The other man shook his head defiantly. "I have come this far. Find me a set as well."
It was obvious the git would not take no for an answer, so Brandon complied.
“So you didn’t do sport in university, what about amateur theatrics?” Bruce asked.
Harker slipped into the coat. “My peers considered my interpretation of Romeo quite moving.”
With a stethoscope clipped around Harker’s neck and a clipboard tucked under Brandon’s arm, Bruce led them back out into the barn. They now walked with more of a purpose if not a slight swagger. So long as they acted as if they were supposed to be there, no questions would be asked. From the looks of the silhouette they had seen, the presence of three more doctors could go unnoticed.
Rounding the corner, they watched the silhouette of the woman being rolled away on a gurney.
"Let’s see where they take her," Bruce whispered. "Look... doctorly."
Brandon whispered gibberish to the two of them as he "read" off his clipboard. His partner did relish a good role. They turned another corner to catch sight of an orderly pushing the woman further into the barn. The patient looked asleep. Perhaps that was best. The walls disappeared, and the barn opened to a central, spacious area. This space was far more characteristic of what a barn should be, wide and open for everyone to see what was inside.
“Doctors,” a gruff voice called from behind them.
The three of them turned around to see a foreboding man dressed in black. An Usher Houseboy. A big one. His mates, standing behind him, were openly brandishing Lee-Metford-Tesla rifles. This would not be—
“Finally, security,” Harker said, stepping clear of Bruce and Brandon. “Where the hell have you been?”
Oh dear God, Bruce thought.
“I’m sorry?” the Usher operative asked.
“We requested a security detail over an hour ago, and no one has followed up with me,” Harker insisted. “Have some free time on your hands now, do you?”
The operative was now looking to the three of them, his skin blanching somewhat. “I’m… sor-sorry, Doctor, but I didn’t catch your—?”
“We reported during our shift change that we sighted something odd in the forest. Movement of some sort. Didn’t look like wildlife as it was walking on two feet. I was expecting to hear from someone on this matter, and no one replied.” Harker looked at each of them, before asking, “So, have you investigated?”
“Um, Doctor…”
“You haven’t? Bloody hell…” Harker stepped even closer to the Usher henchman and drove a finger into the man’s broad chest. “Do you have any idea the scope of this project? What will happen if we fail? What if what we saw were agents of… let’s say… the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences? What then?”
The henchman nodded before turning to his mates. “Round up all security teams. I want eyes on the forest perimeter now!”
Once they were alone in the corridor, Bruce placed a hand on Harker’s shoulder. “Well done, mate.”
He smiled. “Improvisation always was a strength of mine. Let’s see what those cads were protecting.”
Occupying five rows of beds, six deep, were women, all of them hooked up to a variety of machines. Whatever these devices were, Bruce could only hope their function was kinder than how they looked. These mechanical monsters were a variety of tubes and coils reaching from a central core like the tentacles of an octopus, attached to the women either in the arm, left breast, or womb. The three of them continued deeper into this bizarre, macabre spectacle, some women looking up from their books to smile and nod. One sat up in her bed and smiled as she made eye contact with Bruce, whispering "Doctor?" as he walked by. Some were asleep, but they were in a fitful state as their faces twitched in either pain, fear, or both.
A metallic groan came from Bruce’s right, compelling him to take a closer look at what these women were hooked up to. Whatever the machines were churning, the luminescent liquid visible through the device's portholes was green, and a heavy warmth emitted from every machine. Bellows rose and fell as the constant click-click-click-click kept time with jets of steam that occasionally burst hard and quick from vents. Solutions swirling in glass containers hung from metallic trees and, like the many tubes that slinked from the machine to various places on the body, ran from the bottles to each patient. Every woman was in a different state of pregnancy, some barely showing while others looked as if they were ready to give birth any minute. Bruce noticed something each woman shared in common: the largest of tubes coming from the mechanical churn connected to each woman’s belly.
"Bugger me," Bruce whispered. "This is a farm all right. This is a breeding farm."
"But, mate, what are they breeding?" he asked, motioning to the green goo stirring in the small engine.
"David?" a voice from behind them spoke softly.
"Virginia!" Harker blurted out, his voice carrying out across the barn. "My darling Virginia!"
The two agents frantically looked from one side to the other. Perhaps now was a good time to take off the frocks, as they were inhibiting access to sidearms, but so far, no alarms had sounded. Best keep the deception alive. They turned to see a petite blonde girl, grey eyes reminiscent of storm clouds, and round cheeks that had a natural blush to them.
In fact, for a kidnapped woman she looked in top health.
"David, what are you doing here?" Virginia asked, her brows furrowing. She was working on a cross-stitch, but it dropped from her fingers on seeing her husband.
"Why you silly thing, I came here for you. You had disappeared, and I couldn’t do anything but follow after."
Virginia without any expression of relief, happiness, or elation on her face instead narrowed her eyes. "I thought the note I left was quite specific."
Hold on, Bruce thought. What did she say? " You left him a note?"
"I beg pardon, but who are you?"
'"My name’s Bruce Campbell of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. We’re here to rescue you."
Virginia’s eyes went wide then shot back to Harker. "You brought the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences here? To rescue me?" Now that was definitely a glare. "I thought I was very clear!"
"What note?" Bruce demanded, a knot in his stomach developing.
"Oh, my sweet darling Virginia," Harker began, completely oblivious—perhaps blissfully ignorant—of the accusation in her voice. "I’ve read that letter. I read it several times. I knew it wasn’t you. You must’ve written it under duress."
"I wrote it under five minutes, but I think I was very clear."
Harker began showering her face with quick kisses. "See, you’re in a terrible state, no doubt from whatever strange concoctions they are pumping into your system." Harker motioned to the mechanism pumping its bizarre concoction into her arm and still-flat stomach. "Come home with me, my sweet, darling Virginia, and you’ll be right as— "
David Harker never got the opportunity to finish what Bruce assumed was a well-intentioned thought. Virginia grabbed the hose connected to her arm and ripped it free. The needle, decorated with rivulets of her blood, was visible for only a second before she jammed it into David Harker’s eye. If the exchange between Harker and his wife were not enough to alert the guard, the site of David Harker with a needle protruding from his right eye socket, making it cry luminescent, green tears, and his gasping for breath would. The shock on his face was something to behold too.
"Your darling, sweet Virginia," she spat, keeping herself within David’s field of vision, "has never felt more alive until now. I was going to be part of something revolutionary. A new and completely mad world, plunged into darkness. So, of course, you had to come along and bungle the whole thing!" With each of her words Bruce noticed that this sweet, young American woman was transforming in front of him. Bones popped, welts sprung all along her skin, and her eyes went from a light grey to a brilliant emerald.
Virginia screamed and grabbed Harker’s throat. She sunk her fingers into his flesh and tore his
throat out as easily as one would grab a pint from the bar. He'd been coming along so well, but now he would never have the chance to improve any further. Poor bastard.
"Bloody hell!" Even as a seasoned agent this turn of events caught him off guard.
"We have to go!" Brandon said as Harker's body dropped to the ground.
The expression on the poor bloke's face was one frozen in shock and surprise. There was no help for him now.
"Good idea!" Bruce agreed, even as he caught Virginia's blood-soaked face turning in their direction.
The two agents dashed for the end of the row, additional screams of alarm and primal rage filling the air with each step.
"Right," Bruce shouted over his shoulder. “Nearest exit…”
"Not quite yet, partner," Brandon returned.
“Come again?”
"If I would ask myself, 'I am a collection of important documents implicating the House of Usher's management of a breeding farm. Where would I be?' and I really had to think on this..."
"Brandon!"
"Take a left at the end of this hallway!"
He did as instructed and saw two Houseboys coming at him.
"Fists up, mate!" Bruce called before breaking into a guttural howl and launching his right hook down on the lead Houseboy.
He knocked the man's jaw out of joint, but Bruce’s following uppercut did the man’s nose in as well. He let his momentum finish the job as all two hundred pounds of him slammed into his chest. Bruce heard Brandon's scuffle start up as he hit the floor. For now, he was on his own.
Bruce gave the Houseboy two quick punches to his face and held the third one back to see if it was needed. This guard was done. Time to check on...
A dark figure in front of him toppled back, and there stood Brandon, sheathing his favourite hunting knife. "Straight ahead," his partner said, motioning forward. "Then up the stairs."
“Stairs?” Bruce resumed his run, not sure what to think of Brandon’s instincts, but sure enough, a wooden staircase appeared out of the dark. "Up?" he asked.
"Up!"
The two thundered up the staircase, skipping every other step as they climbed higher and higher to an upper floor of the barn’s second level. The stairwell ended at a door that Bruce opened with his shoulder.
He looked around him. "How did you—?"
"That's your problem, Bruce," his partner scolded, as he began looking around the open office overlooking the barn. “Sometimes, research pays off. Barns of certain styles and builds follow a template. Convert it to serve as a medical facility and there will be some alterations to that template.” Bruce could now see through the wide window that this office could not only look into what was happening in the centre section of the barn but also in the small examination rooms they had seen earlier. None of the rooms had roofs to allow that. "When we were changing, I noticed our closet had no ceiling. After a few minutes, I could make out this observation deck. If it was what I concluded it was, then there should be..."
Bruce was about to start stuffing files from every desk into the haversack when he paused. Against the far wall was an analytic engine. "Think you can get this up and running?"
“Let’s take a look.” Brandon flipped a few of the device’s switches, and the screen before him blinked to life. “Interesting.” He clicked a few keys and nodded his head. “Oh, very interesting.”
Glancing down, Bruce watched the screaming harpies below in the barn’s main holding area, with various Houseboys and medical staff struggling to calm them down. From the floor, one Houseboy looked up and pointed at him. “Brandon, our time is about to get a little short. Mind telling me exactly what is so enticing?”
“There is a lot of information here. Timelines. Project objectives. And… oh, lovely.” Brandon chuckled. “Looks like I have an organisation tree here of who is in charge of what departments.”
“Fantastic! Print this stuff up and…”
“Slow down, Bruce. If you want me to print all this data up. We can, but it’s going to take some time.”
“How much?”
Brandon looked at the screen for a moment. "Five hours... maybe six."
Bruce shot a look at the window, then back to his partner. “We got maybe six minutes before it’s us versus the Farm’s security. So, options?”
“We can shut down the engine, disengage the connections, remove the drive.” Brandon pointed to a curved, metal handle protruding from underneath the machine’s housing. “Right there.”
“Do it.”
Brandon typed, but whatever he had entered into the machine, it did not have the results he wanted. Brandon’s cursing and the hard buzzing sound from the engine itself were an indication of that.
“Talk to me, Brandon,” Bruce said, as he drew out from his haversack a Bulldog.
“The analytical engine recognised the sequence for what we want to do, but it is requiring a passcode to initiate it.”
“A what-what?”
“Passcode. Similar to what we use when we are meeting contacts and we use a code to confirm who we are? Analytical engines can sometimes have an extra layer of security. We need, according to the screen, an eight-character passcode.” Brandon dug into Bruce’s bag to fish out his pistol. “Bugger it. We got to go. Whoever designed that analytical engine was a right clever gent. Far too clever for me. Maybe even far too clever than Books himself.”
Bruce blinked. A right clever gent? Like Tinsdale. “Eight letters, you said?”
“Characters. Could be letters, or numbers, or a combination of both.”
Going to the keyboard Bruce started typing. Brandon stopped his hand.
“Mate, if you get this wrong, we don’t know what will happen,” Brandon’s grip tightened on Bruce’s wrist. “This level of security, it could erase the drive in the best-case scenario.”
“Trust me.”
Bruce finished typing the word he had found in Tinsdale’s office. “If I’m right, it was a zero, and not an odd ‘O’ in there.”
“What?”
The clicks and whirs coming from the analytical machine came to a halt. The screen went dark. Then came a series of hard, sharp pops as steam erupted from behind it.
“I… I think you did it. But how?”
Bruce grabbed a hold of the drive. “Gargoyle. Courtesy of our far-too-clever deceased double agent in Usher.” The drive slid out of its housing. “Get back to the hotel, call the Italian police on this operation, and…”
“Blimey,” Brandon whispered from the observation window.
Bruce would expect Brandon to be dancing a dead man’s jig as he should have been well in sight of any Houseboys, but Brandon was standing there, staring out into the barn. When he joined his fellow agent, he watched with the same fascination the odd display playing out before them.
Red lights were slowly blinking while Usher security and medical personnel were working against the wild women in their beds to get them either out of their beds, or wheeling them out of the barn. They were scrambling to escape.
A chill crept under Bruce's skin. Mr Badger shouted out some kind of order, and at his side was Sophia del Morte. She was aiding the evacuation. Her frantic gestures paused on making eye contact with Bruce and Brandon. After glancing at Badger, she mouthed a single word: Run!
“Mate, what do they know that we don’t?”
“Well I did say ‘best-case’ security measure was to erase the drive.” Brandon swallowed. “Worst-case, I would imagine, could be a self-destruct sequence. Even if you safely disengage the drive that sort of measure would be used…”
“Bugger me.”
Brandon made for the door and glanced back. "Last one to the hotel buys the rounds?"
Bruce followed close on his heels. "We’ll drink to the memory of the poor bastard Harker, provided we haven’t mucked around for too long here. Now move!"
Chapter Twenty-Three
Where Old Fears Are Faced
“Damn them all!” Filippo exploded as they
entered their safe house.
“Keep your voice down,” Sophia scolded, closing the door behind them.
His prison might be a specious apartment, but it had begun to feel like a coffin. When Holmes found out that the Farm was destroyed it might well become one. Accountability, Holmes had told them all in a very serious tone.
“We do not need our neighbours growing curious,” Sophia reminded him as she secured the door’s final lock.
Filippo turned on his heel and stuck his finger only an inch from her face. He did not need this woman chiding him as if he were some petulant child. “I will carry myself in whatever manner I see fit, nosy neighbours or otherwise. You’re not my mother. You’re not the Chairman.” He knew full well this woman could kill him that moment, however with the Ministry’s destruction of the Farm, he had nothing more to lose.
Sophia might want him to take her to the House, but that would mean certain death now. The loss of the Farm was an immeasurable loss to the Brotherhood and possibly put the entire venture in jeopardy.
“Ragnarök depended on my success here in Italy, and now thanks to the Ministry, we are ruined.” He ground his teeth together as he entered the darkened parlour. “What am I saying? This is worse. Far worse than that.”
“Calm yourself,” Sophia replied, her tone almost gentle. Turning up the gaslight in the room she slid her hands across his shoulders. “This is merely a setback to you and the House.”
Was she actually attempting to comfort him?
He shook off her touch like it was a creeping spider. “You are talking about things you know nothing about, woman.” He took a seat on the couch and ran his fingers through his hair. On reaching the back of his skull, Filippo balled his hands into fists. “I must think of something to tell the Chairman.”
“We must find and exploit the advantages of tonight’s loss.”
“Advantages?”
“Yes. Focus on what you were able to save, and what you learned, as opposed to the loss," Sophia said, sitting next to him.
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