Halfhead - Страница 17

‘I understand your need to get to the bottom of this, and I admire your determination, but my decision is final.’ She pushed the holo away and stood, frowning down at him. ‘Until the situation at Sherman House has stabilized, there will be no more Network intrusions. Is that understood?’

Will sighed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good.’ The frown vanished, replaced by a beaming smile. ‘I’m glad we had this talk, William, it’s so seldom we get to discuss ongoing cases. Tell me…’ She teetered around the desk, took his elbow, and escorted him to the door. ‘How is Detective Inspector Cameroon getting on?’

‘Detective Sergeant Cameron is doing fine.’

‘Excellent. Well, don’t let me keep you.’ And with that she closed the door.

Will counted all the way to ten before he started swearing.

‘Bastarding shite-bags!’ The pig-faced man glowers up at the sky, as if it’s God himself who’s just crapped down the back of his overalls. A one-sided Rorschach inkblot in stinky grey and white.

His partner grins. ‘Don’t know what yer whingin’ about. On you it looks good.’

‘Fuckin’ birds…’ Pig-Face shoves another halfhead into its bay in the back of the Roadhugger. The halfhead stumbles-falls like a bag of potatoes onto the dirty metal floor.

‘Get up you stupid fuck!’ Pig-Face kicks the prone figure. Putting the boot in. Venting his anger on something that can’t even cry out in pain. Just because a seagull did what seagulls do…

And that’s when she decides to kill him.

Medication be damned. She likes the sound of bees and breaking glass.

She steps quietly out of her little compartment and taps him on the shoulder.

Pig-Face turns, his flabby face swollen and flushed. Eyes glittering like beautiful black opals. ‘The fuck you want? Eh? GET BACK IN YOUR FUCKIN’ BAY!’ He draws his fist back. It’s big, and rough, and ugly. Just like he is.

Her first blow catches him between the legs: a strong knee that ruptures his left testicle. He folds in the middle, gasping for air, a streamer of spittle twisting free from his slack mouth. She grabs the back of his head and shoves hard, bouncing his face off the metal corner of an empty bay. He gurgles, bright red splashing from the remains of his nose like streamers from a party popper. Little jewels of torn skin stay behind on the metal surface. Three teeth lying on the floor.

Pretty.

She wraps her fingers into his hair and smashes his head forward again. And again. And again.

Now his whole body is limp, but she doesn’t stop. Smash, smash, smash-until his features disappear into a bloody pulp. Nothing left.

Someone says, ‘Oh Jesus God…’ and she looks up.

It’s Pig-Face’s partner: the ugly bald one who drives the truck. He stands at the Roadhugger’s tailgate, his stupid, wet mouth working up and down. ‘But…What…Steve?’ Then he does something very, very silly: he steps up into the truck.

She lets go of Pig-Face’s hair and the body hits the deck with a wet splatching sound. A puddle of dark cherry red expands across the scuffed yellow floor.

The ugly man stops moving when his friend starts pooling around his feet. ‘Oh God…’ His face pales, eyes bugging like a startled goldfish, one hand clamped over his mouth. Then he lurches, once, twice, and vomits all over himself.

She waits for him to finish retching before she bashes his brains in.

Nothing fancy. Nothing personal. Just straightforward, mechanical death.

His body is still twitching as she selects a female halfhead of roughly the same size and build as herself from the collection in the back of the Roadhugger. Undressing it is easy enough-though the orange-and-black jumpsuit stinks of stale sweat-then she dresses it in her own clothes, taking care not to get too much blood on her new outfit.

She stares into its eyes, looking for some sign of life. For some spark to tell her there’s still a human being in there somewhere…But all she sees is the familiar, indifferent gaze of someone who has gone away, never to return. So she is merciful.

She pats it on the cheek, then caves the left side of its face in with a heavy metal wrench. Turning the barcode into a ruined mess of torn flesh and fractured bone.

And then she works her way around the rest of the bays, checking on her fellow halfheads. Putting them out of their misery, one by one. They don’t even blink.

Fifteen minutes later the Roadhugger crashes through the retaining wall of the Connelly Memorial Flyover. It plummets fifty-two feet to the carriageway below, killing everyone onboard the municipal transport that breaks its fall. A beautiful fireball of amber and gold. The smell of crackling skin and greasy tallow. Bees and broken glass.

By the time the emergency crews arrive she is long gone.

9

Tuesday evening was muggy and unpleasant-the promised rains were tantalizingly close, but for now Glasgow sweltered. Sitting alone in his sixth-floor office, staring out of the window at the heat-hazed streets, Will brooded. The rest of the day shift had knocked off hours ago, but here he was, still obsessing about flat 47-122, Sherman House.

He’d checked the scanner logs a dozen times. Gone through the recording with Sergeant Slater. Twice. It was definitely the same place. Kevin McEwen had gone home on Sunday night and blown his wife and children into bite-sized chunks. Drenched the flat in blood.

So how come two days later it looked as if nothing had happened there? Services hadn’t been near the forty-seventh floor of Sherman House for months-he’d checked.

But someone had…

There was a flash of light against the gathering clouds-one of the massive Scrubbers catching a ray of sunshine. Tons of rusting machinery, hanging above the streets and houses, glinting like a big, dirty balloon.

Will closed the blinds.

Director Smith-Hamilton was right: they couldn’t send another team in there. The natives were volatile at the best of times, but three visits in as many days had left them ready to explode. And he really didn’t want to be the one who lit the fuse.

But he wanted to know.

So he went back down to the reconstruction suite and ran the recording again. There had to be something he’d missed.

The first evening is rough: huddling in doorways, doing her best not to be seen. Avoiding the Bean-Heads and the Mincers. Just because they’re little children, it doesn’t make them any less dangerous-all wired and jittering with combat pharmaceuticals. Hunting in packs for fresh meat.

She finds somewhere safe to wait, near the service entrance, behind a pair of industrial wheely bins that smell dark and meaty. The ‘WARNING-BIOHAZARD’ label all scuffed and peeling. For once the bees are quiet, their wings still sticky with Pig-Face and his partner’s blood. Fat and contented. She dozes, trying to ignore her own hunger and thirst…

By the time the bright-yellow council Roadhugger appears the sky has faded from pale blue to dark orange, the city’s sodiums coating everything in sickly light.

The Roadhugger’s warning lights flash as it reverses up to the main entrance, then a man gets out of the cab and goes around to the back. He struggles with the tailgate for a moment then leads his cargo out onto the grubby forecourt and lines them up, ready for work. The previous shift of halfheads wanders out through the hospital doors and the man loads them into the empty bays. Then drives away.

She steps out from behind the bins and joins the line-up. She doesn’t look up at the sign that says ‘GLASGOW ROYAL INFIRMARY’-that would be suspicious. Halfheads don’t take any interest in their surroundings.

She’s slightly dirtier than the others, and her jumpsuit smells, but the bored orderly in green and white doesn’t seem to notice. He just steers them all in through the service doors and starts handing out the night’s tasks.

It’s been six years since she was last here. This was where they cut her face in half, removed her breasts, stitched up her orifices and burned away her brain, but before that she’d been in and out almost every day. That’s how she knows she’ll be safe.

She worked here, hunted here. She knows this building, knows where to get what she needs.

The intravenous nutrients they give to coma patients are almost the same as the ones they use for halfheads. It won’t give her quite as much energy, but she can always take supplements. All she has to do is get to the central store.

When the orderly turns his back she disappears, taking a mop and wheely-bucket with her for camouflage. No one sees halfheads anyway: they’re invisible.

She works her way into the bowels of the building, pushing the bucket ahead of her.

Little has changed down here: the walls are still two-tone institution green; everything still smells of stale sweat, rotting cauliflower, and cheap detergent. There are miles of these little corridors, winding their way through the earth. Laundry, Waste Disposal, Protein Recycling, Incinerators…

Her broken glass memory brings up a face: Gordon Waugh. Long hair, high forehead, piercings. He’d screamed and begged when she’d beaten him, mewled as she’d slid the knife into his belly, popped and crackled when she dumped him in the furnace…

Strange. She can see all that, sharp and clear and perfect, but she can’t even remember her own name.

She stops outside a door marked, ‘AUTOMATED STORE: NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS’. The securilock looks new. She reaches out and strokes the buttons lightly with her fingertips, feeling them bump beneath her touch like stiff grey nipples. The display says ‘ENTER PASSCODE’.

Passcode.