Sherlock Holmes- Meet me on Waterloo (A Sherlock Holmes Fan Fiction)

Chapter Seventeen

Of course there was a timer, which was at eight minutes, and of course, being dramatic it had been set up with three wires exposed from the sealed case for added theatricality. They weren’t for me though; they were for someone who didn’t know that, unlike in cliché movies where cutting one wire would cease the countdown, every one of these wires were designed to blow this building sky high.

That was if the bomb was even real, one could never be entirely sure.

I would have happily ran for the hills as soon as the blind man had told me about the bomb wiring on the windows and doors, but I wanted to know what had been so significant about all this to Jim Moriarty. I wanted to know why he’d written me the letter he’d left in the car and why he’d brought the murder that the corpse in the other room had committed.

This had been done for a reason and I wanted to know why.

I went into the room next door and combed the long workbench that lined the eastern wall; I couldn’t believe that I was as predictable as what I found.

There was another letter and in the small amount of light that was peering through the boarded windows I could just about make out the words.

“You should have chosen the other side darling, it’s much more fun.

Though I do so enjoy our little games, perhaps this time I’ll even let you win.

All my love.

M.”

I smirked bitterly, and with it still in my hand, turning it over to look at the back, I retraced my steps back to the bomb-room.

“Cheryl what are you doing?” Looking up from the letter I froze in place, she was knelt against the wall, a pair of pliers in her hand and the bomb in the other, the timer had reached two minutes.

“Cheryl put it down. Now.” I felt my heart exploding in my chest. The timer was down to a minute thirty, and dropping rapidly, I could deal with that but I needed her to put it down and to not do anything hasty or stupid with the pliers. She merely kept going, the metal pincers touched the second, and middle wire. As if in slow motion I saw her hand open till the pliers were in place around the cable, the abductor pollicis in her palm contracted.

I ran.

I didn’t care that as I burst through the door I caught sight of the glint of a wire through the hinge, which split the second that I opened it; I was suddenly thrown forwards by the sheer force of the blast.

It wasn’t a massive explosion. In fact it was relatively small, but as my head impacted with the house next door, a ball of fire behind me, it definitely felt big enough. I had been thrown with my right hand beneath me and as I was flattened to the ground between the wall and the concrete drive, I dared not move as the impact had shattered my radius, my arm searing with pain.

My back and consequentially the shirt that I was wearing was all the protection I had as the debris and shrapnel from the building went flying in all directions, the ringing in my ears threatening to never cease. I cringed as shards of glass and splinters and the heat from the now razed building assaulted the skin of my back and adrenaline left me.

I allowed my head to drop to the concrete and fought against darkness but inevitably it took me.

I blacked out.