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darnedchildSummary: Sherlock Holmes learns the shocking secrets of Molly Hooper's past. *Cue dramatic music and an evil laugh*
Rating: T
A/N - With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft - A modern retelling of Herbert West - Reanimator. Written for the 2017 Sherlolly Halloween fest.
Molly Hooper - (Assistant) Reanimator
Part Seven - The Tomb-Legions
“Mycroft knew?” Sherlock snarled. “He knew about West. He knew Zombie Moriarty was loose in London, and no one thought to fucking mention it to me?” He absolutely hated it when Mycroft knew things he didn’t, especially when it was something about Molly or Moriarty. He saw the way she flinched at his vehemence and made a conscious effort to tone it down. “I understand why you felt you couldn’t tell me any of this before. But what is Mycroft’s excuse?”
She threw up her hands. “Probably because he didn’t think it mattered anymore. As far as we knew, the problem had been dealt with.” Molly slumped back with her hip against the desk, then jerked upright and away from the box that hard started all of this.
He got tired of watching her shuffle around the room and pulled her back down the sofa next to him. “What do you mean, dealt with?”
She collapsed against his arm, and turned her face into his shoulder. He had to strain to hear her when she spoke again. “Mycroft said you needed to give one hundred percent of your attention to your mission, and any distraction could get you killed. By the time you came back, he been dead a long time. Really dead.”
“Moriarty?” Just what exactly had happened in those two years he’d been gone?
“And Herbert.” Molly lifted her head to look at him, her eyes pleading with him to understand. “Both of them. All of them.”
Sherlock froze. “All of them?”
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
Less than four months after Sherlock’s fall, the elder Holmes brother showed up at her house. At first, she had been certain that he’d come to tell her that something horrible had happened to Sherlock.
He must have read her thoughts in her expression because the first words out of his mouth were, “That’s not why I’m here, Miss Hooper. He’s well enough.”
That told her nothing, and yet everything she needed to continue to hope. “If it’s not . . . Then why are you here?” Mycroft Holmes wasn’t the sort to just pop in for a social visit. Still, if she’d been around, Molly’s mother would have told her she was being unforgivably rude. “Forgive me, can I get you anything? A cup of tea? I’ve got some biscuits. Nothing homemade, I’m afraid. Just some chocolate ones I picked up from the corner-“
“I’m fine,” Mycroft sharply interrupted her rambling. “Thank you for the offer.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she stared back. Finally, he took a deep breath. “I am in need of your assistance, Miss Hooper.” He pointed toward her hall closet with the end of his umbrella. “You may wish to take a coat, where we’re going can get quite cold.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Molly automatically objected. “I’ve got a shift at the hospital in an hour.”
He raised a single eyebrow and she knew that her shift had already been reassigned, long before Mycroft had rung her doorbell.
“Where are we going?”
There was the eyebrow again.
“Right. Don’t know why I even bothered asking. Do I get to know why I’m being abducted, or is that a secret too?” She stomped the short distance to the closet and yanked her coat off the hanger.
“You aren’t being abducted. You are willingly, and with full consent, agreeing to join me on a jaunt to the country. We’ve a mutual acquaintance who is quite eager to speak with you.”
She ran through the mental list of people they might both know and quickly discarded most of them. “Herbert?”
For the third time, Mycroft deployed that annoying eyebrow.
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
“He took you to see West? Had he lost his mind?” Sherlock was going to murder his brother.
Molly put her hands over both of his, and he realized he’d clinched them into fists in his lap. She ran her thumb across the back of one hand, attempting to sooth him. “He had his reasons.”
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
Herbert had been hidden away in a nondescript farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It reminded her a bit of the house in Louth at first.
Then she was escorted past the warmly decorated front sitting room, through the kitchen with its still warm Aga, and into the most intimidatingly high-tech room she’d ever seen outside of the telly. It put the security room at Barts to shame. A bank of computer screens and CCTV monitors soundlessly flickered along one wall. Two men sat at a pair of keyboards, both in black uniforms with no visible means of identification. They both turned when she and Mycroft entered. One of them quickly stood and addressed them. “Sir. Ma’am.” Molly noted that he had a firearm tucked into a holster at his side.
They both did. Molly suspected everyone in the house was probably armed, even the friendly looking couple who had welcomed them when they’d arrived.
“Anything to report?” Mycroft leaned toward the monitors and squinted as he studied the empty corridors on most screens and the man who was pacing the perimeter of a small room furnished with a bed, desk and chair on the one in the upper corner.
“No, sir. He’s been in his room most of the day. Would you like me to turn up the sound?”
Mycroft shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. We’re going down.”
The other man flicked his eyes toward her. “She, uh, doesn’t have clearance for that. Sir.”
Mycroft leaned back on his heels, both hands holding the handle of his umbrella as he regarded the speaker. “She does now, Jenkins.”
Jenkins used a hand scanner to open the lift doors, then gestured for Molly and Mycroft to enter ahead of him. The ride in the lift was brief and silent. Just the three of them silently standing there, everyone carefully avoiding making any eye contact with anyone else. She was tempted to cough, just to see what would happen. The lift came to a stop somewhere below the house, and when the doors opened she realized they were in some sort of cold war era underground bunker.
They moved down a corridor and stopped in front of a door. Jenkins knocked in a pattern that was vaguely familiar. Something from Holst? She fully expected him to pull punch in a code on the keypad next to the door, but he simply stepped back.
Jenkins must have seen her expression. “Dr West prefers to limit physical access to his quarters. Other than emergency override, the keypad is for his sole use.” She caught the annoyance in his tone.
It wasn’t difficult to interpret that as ‘He’s a paranoid bastard, and none of us like him. We could get in there if we wanted to, but we’re playing nice as long as the command chain says we have to.’
Molly eventually heard the sound of a lock disengaging from inside the room, then another. Seconds later, the door eased open and Herbert cautiously peeked out.
He brightened as soon as he saw her. “Molly! I wasn’t sure you’d come, after . . . everything.”
“To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have if I’d had any real choice.” She threw a pointed look in Mycroft’s direction.
Herbert nodded as if he had expected her answer. “I know you’re not happy with me.”
“Not happy? That doesn’t come close, Herbert! I don’t even know where to start.” Molly threw up her hands.
“Moriarty, perhaps,” Mycroft helpfully deadpanned.
“Yes! Thank you.” Mycroft was undeniably a stuffy pain in the arse, but he just earned himself a tic in the ‘almost tolerable’ column. “Moriarty. How could you?”
“I told you once, Molly. There will always be someone willing to pay for the secret of immortality. Jim Moriarty was willing to pay more than anyone else. A lot more. And he offered me the freedom to continue my work on my own terms.” Herbert actually seemed to believe that was perfectly acceptable justification for what had happened.
She scoffed, “That’s it. I’m done here.”
“Wait, no!” Herbert looked to Mycroft with panic in his eyes before turning back to her and almost begging, “Please. You can’t leave. I need your help.”
“No.” She shook her head, her lips set in a stubborn line as she took a step back. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me . . . a lot, and-and I’m an idiot. I am not getting drawn back in to this insanity.”
Mycroft cleared his throat and Molly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was about to lose any progress he’d made toward not being a complete and utter wanker. “A word, Miss Hooper.”
She followed him off to the side, just out of earshot of Jenkins and Herbert. What followed was an intense negotiation. It started with a calm request of her assistance; followed by an eye roll on her part. An firm appeal to her loyalty to Queen and Country; another eye roll. A vaguely menacing and yet unspecified threat to her position at Barts; the largest and most aggressive eye roll yet. The grudgingly given offer of a minor favour from the British government (to be named later); a ‘do I look stupid’ head tilt that would have made Sherlock proud. And finally, a bitterly conceded agreement to update Molly once a week with a simple “yes” or “no” answer to the unspoken question of “Is Sherlock still alive?”, which is how Molly found herself assisting Herbert West for the next twenty-nine and a half days.
Mycroft—or someone working for him—arranged for an extended leave of absence from her job, no questions asked. Toby was handed off to a junior government employee who had sworn to keep her cat fed and cuddled under the threat of Anthea’s wrath. Meanwhile Molly was moved into the instillation. She absolutely refused to sleep in the underground quarters that had been assigned to her, and was given a smaller room in the back of the farmhouse.
Herbert—ever reluctant to leave the safety of the bunker—rarely ventured up to the house and never stepped foot outside the building.
“Moriarty has people everywhere.” Herbert looked over his shoulder, as if saying his name might accidentally summon the man. “You don’t understand what he’s done. It was too much.”
If Herbert thought it was too much, it must have been something truly horrific.
“He insisted on bringing Moran back, but he wouldn’t let me reattach the head first. He make Moran carry it around in a box. Halsey’s loose, did you hear about that? Moriarty took me back to the States when he broke Halsey out of Arkham. People we knew from Miskatonic worked there. Halsey ripped them apart on his way out, and Moriarty . . . helped. I can still hear him laughing as he pulled an orderly’s tongue from her mouth. I think he ate it, Molly.”
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
“Jesus,” Sherlock muttered under his breath.
That was excessively brutal, even for Moriarty. The man Sherlock remembered had exhibited momentary bursts of mania, but Sherlock had never discovered any evidence to suggest Moriarty done something like that before. He definitely did not murder people with his own bare hands, much less eat their flesh.
She nodded. “I know.”
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
Molly had made it crystal clear that first afternoon, to both Mycroft and Herbert, that she had no qualms about walking if their project even looked like there was a chance in hell of producing another cannibalistic zombie creature thing. She’d packed up her life and ran on a moment’s notice before, she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. Mycroft’s ‘minor’ influence with the British Government none withstanding.
“I assure you, Molly. That is not my intention at all. I’ve taken every precaution to avoid that very thing.” Herbert led her to one of his lab spaces. There was a series of small aquariums lined up on low tables along the back wall. Each aquarium held a decapitated human head. Some of them were clearly inanimate, truly dead; but the others . . . they watched her with blood shot eyes from the moment she entered the room.
Herbert handed her a file folder. “Notes regarding the current round of test subjects.” He sighed as he looked at the pile of loose papers and the computer on a desk near the door. “I’ve been trying to reconstruct my research from memory. Unfortunately, all of my work from the last few years was destroyed when I left Moriarty’s employ.”
Molly smirked despite the seriousness of the situation. “Did a middle of the night runner, did you?”
“Something like that.” Herbert smiled in return, and for just a moment it was almost as if they were back at Miskatonic.
She forced herself to look away, reminding herself of all the horrible things they’d done since. She flipped open the folder to find page after page worth of entries in his tiny, cramped handwriting.
“Save me some time. What am I looking at? And, more importantly, what are we doing here?”
“In exchange for assisting in my extraction from Moriarty’s organization, the government wants exclusive access to the reanimation process. With the stipulation that I manage to correct the issue of the homicidal cannibal side-effect before any products of my research leaves this instillation.”
Molly huffed as she moved toward the aquariums to take a closer look. “Yeah, I could see why they might want to avoid that.”
“That was actually my condition.”
She looked up, surprised.
“I’m not a complete monster. Not anymore.” Herbert titled his head and watched her, as if daring her to disagree. When she remained silent, he joined her at the aquariums. “I’ve had to make do with this little set up. If you remember, I had had success in reanimation dismembered limbs as early as Louth. Muscle spasms, reactions to outside stimulus, that sort of thing. What I had not realized at the time, was that the various parts remained connected with some form of innate recognition that was observable when the limb was in close proximity to the functioning brain. Perhaps a reaction on the cellular level?”
“I’m sorry?” What he was describing sounded like the plot of a gothic horror story. All it was missing was a foreboding castle and a stormy night.
“I know it seems ludicrous, but it became apparent after Sebastian Moran was reanimated. I had fully expected the head to be self-aware; we had seen similar, if limited, results before. But the body . . . That was truly unexpected.”
She set the folder down on the table and turned her full attention to him. “How so?”
“I didn’t administer the serum to the body until we were in one of Moriarty’s warehouses. He had me take Moran’s head to my lab immediately, so we left the body in car initially. As I said, Moran came to immediately and was able to communicate and think. Highly aggressive, but with a modicum of self-control, unlike the earlier experiments. Left alone, Moran was physically unable to do more than snap his teeth in my direction and roll back and forth; but I tossed him into a small box so that he only glare at me from above the rim, rendered him completely ineffectual other than the continued threats he hurled in my direction. That was until the body was brought in and the serum was administered.”
On the one hand, her scientific curiosity was begging to know what happened next. On the other, nothing good ever came from Herbert looked as animated as he currently was. “And then?”
“At first it was the usual, twitches and spasms. It flailed and appeared as if it were trying to sit up but it couldn’t manage such a simple action. Moriarty was disappointed. I admit that after Moriarty’s extraordinary results, I was also a little dissatisfied. I heard muttering from Moran’s box. And that’s when the body sat up and slid from the exam table. Its movements were jerky but coordinated enough to propel it into motion. Within seconds, even without the benefit of sight or hearing, it stumbled across the floor straight toward me with outstretched arms. It had its hands around my neck—and I distinctly heard the head yelling “Do it! Kill him!” from its box, as those hand began to tighten and cut off my airway—when Moriarty calmly said, “Stop, Seb.”
Molly frowned. “Are you telling me that Moran could control his body from across the room?”
“I am. Even more interesting, Moriarty walked over to the head and gave it a pat. ‘That’s a good boy. Let go of the Doctor. I’m not done playing with him yet.’ The body lowered its arms and backed away with much more grace than before. Moran continued to maliciously eye me over the rim of his box, but he had grown quiet as soon as Moriarty had ordered him to desist.”
Herbert nodded toward the heads. “That’s what gave me the idea of using the fish tanks. They test subjects still observable, and within reach if needed, but they aren’t going to roll off to nip at my heels when I’m not looking. We’ve just had to make sure the bodies are kept well away. Through experimentation, we realized that Moran’s mental control over his own body only worked within a certain distance. Take the body far enough away and it was a stumbling mess that could be guided around without exhibiting any of the signs of aggression that were common to our earlier reanimations. Moran had no influence over any other corpses. We . . . tried several others, before Moriarty was satisfied on that account.”
Molly leaned her bum against the table. “But how did Moriarty stop him, though? Was it some memory of Moriarty’s authority over him that had Moran deferring, even in death? Halsey never responded to commands like that.”
“Oh, but he did. Just not for us.”
Her eye’s widened in surprise. “Moriarty?”
Herbert nodded. “I don’t know how, but the others listen to him. The other reanimated. They follow his commands like good little soldiers. And if they please him, he lets them off the chain to do what they want.”
Her blood ran cold. “How many of them are there, Herbert?” Molly eyed the trash bin next to the desk because the urge to vomit was beginning to build.
“Halsey, Moran . . . a few others. Nine total, counting Moriarty.”
She dove across the room and reached the bin just in time. Once she was able to lift her head, he was standing at her side with a clean towel in hand. “There’s a sink down the hall if you want to wash your mouth out.”
“You unleashed a small army of the undead on the world, led by an unstable madman with the money and resources to rival the government of a small country! How can you sleep at night?”
Herbert stomped away, visibly annoyed. “I didn’t do it on my own, did I? Your hands are dirty, too, Molly. Don’t forget that.”
He was right. The wave of guilt had her leaning over the bin once more.
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
“No, Molly.” Sherlock took her by the shoulders and pushed her away just far enough that he could look her in the eye. “You are nothing like West. You did what you did because you wanted to help people, you wanted to save your father. West did it because he could. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”
She shook her head. “I should have stopped him. The first one was . . . I thought it was an accident. The barn fire happened so quickly, I wasn’t with it long enough to understand what was happening, so I didn’t recognize what we’d created. But I should have known.”
“If it hadn’t been you, he would have found someone else to help him.” He needed Molly to understand that West had appealed to her kind-hearted nature and used her.
“But it was me!”
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
Herbert had chosen to focus his current research on the decapitated heads. The better to measure aggression levels, and potency without the risk of another murderous rampage.
In addition to refining the reanimation process, they were also looking for the most efficient way to dispatch the formerly dead bodies. They already knew dismemberment wasn’t terribly effective. A bullet to the brain had taken down the drifter, but Moriarty had been shot in the head prior to reanimation and that hadn’t seemed to bother him at all. The body from the barn in Massachusetts did eventually succumb to damage from the fire; but not before it escaped the burning barn, roamed the countryside, murdered some livestock, and tried to return to its grave.
When she had asked Herbert how he knew that, he explained that Moriarty had tracked the creature down in the hopes of adding it to his merry band of reanimated psychopaths. Unfortunately—or very fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—all he had found was records from the city detailing the discovery of a badly burned body weeks after the barn had burnt to the ground.
“So, brain trauma works some of the time. Fire works, eventually.” Molly followed him down the hall. They were expecting a new shipment of specimens to be brought in: Herbert didn’t like to let anyone other than Molly into his work spaces, so a room near the lift had been set up as a drop off point. Boxes and coolers from various teaching hospitals and morgues containing specimens that had been treated with Herbert’s special embalming fluid were routinely delivered there. Herbert would sort through everything, take what he was most interested in, and store the rest in cooling units until needed.
“Burning them to a crisp puts them down pretty quickly,” he corrected her. “You just have to make sure you get the flames hot enough and keep them contained long enough.”
“Starvation?” She stepped out of the way to let Jenkins push a handcart into the drop off room.
Jenkins unload the boxes as Herbert shook his head. “Does nothing. Consider that the heads in the aquariums have no means of digestion. They will bite and chew if you feed them, but they don’t appear to require sustenance to survive. Moriarty eats, he obviously feels hunger, but I think it’s purely a psychosomatic desire more than a physical need.”
Herbert waited for Jenkins to leave, standing just outside the door to watch the other man step into the lift. He didn’t move until they could hear the electrical hum of machine ascending.
“I have a theory about Moriarty’s head injury.” Molly let Herbert move past her so he could open the boxes to sort through. He preferred to do it himself, and she simply didn’t care enough to argue with him about it. She leaned her back against the door frame, with her hands tucked behind her bum, while she waited for him to pick one or two to work with.
“I’m listening.” He looked into the box on top of the pile and grimaced. “They waited too long to preserve this one. Remind me to have them put it to the incinerator tonight.”
The ancient incinerator unit was in the bunker. Running it would usually require one of the personnel upstairs to come down, baby the temperamental thing until it fired up, keep a careful watch over the equally temperamental fuel regulator, and practically hover with a hand over the pull lever to manually set off the only-slightly-less-ancient fire suppression system on the off chance the unit decided to throw a wobbly and set the instillation on fire. Apparently when your operation was completely off the books and funded through a series of dodgy transactions, updating the plumbing, boiler, and gas line to an underground bunker wasn’t a high priority. Or so Meghan—maker of one of the best peach cobblers Molly had ever tasted—told her over supper one night.
No one liked being roped into running the incinerator; and, of course, Herbert considered such manual labour to be beneath him. Molly sighed and resolved to do it later, rather than bothering someone upstairs.
“He was injected with your window cleaner-“
“Embalming serum.” He glared at her over his shoulder as he cut open another box.
“Whatever you want to call it. You injected it almost immediately, while he was still on the roof, stopping decomp and any further loss of brain matter. What if, at the point of reanimation, the brain compensated for the damage it had already sustained? Whereas, the drifter was shot well after the reanimation process was complete.” She bit her lower lip as she waited for his reaction.
Herbert stopped and stared at the wall as he considered her suggestion for a long moment. “It’s a possibility. We’ll need to figure out a way to test your theory. I wonder what would happen if we injected the serum into a live specimen?”
“No!” Just when she was beginning to think that he might have actually learned something over the years. “Damn it, Herbert. You promised no more . . . We’re supposed to be figuring out how to stop these things.”
“That’s only part of why we’re down here, or did you forget? The people your friend works for want me to perfect the serum just as badly as Moriarty did. And I wasn’t actually going to use it on a living specimen.” Molly thought she heard him mutter under his breath, “Not a human one, at any rate.”
He returned his attention to opening the next box, then turned pale as a sheet as he looked down into it. Before she could ask him what was wrong, she heard the soft ping of the door to the lift opening again, which surprised her because it had only been a few minutes since Jenkins went up and they weren’t expecting anyone else.
Herbert dropped the box that had been in his hands. A head rolled out of it when it hit the floor, which wasn’t unexpected considering. It opened its eyes and focused on Herbert, which was unexpected enough that Molly froze in place. “Found you, West,” the head snarled.
“Moran!” Herbert reacted before her, jumping over the laughing head and grabbed her hand to drag her into the corridor. “Run!”
She let him pull her along, her eyes still trained on the thing on the floor that had begun to yell, “You can run, but you can’t hide anymore!”
Suddenly, Herbert stopped dead, and she ran into his back.
“Hello, Herbie. You’ve been a very bad boy.”
Molly’s blood froze in her veins as she recognized that voice. She peeked around Herbert’s arm and tried not to gag at the sight of Jim Moriarty standing at the front of a group of seven others. He was holding a hand that ended in a stump at the wrist. Two of the others had been guiding a headless body between them, but as they moved closer the body seemed to grow more and more. She realized it must have belong to the decapitated head in the room behind them. On Jim’s right was Dr Halsey. His expression was feral, his eyes bloodshot and wide; and when they fell on her, he began to drool.
Jim waved the hand as if in a greeting, then tossed it to the side without looking. It hit the corridor wall and dropped to the ground. “I needed a hand getting down there, and that helpful chap who came out of the lift was generous enough to lend me his.”
Herbert shifted and Jim finally got a good look at her. He smiled, somehow the tiniest hint of the man she’d briefly dated still managed to shine through. “Well, well, what a surprise. It’s Molly! Look everyone, it’s my little morgue mouse Molly. Oh. Oh! This is delicious. You’re Herbie’s mystery helper.” He shook his head, his smile growing even wider. “I think you’ve just become completely replaceable, Herbie. I know what Mousy is capable of, and she is much easier on the eyes. Not a bad kisser, either.” He winked at her.
She felt sick.
“Does that mean we kill him now?” came an eager question from behind them. Molly looked over her shoulder to see Moran’s head roll into the hall. His body shouldered past her and Herbert, forcing Molly to back up against the wall in an attempt to avoid contact. It bent over and picked up the head, holding it by the hair at its side.
“Oh, God, we’re fucked,” Molly whispered as she grabbed the back of Herbert’s lab coat.
“We never got that far before,” Jim sing-songed. “But I’m game if you are, luv.”
Herbert turned his head to look over his shoulder at Moran. His lips moved, silently mouthing words. At first, she thought he was confirming her assessment that they were well and truly fucked; but then her brain processed the actual movement of his lips. He was repeating one word over and over. “Fire.”
He slid his hand behind his back, and flicked his fingers toward Moran. Or, Molly realized, more specifically toward the maze of branching corridors behind Moran. One of which dead-ended at the furnace room that housed the unstable incinerator.
Her mind raced, trying to calculate their chances of getting out of the underground instillation alive. They weren’t great. Or even good. Near the furnace room there was a little used emergency exit, a set of stairs that lead up to a stone box culvert a fair distance from the house. If they could make it through the staircase door before one of Moriarty’s creatures laid a hand on them . . . But there was no way they’d be able to rig the incinerator to blow, unlock the door’s keypad, and make it up the stairs in time without some sort of a miracle.
Still, the odds of survival trying that were a hundred times higher than if they stayed where they were and let Moran or Halsey get a hold of them.
She reached down and grasped Herbert’s hand, wrapping her fingers tightly around his to show him that she understood. Molly took a deep breath, released his hand, and yelled “Now!”
Both of them turned and ran. Molly ducked under Moran’s outstretched arm, and Herbert spared a second to knock Moran’s head onto the floor. They heard a thump and Halsey howl in rage. Molly assumed Moran’s efforts to retrieve his head had impeded the others efforts to chase after them, but she wasn’t going to stick around long enough to confirm it.
Thanks to days spent walking the complex whenever they needed a break from hunching over their work, Molly and Herbert quickly made their way to the furnace room through the shortest path possible. The sound of powerful arms and hands slamming against locked doors echoed down the halls as the others searched for them.
Herbert immediately set to work on igniting the incinerator while Molly dealt with opening the fuel valve as wide as it would go.
“We better hope Moriarty wasn’t able to get the override code for the lift and stairs off of Jenkins or one of the others in the house. This will only work if we can keep them here. If they aren’t close enough when it blows, it might not be enough,” Herbert cautioned her.
Molly met his eyes as she continued to work. “It will have to be enough.”
The smell of natural gas was strong by the time they had disabled all of the safety shut offs.
They could hear approaching footfalls and snarls when they exited the furnace room, and they both knew the reanimated creatures were close.
“Quickly, up the stairs,” Herbert urged her. She pressed the passcode into the keypad with shaking fingers, terrified that she’d get it wrong and waste precious seconds. The lock disengaged just as Halsey rounded the last corner and yelled in triumph.
Herbert shoved her through the door and pulled it closed behind her. She heard the lock engage. Molly turned to look through the small window, her hand hovering over the keypad on her side. She wanted to open the door and scream at him to come with her; but Herbert was already backing toward the furnace room, waving his arms and calling out to Halsey to draw his attention away from the stairs.
He shook his head as he pressed against the wall next to the furnace room. She couldn’t hear him speak, but this time she had no trouble reading his lips.
“Run.”
Still, Molly hesitated, torn between escaping and trying to help the man she’d known and worked with for so long. He was a horrible person, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. No one did.
Herbert opened his arms wide, as if to embrace the madmen who descended upon him with foaming mouths and hands curled into claws. After a long moment, she could no longer see him, buried as he was beneath a mound of unspeakable howling horrors.
In contrast to the rapid, ravenous movements of the other monsters, Moriarty moved with graceful, deliberate steps. As he approached, he pulled a small black case from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it to remove a syringe filled with the familiar glowing green fluid. She saw him lift his head, nostrils flaring as if he were scenting the air. His eyes narrowed and he looked around. Molly ducked out of sight, but she was certain he’d seen her.
The incinerator was going to blow at any moment, Herbert was surely dead, and Molly had no other choice but to run.
She bound up the stairs as fast as she could, cringing as soon as she saw yet another keypad waiting at the exit to the culvert.
Molly heard the explosion before she felt the heat rushing up the stairway to lick at her back, slamming her against the door as it blew outward. The only thing that saved her, she thought in the moments before she passed out, was the rapidly moving runoff from two days’ worth of solid rain. The flames crawled up the wall to cover the culvert ceiling as Molly let the current drag her away to relative safety.
Part 1 / Part Eight
Rating: T
A/N - With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft - A modern retelling of Herbert West - Reanimator. Written for the 2017 Sherlolly Halloween fest.
Molly Hooper - (Assistant) Reanimator
Part Seven - The Tomb-Legions
“Mycroft knew?” Sherlock snarled. “He knew about West. He knew Zombie Moriarty was loose in London, and no one thought to fucking mention it to me?” He absolutely hated it when Mycroft knew things he didn’t, especially when it was something about Molly or Moriarty. He saw the way she flinched at his vehemence and made a conscious effort to tone it down. “I understand why you felt you couldn’t tell me any of this before. But what is Mycroft’s excuse?”
She threw up her hands. “Probably because he didn’t think it mattered anymore. As far as we knew, the problem had been dealt with.” Molly slumped back with her hip against the desk, then jerked upright and away from the box that hard started all of this.
He got tired of watching her shuffle around the room and pulled her back down the sofa next to him. “What do you mean, dealt with?”
She collapsed against his arm, and turned her face into his shoulder. He had to strain to hear her when she spoke again. “Mycroft said you needed to give one hundred percent of your attention to your mission, and any distraction could get you killed. By the time you came back, he been dead a long time. Really dead.”
“Moriarty?” Just what exactly had happened in those two years he’d been gone?
“And Herbert.” Molly lifted her head to look at him, her eyes pleading with him to understand. “Both of them. All of them.”
Sherlock froze. “All of them?”
Less than four months after Sherlock’s fall, the elder Holmes brother showed up at her house. At first, she had been certain that he’d come to tell her that something horrible had happened to Sherlock.
He must have read her thoughts in her expression because the first words out of his mouth were, “That’s not why I’m here, Miss Hooper. He’s well enough.”
That told her nothing, and yet everything she needed to continue to hope. “If it’s not . . . Then why are you here?” Mycroft Holmes wasn’t the sort to just pop in for a social visit. Still, if she’d been around, Molly’s mother would have told her she was being unforgivably rude. “Forgive me, can I get you anything? A cup of tea? I’ve got some biscuits. Nothing homemade, I’m afraid. Just some chocolate ones I picked up from the corner-“
“I’m fine,” Mycroft sharply interrupted her rambling. “Thank you for the offer.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she stared back. Finally, he took a deep breath. “I am in need of your assistance, Miss Hooper.” He pointed toward her hall closet with the end of his umbrella. “You may wish to take a coat, where we’re going can get quite cold.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Molly automatically objected. “I’ve got a shift at the hospital in an hour.”
He raised a single eyebrow and she knew that her shift had already been reassigned, long before Mycroft had rung her doorbell.
“Where are we going?”
There was the eyebrow again.
“Right. Don’t know why I even bothered asking. Do I get to know why I’m being abducted, or is that a secret too?” She stomped the short distance to the closet and yanked her coat off the hanger.
“You aren’t being abducted. You are willingly, and with full consent, agreeing to join me on a jaunt to the country. We’ve a mutual acquaintance who is quite eager to speak with you.”
She ran through the mental list of people they might both know and quickly discarded most of them. “Herbert?”
For the third time, Mycroft deployed that annoying eyebrow.
“He took you to see West? Had he lost his mind?” Sherlock was going to murder his brother.
Molly put her hands over both of his, and he realized he’d clinched them into fists in his lap. She ran her thumb across the back of one hand, attempting to sooth him. “He had his reasons.”
Herbert had been hidden away in a nondescript farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It reminded her a bit of the house in Louth at first.
Then she was escorted past the warmly decorated front sitting room, through the kitchen with its still warm Aga, and into the most intimidatingly high-tech room she’d ever seen outside of the telly. It put the security room at Barts to shame. A bank of computer screens and CCTV monitors soundlessly flickered along one wall. Two men sat at a pair of keyboards, both in black uniforms with no visible means of identification. They both turned when she and Mycroft entered. One of them quickly stood and addressed them. “Sir. Ma’am.” Molly noted that he had a firearm tucked into a holster at his side.
They both did. Molly suspected everyone in the house was probably armed, even the friendly looking couple who had welcomed them when they’d arrived.
“Anything to report?” Mycroft leaned toward the monitors and squinted as he studied the empty corridors on most screens and the man who was pacing the perimeter of a small room furnished with a bed, desk and chair on the one in the upper corner.
“No, sir. He’s been in his room most of the day. Would you like me to turn up the sound?”
Mycroft shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. We’re going down.”
The other man flicked his eyes toward her. “She, uh, doesn’t have clearance for that. Sir.”
Mycroft leaned back on his heels, both hands holding the handle of his umbrella as he regarded the speaker. “She does now, Jenkins.”
Jenkins used a hand scanner to open the lift doors, then gestured for Molly and Mycroft to enter ahead of him. The ride in the lift was brief and silent. Just the three of them silently standing there, everyone carefully avoiding making any eye contact with anyone else. She was tempted to cough, just to see what would happen. The lift came to a stop somewhere below the house, and when the doors opened she realized they were in some sort of cold war era underground bunker.
They moved down a corridor and stopped in front of a door. Jenkins knocked in a pattern that was vaguely familiar. Something from Holst? She fully expected him to pull punch in a code on the keypad next to the door, but he simply stepped back.
Jenkins must have seen her expression. “Dr West prefers to limit physical access to his quarters. Other than emergency override, the keypad is for his sole use.” She caught the annoyance in his tone.
It wasn’t difficult to interpret that as ‘He’s a paranoid bastard, and none of us like him. We could get in there if we wanted to, but we’re playing nice as long as the command chain says we have to.’
Molly eventually heard the sound of a lock disengaging from inside the room, then another. Seconds later, the door eased open and Herbert cautiously peeked out.
He brightened as soon as he saw her. “Molly! I wasn’t sure you’d come, after . . . everything.”
“To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have if I’d had any real choice.” She threw a pointed look in Mycroft’s direction.
Herbert nodded as if he had expected her answer. “I know you’re not happy with me.”
“Not happy? That doesn’t come close, Herbert! I don’t even know where to start.” Molly threw up her hands.
“Moriarty, perhaps,” Mycroft helpfully deadpanned.
“Yes! Thank you.” Mycroft was undeniably a stuffy pain in the arse, but he just earned himself a tic in the ‘almost tolerable’ column. “Moriarty. How could you?”
“I told you once, Molly. There will always be someone willing to pay for the secret of immortality. Jim Moriarty was willing to pay more than anyone else. A lot more. And he offered me the freedom to continue my work on my own terms.” Herbert actually seemed to believe that was perfectly acceptable justification for what had happened.
She scoffed, “That’s it. I’m done here.”
“Wait, no!” Herbert looked to Mycroft with panic in his eyes before turning back to her and almost begging, “Please. You can’t leave. I need your help.”
“No.” She shook her head, her lips set in a stubborn line as she took a step back. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me . . . a lot, and-and I’m an idiot. I am not getting drawn back in to this insanity.”
Mycroft cleared his throat and Molly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was about to lose any progress he’d made toward not being a complete and utter wanker. “A word, Miss Hooper.”
She followed him off to the side, just out of earshot of Jenkins and Herbert. What followed was an intense negotiation. It started with a calm request of her assistance; followed by an eye roll on her part. An firm appeal to her loyalty to Queen and Country; another eye roll. A vaguely menacing and yet unspecified threat to her position at Barts; the largest and most aggressive eye roll yet. The grudgingly given offer of a minor favour from the British government (to be named later); a ‘do I look stupid’ head tilt that would have made Sherlock proud. And finally, a bitterly conceded agreement to update Molly once a week with a simple “yes” or “no” answer to the unspoken question of “Is Sherlock still alive?”, which is how Molly found herself assisting Herbert West for the next twenty-nine and a half days.
Mycroft—or someone working for him—arranged for an extended leave of absence from her job, no questions asked. Toby was handed off to a junior government employee who had sworn to keep her cat fed and cuddled under the threat of Anthea’s wrath. Meanwhile Molly was moved into the instillation. She absolutely refused to sleep in the underground quarters that had been assigned to her, and was given a smaller room in the back of the farmhouse.
Herbert—ever reluctant to leave the safety of the bunker—rarely ventured up to the house and never stepped foot outside the building.
“Moriarty has people everywhere.” Herbert looked over his shoulder, as if saying his name might accidentally summon the man. “You don’t understand what he’s done. It was too much.”
If Herbert thought it was too much, it must have been something truly horrific.
“He insisted on bringing Moran back, but he wouldn’t let me reattach the head first. He make Moran carry it around in a box. Halsey’s loose, did you hear about that? Moriarty took me back to the States when he broke Halsey out of Arkham. People we knew from Miskatonic worked there. Halsey ripped them apart on his way out, and Moriarty . . . helped. I can still hear him laughing as he pulled an orderly’s tongue from her mouth. I think he ate it, Molly.”
“Jesus,” Sherlock muttered under his breath.
That was excessively brutal, even for Moriarty. The man Sherlock remembered had exhibited momentary bursts of mania, but Sherlock had never discovered any evidence to suggest Moriarty done something like that before. He definitely did not murder people with his own bare hands, much less eat their flesh.
She nodded. “I know.”
Molly had made it crystal clear that first afternoon, to both Mycroft and Herbert, that she had no qualms about walking if their project even looked like there was a chance in hell of producing another cannibalistic zombie creature thing. She’d packed up her life and ran on a moment’s notice before, she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. Mycroft’s ‘minor’ influence with the British Government none withstanding.
“I assure you, Molly. That is not my intention at all. I’ve taken every precaution to avoid that very thing.” Herbert led her to one of his lab spaces. There was a series of small aquariums lined up on low tables along the back wall. Each aquarium held a decapitated human head. Some of them were clearly inanimate, truly dead; but the others . . . they watched her with blood shot eyes from the moment she entered the room.
Herbert handed her a file folder. “Notes regarding the current round of test subjects.” He sighed as he looked at the pile of loose papers and the computer on a desk near the door. “I’ve been trying to reconstruct my research from memory. Unfortunately, all of my work from the last few years was destroyed when I left Moriarty’s employ.”
Molly smirked despite the seriousness of the situation. “Did a middle of the night runner, did you?”
“Something like that.” Herbert smiled in return, and for just a moment it was almost as if they were back at Miskatonic.
She forced herself to look away, reminding herself of all the horrible things they’d done since. She flipped open the folder to find page after page worth of entries in his tiny, cramped handwriting.
“Save me some time. What am I looking at? And, more importantly, what are we doing here?”
“In exchange for assisting in my extraction from Moriarty’s organization, the government wants exclusive access to the reanimation process. With the stipulation that I manage to correct the issue of the homicidal cannibal side-effect before any products of my research leaves this instillation.”
Molly huffed as she moved toward the aquariums to take a closer look. “Yeah, I could see why they might want to avoid that.”
“That was actually my condition.”
She looked up, surprised.
“I’m not a complete monster. Not anymore.” Herbert titled his head and watched her, as if daring her to disagree. When she remained silent, he joined her at the aquariums. “I’ve had to make do with this little set up. If you remember, I had had success in reanimation dismembered limbs as early as Louth. Muscle spasms, reactions to outside stimulus, that sort of thing. What I had not realized at the time, was that the various parts remained connected with some form of innate recognition that was observable when the limb was in close proximity to the functioning brain. Perhaps a reaction on the cellular level?”
“I’m sorry?” What he was describing sounded like the plot of a gothic horror story. All it was missing was a foreboding castle and a stormy night.
“I know it seems ludicrous, but it became apparent after Sebastian Moran was reanimated. I had fully expected the head to be self-aware; we had seen similar, if limited, results before. But the body . . . That was truly unexpected.”
She set the folder down on the table and turned her full attention to him. “How so?”
“I didn’t administer the serum to the body until we were in one of Moriarty’s warehouses. He had me take Moran’s head to my lab immediately, so we left the body in car initially. As I said, Moran came to immediately and was able to communicate and think. Highly aggressive, but with a modicum of self-control, unlike the earlier experiments. Left alone, Moran was physically unable to do more than snap his teeth in my direction and roll back and forth; but I tossed him into a small box so that he only glare at me from above the rim, rendered him completely ineffectual other than the continued threats he hurled in my direction. That was until the body was brought in and the serum was administered.”
On the one hand, her scientific curiosity was begging to know what happened next. On the other, nothing good ever came from Herbert looked as animated as he currently was. “And then?”
“At first it was the usual, twitches and spasms. It flailed and appeared as if it were trying to sit up but it couldn’t manage such a simple action. Moriarty was disappointed. I admit that after Moriarty’s extraordinary results, I was also a little dissatisfied. I heard muttering from Moran’s box. And that’s when the body sat up and slid from the exam table. Its movements were jerky but coordinated enough to propel it into motion. Within seconds, even without the benefit of sight or hearing, it stumbled across the floor straight toward me with outstretched arms. It had its hands around my neck—and I distinctly heard the head yelling “Do it! Kill him!” from its box, as those hand began to tighten and cut off my airway—when Moriarty calmly said, “Stop, Seb.”
Molly frowned. “Are you telling me that Moran could control his body from across the room?”
“I am. Even more interesting, Moriarty walked over to the head and gave it a pat. ‘That’s a good boy. Let go of the Doctor. I’m not done playing with him yet.’ The body lowered its arms and backed away with much more grace than before. Moran continued to maliciously eye me over the rim of his box, but he had grown quiet as soon as Moriarty had ordered him to desist.”
Herbert nodded toward the heads. “That’s what gave me the idea of using the fish tanks. They test subjects still observable, and within reach if needed, but they aren’t going to roll off to nip at my heels when I’m not looking. We’ve just had to make sure the bodies are kept well away. Through experimentation, we realized that Moran’s mental control over his own body only worked within a certain distance. Take the body far enough away and it was a stumbling mess that could be guided around without exhibiting any of the signs of aggression that were common to our earlier reanimations. Moran had no influence over any other corpses. We . . . tried several others, before Moriarty was satisfied on that account.”
Molly leaned her bum against the table. “But how did Moriarty stop him, though? Was it some memory of Moriarty’s authority over him that had Moran deferring, even in death? Halsey never responded to commands like that.”
“Oh, but he did. Just not for us.”
Her eye’s widened in surprise. “Moriarty?”
Herbert nodded. “I don’t know how, but the others listen to him. The other reanimated. They follow his commands like good little soldiers. And if they please him, he lets them off the chain to do what they want.”
Her blood ran cold. “How many of them are there, Herbert?” Molly eyed the trash bin next to the desk because the urge to vomit was beginning to build.
“Halsey, Moran . . . a few others. Nine total, counting Moriarty.”
She dove across the room and reached the bin just in time. Once she was able to lift her head, he was standing at her side with a clean towel in hand. “There’s a sink down the hall if you want to wash your mouth out.”
“You unleashed a small army of the undead on the world, led by an unstable madman with the money and resources to rival the government of a small country! How can you sleep at night?”
Herbert stomped away, visibly annoyed. “I didn’t do it on my own, did I? Your hands are dirty, too, Molly. Don’t forget that.”
He was right. The wave of guilt had her leaning over the bin once more.
“No, Molly.” Sherlock took her by the shoulders and pushed her away just far enough that he could look her in the eye. “You are nothing like West. You did what you did because you wanted to help people, you wanted to save your father. West did it because he could. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”
She shook her head. “I should have stopped him. The first one was . . . I thought it was an accident. The barn fire happened so quickly, I wasn’t with it long enough to understand what was happening, so I didn’t recognize what we’d created. But I should have known.”
“If it hadn’t been you, he would have found someone else to help him.” He needed Molly to understand that West had appealed to her kind-hearted nature and used her.
“But it was me!”
Herbert had chosen to focus his current research on the decapitated heads. The better to measure aggression levels, and potency without the risk of another murderous rampage.
In addition to refining the reanimation process, they were also looking for the most efficient way to dispatch the formerly dead bodies. They already knew dismemberment wasn’t terribly effective. A bullet to the brain had taken down the drifter, but Moriarty had been shot in the head prior to reanimation and that hadn’t seemed to bother him at all. The body from the barn in Massachusetts did eventually succumb to damage from the fire; but not before it escaped the burning barn, roamed the countryside, murdered some livestock, and tried to return to its grave.
When she had asked Herbert how he knew that, he explained that Moriarty had tracked the creature down in the hopes of adding it to his merry band of reanimated psychopaths. Unfortunately—or very fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—all he had found was records from the city detailing the discovery of a badly burned body weeks after the barn had burnt to the ground.
“So, brain trauma works some of the time. Fire works, eventually.” Molly followed him down the hall. They were expecting a new shipment of specimens to be brought in: Herbert didn’t like to let anyone other than Molly into his work spaces, so a room near the lift had been set up as a drop off point. Boxes and coolers from various teaching hospitals and morgues containing specimens that had been treated with Herbert’s special embalming fluid were routinely delivered there. Herbert would sort through everything, take what he was most interested in, and store the rest in cooling units until needed.
“Burning them to a crisp puts them down pretty quickly,” he corrected her. “You just have to make sure you get the flames hot enough and keep them contained long enough.”
“Starvation?” She stepped out of the way to let Jenkins push a handcart into the drop off room.
Jenkins unload the boxes as Herbert shook his head. “Does nothing. Consider that the heads in the aquariums have no means of digestion. They will bite and chew if you feed them, but they don’t appear to require sustenance to survive. Moriarty eats, he obviously feels hunger, but I think it’s purely a psychosomatic desire more than a physical need.”
Herbert waited for Jenkins to leave, standing just outside the door to watch the other man step into the lift. He didn’t move until they could hear the electrical hum of machine ascending.
“I have a theory about Moriarty’s head injury.” Molly let Herbert move past her so he could open the boxes to sort through. He preferred to do it himself, and she simply didn’t care enough to argue with him about it. She leaned her back against the door frame, with her hands tucked behind her bum, while she waited for him to pick one or two to work with.
“I’m listening.” He looked into the box on top of the pile and grimaced. “They waited too long to preserve this one. Remind me to have them put it to the incinerator tonight.”
The ancient incinerator unit was in the bunker. Running it would usually require one of the personnel upstairs to come down, baby the temperamental thing until it fired up, keep a careful watch over the equally temperamental fuel regulator, and practically hover with a hand over the pull lever to manually set off the only-slightly-less-ancient fire suppression system on the off chance the unit decided to throw a wobbly and set the instillation on fire. Apparently when your operation was completely off the books and funded through a series of dodgy transactions, updating the plumbing, boiler, and gas line to an underground bunker wasn’t a high priority. Or so Meghan—maker of one of the best peach cobblers Molly had ever tasted—told her over supper one night.
No one liked being roped into running the incinerator; and, of course, Herbert considered such manual labour to be beneath him. Molly sighed and resolved to do it later, rather than bothering someone upstairs.
“He was injected with your window cleaner-“
“Embalming serum.” He glared at her over his shoulder as he cut open another box.
“Whatever you want to call it. You injected it almost immediately, while he was still on the roof, stopping decomp and any further loss of brain matter. What if, at the point of reanimation, the brain compensated for the damage it had already sustained? Whereas, the drifter was shot well after the reanimation process was complete.” She bit her lower lip as she waited for his reaction.
Herbert stopped and stared at the wall as he considered her suggestion for a long moment. “It’s a possibility. We’ll need to figure out a way to test your theory. I wonder what would happen if we injected the serum into a live specimen?”
“No!” Just when she was beginning to think that he might have actually learned something over the years. “Damn it, Herbert. You promised no more . . . We’re supposed to be figuring out how to stop these things.”
“That’s only part of why we’re down here, or did you forget? The people your friend works for want me to perfect the serum just as badly as Moriarty did. And I wasn’t actually going to use it on a living specimen.” Molly thought she heard him mutter under his breath, “Not a human one, at any rate.”
He returned his attention to opening the next box, then turned pale as a sheet as he looked down into it. Before she could ask him what was wrong, she heard the soft ping of the door to the lift opening again, which surprised her because it had only been a few minutes since Jenkins went up and they weren’t expecting anyone else.
Herbert dropped the box that had been in his hands. A head rolled out of it when it hit the floor, which wasn’t unexpected considering. It opened its eyes and focused on Herbert, which was unexpected enough that Molly froze in place. “Found you, West,” the head snarled.
“Moran!” Herbert reacted before her, jumping over the laughing head and grabbed her hand to drag her into the corridor. “Run!”
She let him pull her along, her eyes still trained on the thing on the floor that had begun to yell, “You can run, but you can’t hide anymore!”
Suddenly, Herbert stopped dead, and she ran into his back.
“Hello, Herbie. You’ve been a very bad boy.”
Molly’s blood froze in her veins as she recognized that voice. She peeked around Herbert’s arm and tried not to gag at the sight of Jim Moriarty standing at the front of a group of seven others. He was holding a hand that ended in a stump at the wrist. Two of the others had been guiding a headless body between them, but as they moved closer the body seemed to grow more and more. She realized it must have belong to the decapitated head in the room behind them. On Jim’s right was Dr Halsey. His expression was feral, his eyes bloodshot and wide; and when they fell on her, he began to drool.
Jim waved the hand as if in a greeting, then tossed it to the side without looking. It hit the corridor wall and dropped to the ground. “I needed a hand getting down there, and that helpful chap who came out of the lift was generous enough to lend me his.”
Herbert shifted and Jim finally got a good look at her. He smiled, somehow the tiniest hint of the man she’d briefly dated still managed to shine through. “Well, well, what a surprise. It’s Molly! Look everyone, it’s my little morgue mouse Molly. Oh. Oh! This is delicious. You’re Herbie’s mystery helper.” He shook his head, his smile growing even wider. “I think you’ve just become completely replaceable, Herbie. I know what Mousy is capable of, and she is much easier on the eyes. Not a bad kisser, either.” He winked at her.
She felt sick.
“Does that mean we kill him now?” came an eager question from behind them. Molly looked over her shoulder to see Moran’s head roll into the hall. His body shouldered past her and Herbert, forcing Molly to back up against the wall in an attempt to avoid contact. It bent over and picked up the head, holding it by the hair at its side.
“Oh, God, we’re fucked,” Molly whispered as she grabbed the back of Herbert’s lab coat.
“We never got that far before,” Jim sing-songed. “But I’m game if you are, luv.”
Herbert turned his head to look over his shoulder at Moran. His lips moved, silently mouthing words. At first, she thought he was confirming her assessment that they were well and truly fucked; but then her brain processed the actual movement of his lips. He was repeating one word over and over. “Fire.”
He slid his hand behind his back, and flicked his fingers toward Moran. Or, Molly realized, more specifically toward the maze of branching corridors behind Moran. One of which dead-ended at the furnace room that housed the unstable incinerator.
Her mind raced, trying to calculate their chances of getting out of the underground instillation alive. They weren’t great. Or even good. Near the furnace room there was a little used emergency exit, a set of stairs that lead up to a stone box culvert a fair distance from the house. If they could make it through the staircase door before one of Moriarty’s creatures laid a hand on them . . . But there was no way they’d be able to rig the incinerator to blow, unlock the door’s keypad, and make it up the stairs in time without some sort of a miracle.
Still, the odds of survival trying that were a hundred times higher than if they stayed where they were and let Moran or Halsey get a hold of them.
She reached down and grasped Herbert’s hand, wrapping her fingers tightly around his to show him that she understood. Molly took a deep breath, released his hand, and yelled “Now!”
Both of them turned and ran. Molly ducked under Moran’s outstretched arm, and Herbert spared a second to knock Moran’s head onto the floor. They heard a thump and Halsey howl in rage. Molly assumed Moran’s efforts to retrieve his head had impeded the others efforts to chase after them, but she wasn’t going to stick around long enough to confirm it.
Thanks to days spent walking the complex whenever they needed a break from hunching over their work, Molly and Herbert quickly made their way to the furnace room through the shortest path possible. The sound of powerful arms and hands slamming against locked doors echoed down the halls as the others searched for them.
Herbert immediately set to work on igniting the incinerator while Molly dealt with opening the fuel valve as wide as it would go.
“We better hope Moriarty wasn’t able to get the override code for the lift and stairs off of Jenkins or one of the others in the house. This will only work if we can keep them here. If they aren’t close enough when it blows, it might not be enough,” Herbert cautioned her.
Molly met his eyes as she continued to work. “It will have to be enough.”
The smell of natural gas was strong by the time they had disabled all of the safety shut offs.
They could hear approaching footfalls and snarls when they exited the furnace room, and they both knew the reanimated creatures were close.
“Quickly, up the stairs,” Herbert urged her. She pressed the passcode into the keypad with shaking fingers, terrified that she’d get it wrong and waste precious seconds. The lock disengaged just as Halsey rounded the last corner and yelled in triumph.
Herbert shoved her through the door and pulled it closed behind her. She heard the lock engage. Molly turned to look through the small window, her hand hovering over the keypad on her side. She wanted to open the door and scream at him to come with her; but Herbert was already backing toward the furnace room, waving his arms and calling out to Halsey to draw his attention away from the stairs.
He shook his head as he pressed against the wall next to the furnace room. She couldn’t hear him speak, but this time she had no trouble reading his lips.
“Run.”
Still, Molly hesitated, torn between escaping and trying to help the man she’d known and worked with for so long. He was a horrible person, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. No one did.
Herbert opened his arms wide, as if to embrace the madmen who descended upon him with foaming mouths and hands curled into claws. After a long moment, she could no longer see him, buried as he was beneath a mound of unspeakable howling horrors.
In contrast to the rapid, ravenous movements of the other monsters, Moriarty moved with graceful, deliberate steps. As he approached, he pulled a small black case from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it to remove a syringe filled with the familiar glowing green fluid. She saw him lift his head, nostrils flaring as if he were scenting the air. His eyes narrowed and he looked around. Molly ducked out of sight, but she was certain he’d seen her.
The incinerator was going to blow at any moment, Herbert was surely dead, and Molly had no other choice but to run.
She bound up the stairs as fast as she could, cringing as soon as she saw yet another keypad waiting at the exit to the culvert.
Molly heard the explosion before she felt the heat rushing up the stairway to lick at her back, slamming her against the door as it blew outward. The only thing that saved her, she thought in the moments before she passed out, was the rapidly moving runoff from two days’ worth of solid rain. The flames crawled up the wall to cover the culvert ceiling as Molly let the current drag her away to relative safety.
Part 1 / Part Eight