Work Text:
Herbert stood on the top of the stairs, his hands were covered in blood and Dan didn’t know if the blood was from a specimen in his lab or if this was the reason that he had been confronted on the street - if maybe a corpse was this very minute ambling its way up 4th and Petunia St.
“We don’t want you here.” The words still rung in his ears. His neighbor, George, had been waiting for him when he pulled into the driveway, tapping a dirty spade in the palm of his hand with each word. George hadn’t been the first one to accost Dan. In the past few weeks more and more people were voicing their displeasure.
The true origin of the blood was that Herbert had been making a sandwich downstairs and had squirted ketchup on his shirt. He’d tried to wipe it up but had only managed to smear into the white fabric.
“I think they’re on to us, Dan.” He said when Dan had rushed up the stairs, gone into their bedroom, and returned with his already packed suitcase. The rest was already in his car. He’d been packing all week.
Dan saw red, beyond the ketchup and grabbed Herbert’s shoulders. “You think so? You think them knocking on the door and demanding that we move out of the town wasn’t a good enough hint?”
He couldn’t stop now, his voice rising in volume, his fingers tightening on Herbert’s shoulders. Herbert flinched. Good! Let him know how upset he was. He wanted him to understand how much pressure and how much anxiety he had to put up on a normal day just trying to live his life.
He didn’t have the patience for the man anymore. Herbert tried to pull back and he saw a hint of fear. Ever since the incident at Miskatonic he’d been jumpy.
“Shit I'm sorry. Fuck! I don’t know what to do.” He pulled him closer, and Herbert wrapped his hands around his waist.
“I'm sorry, Dan,” he said. Herbert never apologized. He wanted to get a good look at him, see exactly what that apology meant, but Herbert stepped back, his foot too close to the edge of the stairs. Dan tried to reach for him, but his foot slipped over. He grabbed first for Dan and then for the banister. Dan saw fear in his eyes and then he tumbled down the stairs. Dan tried, catching empty air, his hand empty just like that other time when the intestines had wrapped around Herbert and dragged him across the lab. Herbert hit his head on the banister and landed at the bottom in a heap, his arm twisted awkwardly under him. Dan was seconds behind him.
“Herbert?” He ducked down.
He’d knocked the wind out of himself, and he gasped for air as he tried to sit up. He let out a gasp of pain, his arm and wrist bent the wrong way, and Dan saw his eyes roll into the back of his head. He caught him before he clocked himself again.
“Shit, Herbert. I can’t take you to the hospital right now.”
He already had everything packed in his car. He was going to leave tonight without Herbert, that had been his plan at least. Pack the car, get the hell out of dodge, but Herbert had apparently come home early from the hospital. Apparently, they had told him to – kicked him out was more likely. They were on to them. The town’s dead just didn’t rise and start roaming the streets, eating pets and clawing at doors.
The neighborhood had been whispering about other incidents surrounding the two doctors. Wherever they went the dead seemed to rise in their footsteps. Blood, guts, and murder. All that good prurient stuff to get the neighborhood-watch out for blood. A small town loved a good controversy and their living arrangement was already a good one to start with.
And then the rumors about Miskatonic. It always came back to Miskatonic.
“Did you hear what happened at Miskatonic? And they blamed the old head of the science department, but have you seen the little one with his greedy eyes and his penchant to look right through you straight to your organs?”
He picked up Herbert bridal style and took him out to the car. He awoke halfway there and started to struggle, pushing against Dan’s chest and he nearly dropped him.
“Herbert, you’re okay. You’re hurt, but you’re safe.”
“You were going to leave, Dan.” He said it quietly. “You were going to leave.”
“Well, I’m not going to leave right now. I’m taking you with me.”
“You weren’t going to before.”
“You don’t know that. Of course, I was going to take you. Think I’d let you join the dead?”
But they both knew it was a lie. They both knew that Dan hadn’t planned to take Herbert anywhere. This time when he said he was leaving he had meant it. That was before he shoved him down the stairs.
“Can you move your wrist?,” he asked.
Herbert tried and hissed.
“Didn't think so. Will the reagent fix that?”
“It might, but you know I don’t like to rely on it anymore.”
“We both know that isn’t true, Herbert.”
“Well grab it then, won’t you? We’ll try it in the car. I can walk,” he said, but he was unsteady and leaned on Dan as they skirted the side of the house, trying to avoid the prying eyes of their neighbors. Dan could feel them peering from their houses and looking at the two of them as if they were going to cause the dead to rise that very instant. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities, he supposed.
He put Herbert in the car, ran back inside and slid as much as he could from the worktable in the basement into a plastic bag. Herbert would kill him he thought as he heard glass breaking, but they’d be dead soon anyway if they didn’t get out of here quickly.
He put the bag in Herbert’s lap, and he knew it was bad when he didn’t protest the state of beakers and notes all crowded together in the bag.
“Your head, Herbert, you got to stay awake. Here, give me the reagent. I’ll do it.” He took it from him.
Herbert rolled up his sleeve, his fingers slow. The crook of his elbow that had been bruised and marked appeared clear.
“You really have been laying off it, haven’t you? Been using it on the rest of the town’s dead, I guess.”
“There’s nothing to do here, Dan. I have to find ways to entertain myself.”
“You’re a doctor, do some research that doesn’t have to do with stitching two dead rats together.”
“You know I haven't done that in years. I’m way beyond rats, Dan. Rats! Ha! That’s child’s play. No, Dan I've moved onto pigeons.”
“Yes pigeons. And the bodies under the graves they roost on. I know what you’ve been doing, Herbert, we live in the same damn place. You think you can hide something like that from me. There’s no way. I’m your lab assistant half the time, anyway. And they've caught on quicker this time. It’s not safe for either of us. You need to quit. Can’t you just quit?” He couldn’t stop talking, his words rising in volume. He pushed his hands harder against the steering wheel to hide their shaking. “Can’t we just live somewhere for once in peace? Where we can settle down?”
Herbert didn’t hesitate. “But the work, Dan. You don’t understand. You never have.”
“I have too. I’ve been by your side this whole time.”
“I'm the only one working on it. If I quit, how will we ever cure death?”
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe it's not possible?”
“But it is. We've stopped brain death. We’ve brought people back to life that have been well past the point of resuscitation. Medical impossibilities, Dan! And yet we’ve done it. The two of us. And you aren’t impressed by that? You just want to quit?”
His eyes were feverish and alive, and Dan wanted to scream. Instead, he reached for his broken wrist and held it for a moment between his hands. The bones were out of place, the joint misshapen and surreal. How strange to think that this was Herbert’s wrist. A wrist he had held so many times and now it was so different.
Herbert sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth and Dan didn’t know if it was in relief or pain when the needle slid in.
“You did that on purpose,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back in the passenger seat.
Dan pushed the plunger on the syringe and Herbert shivered as the reagent settled around the damaged joints. The bones snapped and cracked and shifted disturbingly under Dan’s fingers. He didn’t recoil. Herbert’s pulse was strong under his grip.
“How’s your head?” He asked.
“Hurts,” he said. “I have a huge goose egg on the back of it. Were you trying to kill me, Dan?”
“I tried to catch you,” he said incredulously. “I wouldn't kill you.”
“Oh, but you wanted to when you grabbed me. I could tell you wanted to. It was like back in the day when you were so afraid of what we could be. I could tell you wanted to kill me then too. You let Hill take me and ran off with Meg’s corpse.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? You reanimated a head that tried to rape my girlfriend and then got her killed. You think I wanted to help you after that?”
“You did later.”
“You were all I had left.” Words he won’t be able to take back. He skidded across two lanes of the road trying to see straight, rain making the road slick. He gripped the steering wheel hard. There was a car following them for the last couple of miles. He’d been watching it out of the corner of his eye: two dim lights in the downpour.
“We’re being followed, Herbert.”
“Just keep driving and they’ll give up.”
“We're almost out of gas.”
“Just keep going.”
“Well, we’re going to have to stop one way or the other.”
Herbert had his eyes closed.
“Hey! Wake up. I need you to stay awake.” He reached over and shook Herbert’s shoulder as gently as he could. “Stay awake. Open your eyes. Watch the car behind us. I need you to help me with this, Herbert.”
He turned then. The reagent was working. The bones in his wrist had fully snapped back into place. His eyes slightly unfocused had a green tinge to them. Their specimens’ eyes all had the same glow to them. Something new that Herbert had perfected. Something that crossed the blood brain barrier better. Dan had seen it in the bodies that had bled out on their experiment table, only to open their eyes later - different but the same, but never quite what they had been.
They’d been getting closer lately. That was why Herbert’s experiments had increased so much in the past few weeks. The bodies seemed to crawl out of the cemetery on their own as if telling each other that there were some tasty morsels in this town, and the only thing separating them were their coffins and a few measly feet of dirt.
Herbert was so vain to think that no one could catch on, but they had, and Dan had come home to a note pinned to the door, telling him that the two faggot doctors needed to get out of town or face the consequences.
They were going to die here in this little Podunk town in the middle of Iowa and no one would ever know.
“Turn, here,” Herbert said. The car didn’t follow. Dan’s heart was beating so fast he felt it in his temples. And he was finding it hard to catch his breath. He pulled over to the side of the road and leaned his head against the steering wheel. Herbert reached across and ran a hand over the sore muscles in his neck, pushing and prodding with his newly healed fingers. It hurt. It felt good.
“It will be okay, Danny,” he said. “It always has been.”
They stopped at a motel, two dirt roads down from the only stop light in another small town. Dan had tried so many times to leave Herbert. It was simple when it came down to it. The gist was that he couldn’t, that he always ended up coming back - even when he had made it so far down the highway, into the next state - still the next week he had come back to find Herbert where he had left him, at his desk. Herbert had given him a small smile then, so out of place, a smile that Dan didn’t think Herbert capable of. One that he couldn’t believe was directed his way.
Blood filled that smile now as he pulled a molar from his jaw and dropped it into the sink. “I was wiggling it the whole time we were in the car,” he said lisping slightly. “Think the serum will make it grow back?” And it turned out that a concussion resulted in blood and mucus and a headache that he said wouldn’t stop throbbing.
Herbert climbed onto the bed next to him, holding a newly filled syringe in-between his fingers.
Dan feared introducing the serum so close to Herbert’s brain. He didn’t know what it would do. Herbert had always injected it into his arm, but he knew that migraine patients often had injections in their neck of Botox to stave off the pain, and Herbert was there coaxing the syringe into his hand, closing his fingers around it, sitting almost on Dan’s lap as if this were some practiced nightly ritual. So, what was Dan to do? He leaned in close, and he picked up the needle and found a place just under Herbert’s hairline, so close to his spine. He pushed down on the plunger. Herbert stiffened under him. He writhed in pleasure or in pain. It was hard to tell. But when he next opened his eyes, they were sharp and focused. He climbed onto dan’s lap and leaned forward to kiss him, dragging his teeth over his juggler, biting lightly.
“Ah it feels so much better,” he said. “So much clarity. I want to try something new.” He leapt from the bed and dug out the notes and bottles and serums that Dan had so hastily shoved into the bag.
“We need to find a body.”
And that was why Dan was out in the rain at three a.m. in a dark empty little no-name town, using the ‘perpetual shovel’(always in the trunk, always ready at a moment’s notice to desecrate a grave) to dig a body and drop it on the pavement in front of Herbert in some sort of sick offering.
Will this do, master? he thought of saying in Igor’s voice, kneeling with his offering. And Herbert looked at him with that weird little smile.
And the Herbert in his mind said, “Of course, Danny, this is perfect.”
God, was this basically a fucked-up marriage proposal?
The corpse walked about the outskirts of their little motel. Its steps weird and broken and failing. Its teeth gnashing, but then it started to speak, and Dan hadn’t heard any of them speak so clearly. He said the man’s name, remembering it from the grave, and he turned to look at him. The thing had bitten its tongue while it talked, and blood flowed freely from its mouth. It didn’t sound gravelly though.
“Where is my daughter?” It asked.
Something constricted in Dan’s chest. Was his daughter buried next to him?
Herbert stepped closer. “What is your name?”
“Where is my daughter,” he said again, and he reached out and Herbert didn’t move fast enough to get out of the way. The dead man’s hand closed around his neck and squeezed.
Dan grabbed the shovel, swung it as hard as he could, and Herbert landed on the ground with the bloody hands around his neck. The man still tottered forward.
“Unmake him,” he said.
“I can't, Dan,” he said. “You know that.”
“But why him? Why does he remember something like that?”
“It’s just a thought that’s stuck in his head. It’s all he can say.”
“But he loved her. You can see in the way he says it.”
“Dan, you can’t be so sentimental all the time.”
“I can do whatever the hell I want, Herbert.” He grabbed the other solution – the black one- and stabbed it into the neck of the cadaver, now incapacitated enough that he couldn’t grab him. The body dropped like stones to the ground.
They pulled him back out and Dan insisted they put him back in the grave next to his daughter.
Herbert smelled like grave dirt. Dan smelled like the dead, and they climbed into the shower together. The water that ran from them was rust brown and red.
He scrubbed Herbert’s hair. How many times had they done this for each other? Over and over again washing blood away, cleaning wounds?
Back on the bed Dan asked. “You think you’ll heal right? Or is your arm going to gain a mind of its own and detach itself in the middle of the night?”
“Well, that would be quite interesting. Though you’ve seen how it works on living tissue. It serves as a healing agent.”
“Does it always?”
“Yes mostly. Highly addictive though.”
Herbert was starting to shake. “Let me see.” Herbert put his hand in Dan’s lap. “Move each finger if you can.”
“I can, Dan.” But he did anyway. Waving them lightly to demonstrate.
“There were bruises all down your side. Do you have a broken rib?
“Or a few?” Herbert supplied.
“Really?”
“I think so.”
“Let me see.”
He lifted his shirt and Dan traced a finger over his ribs. He shivered and then flinched.
“Well, I don’t think they’ve punctured a lung. So, you should be okay, but I should really take you to urgent care.”
“You know we can’t do that Daniel. They’re looking for me and you by association.” “Oh, don’t I just love being your roommate?”
“Is that what we are.”
“Define it however you want. Doesn’t change the fact that we’re on the run.”
“Well, tonight we’re safe at least until they find the disturbed grave.”
“Oh, they’ll think it’s teens. After all it’s only one.”
There were so many more opportunities for grave desecration that Herbert’s words seemed to imply, and Dan let out a sigh of exasperation.
“Not here, Herbert. Please, please can we just settle somewhere and not disturb the neighborhood.”
“Ah now what fun is that. That’s my forte. That’s why you love me.”
“I want peace and quiet, Herbert. I wanted Meg. I wanted to have a life with her. A normal life.”
“Well, you have me.”
“I have you and I want out.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“If you did, you would just leave. But you never have. Well, you tried but I’m too irresistible so of course you had to come back. Who could resist someone who’s found the secret to life?”
“Have you, though? I have yet to see an application that won’t send loved ones running and screaming from grandma’s corpse chowing down on human flesh. Until you can have an experiment that actually creates a living being that isn’t set on pure destruction, I don’t think you should be allowed in the lab.”
“I’m trying, Dan. The specimens are lacking. I need fresher bodies.”
“You always need fresher bodies, reagent, a new place, a change of clime, and nothing ever changes, does it? It’s all the same. The same fucking thing over and over again. We get established and then you burn it all down. I can’t take it, Herbert. I can’t take it.” He put his head in his hands and tried not to scream. When he next looked up Herbert had his eyes closed as if he were in pain.
“Your head?’
He nodded.
“Well.” He shrugged and Herbert placed his head in Dan’s lap. Dan ran his fingers over the bump on the back of his skull.
“The reagent didn’t even heal this. You have a concussion.”
“Shh,” Herbert said. “My head hurts.”
Dan sighed and ran his hands in all the usual places: over the sides of his temple, down his back, to the sore places just at the edge of his skull.
“Thanks, Dan,” Herbert said his voice muffled and quiet against Dan’s sweatpants. It was as good as ‘please’. He knew there was no way he would ever truly be able to leave Herbert West. Not even when he was in his grave.