Sherlock: New Zombieland

by rukushaka

Sherlock wakes up and John is gone. Where is he? Not in England, apparently... Sherlock, John, Greg, and Mycroft go on an Antipodean adventure. No slash. Character-driven. Written for NaNoWriMo; 50k words, 7 chapters, and technically incomplete.

1. Sherlock in London

National Novel Writing Month November 2012

I don't own BBC Sherlock. This story was written as my NaNoWriMo project: it has 7 chapters, 6 of which are in order; the 7th is actually chapter 16 of my outline. It's just over 50,000 words, and technically incomplete, as I do not plan on filling in the missing chapters from 7-15 and 16-?. That said, it's a good read and not half bad for having been written entirely in a month. I hope you enjoy it.

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Sherlock in London.

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Sherlock surfaced from his Mind Palace, relieved to have sorted the data from their latest bout of cases. Most of it - such as the exact volume and pitch of a yelping four year old female spaniel when she is trapped in a burning house, and the corresponding squeals and sobs of her overly sentimental owner - had gone straight into the trash. There had been a few scraps on traditional uses for plants that could prove useful one day, though, and he had updated his files on Fire: Patterns in the Spread of, and Arson: Motivations behind.

Now, where...?

Ah, good. 221b. Lying full length on the couch.

He stretched slowly, luxuriously, fingers flexing and toes wriggling, still taking advantage of that glorious dark behind the eyes to rest his mind for a moment more. His hand reached out, questing, found the edge of the coffee table, brushed across the surface of it for one, two, three passes before it bumped into his mobile.

There was an edge of anticipation to the air as he brought his hand up in front of his face, inhaling one deep slow breath and releasing it. This was the moment - what would it be? Three missed calls from Lestrade? A spate of murders? Maybe a few texts from John to say he was at the mortuary already and that Sherlock should hurry up because there was something funny going on here and he couldn't make head or tail of it, not that that was any change from usual, but really, John, you're a Doctor, you should at least be able to determine age and cause of death, not to mention you've been flatting with me for long enough that we should be able to add occupation, phobias, marital status, and household pets to that list.

His eyes fluttered open.

The screen was blank, and didn't respond when he tapped it, nor when he swiped a thumb across it, swiped again and again in meaningless patterns, hit the power button, licked it (and John's voice in his head said dryly, "You do realise that licking something to check for surface acid content is really not very smart, don't you?"), and finally sent it spinning across the room with a growl.

It was irrefutably flat.

His charger was - where was his charger? - in the bedroom, probably. He glared at the ceiling.

"John."

No reply.

"John, I need you to get my charger. It's in the bedroom."

Nothing. Sherlock slitted his eyes open and glanced around. Oh. That would explain it. John wasn't in the room.

"John!" Louder now, maybe he was up in his bedroom. Possibly in the bathroom, although there was no sound of running water to indicate the shower was going, and John usually showered in the morning, not at - Sherlock glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece - half past two in the afternoon.

Still no reply, no footsteps, nothing.

"John!" Where was the man? Was he deaf? Asleep? Maybe - oh. Out at work? How dull.

Sigh. May as well get on with that new experiment, then.

Five minutes later Sherlock was seated at the kitchen table with a box of different blends of wool/cotton/nylon/polyester fabrics in front of him, and was drawing up a chart for testing the durability of each of them when dipped in a dozen different acids, and also flammability depending on various fire starters.

Several materials were violently stricken from the chart.

Four hours after that, he added 'water resistance' to the list.

And then 'warmth when wet' and 'rate of drying'.

A few more fabrics were crossed off.

Another five hours, and 'stab resistance to kitchen knife/serrated knife/harpoon/teeth/human fingernails/stiletto heel' was also added.

And then 'ease of removing blood stains'.

The list narrowed further.

Around four in the morning Sherlock set up a three hour blood/water drip to simulate a shallow wound on one of London's frequent days of fog/mist/drizzle, and took a break.

He was halfway through a variation of Rachmaninov's Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor when it occurred to him that he hadn't heard John come in earlier.

Hmm. Odd.

Considering the man was usually (ninety four percent of the time) home by seven pm and always (ninety nine point three percent) in bed by two in the morning, and that if he wasn't he generally (eighty seven percent) told Sherlock where he was going, how long he would be, and when he was planning to be back... this was moderately concerning.

And then Sherlock remembered that his phone was still flat and in an unknown location around the flat from wherever he'd thrown it earlier, and that of course John would have sent a text to say he was staying over at [insert latest girlfriend here]'s place, will see you tomorrow, don't do too much damage to the flat while I'm gone please. Sherlock didn't bother opening the sub-section of John's file to find the name of the girl; she'd likely be gone within the week anyway.

He banished the niggle of irritation (and not even under torture would he admit to feeling not quite... himself... without John) and went back to his music. Playing with the usual concentrated smoothness that meant his mind was elsewhere, he made his way steadily through Trio élégiaque No. 1, and then continued on to Trio élégiaque No. 2 in D minor. Keeping an eye on the clock, he switched to Vivaldi's Concerto No. 2 in E Flat Major for some variation, and at six thirty, just as dawn was lighting the sky, moved into Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 10 in G major: the Cockcrow.

With two minutes to go on his experiment, Sherlock placed his violin back on its stand and moved into the kitchen. He very carefully did not cast a glance at the door to see if John was on his way in yet, but he did angle his chair slightly so as to be better able to see into the living room and through the kitchen door onto the landing from the kitchen table.

The experiment was a moderate success. Pure materials, especially pure wool, were the best for both retaining warmth when wet and washing out bloodstains. Mixed blends, depending on exactly which mixes they were, were rubbish at everything, moderately good for water resistance, or excellent at repelling liquids but horrendously bad at retaining warmth no matter if they were wet or dry.

Sherlock recorded the latest findings on his chart, tried to feel some satisfaction at the results, and was halfway through yelling for John before he remembered.

John's not here.

Which meant he had no-one to share his findings with, no-one to be an audience, no one he could entertain or who would entertain him.

He felt the slight itch of boredom start to creep along his spine.

Half an hour of manic violin playing later ("It's like you communicate through the violin, Sherlock, in a language far more precise, far more emotional than English. It's fantastic. But when you're not communicating, when you're bored or irritated or plain angry, it's just meaningless noise. Gibberish, if you will.") there was still the sensation of growing boredom, and he cast yet another glance at the clock and growled.

Eight thirty.

Where on earth was John? He had work in half an hour, if Sherlock's internal memo of his work roster was correct, and if he'd been out the night before he always liked to shower and change clothes before leaving for the day. It was possible he would go straight from the girlfriend's place, of course, he'd done that a few times in the past; but he strongly preferred coming home first so as to use their own bathroom.

In a fit of irritation (definitely not missing John, he'd only been aware that John was gone for the last eighteen hours, and surely that wasn't long enough to start missing somebody in, was it?) he stalked up the stairs and barged into John's bedroom. Maybe the invasion of territory would trip some instinctual sensor in John and he would come tearing home from the girlfriend's place or the clinic or wherever he was to catch Sherlock in the act of poking around his room.

Speaking of John's room...

Sherlock looked around curiously. He hadn't had reason to visit upstairs since John moved in, and it was rather different to the bare room it had been when he had first looked around 221b as an alternative to his Montague Street flat.

The floor was polished wood, the same as Sherlock's own bedroom downstairs. There was a double bed against the wall opposite the door, covered in a thick blue striped duvet and several pillows - he knew that John relished the comfort of a real bed and proper bed linen after his time spent in Afghanistan on thin sleeping pads and scratchy blankets. A chest of drawers was pushed up against the right hand wall, and an ottoman served as a bedside table, also on the right hand side from Sherlock's view; no doubt this allowed John the best access to them, as they would be on his left when he was actually using the bed, and he was left-handed.

There was a built in wardrobe on the left hand wall, and beside it in the corner a small bookshelf. Sherlock cast a cursory glance over it on his way to peer the window. There were a respectable range of genres and periods - even some very nice leather-bound Shakespeares - but nothing stunningly unpredictable for a man of John's age and tastes. He would bet John hadn't read the Shakespeare more than twice since he'd... bought it? No, was given it for a graduation present, of course.

The sash window was a moderate size, probably big enough for someone as slim as Sherlock (gangly, said his old sports master's voice mournfully in his head, all knees and elbows) to slip through. He thrust the window up and stuck his head out, confirming that he would be able to climb through it at the same time as he looked around for windowsills, fire escapes, and other routes he could use to reach the ground - or to reach this window from the ground, if needed. With a minimum of seven routes plotted, he added them and the window to the file marked Baker Street: 221b: Entry/Exit points, and turned back to John's room.

There wasn't much more to see in John's room: it was fairly boring, really, for all that it had provided a nice diversion. Unfortunately invaded his personal domain hadn't serve its main purpose of bringing John hurtling home to catch him in the act, and in the end it had barely taken up ten minutes of his time.

The boredom was still lurking at the back of his mind, tingling on the tips of his fingers, making him jittery, unable to stand still. Back downstairs and he cast a longing look toward the bedroom, his mind making the purely theoretical journey through the kitchen into his room, turning left toward the wardrobe, sliding the door, removing the false floorboard, taking out the wooden box that sat there, finding the key (from wherever he'd last hidden it before deliberately deleting the location), unlocking the box, lifting out the tourniquet, the syringe, the small bag of white powder...

And then John's voice cut through the haze of craving, clear and sharp and panicked, horrified, disgusted, and Sherlock took a literal step backward with the force of it. No.

No no no, he mustn't do that, mustn't even think of doing that, not since John looked at him with those deadly serious eyes and promised - not threatened, promised - that if Sherlock ever did drugs again and John found out about it (and he would find out about it, never fear, whether he came home to find Sherlock insensible on the couch or got a call from Greg or suffered a kidnapping from Mycroft so that Big Brother could break the news), he would move out the next day without a single backwards glance.

And so Sherlock had locked into his brain drugs=endcommand[wipe page, exit program], and the next time he was in his Mind Palace he had found the tiny sneaking alley that contained all the remembered highs and the rush and the sheer ecstasy, and had planted enough semtex to collapse the entire block (and even the memory of touching the explosives was enough to make his skin crawl, and he remembered thinking good, destroy this, destroy it now before it destroys us) and had blown it sky-high and set a high fence around the rubble.

But now the rubble was shifting, slow, insidious, overgrown with grass and weeds yet struggling to rebuild itself, always, always looking for a creeping way back in, back to life. He was clean, he had been clean for a good few years now, but he'd not actually destroyed the memory of it until John. Oh, he'd deleted the withdrawal, the shakes and the fevers and vomiting, that wasn't anything anyone wanted to remember; but the remembered ecstasy had stayed, always, always at the back of his mind, the back of his skin, itching, itching, itching. And then there was John with his intent eyes, his deadly promise of if you do this, I am gone, and Sherlock had decided enough, this is enough, and had finally deleted (exploded, blown up, detonated, erupted, destroyed, demolished, razed to the ground) that creeping alley of memories and sensations.

Except it wasn't as utterly destroyed as he'd thought.

This was bad.

Deliberately, purposefully, he strode through the kitchen to his doorway, halted for a moment in indecision ("Don't even think about it, Sherlock," ordered John's voice in his mind) and reached out hastily to pull his bedroom door shut. It wouldn't stop him, not if he was fully intent on following that course of action, but the cliche out of sight, out of mind had, in the past, gone some way toward easing the incessant craving. It was with this in mind that he slid the kitchen doors shut, then remembered the side door into the kitchen from the landing and went around to the head of the stairs to pull it closed before retreating to the relative safety of the living room.

Alright. No kitchen meant no experiments. The violin would be a good distraction, but he wasn't in the mood for mindless repetition of the works of other composers, nor for variations on their themes. This left original composition; and it was strange to think that of all the talents he could have discovered having in common with John, it was writing. Of course, John's writing was a fairly inaccurate, not particularly stimulating style of English, whereas Sherlock chose to write in a far more subtle and exacting musical style, but it was a shared talent nonetheless.

Very well then. Sherlock readied the violin, tucked a pencil behind his ear, and let his mind drift as he gazed out the window at the nine o'clock traffic crawling past on the street below. He would start in B flat major. B for Boredom.

And he grinned.

Two hours of B flat and hold and E natural, E flat, D, change key, take the scale up to G, later there was a satisfying six pages of sheet music written, and the creeping crawling itch had died down to the point where he felt more than safe returning to his experiment in the kitchen. He had narrowed the list of materials down to six, most of them being wool or wool blends, and was planning to test them in the acids again, using various mixes.

Start with the nine parts sulphuric to one part hydrochloric, then, and work from there.

The first fabric, a pure merino wool in charcoal grey, took a full fifteen seconds to dissolve completely. Impressive.

The second, a 80:20 wool/polyester blend, took a rather less impressive six seconds. This was crossed off the list.

The third and fourth variations, both cotton/wool blends, were slightly better, taking nine and twelve seconds to dissolve, respectively. The pure merino was still the most acid resistant overall.

The fifth fabric, a different wool/polyester blend, was just entering its eighth second when Sherlock reached behind him for another flask of acid, fumbled slightly as he kept one hand on the stopwatch and both eyes on the dissolving fabric, and upended the flask all over the metal bench top.

Usually spilling a flask would be cause for a irritated sigh and a yell of "John!", but this flask contained concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the bench happened to be topped with aluminium. Sherlock was a chemist ("Any good?" "Very good.") and under File: Chemistry on his hard drive, there was Section 3: Interactions, followed by Section 3.4: Acid-Metal and Section 3.4.7 Hydrochloric-Aluminium. Section 3.4.7 did not end well, and the greater the quantities used, the greater the reaction would be.

Sherlock made a dive for the living room and slid the door shut behind him just as the thin layer of oxide on the bench dissolved, leaving it at the mercy of the acid. There was a moment of dead silence, followed by a small explosion and a profusion of violent hissing and fizzing. Sherlock grimaced. John would not be impressed at the destruction of the bench, his experiment was completely ruined, and the kitchen would be unusable for the next six hours or so until enough of the hydrogen gas had cleared. He could smell it even on this side of the closed doors: the clouds of H2 rising from the spill would be immense. More than a bit not good. And there went his distraction. Blast.

He snarled wordlessly at the ceiling. What to do now, what to do now...

Ah. That could work.

The next ten minutes were spent in a manic search for his mobile. Couch, no. Coffee table, no. Mantelpiece, no. Where on earth had he put it? Bookshelf, no. Other bookshelf, no. Table between the windows, no.

His chair, side, side, back, under the cushion, no. John's chair, side, other side, yes! Finally! Sherlock held it aloft triumphantly before slipping it into his jacket pocket. He'd charge it at the Yard.

Foregoing his coat in deference to the warmth of late summer, Sherlock slipped down the stairs and out the door of 221b, and thrust an arm out for a taxi. The unassuming jacket didn't have the same eye-catching ability as his coat, and it was a few minutes before one pulled up.

"Where to, mate?" The cabbie was in his late thirties with brown hair.

Sherlock glanced at the I.D. card on the dash as he slid into the back seat; after that first case with John, he'd never taken a cabbie at face value again. Thomas Henderson, 39 years old, blue eyes, crows feet and a number of laughter lines. Long term relationship - no, married, there was his wedding ring flashing into sight as he rested a hand on the wheel. Heterosexual, no immediate signs of either religion or secularism, three children. Good.

He locked the data into his short term memory bank and replied, "New Scotland Yard," stubbornly refraining from adding a polite "thank you" in response to a frown from his internal John.

The cab felt distinctly empty with only himself and the driver in it, and Sherlock was relieved when they pulled up at the Met. He stopped in at the coffee shop on the ground floor to buy two coffees: a long black with two sugars for himself and a latte for Lestrade. It was coming up to eleven o'clock and he would be grateful for the caffeine.

Taking the stairs ("I'm not Mycroft, John; taking the elevator is sheer laziness.") he was soon at the right floor. He ignored Sergeant Donovan's eye roll as he wound his way through the desks in the outer area and strode into Lestrade's office unceremoniously.

"Coffee."

The Detective Inspector looked up from his paperwork as Sherlock set the cups on the desk and dropped into the chair opposite.

"Well good morning to you too," Lestrade grinned, "and to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Are you bored already?"

Sherlock grimaced, "I might have exploded the kitchen a bit."

There was a bark of laughter from the older man, and a few heads turned their way from out in the main room. Sherlock nudged the door shut with a gentle kick.

"Oh, John's not going to be happy with you." Lestrade picked up the coffee cup and removed the lid, inhaling the first great rush of steam. The tension dissipating from his frame was almost tangible, and he sat back with a contented sigh. "Go on, then. How'd you do it?"

With anyone else (except John, John was always the exception) Sherlock would have been affronted by the frank enjoyment of his blunder; but Lestrade... well, Lestrade was somehow different. By turns stern and boyish, the man could go from paternal to conspiratorial in the blink of an eye, and Sherlock knew that his enjoyment was balanced by a willingness, a desire, even, to truly help in whatever way the Inspector (colleague, friend, mentor) deemed best.

"Hydrochloric acid," he admitted, "on the aluminium bench top. I was busy keeping an eye on something else and ended up tipping the flask over."

There was a disbelieving look from Lestrade, and then a slight narrowing of the eyes as he thought it over, "But surely there would be a layer of oxide protecting the metal?"

"Mmm, yes. There was, but it was concentrated acid. Highly concentrated, as it turned out. More than strong to eat through the aluminium oxide."

"Ah," a moment's silence as he digested this, and then, "I haven't done chemistry since my high school days - what happened next?"

Sherlock sipped his coffee and met Lestrade's eyes, not quite managing to suppress the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Oh, not much. The hydrochloric acid ate through the oxide layer and bumped into the aluminium. Cue aluminium chloride, a mild explosion, some prolonged bubbling and fizzing, and the liberal production of hydrogen gas."

"Hydrogen - are you alright?"

"No harm done. I was up out of the chair and diving for the door as soon as the flask went over. Didn't see the mess it made, but I could hear it just fine from the living room. My experiment's completely ruined," he sighed mournfully. "The bench will be a bit wrecked, I'm afraid, and the gas will take a good few hours to clear - I didn't have a window open and I couldn't go back in after the spill to crack one."

Lestrade let out a sort of choked laugh. "You didn't have a gas mask on hand?"

Oh, now there was an idea. Sherlock sat up straight, arrested by the idea. He gazed unseeing out the window, eyes alight and mind abuzz with all the possibilities that investing in a gas mask would open up.

Ah, that would be fantastic. He could do all those experiments he had theorised about after the Baskerville case, all the dangerous mixes of chemicals that had much more than 'potential' to produce clouds of poisonous gases, the ones that he couldn't set up at 221b because they could poison John and Mrs Hudson and himself. But if he bought a gas mask, a proper one, and took it to the lab at Bart's... they had proper containment rooms there. He could run his experiments without fear of setting off a toxic reaction and having to evacuate, leaving the trial to be ravaged and the results ruined, without fear of smoking out the house or poisoning the others...

" -lock? Earth to Sherlock..."

He came back to himself with a minute shake of the head and focused on Lestrade. "Yes? What?"

"There we go," Lestrade drained his coffee and grinned. "Welcome back. I assume from your dreamy expression that you hadn't yet invested in a gas mask?"

"Not yet, no. I suspect one won't be far away, though; and maybe a fume cupboard for the kitchen, I'll run it by John when I see him."

"I'm regretting asking, now. More fool me for giving you ideas."

Sherlock lifted a mocking eyebrow, "Indeed."

"Speaking of John... you haven't heard from him yet?" There was an edge of... something... to Lestrade's voice. Surprise or amusement, maybe; Sherlock couldn't put a label on it.

"No, my mobile's flat. Why? Should I have heard from him?" Sherlock reached a hand into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out his phone, "Which reminds me, can I borrow your computer? Need to charge it."

The older man looked as though he was going to say something and then changed his mind mind. "Yeah sure, cables are in the cabinet over there - " jerking his head to the side of the office, "second drawer down, I think. Might be a plastic box of them on the left."

Sherlock pulled the drawer open and rooted around amongst the mess of papers and containers and other miscellany, finally finding the right box and tugging it out. The cable was still on top from when he'd last used it a few months back, and his mobile was plugged in and charging in short order.

"Look, Sherlock..." Lestrade was leaning forward and biting his lip slightly, classic signs of either nervousness or uncertainty in most people. In Lestrade's case it would be the latter: as a naturally confident man and an experienced Detective Inspector, he was hardly ever nervous, and in any observable case thus far in Sherlock's association with the man, his tell for nervousness was much more subtle, consisting of no more than a slight firming of the mouth and tightening of the lines around his eyes. John could do well to learn something of subtlety. He had multiple tells - indrawn breath, stammering over his words, licking his lips, avoiding eye contact - all of which would be immediately and overtly obvious to any member of the general population, let alone those who had been trained in the art of observation, such as Lestrade and himself.

"How long has it been since you've heard from John?"

Sherlock frowned, "He didn't come home last night - "

Lestrade stifled a laugh, hastily turning it into a cough as Sherlock stared at him quizzically.

"He didn't come home last night," Sherlock repeated, "And I assume he was at work yesterday as yesterday was Tuesday and his work roster for this month includes Tuesdays. I was cleaning and organising my hard drive before then; might have been away for a day or so, I'm not entirely sure."

Accustomed to the mind palace/hard drive allegories and to his methods of prioritising and retaining data, Lestrade didn't even blink. "Mmm. I suspect you were out for a bit longer than that, actually," and there was a definite glint of humour in the man's eyes now.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, John's been gone since Sunday. He's in New Zealand, Sherlock."