Firebaby
Chapter 3
Trees and power lines rolled by as Dustin cruised down Kerley road on his way home from Donald's General Store. Joyce Byers still worked there, and he always took the time to catch up with an old family friend, but she hadn't been in today. He wondered how much he would have told her about the recent excitement in his life. Mike and El, certainly. She'd be happy to hear that they were safe after their house fire, which probably everyone in Hawkins had heard about. A whole house going up in flames was the kind of news that went around town quick. But baby Allie and her superpowers... Dustin probably wouldn't have mentioned that part to Joyce. That wasn't his secret to tell.
The trees on the side of the road cleared, giving way to an open field, giving Dustin a clear line of sight all the way down to the street corner where he'd turn toward his house. Driving on autopilot down a road that he'd covered literally thousands of times in his life, whether in a car or on a bike, something grabbed at his subconscious and jerked him violently awake.
There was a white van parked on the side of the road up ahead. A tiny feeling in the pit of Dustin's stomach drew his curiosity. He wasn't a paranoid man. In fact, Dustin considered himself to be fairly trusting and easygoing. But he had learned over his life never to close a door when his curiosity was piqued. Or his suspicion.
He slowed down to get a better look. A man in blue coveralls was kneeling at the base of a power line pole, half concealed behind the parked van. Dustin drew up next to him and rolled down his window.
"Hey man, how's it going?" He asked very awkardly.
The man, holding a piece of power cable in one hand and a pair of wire cutters in the other, barely glanced up in response.
"Mornin," the man in blue said.
"So you work for..." Dustin glanced back at the Van with the big blue logo on the side. "AT&T? You know I live just down the road and my internet's been really slow lately."
"That right?" The supposed workman said, this time not even looking up from his work.
"Yeah, glacially slow," Dustin said, trying his absolute best to sound conversational. "Uh..." he squinted at the name tag sewn onto the man's coveralls. "...John." Such a common name, Dustin thought. Such an easy name to fake.
"Well you'd have to call them," John, if that was his real name, said, pointing over his shoulder toward the logo on the van. "I just fix work orders when they give 'em to me."
"Right," Dustin said quickly. "I will." He searched around for another thread. "You know, I used to work for The Phone Company, right after I got out of school."
The so called John still didn't look up from his work, and took so long to answer, it was clear he was hoping Dustin would just go away and leave him alone. "Oh yeah?" he said, after forever.
"Yeah," Dustin said, jumping at an idea that had just come to him. "It wasn't a bad job. Do they still pay mileage when you have to come way out here?"
Finally the repair man paused what he was doing and lifted his face to Dustin. "Buddy, they haven't paid mileage in a couple of years. It's a crime. They expect me to come all the way to nowhere Indiana, no offense. It takes twice as long, but I get paid the same. They just don't care."
"Don't I know it," Dustin said, shaking his head in empathy. "My buddy Tim still works there. He says he wishes he'd gotten out when I did."
"What can ya do?" John said, shrugging his big shoulders.
"Hey, if you're the tech they send down to fix my internet, I'll buy you a pizza for your trouble," Dustin said.
John chuckled, "I'll take it, thanks."
"Well listen, don't work too hard," Dustin said, lightly slapping his steering wheel to break the moment. "I know The Company can be slave drivers."
"I'll try," John said cheerily, and waved his wire cutters as good bye. Dustin pulled away and continued on down Kerley, his suspicions well and fully put to rest. He hadn't actually ever worked for AT&T, but a friend of his had, and Dustin knew the company had stopped paying its repair tech mileage two years ago. Confident that John from AT&T really was John from AT&T and not Agent Jones from the NSA, and more than a little proud of his sleuthing work, Dustin continued on home with his haul from the general store. He had food for the baby, extra paper plates, since he had house guests and didn't like doing dishes, and a few candy bars for himself and for El. He'd gotten some candy bars to offer to Mike, too, but he didn't eat nearly as much candy, so Dustin would be happy to eat Mike's share.
El pushed open the screen door that led into Dustin's back yard. The springs creaked and rasped with age. One of the hinges was half broken off, too, so she had to lift as she pushed to keep the door from falling out of the frame. Clearly Dustin wasted little time on do-it-yourself home repair.
The afternoon sun was shining down on the mildly overgrown grass and weeds of Dustin's back yard. He owned a couple of rickety lawn chairs, and El dragged one over into the shade of a tree. Mike pulled a second a chair over and sat on the side where she was holding Allie. He gazed at the baby, concern obvious on his face. El didn't even need her extra senses to feel the concern flowing out of him.
"She's fine right now," El reassured him.
"Really," Mike asked. "No chance of a... a fire?"
El thought for a minute. "Not much," she told him.
"What happened?" Mike asked.
Again El considered her answer, looking down at Allie as she though. "Nightmare," she told him. "About fire."
"But why now?" He asked. "It's been years since that happened to her."
El wished she had an easy answer. She'd experienced a very brief flash of Allie's nightmare, but only a flash. For that one second before their whole living room had gone up in flames, she'd been able to feel the baby's fear, sudden and alien, seemingly out of nowhere. She couldn't explain where it had come from. Her intuition gave her only a few hints. While she gazed down at the baby, he eyes going a little out of focus, she was distracted by a quiet buzzing sound. She glanced up to see a bee flitting around over head.
"What are the chances it'll happen again?" Mike asked.
The bee flew a little too close to his face, and Mike flinched.
"It's worse if she's asleep," El told him. "Or upset." A second bee zipped by her own face. El gave the air around her a gentle push, and the bee zipped away as if blown by a stiff breeze. "I can keep her calm," she told him. It only took a little effort to touch Allie's mind and send her reassuring feelings of happiness and safety, not nearly enough to drain El. She could keep it up all day if she needed to.
Another bee buzzed Mike's head, and he swatted it away.
"No idea what caused it?" Mike asked. El frowned, wishing she knew. She heard another bee swooping from above, and she formed a thin little barrier in the air over her head. The bee bounced into the invisible wall nose first, then turned around and buzzed off.
"I guess it could have been a random thing," Mike thought out loud. "Or at least a one-time thing. Maybe we don't need to worry about it again." He was hoping to convince himself. She knew Mike to be a worrier. As long as there was anything wrong with the baby, Mike would pull his hair out and grind his teeth in his sleep until the danger was passed. That first time Allie had gotten an ear infection had been really rough on him. El wished she could send him calming thoughts as easily as she could the baby, but it wasn't so simple. Allie was half El, after all, and also shared El's receptivity. Instead, she put a hand on Mike's, hoping it would help almost as much.
Another bee tried to land on Mike, and he flapped his arm to keep it off.
"Maybe we should go back inside," he suggested.
El took her attention off the baby for a minute and looked around. There were indeed several bees, maybe a dozen, flitting around their lawn chairs. She cast her eyes up to the tree they were using as shade. There were more bees up there and, as expected, a big paper nest hanging from one of the higher branches. El pointed up at it.
"Oh," Mike said in alarm, swatting at another bee. "Yeah, why don't we go back in?"
Narrowing her eyes a little at the paper nest, El tugged at it gently. The thing shifted, disturbing a couple more bees, but only a couple. She hoped the bees were used to their nest being jostled by the wind a little bit. She tugged again.
"Uhh..." Mike said nervously.
As carefully as she could, El pulled one more time, and the little stem holding the nest to the tree tore free. A few more bees buzzed around in alarm, but the nest had only moved a couple of inches, so they didn't get too upset. Slowly, slowly, she made the nest drift through the air away from their tree and out into the open air. The bees followed their nest as it floated like a lazy balloon. The few that still remained buzzing around her and Mike now took off, alerted by their hive mates that their home was on the move.
She'd never even seen a bee until she was about twelve years old, though she'd seen drawings of them in some of the little children's picture books Brenner had given her when she was young. The first time she'd ever been stung had been in Mike's front yard a few months after the whole ordeal surrounding Hawkins Lab had finally ended. Once she knew what they were and what they did and that she shouldn't ever poke one, El had thought very little about bees, until some time later when Ted had introduced her to honey on her eggos. Then she'd been fascinated by the little things.
She still didn't want one to sting Allie. That might have been disastrous. Wrinkling her forehead in concentration, El set the paper nest down, very gently, in another tree much farther away. She settled back in her lawn chair to relax. Allie made quiet but content sounds in her arms.
"I'm sure it'll get easier for her when she gets older," Mike offered, partly to himself. "Just like crying, or diapers. Kids outgrow things."
El considered that. It was possible. She had no past experience to draw on. She'd never known anyone like her, anyone who shared her condition. As a child, she'd sometimes wondered if there were other kids like her in other rooms of other wings of Hawkins Lab. When she looked back on it now, though, she was pretty sure she would have been able to feel if there had been others there. As far as she knew, she'd been the only one in the Lab with abilities, and the only child in the lab, besides. She'd never even seen another child until she'd run into Mike, Dustin, and Lucas completely by chance. Before that, nearly every other human she'd ever laid eyes on had been 6 feet tall, gravely serious, and under the authority of Brenner. A tiny smile curled her lip as she realized how bizarre it all was, in retrospect.
Over on the front side of the house, they heard a car slow down and pull into the driveway, and El was aware it was Dustin.
"I'll see if he needs help carrying things in from the car," Mike said, getting up out of the lawn chair. He left the shade of their tree and turned back toward the house. Dustin beat him to it, coming through the back screen door with a loud scrape as he didn't take the time to lift on the broken hinge while he pushed it open.
"Oh, there you guys are. I'm back with the stuff," he said. "He, you guys shouldn't sit too close to that tree. There are bees."
"El took care of it," Mike told him.
"Oh," Dustin said, coming closer and craning his neck up to search the tree's upper branches. "Thanks El. I got a ladder and tried to get the nest down with a broom one day. It was horrible. I put on two jackets and gloves and a mask, but one of the bees got inside the mask, and then I fell off the ladder. I didn't break anything. Anyway, whose hungry?"
The pizza was nearly gone, with what remained of it sitting in the open box on Dustin's coffee table. Mike had half of a slice in one hand, nearly forgotten as he gazed with only partial interest at the living room TV, which had started showing the evening news. On the couch next to him, El had her own half-eaten piece of pizza on a paper plate on her lap, baby Allie held, as ever, in one arm. In the last place on the couch, Dustin was collecting up the wrappers to his Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and El's Milky Way Dark.
"A car crash on I-69 today claimed two lives," the news woman was saying, though Mike wasn't really listening. Anything outside of his bubble, right now, was low priority.
"Dustin," El said, turning her attention away from the TV to look over at him. She reached under the coffee table and handed him his book: Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. "Why isn't Leia a Jedi yet?"
"You finished it already?" Dustin asked in surprise. Taking back the book that he'd given her the day before, he bounced it absentmindedly in his hands.
"It looks like thunderstorms all day tomorrow in Fort Wayne," the weatherman was saying on the TV. Mike listened with only half an ear as El continued to stare at Dustin intently, awaiting an answer.
"Her brother is a Jedi," El pressed. "Why isn't Leia?"
"I guess she's too busy with the new government and stuff?" Dustin said, glancing down at the book for inspiration. "And then she's got her new family that takes up a lot of her time..."
El's eyes briefly flicked to Allie.
"She just doesn't have time to train to be a Jedi, I guess," Dustin said.
El raised an eyebrow.
"They aren't like you, El," Dustin told her. "You were born with your powers. I mean, I guess they were, too, but it's not the same. Luke never knew he could use the Force until he was, like, 18 years old. And he didn't tell Leia that she had the Force, too, until the last movie. It's like kung fu. You have to train to be a Jedi."
El seemed to consider that for a long moment.
"And in other news," the anchor said, as Mike distractedly took another bite of his pizza. "The latest in a string of fires in Sacramento California, responsible for a number of deaths. Steve Curtis, on location with the fire fighters-"
Mike was violently jerked out of his stupor as El nearly leaped off the couch. Before his mind had time to catch up she had crossed the room, with the baby still in one arm, and was kneeling in front of the TV, her face pressed nearly up against the glass.
"El?" Mike called out in alarm, echoed a split second later by Dustin. "What is it?" He asked, moving closer to the TV himself. She didn't answer. She only continued to stare.
Hopper took out a cigarette, decided he didn't need it, and put in back in his pocket. He gently drummed his fingers on the open window frame of Sam's truck as he eyed the police station across the street. Somewhere inside, Same was pleading his case to the chief, and Hopper didn't envy him. It wasn't easy being the only person who knew a thing. It wasn't easy when everyone around you who you were supposed to know and trust suddenly started telling you that you'd lost your mind.
The police station's door flew open, interrupting Hopper thoughts, and Sam burst out and stalked across the street to his truck. He climbed in behind the wheel and slammed the door. Hopper wordlessly offered him the same cigarette, which he took.
"Chief didn't want to hear a word of it," Sam growled.
Hopper offered him a lighter.
"Then he wanted to know why I was poking around a crime scene when I was supposed to be off duty," Sam went on. He cranked the key in the ignition as if he was twisting the cheif's collar around his neck. "Maybe I should have dropped it right there, but I couldn't. So we had a few more words, and now he put me on medical leave. I'm out of commission until the chief thinks my head's back on straight."
Hopper's shoulders sagged a little, sympathetically.
"I need a drink," Sam said, pulling out of the parking space.
"Just one," Hopper reminded him.
Sam didn't say much else until they sat down at his favorite grill-and-bar and had been served their drinks. Hopper had been allowing him to work through his thoughts in silence. After his first swigs, Sam said "Sorry I dragged you into this. You could be at home fishing right now."
Hopper shook his head. "The fish'll be there when I get back. But now, I think maybe you should take a few days off, for real this time, actually get some rest."
"I'm not letting this go," Sam said, scowling down at his beer.
"Maybe just don't kill yourself while you do it," Hopper offered. "This arsonist is real, so sooner or later other people will see him, and eventually everyone will know you were right this whole time."
Sam finally looked up from his drink and looked at, really inspected, Hopper's face. "I used to be the reasonable one, Hop." Sam's eyes dropped back down to his hands again and he gave a self conscious chuckle. "Now look at me."
"You're allowed to be unreasonable sometimes. I sank pretty far before I swam back up," Hopper told him. "I wasn't reasonable for a long time."
To Hopper's surprise, Sam only seemed to sag further. He hung his head and seemed unable to meet Hopper's eyes.
"Sorry I wasn't there," Sam told him, so quiet Hopper could barely hear over the other people talking around the bar. "When you and Diane lost Sara, I should have been there for you guys."
Hopper took a sip of his drink. "It's not your fault," he said. "I was pushing everyone away then. You, Frank, the other guys from the station, even Diane. I was crawling down into a little hole. I wanted to die down in there alone, and I didn't want anyone in there with me. You weren't there because I chased you away, and everyone else. That's on me."
"It must have been hell," Sam mumbled.
"It was, but I made it worse." Hopper said. "I didn't have to be alone. Look how many people I could have hand around me, holding me up. But I didn't want that, cause I wanted to make it worse. I wanted to drown. I didn't have to quit the force. I didn't have to lose Diane. I'm the one who did that. Sometimes bad things happen that you can't control, but I didn't have to lay down and live in it for years like I did."
Sam lifted his head again and gave Hopper a puzzled look. "You must have had something really good happen to you."
"I had a few things, yeah," Hopper admitted.
"What's she like?" Sam asked.
Hopper laughed. "Maybe you'll get to meet her when we're all done with this."
"When WE'RE all done?" Sam asked.
"Yeah," Hopper told him. "I can see you're stupid enough to keep chasing this, and I'm not gonna let you get into trouble without some backup."
Sam tried to hide his smile by looking down again. "Thanks," he choked out, then took another drink to cover the moment. Hopper offered him another cigarette.
"Would you believe I'd quit smoking before this whole fire thing started?" Sam asked. "Cold turkey, six months ago."
"Well, if you did it once, you can do it again," Hopper said. He let Sam smoke and think in silence for a full minute. After pressing the butt into an ash tray, Sam made a show of looking all around the bar.
"Alright, Hop, we're here, there's no one paying attention. I have to know," Sam said. "What happened in Hawkins that you can't talk about? What was the big conspiracy?"
Hopper lifted his drink to his mouth, but only to provide cover while he considered what to say.
"How do you know about that, anyway?" He asked, honestly curious.
"You're the one who turned me on to something," Sam told him. "Frank and I get a call from you, out of the blue. Haven't heard from you in years, but there you are, asking for an address for a Terry Ives. Then you're off the phone. No explanation, no time to catch up. Then I start seeing things in the papers. A bunch of dead bodies at a school in Hawkins. A kid showed up alive after they had a funeral for him, in Hawkins. Hawkins national lab gets shut down. I didn't even know Hawkins was big enough to have a national lab. I don't think Hawkins has been in the papers so much since that one time Richard Nixon visited there on campaign and broke his toe."
"So I started asking some of my friends at State if they knew anything," Sam went on. "A guy I know, don't think you ever met him, name's Mike Klein, told me his partner, a guy named O'Bannon, up and disappeared. Retired from the force and moved out of Indiana, all because of something weird that happened in Hawkins. So you see how it looks from my angle."
Hopper rubbed his chin and grimaced. "There's not that much to tell," he said, wondering how much he wanted to give up. "A kid went missing, we thought he was dead, until I stumbled on a big cover up. They weren't playing games back then. They were bugging people's houses, staging suicides... It wasn't a fun time. Then the lab got shut down, and nobody was supposed to talk about it ever again. That was years ago, and nothing's changed."
"But it wasn't just suits from the NSA, right?" Sam pressed.
"Why? What have you heard?" Hopper asked.
"Just some crazy things," Sam mumbled.
"Crazy like a guy who moves fire with his hands?" Hopper asked.
"I guess so," Sam allowed.
"Well there was some crazy stuff," Hopper told him. "Stuff they don't teach you about in school, or even Sunday school. But it's over now, so I try not to worry about it." His eyes glazed over for a moment as he remembered a huge, gaping maw, breathing and rumbling, like the belly of a leviathan. He remembered the place that was like Hawkins but cold and dark and dead and empty, except for a kid, a kid who'd gotten trapped there and almost died. Hopper shuddered a little at the memory. He couldn't say it had all been bad, though. If it hadn't been for that single night where he'd been handcuffed and tazed by agents from the lab, and then allowed to put on a hazmat suit and climb through the maw, he'd never have met Will. He'd never have been given the gift of being something close to a father again. He'd never have gotten to watch the kid grow up and move out of the house. Though he'd never admit it to the guys, his eyes had actually misted up on the day Will moved out for college. Sometimes Joyce still teased him about it.
Then Hopper's face darkened. "There was a monster, too," he said, as if he's told Sam, out loud, all those other things. He realized the slip he'd made, but decided he didn't need to hide it from Sam. "That's what killed all those people at the school. And a few guys out deer hunting, and a girl who happened to be out late one night. It wasn't anything born on this earth. I don't know what it was or where it came from. And there was a girl. She could do things with her mind."
Sam swore softly. "What else do you think is out there?" He waved a hand encompassing... the world.
"I try not to think about it," Hopper said. "Stuff like that isn't very forgiving. When us normal humans run into it, it ends badly."
"So what in the world were they doing down in that lab?" Sam asked, looking alarmed.
"Playing with things they shouldn't have," Hopper said.
"And do you think that means our arsonist came from a lab?" Sam asked.
Hopper thought about that, but he really had no answer.
In a small house in Los Angeles, a woman lay asleep in her bed. Next to her bed stood a monster. There may have been other monsters in the world, but this one, both because of who he was and what he did, was truly a monster. He'd been a man once. He'd even had a human name, though he didn't use it anymore. He'd once had family and people he called friends, but none of them would have recognized him as he was now. He had simply changed too much, both in body and in spirit.
He stared down at the sleeping woman. She had a human name, too, and friends and family. She wasn't a monster, like he was, but she was special. Though she looked perfectly unremarkable on the outside, she could do something that normal people couldn't. She could move things with only a thought.
He knew she had telekinetic abilities. He had seen it in his dreams, just as he had known where to find her from his dreams. His dreams told him quite a lot, and they'd never yet been wrong. He had spent some time deciding what to do about her, but in the end, the decision was easy. Her powers were weak. At most, she could close a door from across the room, or lift her car keys off a table. Anything bigger than that was beyond her limits.
That didn't mean she was entirely harmless, though. She might have a child one day, who might have no special talents at all. But her child might just as easily have the same talents as her, only more powerful. Or maybe someone would discover what she could do and put her in a lab to be studied, and one day figure out how to replicate or increase her powers. There were many possibilities, if she remained a loose end. The monster didn't want that. He wanted to be the only one, or at least, the only one who mattered.
He could influence her mind and make her leave with him, but she was simply of no use to him, and would only slow him down. He extended a hand toward her sleeping form. Unaware of his presence, she slept on. With his hand still outstretched in the air, the monster clenched it into a fist. With a barely audible crunch, he crushed her neck. It was easy for him. His power was not so limited as hers.
"Mike, tell me that you've seen Jurassic Park," Dustin said as he pushed their shopping cart through the sliding glass Kmart doors.
"I didn't have time," Mike said.
"It's the best thing ever," Dustin told him. "Spielberg really outdid himself this time. I mean, I'm not saying it's better than Raiders of the Lost Ark or Back to the Future, but it's pretty awesome. The things they can do with animatronics these days... El," he turned to her. "You HAVE to make sure Mike gets it when it comes out." He paused to take a quarter out of his pocket and put it into the gumball machine next to the layaway counter. "You guys want one? Anyway, we should make sure to hit the toy section before we leave. You'll want to see the big T-Rex they have. It looks exactly like the one in the movie, and it's ten times as big as Rory the Dinosaur. Whatever you do, though," Dustin segued into another thought. "Don't watch Super Mario Brothers. That movie's a disgrace to the game and everyone who played it."
They visited the baby section first to get more diapers and maybe a stuffed animal. Dustin was looking at a rubber duck on the shelf and considering offering it to Allie when something else caught his eye. He put down the rubber duck and quickly made an excuse to Mike and El. "Just a second, guys," Dustin said. "I'll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom." He ducked out of the aisle and tried to stroll as casually as he could while he searched for the object of his suspicion. He found the man in question three aisles over, standing and examining a 30 inch TV that was on sale. Dustin came around the corner with his hands in his pockets and ambled slowly down the aisle.
The first thing that caught his attention was the man's three piece suit. How many of those had he ever seen shopping at Kmart? The next thing he noticed was the military hair cut, and lastly, that his shopping cart was empty. Dustin looked him up and down as he slowly approached from behind, looking for any further clues about the mystery man's identity.
The man put down the TV he'd been looking at and turned around. Dustin spun like a top and grabbed the first product off the shelf that his hand landed on. It turned out to be a lava lamp, and he pretended to study it in great detail. The mystery man didn't seem to have noticed that he was being watched. Not yet, anyway. Dustin realized his good fortune at having grabbed a lava lamp, because he found himself able to look through it while pretending to look at it. He did just that, continuing to spy on the man in the suit, slightly distorted through the lamp's curved glass. The man had now moved on to look at a four piece stereo boxed set. He appeared to be acting completely natural, as if he really was just shopping for a TV and a stereo. But then, Dustin thought, he WOULD act natural if he was an agent highly trained in the art of spycraft.
Dustin backpedaled a few steps to the end of the aisle, where he could look back down the main track. Mike and El had finished in the baby section and were now heading toward the women's clothing department. He glanced back at the mystery man, who made no move to follow them. But then, if he was well trained, he would keep his distance, and never appear too eager, wouldn't he? Dustin didn't want to turn his back on a potential threat until he was sure there was no danger. Placing the lava lamp back on the shelf and shoving his hands back in his pockets, he sidled up next to the man in the suit.
"I'd go with a Sony, if I were you," Dustin said.
"I'm sorry?" The man said, either surprised by this unexpected interruption, or pretending to be surprised.
"If you're going to buy a stereo set," Dustin clarified, "Sony is a way better brand." Did his voice sound natural? He hoped so.
"Oh, thanks," the mystery man said quickly, and turned back reading the product features on the box.
"Yeah, I'd check out Radio Shack, though," Dustin pressed. "They always have a better selection."
Seeming to realize that Dustin wasn't going to simply go away, the mystery man slowly turned from the stereo box and looked at him.
"Yeah, maybe I'll look there," the man said.
"Hey, that's a nice suit," Dustin said, hit by a burst of inspiration. "I have this job interview coming up, and I need to get one. What brand is that?"
The mystery man put the box down and stared back at Dustin with a confused look on his face. When Dustin responded with nothing but an eagerly inquisitive and friendly expression, the man seemed to finally take him seriously.
"I ahh," the man said. "I don't remember," he opened one side of the jacket and looked at the tag inside. "Oh, it's a Corleone."
Dustin wasn't actually interested in the brand, but when the guy had opened the suit jacket to look, Dustin had been able to see that he didn't have a shoulder holster underneath. Reasonably satisfied that the customer was just a customer, he tried to make his exit as graceful as possible.
"Maybe I'll get one," Dustin said. "For my... job interview. So yeah. Remember... Radio Shack... Sony..." The man seemed all too happy to be left alone, so Dustin retreated from the aisle and backed onto the main track. Mike and El were already coming back up the track toward him.
"I'm back," Dustin said brightly. "From the... bathroom. Did you find everything?"
"They didn't have the shirt in the color she wanted," Mike said.
"Oh," Dustin said. "Well, don't forget we need to visit the toy department before we go. You still haven't seen that T-Rex." He fell into step beside them as they walked, but kept glancing back toward the aisle where he'd talked to the man in the suit. "Hey El, you would uhh," he tried to word it as carefully as he could. "You'd know if someone was lying, right? Or hiding their identity?"
She gave him a completely unreadable look, and Dustin wondered whether he should come right out and say it or not. While he was debating with himself, the man in the suit emerged from the aisle, pushing his empty shopping cart. Upon seeing Dustin, he quickly looked away, possibly afraid that Dustin was going to bother him again. Dustin's eyes followed the man as he turned and disappeared down another aisle. He glanced back at El to realize that she'd been looking at the man, too. She continued to gaze for a half second longer, then looked back to Dustin.
"He's alright," El told him.
"Oh, good," Dustin said, feeling all of the tension drain out of his muscles. "I wasn't worried." He glanced over at Mike, who didn't seem to have noticed the little exchange. That was good, Dustin thought. He didn't want to worry Mike without a good reason. The poor guy already worried too much.
Mike slept very uneasily. He'd begun sleeping uneasily when they'd first brought Allie home from the hospital. He'd always worried about her. Even before he and El had become aware of her... gifts, he'd been a worrier. One of the nurses had told him, quite bluntly, that there were two types of parents in the world: the kind who worried about their babies every second, and the kind who didn't have nervous breakdowns.
He'd always envied that El could sleep soundly all night, while he tossed and turned and got up every twenty minutes to make sure Allie hadn't rolled over onto something that might smother her. Yet, somehow, when the baby did wake up crying in the middle of the night, El was already up, anticipating it by at least a minute. After the first few days, Mike had bags under his eyes and his already thin features had become even more drawn, while El looked positively chipper. Had it been anyone else, Mike would have been very resentful.
Tonight, Mike slept even worse than he had when Allie was only a few days old. When he did drift off, he was rewarded with some of the darkest dreams he'd ever experienced. Memories of standing at the edge of a stone quarry cliff and knowing he needed to jump, or memories of standing in his middleschool science classroom while a monster smashed through the door, kept swimming through his head. He was even plagued by memories of Allie's first incidents. The memories seemed so vivid that he could smell the smoke.
He could smell the smoke.
Then he heard a sound that his dreaming mind interpreted as the Demogorgon's roar, and Mike jumped out of the bed, yelling in alarm.
El sprayed the fire extinguisher again, which sounded a bit less like the Demogorgon now that Mike was awake. He blinked his eyes, trying to orient himself. El was standing next to him at the bedside, baby Allie in one hand, and a fire extinguisher in the other. She sprayed the baby's crib one last time. The smell of smoke still hung in the air.
"El," Mike began.
He heard a loud thump and then a crash from somewhere else in the house. A second later, Dustin burst into the room, wearing plaid pajama pants and a ninja turtles T shirt, a fire extinguisher in each hand.
"Did it happen again?" Dustin asked, his eyes wide and round.
Mike was too tense to answer.
"Woah," Dustin said, crossing the room to look into the baby's crib, which was only partially burned.
Next to Mike, El was quietly talking and humming to Allie, who seemed so much calmer than any of the adults in the room.
Hopper was jerked out of a pleasant dream about fishing when Sam slapped him on the leg. He sat up with a surprised shout and looked around the dark living room as if ready for a fight. It took a full second to remember where he was.
"Get your boots on," Sam told him. "There's another fire."
Hopper wiped a tiny bit of drool from his chin and slowly rolled off Sam's couch. "Have you been up the whole night listening to the police scanner?" He asked.
"Yeah," Sam said without apology. "Hurry."
Grabbing his hat and stepping into his boots, Hopper followed Sam out the door. As soon as Sam turned the key in the ignition, the police radio came to life and started spitting out an intermittent stream of chatter. There was a fire, alright. Hopper glanced at his watch. It was 1:00 AM.
"Did you get any sleep? At all?" He asked Sam. The other didn't answer, but backed out of the drive way and burned rubber as soon as he hit the street.
The roads were pretty empty, considering the late hour. Not Hawkins empty, but pretty empty. That only made it easier for Sam to ignore the stop lights. Luckily, none of his fellow Sacramento PD friends seemed to be on the prowl that night. Maybe they were all on their way to the fire, too.
"Corner of 127 and Douglass," Sam said, repeating what he'd just heard the dispatcher say over the radio. "That's government housing. Nothing good ever happens there."
"You're being a little harsh," Hopper said.
"Not really," Sam told him. "We get called down there all the time. Most of the city's murders happen within a few mile radius."
"So maybe this isn't even connected with our arsonist," Hopper tried. "Could be unrelated." Sam didn't answer.
Despite their speed of travel, a number of fire trucks were already on the scene, as well as a number of squad cars, which had already started setting up a perimeter. Even from a few blocks away, the bright orange flames lit up the sidewalks and front porches.
"Don't get too close." Hopper put a hand on Sam's arm to make sure the other was listening. "You hear me? We're in Operation: Don't Ruffle the Chief's Feathers Any More Than They Already Are. He won't be happy if he finds you running around another crime scene when you aren't supposed to be."
Sam scowled, but didn't argue.
"Park over there," Hopper suggested, pointing to a gas station that was closed for the night. "We'll be able to see what's going on well enough."
"I want to look around back, first," Sam said, turning down a side street and taking up a more reasonable speed that wouldn't attract any attention.
During his twenty minute tour of the government housing district, Hopper had to agree with Sam's characterization of the area. It looked pretty shady. Rather than dwelling on that, he happily reflected that the absolute worst part of Hawkins (now that the lab had been shut down, of course) was the decrepit old farm house where old Mrs Peacock and he sons had lived. The house still didn't have electricity, and nobody went there because the family was weird and never left the property.
Sam's search proved fruitless, though. There were simply too many people moving about the projects, either driven onto the streets by the fire or possessing a natural nocturnal tendency, to identify one of them as their arsonist. Nothing on the police scanner the whole time had mentioned a suspect or a culprit, either. After more circling, Sam finally took Hopper's advice and parked at the closed gas station. He folded his arms and scowled at the fire through the windshield.
"We'll get him," Hopper tried to reassure him. "Sooner or later they always make a mistake and leave a trail. Maybe once the boys down at the station figure out what they're really dealing with, they'll be able to track him down. Just give it time."
"How many more places does he torch by then?" Sam asked. "The people in these projects are packed in like sardines. Who knows how many people got caught inside this time."
Hopper squinted through the windshield and the steadily dancing flames in the distance, which had engulfed one corner of one of the housing complexes. All the fire trucks were arrayed around it, hosing it down to no measurable effect.
"I don't think he wants to kill a bunch of random people," Hopper thought out loud.
"You asked him?" Sam said humorlessly.
"Look at the fire," Hopper pointed. "It hasn't spread."
Sam leaned forward over the wheel to get a better look.
"You remember how fast that house went up yesterday," Hopper reminded him. "When our arsonist wants a place to go, it goes, and there's no stopping it. But it looks to me like this one hasn't spread since we got here."
Sam grunted.
"And you remember the fire-wall," Hopper pointed out. "It didn't spread, either. It just stayed right where he left it. Didn't move an inch."
"So?"
"So, maybe he's keeping it contained," Hopper suggested. "It seems like he can make the fire do anything he wants. If he told it not to spread beyond that one section of housing, maybe he wanted to burn somebody in particular, and spare anybody else who just happened to live next door. Maybe he cares about innocent people."
Sam grunted again.
The fire blazed on into the night and early morning. The fire trucks kept up their work, but they might not have bothered. After an hour or so, the one corner of the complex had disintegrated into a fine, black dust, and the flames finally burned themselves out. The other three quarters of the complex still stood, miraculously untouched. By 5:30, Hopper was dying for breakfast, but Sam wasn't ready to leave, so he walked a few blocks to the nearest Tim Horton's and brought back a dozen donuts and two coffees. On his walk back, he thought about stopping at a payphone to call Joyce again, but, if he remembered her schedule right, she would already be off to work at Donald's.
When he made it back to the truck, Sam wasn't there. Hopper found him a block and a half closer to the burned down building, sitting on a heavily graffitied park bench. Hopper sat next to him and offered the coffee and box of donuts.
"Did I miss anything?" Hopper asked. All of the fire trucks and most of the police had left, though yards and yards of yellow tape still marked off a wide patch of the block.
"Not much," Sam said. "The boys took a few statements, but they didn't pick anyone up. It looks like they're about to head back empty handed."
Hopper leaned back on the bench and put his coffee down beside him. He watched the boys in blue-black uniforms mill about the taped-off crime scene, one by one returning to their squad cars to disappear.
"Who did they talk to?" Hopper asked.
"The kid by the broken payphone over there," Sam said, nodding in the direction instead of blatantly pointing. "That tall guy there with the red car, probably full of cocaine. This old couple who already left..."
"What about her?" Hopper asked, using his chin to point toward a girl sitting alone on a bench that had once been a bus stop before the bus had stopped running through that part of town.
"I don't think so," Sam said.
"She looks upset," Hopper told the other.
"Maybe she's upset cause her place just burned down," Sam said.
"Maybe." Hopper allowed. "Really, nobody talked to her?"
"She wasn't there earlier," Sam said.
"Sure she was," Hopper told him. "I saw her over by that alley when we first got here."
"Ok, so she wasn't RIGHT here earlier. The boys probably couldn't see her from way down there," Sam said.
"So she doesn't want to talk to cops-" Hopper began.
"Sure. In this place? She's probably a hooker," Sam said. "That's why she doesn't want to be around the cops."
"You really need to give people more of a chance," Hopper said with only half a smile. "I'm going to go ask her if she saw anything."
"I thought the plan was to not get too close this time," Sam said.
"It is, for you," Hopper told him. "Me? Your chief won't care if I go down there. I'm nobody. Just a concerned citizen." Hopper left his hat with Sam, thinking he'd look less like a cop without it, and wrapped up two donuts in a napkin. Slowly making his was down the street, he put a cigarette in his mouth but didn't light it. He aimed as if he was going to walk past the abandoned bus stop. He didn't want the girl to feel like she was under a stop light while he approached. He did make sure to be easily visible, though. He didn't want to scare her away by suddenly appearing form behind. When he was about level with the bus stop's bench, he slowed and made a show of feeling around in his pockets for a lighter. As he shifted the donuts from his left hand to his right so that he could check his left pocket for the mysteriously absent lighter, he let one of the donuts fall onto the sidewalk. He swore and knelt down to pick it up. He started to brush the specks of gravel off of the pink icing, and then looked up as awkwardly as he possibly could. The girl was looking down on him from her seat on the bench.
He gave a self conscious laugh as their eyes met. "Five second rule," he said, and took a bite of the doughnut. She gave him a look that was between humor and bemusement. Luckily, it was not at all suspicious. He pulled himself up off the sidewalk and sat on the other end of her bench.
"Sorry," he said around the cigarette in his mouth. "You don't have a lighter, do you?"
She only scowled a little bit as she fished in her own pocket and held it out at arms length. He leaned into the tiny flame, and then leaned back against the bench.
"Crazy, isn't it?" He asked after a moment. "That whole place burning up like that? Or half of it, or whatever?" When she didn't answer right away, he glanced over at her.
"Yeah, crazy," she said, staring ahead at the building's remains.
"They ever say how many people were inside?" Hopper asked.
"I don't know," she told him. "A few, I think."
He shook his head sadly. "That's no way to go. It's the worst feeling in the world. I know. This one time, my garage caught fire. My fault. I had some old gas cans stacked up in the corner, and I was uh.. well" he flicked a few ashes from his cigarette and held it toward her with a guilty laugh. "Like I said, it was my fault. Here, you want one?" He offered her one of his cigarettes, which she took with only a little hesitation. She was a little young, but he'd been smoking a pack a day at her age, so he didn't feel too bad about feeding her habit.
"So anyway, those gas can just blew up," he mimed the explosion with his hands, almost dropping the donuts in the process. "My garage caught fire, and I started knocking over things trying to find something to put it out. Of course, I didn't have anything. Then this whole sheet of plywood I had leaned up against the wall, it caught fire too, and then it fell in front of the door. So then I was too scared to try and climb over it. I've never been so scared in my life. I got lucky, cause my friend was outside and he ended up pulling me out. When he came running over, I was trying to poke the plywood with a shovel and push it out of the way." He laughed at himself. "Never been so scared in my life," he repeated, and glanced over at her. She seemed to be listening to the story, at least.
"Look," he said, pulling up one sleeve. "This is where I got burned. Years ago, and you can still see it." She looked over at his burn scar without any hesitation, so he decided the time was right to offer her the doughnut.
"You want this one? I'm not going to eat both." When she took it, he looked back to the aftermath of the fire. "So you have any idea what happened?"
She glanced over at him just a little sharply. "Are you a cop?" She asked.
"Nope," he said. "I just had a friend who got caught inside the.. the fire."
"You had a friend?" She asked. "Here? You're not from anywhere around here."
"You caught me," Hopper said with an easy laugh. "I'm not from around here. Hawkins Indiana, born and raised."
She frowned over at him, then took another bite of the doughnut. "Never heard of it."
"You wouldn't have," he told her. "It's small, quiet. You'd like it there. People are more real."
"It's quiet?" She asked.
"Most of the time."
"What do you people do for fun?"
"We find things," he said defensively. "Sometimes fun is overrated. Peace and quiet's worth more."
"So why are you here?" She asked him.
"You seem pretty smart, so I'll be honest with you," he said, keeping his eyes on the burned out building. "I'm looking for someone. I heard some stories."
"What kind of stories?"
"Stories about somebody who starts fires," Hopper told her, still not looking at her.
"Anybody can start a fire," she said, a strange tone taking over her voice.
Hopper put his cigarette down and turned fully on the bench to face her. "Not like this. This is different." He narrowed his eyes a little, wondering if he should push his hunch all the way or not. "And I think you know that, don't you?"
She turned away so fast her neck might have snapped, and Hopper leaned leaned a few inches closer.
"I remember seeing you earlier," he told her. "Before the fire died down. You were standing over there, right?" He pointed.
"I don't know," she mumbled, still looking away.
"Weren't you wearing a jacket then?" Hopper asked. When she didn't answer, he put the cigarette back in his mouth and stood up. There was a beaten up old trash can at the opposite end of the bus stop. He started toward it.
"You live inside there?" He asked.
"Why all the questions?" She replied. "You sound like a cop."
He looked down into the trash can and found what he was looking for. He reached in and dug out the lightweight blue jacket. He held it up so that she could see him inspecting it. She shifted the other way on the bench so she was again facing away from him again.
Hopper poked at the jacket, at the big patch of burned, black fabric on the left sleeve. "You were inside when the fire started," he told rather than asked her.
She started to get up off the bench.
Dropping the burned jacket back in the trash can, he crossed the sidewalk to intercept her.
"Hang on a minute," he said, crouching down directly in front of her so that their eyes were level. "Please," he said, almost forcibly holding her gaze. "Help me out."
She tried to slide around him and he again moved to intercept. "Look at what just happened here," he told her. "These fires. This isn't the first one. It won't be the last one. Whoever this guy is, I need to find him. I think you understand that. So help me out. You know something."
"Why do you care?" She demanded.
"People died in there," Hopper said. "People who lived here their whole lives. I don't need to tell you. Maybe they were friends of yours. This can't happen again. We need to find this guy."
"We?" She ask, scowling at him. "You and the other cops?"
"You want this guy running around free, starting fires?" Hopper asked her.
"He's not like that," she blurted out.
"Not like what?" Hopper demanded.
"He's not..." She snapped her mouth shut and turned away from him again.
Sighing slowly, Hopper slid back onto the bench and gave her some space. "I believe you," he said. "That's why I'm here. Just me. If the cops do find this guy, they'll shoot first and ask questions later. So I'm here asking questions. I think maybe there's more to this guy. Help me out. Maybe it doesn't have to end so bad."
"I don't know anything," she said. "I can't help you."
"If I WAS a cop, I'd think you were protecting this guy," Hopper said.
"I don't even know him."
"But you saw him inside?"
She shrugged.
"Do you know why he started the fire?" Hopper asked.
She shrugged again.
"The people inside, the ones who didn't make it out, did they know him?" Hopper pressed.
She didn't answer.
"Work with me," Hopper pleaded. "You could save innocent people here. Do you want more fires? Do you want him to keep doing it?"
"There weren't any innocent people caught inside," she said.
"You were inside," Hopper said.
"And he pulled me out!" she snapped.
Hopper stared for a long moment, giving her time to explain, but she didn't.
"He saved you?" Hopper asked.
She scowled at him sideways.
"The same guy who started the fire? He pulled you out?"
"Yes," she said at last. "As soon as he saw me, he ran back inside to get me. When I was next to him... the fire didn't touch me."
"And you saw him moving the fire around with his hands?" Hopper asked. She gave him a surprised look, but didn't try to deny it. "Why would he go out of his way to make sure you were safe?" Hopper asked her. "Does he know you?"
She shook her head.
Hopper sank a little deeper into the bench, frowning in deep thought. "I'd really like to talk to this guy," Hopper told her. "I think I could help him. I could keep things from turning really ugly."
"Well I can't help you," she said. "I've never seen him before today."
"Why did he do it, though?" Hopper asked.
"Why do you think?" She said in exasperation. "Don't they have places like this in Hawkings?"
"Hawkins," he corrected her.
"A cop like you should know better," she told him. "Those guys inside, the ones who didn't make it out-"
"You knew them?" Hopper asked.
"Some of them."
"You don't seem too broken up."
"Cause I knew them," she said. "They probably had it coming."
"That sounds a little harsh," Hopper said. "Who were they?"
"The kind of people who won't talk to cops," she told him. "I guess the kind of people they don't have in Hawkings. The kind of people who end up in jail or shot. If I could move fire with my hands, why would I come all the way down here, burn up one little corner of the projects, and make sure only certain people never made it out alive?"
Hopper smiled at her. "You'd make a pretty good cop yourself, kid."
She snorted in disgust.
Mike followed behind El as she pushed open Dustin's screen door again. He wasn't sure if El just wanted to go out and enjoy the sunshine, or if she felt safer having Allie outside of the house. Fighting with the broken hinge, El stopped in the doorway and examined it. She turned back to Mike.
"Does Dustin have tools?" She asked.
"Somewhere," Mike shrugged. "He builds a lot of Heath Kits, so he must." They searched around the house for a few minutes until they found Dustin's tool box, with tools as diverse in their use as rough carpentry and fine electrical work, thrown and piled inside until the lid wouldn't close. Mike tried digging through it to find a screwdriver, but after stabbing himself on a small drywall saw, he just poured the whole thing out onto the kitchen floor. A screwdriver with part of the handle missing rolled against El's foot, and she picked it up.
"Terminator," she said out of the blue, shifting Allie into one hand so she could remove the offending door hinge. "Dustin couldn't explain it either."
Mike knelt down and started picking up the scattered tools. "It does make sense," Mike insisted, repeating the defense of James Cameron he'd made a few times before. "Kyle Reese is John's father. When they first met each other some time in the future, John already knew Kyle would go back in time and become his father, but Kyle had no idea who he was. John gave him that picture of his mom, because he already knew Kyle was supposed to have the picture when he went back time. It's not a loop. It's just one possible future going back and creating another branch point, creating another possible future." He started arranging Dustin's tools in order according to size, color, and purpose.
"But..."She said, putting the screws back in to the door hinge. "Back to the Future..."
"Same thing," Mike said. "Whenever Marty changes something in the past, it creates an alternate possible future. So the future that he left still exists, but now he's on the path to a different future, based on the changes he made. All those futures exist in parallel, but John Connor or Marty are limited to the particular path that they're on."
El held up the screwdriver thoughtfully, then pointed at an empty spot in the air. "Infinite possible futures?" She said.
"Right," Mike said. "Every possible decision every person makes creates another possible future that stems from that point in time, like the branches of a tree. And each of those branches has small branches splitting off, and each of those has smaller branches, infinitely."
El pointed with the screwdriver to another empty spot in the air. "And infinite possible pasts?"
"Yeah," Mike said. "Past is just perspective, looking back from one of those branches. You'd see only the branch that led to where you're standing. You can't see all the other branches that led to other presents. But if time stretches back to infinity, then there would be an infinite possible number of paths leading to any particular present, like the roots of a tree instead of the branches. Only, it's all perspective, again. Because the present only seems like the trunk of the tree because we're in it. Really, each branch and root would look like its own trunk if you were standing on it."
El's screwdriver pointer was still frozen in the air, indicating the invisible timeline. "How do they know which past is the right one to go to?" She said.
Mike opened his mouth, then closed it. He covered the silence by closing the lid on Dustin's toolbox, which now comfortably held all of his tools with room to spare, neatly organized and sorted.
Dustin cruised down Kerley road, as he always did, his mind drifting off as he deftly avoided the potholes by instinct. After living in Hawkins for so many years, he could have driven Kerley with his eyes closed. Over the years, he had grown to like that familiarity. It was markedly different from the first decade or so of his life, where his family had moved around so often that he'd never been able to make lasting friends or really call any place his "hometown."
Another familiar and equally pleasant sight caught his eye up ahead. Dustin beeped his horn gently and slowed down as he approached the white van painted with giant ice cream cones and brightly colored cartoon characters. Hank, the ice cream truck driver, who Dustin knew well, also stopped. He was heading the opposite direction on Kerley on his way back into town, but Dustin was a regular customer, so Hank wouldn't have ignored him. They both pulled onto opposite shoulders of the road, though traffic on Kerely was light enough that they might not have needed to. Dustin got out of his car and went up to the van as Hank rolled down his window.
"I drove past your house, but I saw your car was gone," Hank said. "Figured I'd missed you this time."
"Not a chance," Dustin told him with a grin. "I can tell when you're close. It's like a sixth sense."
Hank chuckled at the joke. "You have house guests? I thought I saw some people in your back yard."
"Uh, yeah," Dustin said. "Some friends are staying with me for a few days." He picked out an ice cream Tweetie Bird on a stick for himself, a strawberry eclair for El, and an orange pushup for Mike, or for himself if Mike didn't want it. He handed Hank the cash, plus an extra two dollars for his troubles. Dustin always made sure to keep on the very best of terms with the ice cream man.
"Pleasure doing business with you, as usual," Hank said. "This is more than I've sold all afternoon."
"The kids aren't out playing today?" Dustin asked. "Or their parents just don't want to fork over the money?"
Hank shrugged. "Both. That's how it is, sometimes. I even tried selling to those weird guys in suits over on Mintdale road, but they didn't want to give me the time of day."
Dustin's heart skipped a beat.
"Suits?" Dustin asked, his throat suddenly dry.
"Yeah, two of 'em," Hank said as he folded the money and tucked it away. "In a black car. I figure they were building-code inspectors or somebody from the county, since they were taking pictures and poking around."
"Mintdale road, you said?" Dustin asked him in a rush.
"Yeah, about a half mile down," Hank said, leaning out the window to point. "Why?"
"No reason," Dustin said, already moving back toward his car.
"Is something wrong?" Hank asked, a note of alarm in his voice.
"It's nothing," Dustin said, taking the last three steps to his car at a jog. "I just forgot something." He sped off down Kerley without saying goodbye to Hank. Kerley met Mintdale a very short distance away, and Dustin could still see the ice cream truck in his rear view mirror as he ignored the rusted old stop sign and turned on Mintdale.
The road went up a little hill, so Dustin couldn't see what lay ahead until he reached the top.
He felt cold sweat bead up on his skin as the shape of a black sedan rose into view just past the crest of the hill.
The car was parked on the side of the road, and Dustin had time to notice two men in suits sitting in the car before he caught himself, and forced his eyes straight ahead. The last thing he wanted was for them to catch him staring. With his hands squeezing the steering wheel to death, he tried not to move a muscle and keep his speed steady. He wanted to stop and get a better look at them, but he also wanted to slam on the gas and get away from them as fast as he could. He couldn't risk drawing suspicion, though, so he kept perfectly still as he rolled past with his eyes locked in the twelve o'clock position. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the men in suits turn to watch him go. Clenching his hands even tighter, he forced himself not to react. As the black car slid into line with his rear view mirror, he tried to get a good look at the license plate. It was a little far away, but he could tell that it wasn't a County plate. It wasn't even an Indiana plate.
He rolled on down the road at a frustratingly slow pace until he reached the next cross road and the black sedan was out of sight behind him. Dustin paused at the stop sign and fought to come to a decision. It might be nothing. Just as Hank had said, they might have been some kind of building code inspectors, but Dustin needed to be sure. Taking a purposeful in and out breath, he tried to calm his nerves, then turned around in the intersection and headed back the way he'd come.
To his relief, the black sedan was gone when he returned to the top of the hill. Driving past them a second time would have been very suspicious. On a hunch, he pulled off the road and parked where they had. Their recent tire tracks in the long grass made it easy for him to get the spot right. Dustin let the car idle for a minute as he cast his gaze around to see what the men in black might have been looking at. At the top of a little hill, as he was, he was able to see over a lot of the trees and cornfields that surrounded Hawkins. Though his own house was on a different street, it wasn't that far, if you drew a straight line on a map. His hand starting to shake with nerves, Dustin reached into his glove box and took out that pair of binoculars that an old friend had taught him to always keep handy.
Afraid to confirm his own suspicions, Dustin raised the binoculars to his eyes and swept them drown the hill and across the trees. Several houses were visible in the near distance.
His own peeling shingles, gravel driveway, and unpainted door frame slid into view.
His heart beating faster, Dustin leaned his head out of the window and looked down at the tire tracks again to make sure he was parked exactly where the men in black had been. He was.
With an unsteady hand, he put the car into reverse and backed up a few feet. Raising the binoculars again, he could no longer see his house. From his new angle, it was completely obscured by trees. He put the car into drive and crept forward another four or five feet. Again he checked through the binoculars, and again his line of sight was blocked by trees. He backed one last time to the exact spot where the black sedan had been, and there was his house again, in perfect view.
Dustin threw the binoculars onto the seat and tore off down Mintdale, throwing a tail of gravel behind him. He wondered if it would be safe for him to go back home, if he should instead get to a phone and call Mike and El to warn them. But they didn't have a car of their own to escape in, so he'd need to get them himself. Afraid that he'd run into the black sedan again on the road home, Dustin raced back down Mintdale and back onto Kerley. So far so good.
He was nearly bouncing up and down behind the wheel as he ran through escape options in his mind. Would it be better to head into town and try to hide in a crowd, or get out of town completely and hope the agents wouldn't be able to track them? How many agents was he dealing with? Had they already placed a net around his house where they'd spot him coming and going from any direction? Or had he sprung their trap before it was set?
His house came into view up ahead as Dustin ate up the country road at well over 80 miles an hour. He was relieved beyond words to see there were no black cars or white vans already parked in his driveway waiting for him. That didn't mean they weren't parked somewhere else, though, watching from a distance.
He skidded to a stop in his gravel driveway and threw the car door open, forgetting to put it into park. The car rolled a few feet before he jumped back in and stopped it. Suddenly he wondered if agents had already visited his house while he was gone. He envisioned finding the place empty, with signs of a struggle. If El had been there when the agents showed up, well then Dustin felt bad for the agents. On the other hand, baby Allie might have really complicated things.
Almost tripping on his front porch, Dustin threw open the door and burst into his house, shouting for Mike and El. He found them in the kitchen, looking up at him in alarm. Grabbing the dining room table to stop himself, he said "We need to go. Right. Now."
"Dustin?" Mike asked. "What-"
"There's no time," Dustin told him. "Leave everything, and get in the car. We have to run."
"What happened?" Mike asked, still not moving from the kitchen.
"Agents." Dustin fumbled around for words. "We're being watched."
"Slow down," Mike began, but Dustin slapped his hand hard on the table to cut him off.
"Bad men, Mike! Bad men!" Dustin wheeled around and hurried back to the car with El suddenly tight on his heels and Mike stumbling to keep up.