Firebaby
Chapter 5
"And you don't think the agents followed you here?" Will asked.
"I don't think so," Dustin told him. "We picked up an unmarked car, so they shouldn't be able to track us. We haven't seen any sign of them since we left Hawkins. We wouldn't have come here if they were hot on our tails. That would put you in too much danger."
"I mean, I'm not so worried about me," Will said. "Just wondering if we should keep a lookout or anything."
"I'm pretty sure they didn't follow us," Dustin said. "If they know we're here, they'd have tossed smoke grenades through your windows and kicked down the front door already."
"That's a pleasant image," Mike grumbled. He sat on Will's couch next to El and Allie, while Will and Dustin sat on chairs they'd brought in from the kitchen. Will, trying to be a good host on such short notice, had cooked them all Hot Pockets. Mike's Hot Pocket still lay untouched on his plate.
"And, sorry Mike, but I just want to make sure I understand..." Will said gently. "Allie..." He seemed to be trying very hard to choose his words so as not to bother Mike, so Dustin stepped in to supply the necessary information and save Will the discomfort of stepping on Mike's toes.
"She's a Pyrokete," Dustin explained. "Pyrokinetic powers. She can create and manipulate fire."
"Like Human Torch, Johnny Storm?" Will offered, a gleam in his eye. He caught himself and glanced sideways at Mike. A little sheepishly, he said "I mean-"
"Exactly like that," Dustin confirmed, pulling Will's attention back from Mike. "The only thing is, she can't control it. She's too young."
"Wow," Will said. Dustin looked over at Mike, whose eyes were cast unhappily down at his uneaten Hot Pocket, still clearly feeling the full weight of the situation pressing on his shoulders.
"So we need to take a few precautions," Dustin continued, bringing Will up to speed as quickly as he could. "Fire extinguishers in every room. At least two in whichever room Allie sleeps in, since that seems to be when she's most likely to start a fire, in her sleep. Do you keep up the batteries in your smoke detectors? Never mind. El's the only smoke detector we need. How about this house? Did it pass inspection for fire safety standards when you bought it?"
"Uhh, I think so," Will said.
"Really that's all we can do," Dustin told him. "El seems to be able to keep the baby calm and happy whenever she's awake. I think the only danger is when she has a nightmare."
"And that's what happened to your house?" Will asked Mike quietly.
Mike nodded his head sadly without looking up.
"But that was before El knew just HOW powerful Allie's abilities are," Dustin told Will. "She's been on high alert ever since, so the danger is probably a lot less now."
"Wow," Will said again. "No wonder the government wants her."
"Right, and she's still only a baby," Dustin said. "Just think what she'll be able to do once her powers are fully grown." For a brief moment, the two friends shared a look of pure wonder as their imaginations ran in the same direction, but Will broke eye contact and let the moment end, probably out of respect for Mike, Dustin thought.
"So I don't mean this the wrong way," Will said, changing the subject, "Because I want you guys to stay here as long as you need, as long as it takes until you're all safe. But... How long...
"How long will the agents keep looking for Allie?" Dustin finished for him. "That's the real question, isn't it? I don't know the answer. I was hoping we could brain storm. I don't think they'll just get tired of looking and give up. We need to find a solution, so that Mike and El don't have to live in hiding for the rest of their lives."
"Hmm," Will said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
"Tell me your ideas," Dustin insisted. "We need all the brainpower we can put together."
"Well, what worked last time?" Will thought out loud. "Why did the agents stop looking for you and El when we were kids?"
"Because the Demogorgon ate Dr. Brenner and his men," Dustin said, unnecessarily. Though Will hadn't seen that happen with his own eyes like Dustin had, he'd certainly heard the story a million times in the years after the actual events.
"You're right," Will said. "We can't hope for that to happen again." He wrinkled his forehead in thought. "I wonder how high this goes. I mean, Hawkins Lab has been shut down for years. So these people aren't a part of that crew. Who are these agents? CIA? NSA? Is the whole government in on it?"
"I doubt it," Dustin said. "The more people that know about a thing, the harder it is to keep quiet. I don't think the president knows, for example. Or congress. There are hundreds of them. You'd think at least one of them would have a conscience and come clean to the American people that super heroes are real, and aliens landed at Roswell, and the Montauk Project really happened. No, I think this is just a single agency or department. Maybe they get their regular funding from the government, but they cover up what those funds are used for. And if they can produce some kind of results, like new weapons to use against the Commies, the rest of the government knows better than to ask where they came from."
"But we aren't at war with the Commies anymore," Will pointed out.
Dustin shrugged. "I guess there'll be other wars."
"What if we..." Will began, then gave up.
"We're brainstorming here, Will," Dustin told him. "There are no bad ideas. Come on. Out with it."
"Fake identities?" Will asked shyly.
"Do you know anyone who can forge birth certificates and passports?" Dustin asked honestly.
"No."
"We'll put that down as a maybe. What else have you got?" Dustin asked.
"What if we smuggle them across the border?" Will asked. "We could hide out in Canada."
"Mike hates Canada, remember?" Dustin said.
"Mexico, then," Will tried.
"Hmm. We'll put that down as another maybe," Dustin said. "Ideally, we want to find a way to make things go back to normal. Mike likes teaching at Hawkins Middle, and Allie deserves the chance to grow up surrounded by all her family and friends. If they have to go into exile and change their identities..."
"What about black mail?" Will offered.
"Keep talking," Dustin said.
"We tell the government that we'll expose them," Will said. "We'll go public with everything that happened when we were kids, unless they leave Allie alone."
"It could work," Dustin said. "Those secrets are ten years old. Not as juicy as they'd be if they were fresh, but it could work."
"We'd need to figure out WHO to contact with our demands, though," Will said.
"So it's another maybe," Dustin summed up. "That's three so far. I like this. We're making progress. What else have you got?"
"I just... I just wish we knew more," Will said in exasperation. "If we knew exactly who the agents work for, and how high up the chain this conspiracy goes... I think we need to call in help on this one."
Dustin raised his eyebrows in question.
"I bet Lucas could tell us more," Will said, a sudden note of hope in his voice.
"Why didn't I think of that," Dustin said, smacking a palm against his forehead.
"Are you sure we can trust him?" Mike said from the couch.
"Mike, are you crazy?" Dustin asked. "It's Lucas."
"I don't know," Mike said. "He went into Army Intelligence. Maybe he's on their side, now."
"I'm gonna pretend you didn't say that," Dustin told him, purposely turning his head and shoulders back toward Will and away from Mike.
"Besides, he's out now," Will said. "A few months ago. And it's great that he was on the inside. He'll know how they think."
"Brilliant," Dustin proclaimed. "That's our move. Let's call him up right now. Wait... We can't say any of this over the phone."
"The agents might be listening," Will agreed.
"Exactly," Dustin said. "They don't even need to put a bug in your phone these days. They can just tap into the line from anywhere."
"So no phones," Will said sadly.
"Maybe not," Dustin said. "Assuming the agents don't know that we're here, then as long as you don't mention anything to Lucas about us, we should fly right under their radar. Can you get the message across to him without giving anything away?"
"I think so."
"That's Will the Wise talking, right there," Dustin said proudly. "I knew we came to the right person."
Will glanced down at the floor, trying to hide his beaming smile.
"It's late, maybe we shouldn't bother him tonight," Mike said.
Dustin looked over at him. If his friend was going to let doubt and worry paralyze him, then Dustin would have to take charge of the situation, for his own good.
"This could be life or death. I think Lucas will forgive us for disturbing his evening," Dustin said. He glanced from Mike to El, who sat next to him on the couch. To all outside appearances, she wasn't paying attention to them and was preoccupied with talking to the baby, and also "talking" to the baby without words. Dustin knew better, though. He didn't need to ask what she thought about their plans. He'd been her friend long enough to know she was always paying attention to what went on in a room, even if it looked like she wasn't, and if she'd wanted to contribute something to their deliberations, she would have. Since she hadn't said anything when he and Will had agreed to call Lucas, Dustin knew she was on board with the idea.
"Let's call him tonight, then," Dustin reaffirmed, looking from Mike to Will. "First, I'm still a little hungry. Can you show me what you have in the fridge?" Before Will could ask any questions, Dustin pulled him into the kitchen where they could talk alone. "I need you to help me with something else," Dustin told him in a low voice. "This is Operation: Fix Broken Mike."
Will gave him a very confused look.
"They guy is turning into a boring adult," Dustin said, still keeping his voice down. "He probably spends more time worrying about saving for retirement than he does wondering if they'll ever make a third Terminator movie. I mean, just look at him."
Will leaned toward the kitchen door way and craned his neck, but Dustin pulled him back.
"Don't ACTUALLY look at him," Dustin hissed, fighting to keep from being overheard. "I just mean, look at him. This is hitting him way harder than it should. He can't deal with the pressure, because he's lost touch with his sense of adventure. Do you realize he hasn't played D&D since Allie was born?" Dustin paused to let the weight of that sink in to Will. "I mean, he's probably going to buy Allie cabbage patch dolls for her next birthday instead of a plastic Millennium Falcon. He's going to be so regular we won't even recognize him. If we don't do something, he's going to turn into his dad."
Will grimaced at the thought. "What do we do?" he asked.
"I don't know yet," Dustin said. "Mike's going through a lot right now, so we can't be too rough on him, but we need to do something before we lose him. This is a job for Will the Wise. Let me know what you come up with."
The air was so hot that Hopper could barely breathe. Each lungful of air felt like gulping down coffee fresh off the burner. Huge chunks of the building were already gone, so that he might look through a doorway and find a cavernous space where several internal walls had burned to nothing. He wasn't sure how to find their Arsonist inside the inferno, but he hoped the Arsonist would find him if he bumbled around long enough in the rapidly collapsing housing project. He kept one arm in front of his face, and tried to breathe through his sleeve as much as he could. He'd begun to sweat even before going into the building, but the air was so hot and dry it just sucked the moisture right off his skin.
A single, wordless shout pierced through the crackle-roar of the fire. Hopper turned to look, his heart racing. Across a wide open space that the fire had cleared out, a lone man stood among the flames. Hopper tried to take a few steps toward him, but the half-burned floor boards creaked menacingly, and he drew back.
The man was almost impossible to make out, barely more than a silhouette visible through the dancing flames that surrounded him. He reached out a hand and, incredibly, the fire moved away from Hopper. As if he stood in the eye of a terrible storm, the flames spun and leaped away from him in all directions, until he was at the center of a circle of calm. For a dozen feet in each direction Hopper saw charred, but not burning, floor boards and crumbling, but still not burning, drywall. Mercifully, he could breathe again. He felt as though the whole building could burn down around him, and he would be safe and unhurt in his little circle of calm.
"What are you doing here?" The semi-visible man shouted from across the way. The flames around him were so bright it was hard to look directly at him. When Hopper didn't answer, the man spoke again. "I'll make a path for you," he said impatiently. "That way, go! You can get outside. There are firemen out there. They'll take care of you."
True to his word, on the left hand side of Hopper's fire-free circle, a little corridor opened up, easily wide enough for him to walk through, and wonderfully free of the leaping flames.
"Go!" The man shouted again, when Hopper didn't move. "Hurry!"
"I'd rather stay," Hopper told him.
"What?" Came the reply, sounding completely caught off guard.
"I've been looking for you, actually," Hopper said.
"Go, before I change my mind," the Arsonist said.
"No thanks," Hopper told him. "You weren't easy to find. Now that I'm here, I really want to talk."
The silhouette turned it's back to Hopper. "This whole place is going to come crashing down in about ten minutes," he told Hopper. "Get out while you can." He took a single step away.
"Hey!" Hopper shouted at him, taking a single step of his own toward the other man. The weakened floor boards creaked under his weight. The Arsonist did stop, though he didn't turn around. "I want to help you," he called across the distance. "I've been following you for a while now. I think I know your name, and I might even know why you're doing all of this. And I just want to help you. I don't want to see this end badly for anyone."
"There's your way out," the Arsonist told him coldly. "I won't keep it open forever. Go." He started to move away again.
Again, Hopper shouted at him and moved closer. A floor board actually snapped, and splintered wood scraped little bloody lines across his ankle as one foot fell through the floor. Hopper pulled himself back to safety, never taking his eyes off the dark silhouette in the dancing inferno.
The man actually did turn around, then. He moved a little closer to Hopper and some of the obscuring flames slide aside like a curtain. He stared at Hopper with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief. Hopper stared back. It was indeed the same face he'd seen in that police case file.
"You're Francisco Castillo," Hopper told him. "You used to live in the Brushwood complex, apartment number 141B."
The man's face darkened at those words.
"I'm not with the SPD, but I know there were two cops there the day your place burned down, I know why they were there."
The man's eyes flashed, and the fire all around grew, blazing brighter and hotter for a single heartbeat. Hopper flinched, but his own personal bubble of safety hadn't collapsed. He held his breath as he listened to parts of the building break off and crumble in response to the brief surge. Tensing every muscle in his body, he pressed on.
"I've seen what you can do," Hopper told him. "I'll be honest, it scares me. But I know you can't keep doing it forever. So maybe you're only killing some pretty bad people. Maybe they deserve it, I don't know. But I don't think that's who you are."
Even though Hopper could at least see the man's face, he had no idea if his words were getting through. The fire certainly wasn't dying down, and if it wasn't for his little bubble of safety, he'd be long dead by now.
"I don't think you're a killer," Hopper went on. "Maybe you can do it if you tell yourself these people deserved to die. Maybe they did, maybe not. I don't think you can keep that up. Pretty soon you'll think about everything you've done. It'll hit you, that maybe some of the people you killed didn't deserve it. Maybe none of them did. Maybe no one ever does. And I think, when that hits you, it'll eat you inside. You won't be able to live with it. Maybe, if you stop now, it doesn't have to end that way." His voice had grown a whole lot softer as he spoke, losing all of its edge. He wasn't sure if he'd pegged this guy. Maybe the man did have a heart, or maybe he was an uncaring killer. Hopper wanted to believe. He knew he was taking a big risk, but he so wanted to believe.
The Arsonist, the man named Francisco Castillo, shook his head slowly. "Whoever you are," he growled, "You think you know." He spat the words as if they were fire themselves. One last time he turned around and walked away. "You don't."
"I won't let you go that easy," Hopper called after him. "Either you kill innocent people, or you don't. No more lying to yourself." With one last wince as every instinct in his body told him not to, he ran across the burning floor that separated them.
"Joyce," he whispered to himself. "If I'm wrong about this, I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
As he'd expected, the fire-weakened floor boards splintered under his boots. The floor fell away and Hopper dropped like a stone. Castillo's head snapped around to look over his shoulder at the noise, but that was all Hopped could see before he fell through. The fire was even worse on the floor beneath him. During his split second of free fall, Hopper could see the bright, dancing flames reaching up toward him. The unbearable heat wrapped him up like a blanket. His stomach flipped as he tumbled, and the flames reached up, ready to swallow him.
"I'm sorry. I was wrong," he said.
The ground hit him like a truck.
Pain shot up and down his spine, and he wondered if it had snapped. The air went out of his lungs, and he tried to suck in a breath, just a single breath, but couldn't. His vision turned black and then began to fill with bright, dancing stars.
But he wasn't on fire.
Again Hopper tried to draw in air, but he couldn't. He tried to moan in pain, but couldn't do that either. He blinked his eyes, but the stars wouldn't go away.
But he wasn't burning.
As if from a hundred miles away, Hopper heard a voice shout "What is wrong with you?!"
Finally his lungs came back to life, and Hopper gasped and wheezed in a voice like an old, dying frog. He tried to roll onto his side, but every muscle in his body screamed in protest. He seemed to have landed flat on his back, and the concrete floor had proven itself to be far tougher than he was. He'd fallen and had the wind knocked out of him before, but this one took the cake.
His vision finally cleared enough that he could see the other man's face swim into view. He seemed to be kneeling over Hopper and staring down at him.
"Why would you do that?" He demanded.
To Hopper's relief, there wasn't a single flame to be seen on the floor where he painfully lay, or anywhere nearby. His Arsonist had been fast enough to put out the fire that he'd been about to drop into. All of it. Impressive. He could still see fire up above him. Lying on his back and unable to look anywhere but straight up, he could see the hole he'd fallen through. It was at least three stories up. He hadn't counted on that. He'd banked on falling eight or ten feet at most, not thirty. That explained the pain.
Hopper again tried to roll onto his side, grunt-moaning as his body begged him not to do it.
"Why?" The other man demanded again.
"Because I," Hopper croaked, then ran out of air. He needed to draw another whole lungful before he could continue. "Didn't want you," Again he had to stop for more air. "To turn into somebody you," He took another ragged breath. "Hate."
After a few more breaths, he tried for a whole sentence. "If you do too much, you can't live with yourself after a while."
The man continued to stare down at him without words as he recovered.
"I don't want you to go there," Hopper said, when he felt strong enough. "You don't come back from there."
"Who ARE you?" The other asked.
"Name's Jim Hopper," he said slowly. The other man tried to help him sit up, and Hopper winced. "Not too fast." He looked slowly, very slowly, around the basement, or ground floor, or wherever he'd fallen to. "Can you get us out of here?"
"I can't fly," the other told him. "But the stairs might not have completely burned up."
"Hmm," Hopper said unhappily. "What if the whole building falls on us first?"
The other man looked up through the Hopper-sized hole, then held his hands over his head, and closed both fists. The flickering orange light that was so far above them instantly went out.
"It's that easy?" Hopper asked him.
"For me, it is," he said.
"Francisco, can I call you Franc? It's shorter. Listen, when we go outside, some of those cops are gonna be a little trigger happy, so stick close to me. Let me do the talking, Ok?" He mentally crossed his fingers. "Franc" hadn't actually said that he was willing to give himself up. Hopper hoped he could just sort of guide him into it. He tried to draw his knees under him and stand.
"Actually, I lied," Hopper told him. "I only said that cause I wanted you to help carry me. I don't think I can walk on my own yet."
Lucas froze in mid step on his way through Will's front door. Dustin jumped up from the couch, where he'd been sitting next to Mike and El, and bounded toward his old friend.
"Uhh... hi... guys..." Lucas said, his gaze slowly falling on each person in turn. "Will, you didn't tell me you had everyone here."
"We couldn't risk it," Dustin told him. "Talking over an open phone line isn't safe, so Will had to lure you here under false pretext."
"What do you mean it isn't safe? Hi Dustin, by the way. Good to see you. What do you mean it isn't safe?"
Dustin pulled Lucas the rest of the way through the door and shut it behind them. "Don't stand out in plain view," Dustin told him. "Just in case they're watching."
"Whose watching?" Lucas asked, a very confused expression on his face. He looked back over at Mike and El. "Mike, it's been a long time. El... What's going on?"
"There's a lot we need to catch you up on," Dustin said, steering Lucas toward a chair. "So listen carefully. Mike and El are on the run from agents. They're fugitives. Will and I are protecting them, and we need your help."
"Hold on," Lucas said, pulling out of Dustin's grasp. "Agents? What are you talking about?"
"We escaped from Hawkins yesterday," Dustin explained. "Barely escaped. With our lives. It was pretty intense."
"I'm confused," Lucas said, looking to Will and the others for help. "Is this for real? This sounds serious."
"It is serious," Dustin said, placing himself right in front of Lucas again to hold his attention. "I need you to catch up to where we are. Mike and El are on the run from agents. We're hiding. We need your help."
"Ok, Dustin, listen to me," Lucas said, pulling his friend into one of the living room chairs. He pulled a chair directly in front and sat and leaned all the way forward toward Dustin. "I don't know what you saw, you'll have to explain that to me. But, whatever it was, it's wasn't agents from Hawkins Lab. That place has been shut down for years."
"I know what I saw," Dustin began, but Lucas interrupted him.
"That Doctor Brenner and the people who worked there are dead," Lucas said firmly. "Most of them, anyway, and a few of them are in jail right now. Understand? I looked into this. Hawkins Lab wasn't a big government conspiracy. It was basically a tiny operation gone rogue. The program was supposed to have been shut down years before, and Dr. Brenner kept it running in secret." He glanced over to El with a little apologetic look and then turned back to Dustin. "They misappropriated funds, cut corners wherever they could, lied about what they were doing... The whole operation, everything that went on inside the Lab, the rest of the government didn't know about it. Like I told you, I looked into this."
"If you say so," Dustin argued. "Then this is somebody else. I don't know who it is, but they're some kind of agents and they're after us."
"Some kind of agents?"
"Black suits," Dustin said. "Black cars. Black sunglasses. Guns."
"And they... chased you?" Lucas said skeptically.
"Yup," Dustin told him.
"And they want to take El back to the lab again?" He said, looking over at her with a now worried expression.
"Actually, that's not it," Dustin began.
"Listen, you need to understand how this works," Lucas said, looking back to Dustin. "I worked in intelligence."
"I know," Dustin snapped. "That's why we called you."
"And it doesn't work like that," Lucas continued uninterrupted. "I helped decrypt Russian messages. I studied satellite photos that could see into Saddam Hussein's bathroom window. We kept track of Chinese nuclear submarines. Did you know the Chinese have nuclear submarines now? And I never saw anything like Hawkins Lab. The government just doesn't do things like that anymore. They're actually... kind of boring. They worry about the tiniest little things. They'll spend a billion dollars trying to slip a bug into Fidel Castro's private phone, only to find out that he mostly just uses the phone to call his personal chef. They just don't have labs where they experiment on kidnapped kids anymore. That's a thing of the past." He turned to look at El again. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound-"
"Then I don't know who they are, but they're real," Dustin argued. "You figure out who they are. I'm just telling you what's happened so far."
El slid off the couch and crossed the living room where Lucas was sitting, baby Allie held in one arm. She crouched down so her eyes were level with Lucas. "It's true," she told him quietly. "I promise."
Lucas stared into her eyes for a long time. Dustin watch his face closely as his expression changed from hard skepticism to curiosity to acceptance.
"Ok," Lucas said at last, slumping back against the chair. "I believe you, but I still don't understand what's going on here. So... these people... chased you out of Hawkins?"
El nodded once.
Dustin nodded way more emphatically. "And we came to Will's house to hide. So now I need you to tell us who they are and help us come up with a solution"
Lucas pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and let out a long breath, thinking. "What did they look like?" He asked Dustin.
"Black suits. Black sun gla-"
"I got that part. When did you see them first?"
"I caught them spying on my house," Dustin told him.
"You caught them?"
"I saw them. In the act," Dustin said.
"Then they can't have been very good spies," Lucas said.
"It's not like they were parked right in front of my house," Dustin said. "I had to do a little bit of detective work."
"Then what?"
"Then I told Mike and El that we needed to run, so we all got in the car. On our way out of Hawkins, a county cop pulled us over."
"And you think he was working with the agents?" Lucas asked, sounding only a bit less skeptical.
"Well, maybe. He might have been. But I was speeding, so..."
"Then what?"
"Then the agents showed up," Dustin continued. "They parked behind the county cop. They told him to arrest us, and-"
"Really?" Lucas asked in surprise.
"Probably," Dustin said. "He told us to get out of the car. He had a hand on his gun and that's when-" Dustin looked over at El, who had returned to the couch next to Mike. With a proud smile, Dustin said, "Then El saved us from the agents. She tossed them across the road, smashed their cars, and-"
"What?!" Lucas said, jumping out of his chair.
"Yeah, pretty awesome, isn't it?" Dustin said.
"Oh, this is bad," Lucas said, beginning to pace through the living room.
"I know it is," Dustin said. "That's why we're hiding from the agents."
"No, I mean really bad," Lucas told him. "Not like: a few people who work at Hawkins Lab are chasing you, bad. I mean like: you could go to jail for actual crimes, bad. Attacking anyone from law enforcement, cops, FBI, CIA, anyone. That's a federal crime. They don't have to be rogue agents working in secret to get you. They could just be regular FBI agents, and now they have an actual reason they could put you all in jail. Oh, this is bad."
"What were we supposed to do?" Dustin demanded. "Let them take us away to some secret facility where we'd disappear forever?"
"How do you know that's what they wanted to do?" Lucas asked him. "Maybe they just wanted to ask you some questions."
"Right, that's why they sent men with guns. To 'talk' to us," Dustin said.
"ALL agents have guns," Lucas said. "It's part of the job."
"Besides, I'm pretty sure I know what they wanted," Dustin added. He glanced over at Mike and El. "Guys, can I tell him now? I really need to tell him."
El nodded her head, but Will got the jump on Dustin.
"Little Allie has super powers," Will said, the same note of excitement in his voice that Dustin would have had. He really wished he could have been the one to say it. It was just such an awesome thing thing to be able to say. How many people ever got to say words like that in their lifetime?
Lucas stared from El, to Mike, to the baby, back to Mike, then back to El.
"She's a pyrokete," Dustin said, his voice full of pride.
"A pyro...?"
"Kete," Dustin finished. She has pyrokinesis. She can make and control fire with her mind."
"Except she's too young to control it," Will interjected, clearly loving it just as much as Dustin was.
"Right, she's too young," Dustin continued. "And she had a nightmare, and started a fire, and burned down Mike and El's house."
Lucas' eye went wide with surprise. "Are guys alright?" He asked Mike and El.
"Of course they are," Dustin said. "They're sitting right here. Do they look hurt to you? Anyway, that's why the agents are after baby Allie, I'm thinking. They never knew she had powers before. But now the secret's out, and they want her for their experiments."
Lucas continued to pace around the living room. He tried to start speaking several times, then stopped and resumed his pacing.
"Ok, we need more information if we're going to figure this out," Lucas said at last. "You're sure no one knows you're here, at Will's house?"
"Pretty sure," Dustin said. "We came in an unmarked car."
"Unmarked?"
"Come on Lucas, unmarked," Dustin said. "It means a car they don't know they should be tracking. It's a word spies use all the time."
"No, it isn't," Lucas said.
"After we escaped from those agents," Dustin continued, "We ditched that car a found a new one. We bought it from a nice Mexican family. El helped us out with that, too."
"We need to do some reconnaissance," Lucas said. "If they don't know you're here, they'll probably still be looking in Hawkins. Maybe they still have your house staked out. Or Mike's parents house, for example. They'd keep eyes on the places that you're most likely to return to. I'll go take a look. If I see them there, maybe I can get an idea of who they are."
"Great," Dustin said. "I'll come with you."
"They aren't looking for me," Lucas said. "Nobody will care if they see me driving through Hawkins. It'd be better if you stay here, out of sight."
"You're going to need a second pair of eyes," Dustin insisted. "And a second pair of hands. I'm coming."
"If I need anyone, it'd be El," Lucas said. "Flipping cars is a pretty useful weapon to have in your arsenal."
"Can't. El needs to stay here with the baby," Dustin explained. "She keeps her calm. If Allie gets upset, she might... you know. Burn stuff again. Besides, I know the lay of the land. You haven't been in Hawkins since you joined the Army."
"It can't have changed that much," Lucas argued.
"You need me, end of discussion," Dustin said. "Grab some snacks. We're going. Will, Mike, El, I'm sorry but I'm taking Lucas. You guys can catch up on lost time when we get back. We'll give you a situation report as soon as we've scouted Hawkins."
"Reconned," Lucas said.
"What?"
"As soon as we've reconned Hawkins." Lucas corrected.
"Whatever, let's go," Dustin said. "No time to waste."
"Just a minute," Lucas told him. He crossed the room again and sat on Will's coffee table, right in front of Mike and El. "Guys, uhh, this is a little crazy. I'm sorry this is how we get back together. I'm sorry we haven't really talked in a few years."
"It's my fault," Mike offered. "You were off doing important things. I should have been the one to call you."
"Some of the things were important," Lucas admitted. "Some of them were boring. I was stationed in Fort Knox, in Germany, in Okinawa, in Guantanamo Bay-"
"Where's that?" Dustin asked from behind him.
"Never mind," Lucas said quickly. "The point is, I'm here now. We have a lot to catch up on when I get back. I've missed you two. And I've never even seen the baby. Will's told me about her. Except for the fire stuff. I never knew that."
"I never knew that, either," Will added.
"Listen," Mike said, searching for words. "I shouldn't be asking you to put yourself in danger. If the agents see you with us, they'll come after you too, maybe your family-"
"Stop," Lucas said gently. "I love you guys. If you're in danger, I'm here. No questions. Whatever you need." He looked over at El. "Even if you did just commit a federal crime. I'm still with you."
El laughed lightly.
"Maybe those agents deserved it, I don't know," Lucas continued. "We'll find out. Whatever this is, we're in it together."
"Thank-you-Lucas-really," Mike said, his voice breaking a little.
"All for one, you know. Party rules," Lucas said, standing up. "We'll know more once we've reconned Hawkins. We'll hurry back."
Dustin followed Lucas out the door, closing it behind him, and they were gone.
Agents Jack Smith leafed through a handful of Mr. Dustin Henderson's mail. He picked out one that looked promising and tore it open, but it gave no clues as to where the Wheelers and their friend might have gone. The inclusion of Mr. Henderson by the Wheelers had only made a complicated situation worse. Smith had hoped to keep the operation as quiet as possible, and each new person who got involved made his job more difficult. Still, if the Wheelers were seeking help from friends and family, that gave him a list of places to look. He already had eyes on the homes of both Mike Wheeler's parents house and Mr. Henderson's parents house, as well as wire taps. Both of them lived in Hawkins, so it was entirely possible his targets would try to contact their families. Smith had even gone to the effort of sending a few of his people to surveil the home of Mike Wheeler's sister and her husband, who lived in New York. That was a long way to go, but it was conceivable that they might run that far.
Having learned nothing from Mr. Henderson's mail, Smith tossed it back onto his desk. He picked up his coffee mug, realized it was empty, and set it back down with a sharp clink. Deciding that he'd procrastinated long enough, Smith pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up. He gathered the file folders he would need, and headed out the door. He'd chosen to use a motel in Cartersville as his temporary office while he was running the investigation. The room he'd given Walter was as far from his own as the little motel allowed. He didn't like Walter. He didn't like being too close to Walter. He didn't like talking to Walter. If the man's special talents could shave days off their investigation, though, he couldn't help but use them.
Smith knocked on the door, only as a formality, and then used a master key to let himself in. He found Walter inside, hunched over his own little desk, sketching something in pencil on a single sheet of paper.
"Good morning, Agent Smith," Walter said to him, without looking up. The man was old and thin with a heavy smoker's rasp. He was dressed in a gray sweater and penny loafers, and gave no outward appearance that he was special.
"Do you have anything for me?" Smith asked, without preamble.
"I had many dreams last night," Walter told him. "But I don't know where your fire-starting child is. If I did, I would have told you earlier."
"Anything at all?" Smith pressed.
"Yes," Walter allowed, finally looking up from his drawing. He held it for Smith to see. It was a simple, though very good, pencil sketch of a man sitting down with a plate and coffee mug. "This is what Boris Yeltsin had for breakfast yesterday."
"Fascinating," Smith grumbled.
"I don't control my dreams, not really. You know that," Walter said. "Sometimes what I see is mundane, sometimes it's critical." He picked up a second drawing from the desk, which did a lot more to catch Smith's eye. "This one will interest the boys back at the agency," Walter told him. "It's a Russian nuclear silo. I saw it, in my dreams, clear as day, but I have no idea where it is. Somewhere in Siberia, I'd guess. The boys will have to spend hours comparing it with satellite photos to figure that out. You see how this works? I can't close my eyes and see whatever you ask for. The dreams come to me in their own time."
"Anything at all that relates to THIS case?" Smith asked, impatiently. As useful as it might be to keep an eye on Russian nuclear bombs, that wasn't why they were in the middle of now-where Indiana. For now, he was only interested in the Wheeler family and whoever might be helping them to hide.
"Yes, but it's nothing you can use," Walter said. "I can tell you that the child is currently safe with her mother."
"Safe?" Smith asked.
"She feels safe," Walter said. "And calm. That's the feeling I got. My dreams didn't tell me where she was. If they do, you'll be the first to know."
Smith slapped his file folders down on Walter's desk and took out several photos. Most of them were recent, taken only the day before, though a few had been taken from the ten-year-old files that had been confiscated when Hawkins Lab had been shut down. He slid the pictures across the desk to Walter and spread them out so he could get a better look. There was a photo of Mike Wheeler's parents, along with their middle-school aged daughter, Holly. There was also a low quality photo of Mr. Henderson that had been quickly taken from a poor angle. Smith supplemented that photo with a better, though badly out of date photo, of young Mr. Henderson that had been taken and filed away back when Hawkins Lab was still operational.
Walter's eyes skimmed over the half dozen other photos of family and known friends of the Wheelers.
"You don't want to give me too much to work with," Walter cautioned him. "If I go to sleep with too many images on my mind, my dreams will be jumbled and disjointed. You won't learn anything."
With a scowl on his face, Smith took back all of the photos except for the two of Mr. Henderson. He had his men observing all the others, so he would presumably know if the Wheelers turned up at any of those places before Walter knew. He slid the new and old photos of Mr. Henderson closer to Walter.
"This one, then," he said. "We know Mr. Henderson is with the Wheelers." Smith shuffled the other photos and slid them back into the file folder along with a number of other documents. As he did, his eyes fell across one of the other old photos. He examined it for a moment, his curiosity piqued.
The photo, like some of the others, must have been taken a decade ago when the Lab was still operational. Whoever had taken it was likely either dead or no longer a part of the agency. It showed four children on three bicycles with tall power lines in the background.
Young Mr. Wheeler was instantly recognizable in the old photo. Though he was ten years younger, his features hadn't changed that much. The child seated on the bike behind Mr. Wheeler, Smith knew, was the current "Mrs. Wheeler." He only knew this because he had studied the documents and photos extensively. In fact, the girl in this old photo was nearly unrecognizable. Her head was shaved and she was wearing boy's clothes. That helped him to date the photo, since hear head had also been shaved in the photos he'd seen of the test subject designated as "011." A lot of the documents from the Lab's active days had been redacted or destroyed, but Smith had indeed seen a number of photos of test subject 011 undergoing various tests at the Lab. If he hadn't been allowed to read as many of the documents as still existed, he would have had a hard time connecting the old photos of subject 011 with the present day Mrs. Wheeler.
His eyes roved to the other two boys in the bicycle photo. One of them he recognized as young Mr. Henderson. The last boy happened to be facing away from the camera, so he face wasn't visible. Deciding this photo held nothing useful for Walter, Smith filed it away. But it reminded him of another old photo he'd seen. He searched through the folder until he found it. This one featured three children walking out of school. Again, Smith had no date for the photo, but it must have been about ten years old, judging by the childrens' faces. Again, he recognized the young Mr. Wheeler and the young Mr. Henderson. The third boy's face looked familiar as well. Another quick search through the folder confirmed his initial guess. He found a wrinkled and torn missing-poster with the same face. It was the face of William Byers, the boy who had been at the heart of the crisis that had led to the Lab being shut down. Smith hadn't paid much attention to that boy on his first reading of the old documents. Of course, the boy would be in his twenties by now, and Smith didn't have any current photos on hand, but it would have to be good enough.
He slapped the missing-poster down in front of Walter, next to the two photos of Mr. Henderson.
"This one, too," Smith said. "Let me know the moment you have anything. If it's the middle of the night, wake me up." With the frustrating feeling that he was overlooking something important, Smith briskly walked out of the hotel room, closing the door sharply behind him, and leaving Walter alone with his drawings and the photos.
The forests and cornfields of southern Indiana rolled past as they cruised down I-69. Lucas had argued that there was no need to take the back roads, since no one was looking for his car. They'd been driving over four hours from Chicago and were nearly to Hawkins. Dustin offered his Pringles to Lucas, who took them without hesitation.
"So how does a big operation like Hawkins Lab stay a secret from the government, anyway?" Dustin asked.
"Well, for one thing, the budget is huge," Lucas told him. "There's no one person who knows where every dollar ends up. It's just way too big. So the budget gets spread out over different departments. You know, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education... Each of those budgets is pretty big, so even something as expensive as Hawkins Lab can hide pretty easily. If somebody higher up wanted to check the Department of Energy's accounting books, there might just be a line that says 'Hawkins National Lab: X number of millions of dollars' with no more details than that. Somebody would really have to know that there was something to find, or they'd never go looking for it."
"So you don't think that Dr. Brenner worked for the CIA?" Dustin asked.
"Not really," Lucas said. "That's not the kind of thing they do."
"How do you know?" Dustin protested.
"Ok, I'm pretty sure that's not the kind of thing they do," Lucas amended.
"They showed you all their dirty laundry, did they?" Dustin asked in a snarky tone.
"I'm just telling you, from the people I've met and the people I've talked to, that's not what they're like," Lucas argued. "Look, have YOU ever even seen someone from the CIA?"
"I don't know, do the agents that chased us on our bikes with their vans when we were kids count?" Dustin asked.
"No," Lucas snapped.
"Then how about the ones that tried to kidnap baby Allie yesterday?"
"I don't know!" Lucas said in frustration. "Listen, the CIA is full of people, that's all. People, just like you and me."
"Bad people," Dustin remarked.
"How about this," Lucas tried. "Are teachers good or bad?"
"Teachers are great," Dustin said. "They help you open curiosity doors."
"You're thinking of Mr Clarke and Mike, people like that," Lucas said.
"Sure," Dustin agreed.
"What about Mr. Kowalski?"
Dustin made a face.
"Or old Ms. Ratliff?" Lucas pressed.
Dustin shuddered visibly. "I hope she's not still around."
"You see my point?" Lucas asked. "You find good and bad people everywhere. Me, I know a few people who went to the CIA. A few of the guys I used to know in the army. A friend of mine named Smitty, from basic training, he got recruited by the CIA. It's people like that who I'm talking about. They didn't join the army hoping that one day they could run a secret government lab that does illegal experiments. Sure, there are a few Dr. Brenners out there in the world, but only a few. And most people don't like them, so they don't make it very far."
"Then who are the agents who were spying on my house?" Dustin asked. "Tax collectors?"
"I wish I knew," Lucas said, looking concerned. "We'll know more when we finish our reconn. We're almost to Hawkins."
The monster usually moved around by night. It was easier to avoid prying eyes that way. This late at night, the streets of the outskirts of Los Angeles were almost deserted. He'd been dreaming again, and his dreams had finally shown him where he wanted to go next. He waited in the shadow of an abandoned building until he saw the glow of approaching headlights. When he felt that the van was close enough, he stepped out into the road.
The headlights flooded over him, exposing his inhuman visage to the van's lone occupant, who slammed on the horn and the brakes at the same time. The monster had timed it well, as the van was able to skid to a stop just a few feet from hitting him. He slowly walked around to the driver's side door, where the man inside was panicking and shouting. At first the driver had been horrified that he'd nearly killed a man. Then his reaction only worsened when he laid eyes on just what it was he'd nearly run over.
By then, though, the monster was close enough to do his work. He locked eyes with the panicking driver, and poured out his willpower into the man, giving him a strong mental "push." For a few seconds the man's eyes rolled back in his head until only the white was visible. He gave a little shudder, and when his eyes came back, they were glazed and unfocused. He was no longer panicking, though. He sat behind the wheel, calm and docile, awaiting his instructions.
The monster moved around to the back of the van, opened the door, and climbed inside. The rear area was mostly empty, and even tall enough for him to stand. As he closed the door, he gave his wordless instructions to his new thrall, who took his foot off the brake, and headed down the road with a new destination in his head.