back the way he’d come.

There were two of them. One was wearing a long, black cloat with the hood up, hiding his features, the other a thick maroon scarf and wetjacket.

There would be others—lurking in the dark somewhere up ahead. Waiting for him to get far enough into the park to make sure no one saw what was about to happen. Following the signal from the transmitters they’d buried under his skin.

Yeah, way to be unpredictable.

Four against one—if he was lucky—and the bastards would all be Black-Ops trained. Professional killers.

Will forced himself to slow down to a stroll. He still had Brian’s Palm Thrummer, at least that was something. And it was fully charged, so the first one to try anything would get their face thrummed off…Then it’d be three to one, and they’d kill him.

Will faked a cough and triggered his throat-mike.

‘Control this is Hunter,’—keeping his voice low—‘I need you to get a pickup team to Kelvingrove Park,
now
.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but the Director has asked us to make sure you’re not bothered by Network business today.’

‘I don’t care what she says: get me a bloody pickup team!’

‘No can do, sir. I have been specifically ordered not to patch through any more calls to or from you while you’re on compassionate leave.’

‘It’s Lucy isn’t it?’ He paused under one of the sodiums, his eyes flicking across the trees and bushes. ‘Listen up, Lucy, I’ll be on terminal leave if you don’t get someone here right now. I’m getting set up for a hit.’

‘Bloody…Right: sorry, sir. All active Dragonflies are out on jobs…’
There was a burst of staccato keystrokes.
‘Looks like Delta Three Sixer is nearest. Connecting you now.’

He picked up the pace, trying to put a little distance between himself and the people behind him. It wouldn’t be long now. They were already halfway across the park; Kelvin Way was getting closer with every stride and beyond that Sauchiehall Street. They couldn’t make their move then; it would be too public.

Lieutenant Emily Brand’s voice crackled in his ear, curt and businesslike.
‘Talk to me.’

‘Halfway across Kelvingrove Park, heading southwest towards Kelvin Way. Two on my tail, probably another two up ahead.’

‘Is it a hit?’

‘I’m kind of hoping it’s a miss.’ In his earpiece he could hear the Dragonfly’s turbines changing pitch, followed by the roar of a chaingun. ‘Where are you?’

‘Firefight, corner of Scotland and Carnoustie.’

‘Damn.’ There was no way they could abandon a combat situation—not even for him. He was on his own.

‘We’ll get there as soon as we can. I’ll—’

‘Don’t worry about it. Been nice working with you, Emily.’

‘Will, don’t you dare—’

He killed the link before she could say anything more. He needed to concentrate on what was happening
now
.

Something moved in the bushes up ahead and Will felt for the Palm Thrummer in his pocket, struggling to twist it open one-handed. The tines extending up his sleeve as he flicked the switch to warm the weapon up.

A voice cut through the rain: ‘Oi, Grandad. Any last requests, like?’

This was it.

Will didn’t turn around. The taunt
sounded
amateurish, but he knew what would happen if he took his eyes off the
shadows on either side of the path: he’d never see the other pair sneaking up on him. Clever.

‘Who the hell are you calling “Grandad”?’ He set the Thrummer to full bore, maximum dispersion. ‘Thought you were supposed to be professionals?’

The man laughed. ‘Aye? Well how’s this for fuckin’ professional?’ There was the metallic snickt of a power switch. Something big and clunky: modern weapons didn’t make noises like that anymore. Maybe it was the same antique P-750 that punched a hole in Private Floyd’s shoulder? Didn’t matter how old it was, it would still be deadly.

‘So what you going to do?’ Will slowed to a halt, moving his weight forwards onto the balls of his feet. ‘Talk me to death?’

‘Am gonnae blow a great big hole in yer arse an bugger aff wi a’ yer cards and yer housecode. Then me an some mates are gonnae nick everythin’ ye’ve got. An if yer girl or boyfriend’s aboot we’ll shag the shit ootae them an fuck’em in the heid wi an ice-pick.’

Will frowned. He knew they were the bastards from the Sherman House ‘project’, and they knew he knew—otherwise they wouldn’t be here. So why the play-acting? Maybe they were filming it? Maybe this was one of the few bits of the park where the CCTV actually worked? No one would go looking for a conspiracy, not when they had it all on tape. A mugging gone wrong. His own fault really, should have known better than to cut across the park. A tragic indictment of today’s society. Small state funeral. No questions asked.

Ken Peitai gets away with murder.

Will spun around, bringing the Palm Thrummer up. The one in the cloat was there, but there was no sign of his friend.

‘Cloat’ wasn’t holding a P-750, what he had was even older than that: about as long as the man’s arm, all rust patches and visible wiring. It looked more likely to blow up in Cloat’s
face than do Will any damage…Probably a decoy: something to distract him.

A nuclear family strobed into life at the side of the path, the rain rippling through their holographic bodies as they launched into a song and dance about having pizza for tea. Someone must have set off the advertipod’s sensor.