Free Halfhead by Stuart B. MacBride Page B

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.

6
    Drums pound in the darkness, like the heartbeat of something huge and hungry. Creeping down the pitch-black corridor, Sergeant William Hunter grits his teeth and keeps moving.
    The carpet scritches and screltches beneath his feet, sticky with blood. He can’t see it, but he can smell it: hot copper and burnished iron. Every single floor is like this, shrouded in darkness and drenched in blood. Like a nightmare he can’t wake up from.
    Cramp screams across his back again and he stops for a moment, gritting his teeth and swearing quietly. Private Alexander weighs a bloody ton and Will’s been carrying him around for long enough to resent every last ounce. He unclips the trooper’s harness and struggles the almost dead weight onto his other shoulder.
    ‘Bloody hell…’ his voice is barely a whisper, ‘…why did you have to be such a fat bastard ?’
    Private Alexander isn’t the only weight he’s carrying: the whole building’s pressing down on top of him, grinding him into the blood-soaked carpet. Making every step a battle. Add to that one empty Whomper—the battery as dead as the rest of the Dragonfly’s team—and Will has all the fun he can handle.
    He fastens their harnesses together again, then pushes off the wall and staggers on in the dark: one hand held out in front of him, the other brushing the wall at his side.
    Plastic doors bump beneath his fingertips, each one hiding its own horrible little story. A murdered family. A VR shrine to the building’s new digital god. A tattered corpse, mutilated and half eaten…
    It’s been a day and a half since the Dragonfly crashed headfirst into this freak show, thirty-nine floors up, and so far the only people he’s seen have all been very, very dead…
    He stops. Something has changed, but it takes him nearly a whole minute to figure out what: the drums are