Monday, November 7, 1983 - 3:42 AM
The streetlight at the corner of Cherry and Vine died as Troy Walsh stepped under it.
He didn't break stride. Streetlights died in Hawkins. The town's grid was older than his father and the bulbs were older than that, and his dad complained about the city budget at the dinner table every other Tuesday. Troy walked through the sudden dark with both hands shoved in his jean jacket pockets and his sneakers slapping the asphalt and a wad of sugar still on his tongue from the last cookie James's mom had left out before she'd gone to bed.
The second streetlight, the one over the back of the Hawk's marquee, died when he was halfway through the parking lot.
But this time Troy stopped and looked up at it.
The bulb in the housing was still intact. He could see the wire glow for a second after it went out, a thin red filament fading like the last second of a TV picture tube turning off. Then nothing. The lot was lit only by the back-spill of the gas station across Cornwallis, a yellow puddle of light that didn't quite reach to where he was standing.
He stood in the middle of the lot and listened but that came out short because no sound was there.
Troy took his hands out of his pockets.
He'd been cutting through the Hawk's parking lot since he was nine years old. Two blocks faster than going around. His mom didn't like him taking it after dark because of the loading dock dumpsters and the alley behind the pharmacy, where she said a man could get jumped if you weren't paying attention. Troy wasn't worried about that. Troy was the one who jumped people. Nobody jumped Troy.
The asphalt under his sneakers was the same asphalt it had been a minute ago. The marquee above him still spelled out THE RIGHT STUFF, the S crooked because Mr. Donaldson got drunk every Friday and put the letters up wrong. The pharmacy across the lot had its security light on, a dim yellow square he'd walked past every Sunday night of his life. Nothing visible was wrong.
But something was wrong.
The smell was wrong. He knew this road like his own room, and this wasn't its usual smell.
Something metallic. A bright, sharp tang at the back of his throat, like he'd put a quarter in his mouth and held it there. But worse was the smell of old meat, almost rotten. The kind that had come out of his grandmother's freezer the summer of '78 when the power went out for three days and the chest freezer in the basement had thawed and refrozen and thawed again, and his uncle had carried the whole thing into the back yard and dumped it because nothing in there could be saved. Troy had been ten years old. He had been the one who'd had to help carry the trash bags after, because his dad had said boys learned to do hard things by doing hard things. The smell had been in his hair for two days. He'd washed it six times and it had stayed.
He smelled it now.
His stomach went cold.
A scraping wet sound from the dumpsters.
Not the dry rattle of a raccoon, nor the soft skitter of a rat. Something heavier than that, and dragging, and the drag did not quite fit the shape of what was being dragged across.
Troy was the kind of kid who walked toward sounds.
That was the part of him he'd been proud of since he was eight. The part that had let him climb the elm in the back yard to look at the beehive his mom had told him not to climb. The part that had let him push his cousin off the high dive when his cousin had cried about how high it was. The part that had let him put a frog under Miss Petersen's chair in fourth grade. The part that had not folded last spring in the cafeteria when that freak Reed had pinned him to the wall in front of everyone in school. His mother had told him more than once that he was going to get himself killed one day and she hoped she wasn't going to be the one to find him, and he had laughed in her face. He had laughed because he wasn't going to get killed. He was the thing that other things got killed by. That was the order.
The order was breaking in his stomach right now and he didn't know why.
He walked toward the dumpsters anyway.
His feet did it before his head caught up. Fifteen years of practice.
A glow started up somewhere behind the dumpster.
Not the streetlight, the streetlight was still dead. This was something else. A low, red pulse, slow and even, like a heart you could see through the skin. Once. Twice. The dumpster's shadow on the cinema's back wall expanded and contracted with each pulse, except the dumpster wasn't moving. Only the shadow.
Troy stopped at the edge of the loading dock.
His knees were locked. He noticed that in a remote sort of way, like he was watching himself from up on the marquee. His knees were locked and he could not make them unlock. His mouth was dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The cookies were a sour lump halfway down his throat.
The thing came out from behind the dumpster.
He didn't see all of it at first. He saw the arm. Arm that was bent at the elbow and then bent again at a place that wasn't supposed to bend, and the fingers were too long, and the fingertips ended in points that looked black and wet under the gas station's distant light.
The body came around the dumpster next. The body was longer than a body should be. The shoulders were narrow but the chest was wider, and the spine bent wrong, and the legs were too thick at the thigh and too thin at the ankle, and the feet bent backward like a bird's feet, except no bird this large had ever stood in an Indiana parking lot.
The head came last.
The head opened.
Troy tried to scream.
His chest wouldn't move. His ribs were a cage somebody had welded shut from the inside. He opened his mouth as wide as it would go and pushed every muscle in his throat against the silence, and nothing came out. Nothing. He could hear himself trying. A wet click at the back of his tongue. The breath going in and refusing to come back.
His sneakers were stuck. The rubber had melted to the asphalt, or his legs had stopped getting messages from his brain, or both. He stood there with his arms half-raised in front of his chest and his mouth wide open in the silent scream, and the thing took one step toward him.
The leg bent forward at the knee, and the foot came down without a sound on the asphalt.
Twelve feet from him.
Troy's bladder went.
He felt the warmth spread through the front of his jeans and he didn't care. He had no room left to care. He had room only for the thing in front of him and the petal-mouth, which was opening wider than any mouth he'd ever seen on any animal in any book.
The air ripped. He felt like someone was carrying him by force and dropping him somewhere.
He heard it before he understood it. A sound like a sheet being torn down the middle, except the sheet was inside his head, and the tearing was wet, and it was happening behind his teeth and in the bone of his face and in the part of his skull that connected his eyes to his ears.
The parking lot peeled.
That was the only word for it. The asphalt under his feet curled at the edges of his vision, and then the curl spread, and then the whole world peeled back like wet paint coming off a wall in long strips, and underneath the peel was something else. Something red and black and moving.
Troy hit the ground.
He didn't remember falling. One second he was standing with his arms half-up and his pants wet and his mouth open, and the next second he was on his hands and knees on something that wasn't asphalt anymore.
It was warm.
That was the first thing.
It was warm and soft and it pushed back when he pushed down on it. Like kneeling on a sleeping animal. His palms sank half an inch into the surface, and the surface gave under them, and when he lifted his palms the dent stayed for a second before slowly pulling itself smooth again.
Troy made a sound.
Not a scream. He still couldn't scream. A small sound at the back of his throat, a noise a dog made in its sleep when the dream went bad. He scrambled backward on his hands and his heels and his butt hit the loading dock, and the loading dock was warm too. The steel that had been cold a minute ago was meat now. He could feel fat ropes of something moving under his shoulder blades, like he'd backed himself up against the spine of something alive.
Troy looked up.
The sky was black with red inside the black, like blood inside a vein, and the sky was moving. Not cloud-moving. The sky itself was breathing, slow and even, in and out, and the breathing was the same breathing he'd been hearing from the dumpster, except now it was the size of the world.
The marquee was still above him. THE RIGHT STUFF. But the letters had grown things. Thin black vines crawled out from the tops of them, hair-fine at first and thicker further out, and the vines connected the letters to each other and then connected the marquee to the pharmacy across what used to be the parking lot, a network of dark webbing that stretched in every direction and pulsed in time with the sky.
He heard wet breathing close by.
Not his own.
The thing was still here. The thing had come with him.
Troy Walsh, who had broken his cousin's wrist for crying, who had been sent to the principal's office four times last semester for things he did to other kids that other kids would not tell adults about, who had never been afraid of any single thing in his life that he could remember being a person, ran.
He didn't think about where. He thought about away. Away was a direction. Away was enough.
He ran into the alley between what used to be the cinema and what used to be the pharmacy, and the walls of the buildings on either side of him were wet and ribbed and breathing softly, and the moss across the brick was not moss but something with fine hairs that bent toward him as he passed, hairs that seemed to want to touch him, hairs that were curious. He ran past the door that was not a door. He ran past the trash cans that had stopped being trash cans and become something he didn't have a name for. His sneakers hit the warm ground and made no sound.
He couldn't hear his own running.
He couldn't hear his own breathing either.
His lungs burned. He kept going. He turned right at the corner where Birch Street should have been, came out into what should have been the street, and he was back where he'd started.
He was back in front of the cinema.
He stopped. Bent over with his hands on his knees and his lungs trying to find a shape that worked.
The breathing he'd been running away from was no longer behind him.
He couldn't hear it anymore.
That was worse.
If he could hear it he knew where it was. He couldn't hear it. He didn't know where it was.
Troy turned in a slow circle. The parking lot was the same parking lot it had been a minute ago, and it was nothing like the parking lot it had been a minute ago, and the gap between those two facts was where his mind had stopped working.
The cinema lobby was open.
The door that was somehow still a door pushed when he pushed it. He stumbled inside. The lobby was empty. The carpet was gone. The carpet had become the warm pulsing meat-surface he'd been crawling on outside. The popcorn cart was still there. The cart had sunk halfway into the floor, its metal base half-merged with the surface, the glass case foggy with something that wasn't steam. The popcorn inside the case was black.
Troy crawled behind the popcorn cart.
He didn't decide to. His legs did it. He pulled his knees up to his chin and pressed his back against the cart's metal side. The metal was warm. The metal had been cold steel a minute ago. The metal was getting warmer the longer he leaned against it, and he didn't dare to move.
He waited.
He didn't know what he was waiting for. He didn't know what would happen if the wet breathing came in through the door. He just knew his legs wouldn't carry him any further and his lungs wouldn't pull any more air, and he wasn't crying yet but he was going to cry soon.
He thought about his bed. His mom's meatballs on Tuesday nights. The Joe Montana poster over his desk. The Walkman his uncle had gotten him for his fifteenth birthday that he kept under his pillow because he didn't want his sister to find it and break it.
The small list of things that belonged to him in the world.
He wanted his mom.
He didn't know he'd had room left for that thought. He wanted his mom and he didn't want her here, because if she came here she'd be where he was, and where he was wasn't a place a person was supposed to be.
He closed his eyes.
He tried to make himself small.
Outside, somewhere in the warm dark beyond the cinema doors, the breathing started up again.
Slow and wet.
Troy Walsh, who had never been afraid of anything, started to cry.
* * *
Miller Property - same hour
Ryan had given up on sleep twenty minutes after the lamp went off.
He'd known he wouldn't sleep. He'd lain down because lying down had felt like the only honest thing to do with midnight, and once midnight had passed and he was still staring at the ceiling tracing the same hairline crack he'd been tracing since August, he'd put his feet on the floor and gone back downstairs.
That had been three hours ago.
He was at the kitchen table now. Coffee at his elbow. The Commodore against the wall printing its slow paper roll. Lab traffic had been holding at elevated since eleven and had not climbed and had not fallen. Nine transmissions an hour. Routine codes mostly, with two of the unmapped tags he'd been seeing for a week. Nothing that pinged as critical.
Mana Sense was open. Had been open for hours. The southeast pressure from the Lab was a familiar weight against the back of his skull, climbing in tiny increments since Friday, but it was a slow climb. A climb you could watch for days.
He drank his coffee. He drank a lot of coffee today…. Maybe it was another reason for why he can't sleep.
The house was quiet with the furnace clicking on every twenty-two minutes in the basement. The refrigerator's compressor running its own schedule. The tick of the cooling baseboard near the front window where the heat collected and let go again. The slow creak of the roof beam over the dining room when the temperature outside dropped half a degree. He knew all of those sounds. He'd learned to recognize them on the first night he'd slept here alone, and they'd been the house's voice ever since. He couldn't believe how much time had passed since.
The TV in the living room had been off for hours. Whichever of the guys had gone to sleep last hadn't bothered to turn the lamp out. He hadn't gone in to check on them. He didn't need to. Detect Life had four steady points in the next room and would tell him if any of the four moved.
At one-thirty he made a second pot of coffee.
At one-fifty he checked the runes around the house, walking the perimeter inside the walls and laying his hand on each anchor point. All quiet. The Ward lenses pulled their slow trickle from the ambient field. Nothing approached the property line.
At two he sat back down at the table and stared at the Commodore for ten minutes without reading what was printing.
The doubt came in at two-fifteen.
It worked its way down into his shoulders. What if he was wrong about the date? What if his foreknowledge had already broken from too many changes and the gate was opening Tuesday or Wednesday or next month, and he was burning himself down to nothing sitting in a kitchen waiting for the wrong night to be over. What if Will not getting taken had pushed the schedule. What if the schedule had never really existed and he'd been forcing the show's timeline onto a world that was running its own clock.
He couldn't shake these thoughts for a while.
Then he made it move along. The energy signature wasn't a memory from his old life. The energy signature was a real measurement, climbing, in the right direction, on the right week. Whatever happened tonight or didn't, the data was the data, and the data still pointed at the Lab going critical inside the next forty-eight hours. He could be wrong about the hour. He couldn't be wrong about that.
At two-thirty he went out to the back porch in his sweatshirt.
The orange tabby was on the railing. The cat had taken to sleeping on the railing when the temperature dropped, instead of the woodshed roof where it slept in October. Yellow eyes half-closed. Tail wrapped around its paws. It opened one eye when Ryan came out, looked at him, and closed the eye again.
Ryan watched the trees.
The dimensional pressure from the southeast hadn't moved. The membrane was thin and getting thinner and not yet torn. The thinness felt different at this hour than it had felt at eight, but he couldn't put a finger on what was different, and pushing on it harder didn't help. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was his coffee count. Maybe it was the part of him that knew Sunday was almost over and that if the breach didn't come tonight he was going to have to start the wait over again from scratch.
He stood out there for ten minutes. The cold went through the sweatshirt. He could see his breath in the dim porch light. The cat didn't move.
He went back inside.
He had to make another pot. Couldn't fall asleep now, not that he could with the Gamer system, unless he wanted to… but force of habit….
* * *
At three-forty-two it happened.
The alert runes in the house fired all at once. Not the small chime that flagged a body crossing a threshold but a long sustained tone that meant a dimensional event of sufficient magnitude to register on every rune in the building at the same moment. The Commodore at his elbow emitted the single high beep he'd set as a critical override. His Mana Sense detonated.
The southeast resonance, the slow pressure that had been climbing for two weeks, ruptured.
It was like a flashbang in a dark room. The wave hit his psychic sense with no warning and no falloff, and he had to put both hands on the table to keep his head from rocking forward. His ears didn't hurt, because the energy wasn't acoustic, but the part of his head behind his ears felt the same way an ear felt when a firework went off too close.
He sat for a second and let the afterimage settle.
His heart was at sixty and climbing. Gamer's Body kept the rest of him steady. No shaking hands or nausea. The mind underneath the body knew exactly what had just happened and the mind was the part that needed a second.
Then he opened his eyes.
The first notification was waiting.
[WARNING: MASSIVE DIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED][Location: Southeast, 2.3 km from current position][Dimensional Resonance: CRITICAL - GATE OPEN][Multiple entity signatures crossing dimensional boundary]
He read it once. The numbers matched the Lab to within fifty meters. There was no surprise in him for being right. Being right was the floor of where this morning started. The second notification slid up underneath the first.
[ID Create - DIMENSIONAL UPDATE]
Active dimensional breach detected in local area.
NEW CAPABILITY: Upside Down Access
ID Create can now open an independent gate to the Upside Down from any location. Gates opened by the user can be opened and CLOSED at will. Gates opened by OTHER entities (Demogorgon, Vecna, Lab experiments) require ID Escape at LV 25+ to forcibly close. Current ID Escape level: insufficient. WARNING: The Upside Down is NOT an Instant Dungeon. Real, persistent dimension with no safety net. No ID Escape abort. Entry is permanent until you exit through a gate. MP Cost: 150. Cooldown: 10 minutes.
CREATURE INTERACTION UPDATE
Creatures originating from the Upside Down (NOT ID copies) that are killed in the real world DO NOT dissolve. Physical remains persist. Loot and XP are still granted.ID spawned creatures continue to dissolve normally upon death within the ID.
Ryan read both twice.
The second notification was huge. He could open the door himself now. From anywhere. Walk in, walk out, close it behind him. The Gamer system he'd been using for six months had just dropped in his lap another surprise he didn't expected.
The catch was the close-someone-else's-gate part. ID Escape was at level fourteen. The threshold was twenty-five. Eleven points of grinding on a skill that didn't level passively, which meant months of focused work, which meant the Lab's gate was going to stay open until he either hit that threshold or found another method. He'd think about that later… maybe he could bypass it by investing skill points from Leveling-up.
Also, in Season one, Eleven didn't actually close the Gate at all, and things still stayed more or less okay, unless he wanted to count the corrupted vine network spreading through Will as "okay," which felt like cheating on a technicality. Still, he needed to be a lot more cautious this time. According to the later tie-in series '85 Tales in the Stranger Things World, creatures from the Upside Down could affect local wildlife and twist it into something else. Which meant this wasn't just a repeat of canon with the serial numbers filed off, this had the potential to turn into a full ecological contamination problem if he let it run.
The corpse persistence was another new rewrite. Every Demogorgon he killed in Hawkins was going to leave a body now. Bodies meant evidence. Evidence in the woods would draw the Lab. Evidence in town would draw Hopper and eventually draw the Lab back to the scene. He was going to have to clean up after himself.
Eleven was finally out.
The system didn't track her past the eighty-meter resolution of his sense, and it wasn't going to. He didn't need it to. He'd watched the show thrice in his old life, the year he'd graduated college, and he could draw the route from his memory. Out of the Lab in the chaos. North through the woods. Past the trailer park she'd have no reason to enter. Up to the state road. Walking until she found food. Benny Hammond's diner on that road, open at six, and a small girl in a hospital gown turning up at his back door before lunch.
That was the show's version.
The show's version was the best lead he had and the only one he was going to get. He'd be at the woods east of the diner before sunrise, and he'd intercept her in the trees before she ever crossed the threshold of the building. Benny would not see her. Benny would not call the social worker. Benny would not die at the hands of a Lab cleanup crew that had arrived within hours.
He stood up.
The Commodore had stopped printing for a second, doing what it sometimes did when the volume of incoming traffic overwhelmed the buffer. Then it caught up and started printing again, faster than he'd ever seen it print, lines stacking on each other:
CONTAINMENT BREACH. SUBJECT ESCAPE. ALL TEAMS RESPOND. PERIMETER LOCKDOWN INITIATED. VEHICLES DISPATCHED. SECTOR FOUR SECURED. SECTOR THREE SECURED. SECTOR TWO COMPROMISED. VISUAL CONFIRMATION ON ANOMALY. ANOMALY EVACUATING SECTOR ONE.
The Lab's bureaucratic vocabulary for what had just happened was clean and procedural. Underneath the vocabulary it was a building on fire. The gate had opened in their basement. Their experiments had broken loose. Their subject had walked out the front door. They didn't even use the encrypted channel for it, just broadcast it to all their forces on the Hawkins perimeter.
He stood at the table for a long moment.
The first instinct was to grab the keys and the F-150 and be on the access road in ninety seconds. The first instinct was completely wrong. It was three forty-five in the morning. He had four kids asleep in his living room. Driving out of the property in the dark would wake them. Waking them at this hour would mean an explanation, and the explanation would have to come either way, but the explanation went down easier with bacon and daylight and three hours of him having his face under control.
Also, the whole idea of bringing his friends here was not to leave any of them alone. If he went out, they'd definitely follow him even with him explaining things, and that risked everything he'd planned.
He didn't need to be at the diner yet either. The girl was walking barefoot in hospital gown, starved. It was going to take hours to get there.
He had time.
He stepped quietly into the living room.
Mike on the floor, arm thrown across his face. Lucas in the armchair, one foot dangling off the side. Dustin on the couch, mouth open. Will under the blanket on the rug.
He stood there for a few seconds looking at Will.
Then he went back to the kitchen.
* * *
Around four something brushed his mind.
Small and warm. Less than a second. Not the ambient hum of her signature moving through the field but a deliberate reach, the kind of touch a kid made with a fingertip on a window. She'd done it twice in October when she'd been lonely or scared or both. She did it now.
She'd felt him awake.
He didn't have the skill to reach back. Telepathy at LV 1 couldn't carry miles through cold woods.
He stood at the kitchen window for a while after that. The trees along the property line were a black wall against the slightly less black sky. The Ward lenses were warm in his Mana Sense, three steady glows around the house, doing their job. Nothing on the property line moved.
At five he started cooking.
* * *
5:34 AM
Dustin came in first, dragging the throw blanket from the couch.
He stopped in the doorway. Squinted at the bacon. Squinted at the eggs. Squinted at Ryan.
"It is not morning."
"It's almost six."
"That is not morning. That is a hostile rumor about morning."
He sat down. He picked up a piece of bacon. He inspected it like he wasn't fully sure it was real and then ate it. He started chewing while looking at Ryan with both eyebrows up.
"Why is there breakfast."
"Because I made it."
"Why did you make it."
"Because I was up."
"Why were you up."
"Sit down and eat the food."
"I am sitting AND I am eating." He took a long swallow of orange juice straight from the glass Ryan had set out. "This is suspicious behavior, Reed. You are behaving suspiciously."
"Drink your juice."
"You're not denying it."
"I'm not denying anything."
"That's also suspicious."
Probably woken up from the noise, Lucas came in next. He had the armchair blanket around his shoulders and only one sock on. He dropped into a chair, accepted the coffee mug Ryan slid in front of him, and held it under his chin for a long time without drinking from it.
"My back is broken."
"You slept on a chair."
"That chair has always hated me. I'm going to write its owner a strongly worded letter."
"I'm the owner."
"I know... That why"
He drank the coffee and stared blankly at the table.
"What time is it."
"Five-forty."
"In the morning?"
"It's still dark out, Lucas."
"That doesn't actually answer my question." He looked at the window. "I hate the morning. I want to be on record. I officially hate the morning. Sinclair, Lucas, on the record, against the morning."
"NOTED, I also want to join the records… I HATE MORINGS TOO" Dustin said with full mouth.
Mike and Will came in together. Mike's hair was flat on one side and Will was rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand and very much not awake. Mike stopped in front of the stove and breathed in.
"Oh my god."
"It's bacon, Mike."
"It's a lot of bacon."
"Sit down."
"How long have you been cooking."
"Forty minutes. Sit down."
They sat. Will took the chair next to Ryan's. He didn't say anything. He picked up a fork. He picked up a piece of toast. He started eating it in small careful bites without looking up from the plate.
For a minute it was forks on plates. Dustin breathed through his nose because the bacon required full attention. Lucas's mug clinked against the table every time he set it down, which was every fifteen seconds. Mike worked through the eggs methodically, no hurry, one bite at a time. He always ate like that.
Outside the windows the dark had the faintest blue tinge at the edges. The kitchen smelled like coffee and grease and toast.
"So we're not going to talk about the bacon."
"What about the bacon," Ryan said.
"You make bacon when you've been up all night. We've been over this. We have evidence."
"Drink your coffee, Dustin."
"I'm just saying. Mom of the year. Up since when. Three?"
"Earlier."
"Earlier than three."
"I never went to sleep."
Lucas's coffee mug stopped halfway to his mouth.
Dustin's bacon stopped halfway to his mouth.
Mike kept eating because Mike was Mike, but his eyes were on Ryan's face.
Will set the toast down.
"Why didn't you sleep," Will said.
Ryan put the coffee carafe down. He pulled out the chair across from Will and sat. He didn't look at anyone particular. He looked at the table.
"The energy from the Lab spiked sometime before four this morning," he said. "What I've been watching since September. It hit the wall. The membrane went."
Lucas set his coffee down. He didn't pick it up again.
"Went how."
"Opened."
"All the way?"
"All the way."
Dustin had been chewing. He stopped chewing. He looked at the bacon in his hand and put it back on the plate.
"And something supposed to come through?" Mike asked.
"I don't know yet. The Lab's been dispatching vehicles since just before four. They were running search protocols when I came down here at four-thirty. They were still running them at five. Whatever happened, it's been keeping them very busy."
"And you've been sitting at the table the whole night," Will said. Quietly. Like he was confirming something he'd already worked out.
"Yeah."
Will picked his toast back up. He resumed eating.
Lucas was looking at Ryan. Lucas had the slow steady look of a kid who was waiting for the rest.
"And."
"And I'm going to drive out and see what I can see. I'm not going to the Lab. I'm going around it. I want to see where they set up. Who they're moving. What I can pick up from a distance."
"You said you wouldn't go near the Lab for our own safety."
"I said I wouldn't go near the Lab when there were monsters in it."
"Is there a monster in it now?"
"There was a something in it. I don't know where it is now."
"So you're driving toward something unknown in unknown current location."
"Around it. Not toward it."
"What about school?" Mike said.
"I'm calling in sick. Bad flu. The rest of the week."
"The rest of the week."
"At least."
Mike went back to his eggs without saying anything else.
Dustin still hadn't picked his bacon back up.
"What about us."
"You four go to school. Bikes, all four, together. Don't split off coming or going. You stay in your group through the day. You eat lunch at the same table. You walk between classes together. CB radios in your bags, turned on, on the property channel, volume low. If anything off happens during the day, you call. If anything pings as wrong, you call. I want to know fast."
"Define off," Lucas said.
"Anything that's not the day you expected to have. If a teacher's missing. If somebody you know is absent who shouldn't be absent. If a kid says they saw something weird in the woods on the way to school. If the bus driver is acting strange. If somebody's parent shows up to pull them out of class. Anything. You don't have to know what it means. You just have to call it in."
"Absent kids," Lucas repeated. He'd caught the line.
Ryan didn't answer that.
Lucas looked at him for a second longer. Then he picked his fork back up.
"Got it."
"Anything else specific," Dustin asked.
"Watch the cops. If you see Hopper at the school, that means something. If you see a state trooper at the school, that means something more. If you see anyone in a suit at the school, you don't engage and you call me."
"In a suit."
"Tie, jacket, dress shoes, hair too neat. You'll know."
"That's a lot of pattern recognition for first period," Dustin said.
"You'll manage."
Will hadn't spoken since… yeah. He was halfway through his toast. He took a sip of orange juice and set the glass down carefully.
"If I get to right vibe from you than I'm glad we slept here," Will said.
He said it to the table, mostly.
Ryan looked at him.
"Yeah."
Will didn't look up. He kept eating.
After a long pause Dustin reached out and put his bacon back on the plate. He thought about it. He picked it up again. He ate it.
"When do you come back," Mike asked.
"Tonight."
"You'll call us first if you find anything."
"Yes."
"Promise."
"I'll call."
That wasn't a promise but Mike didn't push it.
* * *
Equipment check at the front door.
Ryan went through it with them by hand. He didn't trust four sleepy fifteen-year-olds to remember the order. CB radio on, channel set, volume low, in the bag, not the side pocket. Knives in the inner pockets where if a teacher decides to check a bag wouldn't find them on a casual look. The sealed bottles with HP potions inside, labeled like sports drinks. Lucas had the spear in some old and used guitar case. Mike had the bat in two pieces with the wooden handle in the side of the bag. Dustin had the crossbow he'd been working on in the workshop also in the bag and bolts in a bundle that passed for pencils to anyone who didn't open the bundle. Will had the carved staff laid along the spine of his bag.
They were fifteen-year-old kids and they were going to school with weapons in their bags. Ryan stood in the doorway and didn't say anything about it, that fell like a regular American student going to school, everyone needs to get themselves armed.
[A.N: It's a joke… don't be offended]
"Got it," Mike said.
"Got it," Dustin said.
Lucas just nodded.
Will adjusted his bag strap and looked at Ryan.
"You'll be safe."
"Yeah."
"Say it like you mean it and don't be cringe about it"
"I'll be safe, Will."
Will nodded. He went out.
They biked out at six-fifty. Four boys in formation down the access road, cold puffing white in front of their mouths, the F-150 going by them on the gravel two minutes later in the opposite direction and pulling off into the workshop bay.
The morning was the color of unwashed sheets.
* * *
He called the school first.
Mrs. Petersen picked up on the second ring. She knew him by voice. Pete had her on speed dial for things Pete needed to know about, like the time Tommy Hagan had shoved Will into the lockers in September and Ryan had ended up in the principal's office, or the time the gym coach had wanted to talk about Ryan's bench press numbers because they were an outlier and the outlier was a concern.
Besides, Ryan was a straight A student. The teachers would believe anything he told them, even if he said he was going to sell ice in Antarctica.
"Mrs. Petersen, hi. It's Ryan Reed."
"Ryan. You sound terrible."
"Yeah, came down with something hard overnight. Probably that flu going around. Out the rest of the week if it's okay."
"It's okay. I'll mark you down."
"Thanks."
"Take care of yourself, hon."
"I will."
He hung up. He stood at the counter for a second with his hand on the receiver. Then he picked it back up and called Pete.
Pete answered on the first ring.
That was unusual. Pete answered on the third or fourth, depending on what Pete had been doing when the phone rang. First ring meant Pete had been near the phone, and Pete had been near the phone meant Pete had been near the phone for a reason.
"Hey kid."
"Hey, Pete."
"You're calling in sick."
"Yeah."
"Before you asked, I answer fast because our sweet and magnificent Hawkins Lab woke me up at four this morning. Lou's wife called Lou's brother because Lou's brother used to work for the county, and Lou's brother called me at quarter after four because Lou's brother thinks I want to know things like a fleet of state vehicles running County Road Twelve in the dark."
"Yeah."
"You picking up on it?"
"A little."
"You're not."
"I'm not what."
"You're not just picking up on it a little. You're either out the door already or you're out the door in the next ten minutes."
Ryan didn't say anything. It always amazed him how much he underestimated Pete's ability to connect the dots.
"You going out alone?"
"Yes"
"And what in god's name are you going to do? You know what, never mind, it's not like you'll tell me anyway. Will you be safe?"
"I think so."
"You think."
"I'll be safe, Pete."
"That's a better answer." Pete made the noise that meant he was rubbing his jaw. Ryan had only ever seen it twice and had never been able to picture it happening over the phone. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"You'd tell me if you weren't."
"I would."
"No you wouldn't."
"I would."
"Sure you would." A pause. The kitchen radio on Pete's end was playing something Ryan couldn't identify. "Call me tonight."
"I will."
"And come around Sunday."
"I will."
Click.
Ryan stood at the counter for another minute. Pete hadn't taken the lie at all. But Pete would also let it ride for a week. Ryan had until Sunday before Pete decided to drive out and see for himself what the so-called flu looked like in person.
He went down to the workshop.
The F-150 was where he'd left it, dark blue under the overhead lights, the Composite plating across the doors smooth where the steel and hide had bonded into one piece. The hidden compartment behind the bench seat was already loaded. Backup armor. The longer spear. Spare potions in the medical kit with paramedic stickers on them, in case anyone ever opened the kit. A folded raincoat. The incendiary device in its mason jar, sigil on the bottom, ignition source in the lid.
He added the day's load.
The Fang sword came out of Inventory in his hand. Heavier than it looked, three pounds at the hilt, the blade matte black where the Demogorgon hide finish had cured. He clipped the sheath to his belt and adjusted the angle three times before it sat right. Then the armor. The Demogorgon Hide panels he'd cut and sewn fit under the sweatshirt without showing under the fabric. Cold against his skin at first. Warming as his body warmed it. Heavy in a way that wasn't tiring. He'd worn this armor for a hundred hours of training throughout the last month and his shoulders accepted the weight as a known thing.
Claw Gauntlets into the deep pockets of the jacket. Three Greater HP Potions distributed across the inner pockets, two left and one right, because if he had to grab one in a hurry his left hand was faster. Lighter fluid bottle into the right outside pocket where he could squeeze it through the fabric without taking it out. Zippo into the breast pocket where he could feel it through the seam.
The incendiary stayed in the truck. Carrying a chemical bomb on his person while driving past Hawkins's three traffic cops was a risk he didn't need to take.
He stood in the middle of the workshop for a second and ran through the gear list in his head. Sword. Armor. Gauntlets. Potions. Lighter fluid. Zippo. Backup in the truck. Combat Golem on standby. Property runes warded. Cat on the porch.
He'd thought about this moment for six months. He had imagined it differently. He'd imagined a kind of inner clarity, a focusing-down of attention to a single bright line. What he actually had was tired eyes and a fourth cup of coffee sitting heavy in his stomach and a slow methodical preparation that felt no different from any other Saturday in the workshop. But….at the end the body was ready. The brain was ready. There was no ceremony to have been ready for half a year and stepping into it.
The orange tabby was on the workbench when he turned around. The cat had jumped down from the porch at some point and made its way through the cellar door he'd left ajar. Yellow eyes following the motion of his hands. He picked the cat up and walked it back upstairs and set it on the porch railing on his way out.
The cat blinked at him.
"Stay," Ryan said.
The cat did not stay. The cat hopped down off the railing the moment he turned his back, walked across the porch, and climbed up into the truck through the still-open driver's side window before he'd even finished crossing the gravel.
Ryan got in. Looked at the cat in the passenger seat. The cat had arranged itself on the bench with its tail wrapped around its paws and was watching the road through the windshield like it had places to be.
"You're not coming."
The cat blinked at him.
He sat with his hand on the keys for a second. Then he sighed and turned them.
The F-150 started on the first turn.
* * *
The roads were empty.
He drove west on County Eleven toward the highway that ran past Benny's. The sun just barely come up yet but the sky behind the tree line was lightening from black to a slow steel gray, and the frost on the fields beside the road shone where the headlights caught it. Indiana farm country in November. Stubble in the cornfields. A handful of cattle clustered along a fence line because cattle were warm together. A barn with one light on in the second-floor window, somebody up early to do something farming required at that hour.
A state trooper passed him going the opposite direction.
Ryan didn't slow down and he didn't speed up. The trooper didn't slow down either. The cruiser blew past with its lights off, in a hurry, heading southeast toward Roane County, which was the direction the Lab was. Ryan watched it in the rearview until it was gone.
Three minutes later a second cruiser came up behind him and passed him on a straightaway, also heading southeast. Then a third, two miles after that.
The Lab had called in everyone. The state was running a missing-subject protocol across two counties.
He stayed on County Eleven. He took the cutoff onto Old Mill at six-thirty and worked the back roads from there. The back roads were empty. They were always empty. He'd driven these roads for months on weekends, picking up his routes, learning every culvert and crossroads, mapping out the places he could pull the truck off and not be seen from the main road.
The cat slept.
He turned onto the gravel that ran east of the diner and parked the truck in the tree cover by the old culvert.
The dashboard clock said seven-eleven.
The diner wouldn't open for another hour. The girl wouldn't be here for another three at the earliest, and possibly longer. He sat with the engine off and listened to the truck's metal tick as it cooled, and watched the sky over the tree line turn from steel to pale orange to the faded blue of an Indiana November morning.
He drank the rest of his thermos.
Around seven-thirty he got out and did a slow perimeter walk through the tree cover. Stealth at LV 8 ran in the background by reflex, his boots finding the soft places in the wet leaves. Half a mile up the gravel road he had a clean line of sight to the diner's back lot, and he sat on a downed log for fifteen minutes to take that in. The diner opened at eight. Benny's Buick pulled in at seven-fifty. The two early customers, regulars by the look of them, arrived in their own cars at five past. A normal Monday morning.
Ryan walked back to the truck.
The cat was where he'd left it, on the dashboard, asleep in the patch of sun that had crawled across the windshield. He climbed back in, pulled the granola bar out of the glove box, and settled in to wait.
* * *
Hawkins National Laboratory - 3:38 AM
Eleven had been inside the water tank for forty minutes. The normal session was fifteen. She had counted to fifteen at the beginning, but Papa had not opened the door, so she had counted to fifteen a second time, and Papa had not opened the door, and after that she had stopped counting because the counting had not been helping her.
The water held her up. The salt was strong today, and it stung the cut on her ankle. The salt stung the corner of her eye where the goggles did not seal. The mouthpiece pressed into the roof of her mouth because it had been made for a smaller face and Papa kept saying he would have a new one made and the new one had not come.
She could not see anything.
The tank was dark inside. The goggles were dark inside the tank. She had practiced this for months. The dark was supposed to be a friend. Papa had told her the dark was a friend because the dark made the inside louder, made the place she could find when she was alone with herself easier to find. She did not think the dark was a friend. But She couldn't say so, Papa will be mad.
Through the water and the goggles, very far away, she could hear Papa's voice.
"Find him, Eleven. Find him and listen."
Him was a man with a beard. Papa had shown her the photograph for an hour this morning. The man was stranger from somewhere else. The man spoke a language Papa had been teaching her in pieces all year, words she did not know the meaning of but could repeat back into a microphone after she had heard them in her head. Papa said the man would be at a desk in a room far away and Papa said she could find him and Papa said this was a test that was important, that was the test he had been preparing her for since forever.
She did not want to find the man with the beard.
She wanted to come out of the tank, but nobody ever asked her what she wanted.
The place she went to was the same place she always went to.
It was a long room. The ceiling she could not see. The floor was black and shining and it had a thin film of water across it everywhere, and when she walked the water broke under her bare feet and made a sound, and the sound went out in every direction and did not come back. It was the only sound. There was no wind. There was no light source she could find. The light came from somewhere that was not above her and not below her and just was.
She walked.
She walked because walking was the way to find what Papa wanted her to find. The place she walked in was very large and the things she needed to find were always somewhere in it, and she had learned that if she walked in one direction long enough she would feel the thing she was looking for, and then she would walk toward the feeling, and then the thing would be there.
She thought about the man with the beard.
She did not know what he looked like in person, only what he looked like in the photograph. She tried to keep the photograph in her head. The hat. The desk. The window. The bookshelf behind him with two books leaning against each other on the second shelf.
She walked.
After a long time, in the distance, she felt something.
It was not the man with the beard.
The thing she was supposed to find was supposed to feel like a person. People felt warm. People felt like a small steady glow she could move toward. This was not warm. This was the opposite of warm. This was a cold spot in the middle of the room where the air was different.
She stopped walking.
Papa's voice was very far away now. She could not hear what Papa was saying. The voice was on the other side of the water and the goggles and the place she was in, and she had learned how to keep it small when she was working, and the voice was small now.
She should have turned around but she didn't.
The cold spot was a question she had not been asked. She had spent her whole life being given questions to answer and never being given the chance to ask one. The cold spot in the dark was the first thing she had ever found that was not on Papa's list. She wanted to know what it was.
She walked toward it.
* * *
The cold spot got larger as she got closer, and the larger it got the more she understood she had made a mistake.
It was not a spot. It was a shape. The shape had a back and a head and arms that she could not quite see, and the shape was standing very still in the dark, and the shape was very tall, taller than any of the men in the white coats, taller than Papa, taller than the orderly who held her arms when she did not want to do what Papa wanted her to do.
The shape was facing away from her.
She could see the line of its back. The back was wrong. The shoulders were narrow but the spine was too long, and it was weirdly bent, and the skin was the same wet black as the floor.
It had not heard her.
She had walked toward it and the water under her feet had not made any sound, and the shape had not turned, and she was close enough now to see that the shape was breathing. Slow and wet. The same breath she sometimes heard in the dark of her room when she was almost asleep and she did not know if the breath was hers or somebody else's.
She should turn around.
She knew that, in the part of her she trusted, in the same part that had stopped believing Papa. The part that knew the difference between a thing Papa had told her was safe and a thing that actually was safe. The shape was the second kind. The shape was the kind of thing she was supposed to walk away from.
She reached out her hand.
She did not know why.
She watched it move. She watched it reach toward the back of the shape. The fingers were almost touching the wet black skin.
The shape turned.
* * *
It did not turn like any man she ever saw.
The head moved first. The body did not. The head spun on top of the long neck and came around to face her, and as it came around the head opened, and Eleven saw what was inside the head.
There was no face.
Where the face should have been was a flower made of teeth. The petals were skin and the inside of the petals was rows and rows of small wet pointed teeth, and behind the teeth was a darkness that breathed, and the breath came out and she felt the breath on her own face even though her face was floating in a tank outside of here.
The thing saw her.
It saw her. She knew it saw her. The thing's seeing went into her chest and through her chest and out the other side.
She tried to pull her hand back.
The hand would not come.
She had reached out and her hand had crossed something she had not known was there, a thin wall between her and the shape, and now the hand was on the other side of the wall and the wall would not let it come back. The shape took one step toward her. The leg bent forward and then bent again at a place that was not a knee, and the foot came down on the wet black floor without making a sound.
She pulled.
She pulled with everything she had. With the part of her that moved the soda cans across the room when Papa asked. With the part of her that had bent the metal cot frame yesterday when she had been angry. She pulled and the hand did not come.
The shape took a second step.
Her chest was full of water. She could not breathe through the mouthpiece. The mouthpiece had been there a second ago and now it was not, or her face was no longer where the mouthpiece was, or both. Something behind her in the tank was happening. She could not see it. She could only see the thing in front of her, getting closer, the petal-mouth opening wider as it came.
She pulled one more time.
Something tore.
It was not the hand that tore. It was the air. The thing she had reached through had been a wall, and the wall had not let her hand come back, and so when she pulled hard enough the wall came with the hand instead. The wall ripped open in a long uneven line, and behind the wall was darkness, and the darkness was not the darkness of the room she was standing in but a different darkness, a darkness that belonged somewhere else, and through the tear she could see….
She did not have a word for what she could see.
She fell backward screaming.
* * *
She came back into her body in the tank with her lungs full of water.
She did not remember coming back. One second she had been in the long room with the shape in front of her and the wall tearing, and the next second her face was underwater and the mouthpiece was floating beside her cheek, and her arms were trying to push her up through the liquid.
She broke the surface and could not find air.
The water came up out of her throat in long burning waves. Her chest hurt. Her head hurt. There was blood coming out of her nose in a slow steady ribbon and she could feel it on her upper lip, warm where everything else was cold. Through the goggles she could see colored shapes. The colored shapes were lights. The lights were the lights in the observation room and they were flickering, on and off and on and off, and somewhere behind the lights Papa was shouting, the sound coming through the thick glass like a sound from underwater even though she was the one in the water and Papa was the one in the air.
The orderly was inside the tank room. She did not know when he had come in. He was reaching for the side of the tank. His hands were near the rim.
The thing she had pulled was still attached to her.
She did not know how. She did not know if it was attached to her or to the tank or to the air in the room. She only knew that when she had pulled and the wall had ripped, the rip had not closed, and the rip was still there, and something was bleeding through it.
The orderly reached for her.
She did not mean what happened next.
She had meant to push the wall back into place. She had meant to put the rip behind her where she could not see it. She reached for the rip with what was left in her, and what was left in her was not very much and it was not very controlled, and the push came out sideways. The push came out in every direction. The push hit the lights, and the lights stopped being lights and became glass on the floor of the observation room behind a wall she could no longer see clearly. The push hit the alarm system, and the alarm started. The push hit the orderly, who had been bending over the side of the tank, and the orderly stopped being a man bending over the side of the tank and became something on the floor that she did not look at.
She did not look at him.
She did not look at him because if she looked at him she would have to know.
Papa was pounding on the glass with both hands. She could hear that. She could hear Papa shouting something that might have been her name or might have been a command, and either way she did not listen to it, because somewhere underneath the part of her that listened to Papa, the part that had stopped believing him finally bloomed and had taken over the control of everything from now own.
She climbed out of the tank.
She did not know how she got over the rim. The rim was high and she was small. But she got over the rim, and she was on the wet floor of the tank room, and the floor was cold under her bare feet, and she walked.
She walked because she did not know what else to do.
* * *
The hallway lights were off.
That had never happened before. The hallway lights had been on every minute of every day of every year she had been in this building, and they were off now, and the doors that were always locked were no longer locked because the alarm system, when it broke, broke the locks too.
She walked past the orderly on the floor.
She did not look at him.
She walked past the cameras at the corner of the hall. The little red light that was always on was off. She walked past the metal gate she had never been allowed past. She pushed and it opened, and she walked through.
She walked through three more doors that should have stopped her and did not.
She walked out of the building into the cold.
The cold was different from any cold she had ever felt. It went through the gown like the gown was not there. Her bare feet hurt by the second step. She walked anyway because there was nothing else to do, she must run from that feeling… that creature that followed her.
The trees were black against the sky. The sky was a color she had never seen the ceiling be. The sky was very large. She had not known the sky could be that large.
She walked north because the warm thing was north.
The warm thing was steady. It had been there for weeks, since the night she had touched it by mistake, and it did not push at her like Papa pushed when he wanted her to move, and it did not pull at her like the thing in the dark had pulled tonight. The warm thing just waited. The warm thing had hands and a back and a face she could not see but could feel in the shape of its presence, and the warm thing belonged to a body that had not tried to put her in water.
She walked.
Somewhere behind her in the dark, the rip she had made in the wall was still open, and through the rip something was coming.
She did not look back.
She did not look back because looking back was what Papa would have wanted her to do.
After a long time, just before the sky started to lighten at the edge of where it touched the trees, she reached out one more time. Carefully this time. Only a little. The way she had used to reach for the warm thing in October when she had been alone in her room and Papa had been somewhere else.
The warm thing was awake.
The warm thing was awake and waiting.
She walked harder.
* * *
Side road, half a mile from Benny's Burgers - 10:53 AM
The CB clicked while Ryan was eating another granola bar he'd pulled from the glove box.
He'd been parked off the side road in tree cover for nearly three hours. The orange tabby was, for reasons he hadn't bothered to investigate, asleep on the dashboard. The cat had apparently jumped through the open window during one of his perimeter walks and made the truck its own.
The handset chirped twice. The group channel.
"Yeah."
"Ryan, it's Mike."
"Yeah."
A pause. Long enough that Ryan said yeah again to fill it.
"You are there."
"I'm here. Talk."
"Troy didn't come to school."
Ryan put the granola bar down on the dash.
"You are sure?"
"Hopper's here. He came in second period, two cars. He's pulling kids one at a time. He pulled James first. James was the last one to see Troy. James said Troy left their place around three this morning. They were watching a movie that ran late and Troy walked home."
Three in the morning.
At approximately the same hour the gate had ruptured.
Ryan looked at the windshield without seeing it for a second. There hadn't been a separate event. There hadn't been a small phase before the big one. There had been one event, the big one, and a thing on the other side that had been close enough to the membrane to come through wherever the membrane was thinnest at that moment, and Troy had been alone on a sidewalk and Troy walked toward sounds.
"Ryan."
"Yeah. I'm here."
"What does it mean."
"It means Hopper has a missing kid. He's checking the easy stuff first. By lunch he's going to be checking the hard stuff."
"You think Troy was taken."
"I think Hopper thinks Troy was take, and Hopper is right."
Mike was quiet for a second.
"That's why you said to call in missing kids."
"Yeah."
"You knew somebody was going to be missing."
"I knew it was possible. I felt the gate go. I didn't know what could possibly go out. I still don't, not for sure. But the timing is bad."
"It's Troy."
"It's Troy."
Mike didn't say anything for a beat. Ryan could hear the school's hallway behind him. Lockers slamming. Somebody yelling at somebody about something that didn't matter.
"You are really planning on doing something about it?"
"I'm working on it."
"How."
"Tonight. Everyone should come to the property after school. I'll explain it then. Also stay together! All four of you, no detours and don't split for a second."
"Yeah."
"Mike."
"Yeah."
"You're doing fine. Don't try to think about it as much as you have to. Get through the day."
"Okay."
"Anything else weird at school?"
"Chrissy."
"What about Chrissy."
"She came up to me at the lockers between third and fourth. Asked if you were okay. Said you've been wound up since the end of October and now, you're sick out of nowhere. I told her you had the flu. She didn't say if she believed it."
Ryan thought about that.
Chrissy was sharper than she let people see. He'd known that. He just hadn't expected to be the subject of the sharpness this fast.
"Tell her I'll see her Thursday."
"I told her you'd be back end of week."
"That works."
"Nancy was looking around the cafeteria too."
"Looking for me."
"Looking for you. She didn't come over. She sat by herself. She looked at our table for half a minute and then she opened a book and pretended she hadn't been watching."
"Okay."
"That all the okay you're going to give me?"
"That's all the okay I have right now, Mike. Get back to lunch."
"Yeah."
Click.
Ryan set the handset back in the cradle.
The cat on the dashboard had not moved through any of it.
"Yeah," Ryan said to the cat. "I know."
The cat closed its eyes.
* * *
The leaves were wet from yesterday's rain and the cold had not crisped them up yet. He moved without sound. The trees were oak and birch, mostly oak, the canopy thinned from late October but not bare. The cat had elected to stay in the truck again. It was like the twentieth patrol he made.
The tree line east of Benny's gave him a clean vantage. Sixty meters from the back door, slightly elevated. He could see the kitchen window above the dumpster, the gravel parking lot with its three painted spaces, the slope of the access road coming up from the highway. He set himself behind a fallen birch, kneeling, the trunk between him and the road, leaves arranged to break up his silhouette.
Detect Life pulsed outward.
Three points inside the diner. Benny in the kitchen. Two customers in the front. The two customers had been stationary in the same booth for an hour, which meant either truckers who'd come in for a long breakfast or a couple who didn't have anywhere else to be on a Monday morning. One car in the lot. No other vehicles on the road. A normal Monday morning at Benny's.
He settled in.
The sun was up properly now. Light came through the canopy in pale lines and warmed the patches of leaves where it landed. The frost in the shaded pockets stayed where it was. A crow worked the gravel on the far side of the lot, hopping sideways between the painted lines, finding something Ryan couldn't see from this distance. Two cars passed on the highway in the next twenty minutes. Neither slowed.
He uncapped the second thermos. The coffee was still hot enough to steam. He drank it slowly. He had nothing else to do with his hands.
* * *
The body settled into the kneel but the mind didn't.
Hopper, right now, was somewhere in Hawkins. Either at the school still or at Troy's parents' house. Troy's mother was probably the one who'd called it in this morning, before breakfast, when she'd gone to wake Troy for school and found the bed unslept in. Hopper would have driven there before he'd done anything else, asking the right questions to understand the situation. Where did he go yesterday. Who was he with. Has he ever stayed at a friend's without calling. Hopper would have called the friends. James first, because James was the obvious one. James would have told him about the movie, the late hour, the walk home through town. Hopper would have driven the route. He would have stopped at the cinema parking lot. Whatever was in that lot now, Hopper would have looked at it and tried to figure out what he was looking at, and the thing about Hopper was that Hopper was a good cop. He would not see the right thing. But he would see that something wasn't right. And then he would go to the school and start interviewing kids, and that brought it to where Mike's call had picked it up.
By tonight Hopper would have a missing kid and no leads and a county that was about to start panicking. By tomorrow he'd be talking to the state and organizing search parties. By Wednesday the Hawkins Post would have a front page with Troy's school photo on it.
In the show Joyce and Nancy were the ones to drag Hopper into the truth about Will. Without Will kidnaping only Nancy could help Hopper figure it out, and that also depends on Barb situation, which Ryan was going to solve.
Which means everything was back to Ryan…
The only person in the county who knew where Troy was, and that fact sat on his chest like a heavy stone.
Troy was supposed to be on the other side of the membrane now. Troy was alive or he wasn't. Probably alive. The Demogorgon's pattern in the show had been take and store, not eat on the spot, and Troy had been taken hours ago and there had been no body left at the cinema, because if there'd been a body Hopper would have found it on his morning drive past the scene. Probably stashed somewhere in whatever copy of Hawkins existed across the line. Probably completely terrified. Probably making himself small.
Ryan didn't like Troy. He hadn't liked Troy from the show, and he sure didn't like the Troy from here. Troy was a bully. Troy was a coward. Troy was a kid who'd been raised wrong by parents who'd been raised wrong before him, and the end product was a kid who hurt smaller things for fun. Hurting smaller things was the only language he'd ever been taught.
None of that mattered now… Ryan was going to bring him home.
He didn't know how yet. He had the start of an idea. The start was to find the Eleven. The girl was the only way he had to find things on the other side.
He should find her, give her a roof and warmth and food. Give her time to find her feet in a room where nobody put her in cold water. Then ask.
But after this many hours without finding her, he had to start admitting the obvious.
His strategy was beginning to look less like a plan and more like a guy with plot knowledge crouching in the woods, overcommitting to a scene he was way too sure canon would deliver for him on schedule.
If she really wasn't coming here… hell, if she hadn't even managed to get clear of the Lab's perimeter in the chaos, then he needed to locate her somewhere else and fast. Because if Eleven had gone off-script this early, that was not a small divergence…. that was the kind of butterfly effect that took his neat mental timeline, set it on fire, and scattered the ashes into the wind. Benny getting to live was one thing. Missing the girl entirely because reality had decided to stop respecting episode structure was another. And if that had happened, then things could already have been worse than the show. Much worse. He could be standing on the edge of a situation he had never prepared for, armed with nothing but caffeine, a sword, and rapidly depreciating meta knowledge.
Luckily for him, the exact moment he started reconsidering every life choice that had brought him to a log in the woods waiting for a traumatized telekinetic child like he was early for an appointment, his radar skill pinged.
Something was moving slowly through the trees. Ryan went perfectly still, coffee-cold nerves snapping into focus all at once. And just like that, the waiting was over.
* * *
[A.N:13,200+ words this time. We're still on the "I have a problem" trajectory but we've found a stable orbit. I'm choosing to view that as growth.
Thank you all so much for waiting. The last few weeks have been a pressure cooker between university and work. And yes, to everyone who checked in on me, I am still alive. Genuinely touched by the messages, especially the ones from people who have apparently lost authors to mysterious circumstances before. I'm fine. Don't write me off yet.
The plot has officially started. After fourteen chapters of setup, we're finally in it. This chapter ran a little lighter because I needed to ease everyone into the new pace, but it also dropped a lot of pieces on the board that are going to matter going forward.
Quick highlights from the chapter, since there's a lot to track now. Troy Walsh got taken at the cinema parking lot, the canon divergence I've been building toward since Ryan moved Will into the property.
The gate opened at 3:42 AM as Ryan predicted. The system dropped two huge updates on him in the moment of the breach, with ID Create that can now open independent gates to the Upside Down, but Ryan can't close gates opened by other entities until ID Escape hits LV 25 (currently at 14, that's a real grind). And Upside-Down creatures killed in the real world leave persistent corpses now.
Eleven's escape was its own mini arc. She encountered the shape in the Void during her tank session, tore the wall between dimensions by accident, and got out in the chaos. Hope you like my intake on that moment…
And the chapter ends with Ryan in the woods east of Benny's, finally getting his ping.
So the obvious question, how close is Ryan to meeting Eleven? Closer than you think. Or further than you think. I'm not telling you which.
Also wanted to address something that came up in the comments. A few of you have asked why Ryan didn't just go in and rescue Eleven from the Lab before any of this kicked off. I think I touched on this a few chapters back, but it bears repeating now that the plot is moving.
Removing Eleven from the picture is genuinely dangerous on a global scale, not just for Hawkins. We know from the show that other people (at minimum the Russians) know about the Upside Down and have been running their own experiments trying to crack the dimensional barrier. The show never really explores what the limits actually are, which means in theory other entities, other technology, or other psychic kids could open gates in places Ryan can't monitor. If Eleven never opens the gate but the gate opens in Russia, or somewhere else entirely, and gets out of control, Vecna's plan might succeed in a location Ryan can't reach in time. By the time he found out, it would already be too late. So keeping Eleven in play, in Hawkins, where the gate happens on his timeline and on his geography, is actually the safer bet. Counterintuitive but that's the math as Ryan sees it.
The harder question, and one I genuinely struggled with… which none of you asked, but I wrote about her in the disclaimer, is why doesn't Ryan just go into the Upside Down and blow up the exotic source material himself? That one feels more final for the Upside-Down than rescuing Eleven. My honest answer is the same logic. If other actors or technologies can crack the barrier independently, then destroying one source doesn't solve the problem, it just removes Ryan's ability to monitor it. He'd rather have the threat in a place he understands than push it somewhere he doesn't. At least for now. That could change later in the story.
Quick shoutout to TroyLilSon for putting "Tales of '85" on my radar a while back. I actually started watching it on Netflix and it's a pretty fun watch. I haven't fully figured out how to integrate it into the story yet, but I started planting references in this chapter (the line about ecological contamination from corrupted wildlife is a direct nod). Thanks for the rec.
On the schedule. The second half of the semester is heavier than I expected and the chapters are eating more time than I planned, which means I'm constantly chasing deadlines. So I'm going to be honest with you guys upfront: I can't promise weekly chapters right now. I'll aim for once a week but if it slips, it slips. I'm not abandoning the story, I'm just downshifting until the semester wraps and exam season is behind me.
Thank you all for sticking with me through the silence. The fact that the fic stayed in the rankings while I was MIA still feels surreal to me. You guys carried it.
Top 10 Power Stone legends, holding the line:
Psycho_Paradox, Yunos_Noor, GODKINGASH, aXionPingu, Getryx, Corey_Hall_0942, Dillmet_Singh_4812, sdunn0404, DaoistStar, mitch_mitch40. Absolute units.
Top 50, the backbone of this fic:
XenonBlaster65, Xander1910, Arthur25, Piggy, NinjaFrog2077, SleepWalkingMan, Gustavo_Dias_4181, Leylindd, Lucky_Fox, this_your_bush, ChristiaanZA, Mirksas, Dear_Lord, Bam729, Kilaske, Daoist3tTlco, Isabel_Cristina_0876, Lolggloll_XD, BrunooT, Abdullah_Ismail_0552, SCP_41, Ironhood, LouCaz, AlexPendragon, Mik_024, The_lazy, Broccolitop, Sad_Box, Tomik, DontDon, Aaronzaid, SteelWolves_1, blu3Jay, Sultan_Aether, DocImagine, Soul_Tarnished, daviangarcia85, iamaguynamedtre, xNeke, Nuroune, Special_snowflake, KBG_Obsidian, GzeroX, heavenlydemon_, guardian252, FOX_FIRE, corey_miller_0016, DaoistoYcxBR, Celestialicz, Rowel.
And shoutout to all 310 of you supporting the story.
Please don't forget to keep commenting, reviewing, and if you can, send some Power Stones to help push the fic up the rankings. It really makes a difference! And as always, if you spot any inconsistencies, plot holes, or typos, let me know so I can fix them before they snowball into something bigger.