Chapter 13
"What are you doing here?" Joyce asked Hopper, hugging him fiercely.
"Looking for you," Hopper answered. "What are YOU doing here?" He winced as his right arm got caught up in the hug. Will looked down to notice that Hopper's sleeve was torn open to reveal a big, bloody gash. He quickly pulled off his jacket and offered it up. Hopper smile-grimaced in thanks as he took the jacket and began to wrap his arm tightly.
"We need to get out of here," Hopper said quickly. "Anywhere but here." Joyce pulled him toward the van, acting as if his bleeding arm was life threatening.
"Lie down in the back seat," She insisted.
"I'm fine," Hopper protested. "It's just a scratch." Since Joyce was already halfway into the van's middle row with him, he turned toward Sam. "Sam, you drive. Get us out of here."
Will slid into the front passenger seat. If this new guy, Sam, was going to be driving, Will would have to give him a quick primer on the Upside Down. Only when the four of them had climbed inside the van did they realize that El remained behind, standing several steps away, a dark expression on her face.
"Come on, kid," Hopper said , completely failing to read her.
"She isn't coming with us," Will said quietly so El wouldn't have to.
Both Hopper and Joyce gave her confused looks.
"You go," El told them all. "I'm staying."
"Sorry, not a chance. It's too dangerous," Hopper told her. "Thanks for saving me, but you're coming with us. We're getting out of this together."
El quietly shook her head.
"If I go with you, they'll follow us. Today, or tomorrow, or the next day, they'll find us. No more running."
Will watched Hopper gape at El. That was understandable. Hopper didn't know what had happened the last few days. He also watched his mom, already breaking into tears, but not protesting. He might have protested, too, but he'd already guessed at what El was going to do, and he knew he couldn't talk her out of it if he tried.
"Come on, everybody," Will said gently, touching his mom's arm to get her attention. "There's nothing we can do to help. This is too big for us."
"No way!" Hopper argued.
"Just come with us for now," Joyce insisted. "We'll think of something later."
"Not later," El said, shaking her head. "Now. I'm not running anymore."
"You don't know what you're up against," Hopper said.
El turned her dark gaze away from the van and toward the firestarter who was now halfway down the bridge from where they sat.
"I see him," El said to Hopper. "There's another one, too. I can't see him, but he's here."
"So leave it and let's get out of here," Hopper said, his voice strained.
"I can't," El almost whispered. "I don't want them to come to Hawkins. I don't want them to find any of you, or Mike or Allie or Dustin or Lucas. I can't-" Her voice caught and stuck, refusing to work, so she shut her mouth, but she didn't look away from them. Will found himself staring sadly. In the years that he'd known her, he had always admired how El didn't try to hide from her friends. She was strong enough to let them see her when she was weak. He wished he was that strong.
"Let's go," Will said to his Mom and Hopper. "She's doing this."
"El-" Hopper said, but she looked past him, locking eyes with Will.
"Make sure they get away, as far away as they can," El said to him.
The fire all around them was kicking up a breeze, making her hair and clothes flutter. Her eyes were the hardest he'd ever seen them. He felt only fear in the pit of his stomach, but he nodded to her. "I promise," he said.
El nodded back to him, then flicked her chin toward the van doors, which slammed shut at her command.
"Hey!" Hopper said, grabbing the door with his one good arm and trying to open it.
Before Hopper could start kicking out the windows or something, Will closed his eyes and squeezed with his mind, pulling the van into the Upside Down.
That seemed to catch Hopper off guard, and he stopped yanking on the door handle as he stared out the van's windows.
"What the... How did we get here?" Hopper asked.
"I'm sorry," Will said. "It's the only way. And it's what El wanted." Will turned his attention to the man behind the wheel. The man who he guessed to be Hopper's friend, Sam, was staring in wide-eyed amazement at the alien world around him.
"Are you okay?" Will asked him.
"What... Where..." Sam was lost for words.
"We're in another dimension," Will told him quickly, hoping he could get the guy up to speed in time for them to get moving. Maybe he'd need to take the wheel himself. "It exists beneath our world. Sort of. My friends call it the Upside Down."
"Upside Down..." Sam said, looking left and right, taking it all in.
"We're still in Chicago," Will explained. "We're still on the bridge. You see it? We haven't gone anywhere. We're just in another version of it."
There was a flash of orange light, something Will wasn't used to seeing in the dark and dull Upside Down. He wasn't sure if El was already engaging the firestarter or not, but he knew they needed to get moving.
"It's Sam, right?" Will asked him.
"Yeah," Sam said, his eyes still swimming over the strange world on the other side of his windshield.
"And you're a friend of Hopper's?"
"We go way back," Sam said absently.
"Okay, so Sam? I'm going to need you to focus. We need to get moving. We don't want to stay here. Can you handle it?"
"Sure thing, kid," Sam said, reaching for the shifter and sliding the van into Drive, still looking around distractedly.
"That way," Will pointed helpfully.
From the seat behind him, Hopper put a hand on Will's arm. "You did this?" He asked.
"Yeah," Will said nervously.
"Huh," Hopper said, looking from Will to Joyce. He seemed to consider it a moment. "Are there any... demuhgorgins?" He asked.
"I don't think so," Will told him honestly.
"Listen, it's not safe, what we're letting El go and do," Hopper insisted.
"I know that," Will said. "She knows that. She's doing this for us, and for her baby."
Hopper scowled, reluctant to give in.
"Baby Allie is the reason all this is happening, kind of," Will continued. "Those psychics are after her, the agents are after her-"
"Agents!" Hopper said, realization spreading over his face. "Why are there a bunch of government guys all over Hawkins?"
"They want baby Allie," Will repeated. "Mike and El and Dustin had to escape Hawkins. They came here to hide out at my house. And then the agents found us there and... here we are."
"Why do they want Mike and El's baby?" Hopper asked.
"She has powers," Will told him. He realized that the honest answer hadn't even sounded weird when he said it out loud this time. "She controls fire."
"No..." Hopper said in mild disbelief. But already a thoughtful expression was coming over him. "Like him?" Hopper asked, nodding his head back toward the direction they'd come from, toward the bridge in Chicago in another dimension where guy with pyrokinetic powers was burning it down, one car at a time.
Will nodded somberly. He realized that he should have felt a little bad about spilling Mike and El's secret, but it was hardly a secret anymore, and Hopper needed to know.
"A lot's happened in the last few days," Will told him. "You missed some pretty wild stuff. You wouldn't believe-"
"Oh, I believe it," Hopper said. "Sam and I were into some pretty wild stuff of our own. He's with the Sacramento PD. That's where your firestarter back there is from."
"Really?" Will asked, glancing from Hopper to Sam and back.
"Yeah. Name's Franc," Hopper explained. "He's not a bad person, once you get to know him."
"He's not?" Will asked, not sure how to take that.
"Something must have happened," Hopper amended. "I don't know why he's doing this."
"We know why," Will said. "He's after little Allie. At least, that's what the agents think."
"You talked to them?" Hopper asked in surprise.
"Well, one of them," Will told him. "His name's Smith. He's not a bad person, once you get to know him. He's just misguided."
"What in the world would Franc want with Mike and El's baby?" Hopper asked.
"I don't really know," Will told him. "They have the same ability, so we think they share a kind of connection..."
Hopper turned in his seat to look at Joyce, who was trying to rewrap the borrowed jacket around his injured arm. "Are you up to speed on all this?" He asked incredulously.
She gave a shrug and a nod. "Most of it. The boys seem to have things figured out. I didn't know what was going on when I drove up here from home. I just knew Will was in trouble."
"So why did you bring us here?" Hopper asked Will, waving an arm toward the Upside Down all around them.
"We can travel faster, and without anyone seeing us," Will told him. "Right now, Mike and the others are trying to get the baby out of the city. And right now, WE need to be as far away from that bridge as we can. After El is finished, we can all meet up again, and maybe it will be safe to go back to Hawkins. I hope so."
Will looked back out the window and saw they they were creeping along at a leisurely thirty miles and hour or so. He turned to Sam and slapped him firmly on the arm. "Drive!"
"Yes sir," Sam said, stepping on the gas.
El gazed at the blank pavement for a long moment with her eyes out of focus, almost oblivious to the chaos around her. She wanted to make sure Will and Joyce and Hopper got some distance between them before she started anything. Without taking the time and effort to slip into the Void, her ability to sense them was pretty weak, but she knew each of them very well, which made it easier to recognize their individual presences from a short distance. Besides, all she needed to know was whether they were moving away, her sense of them becoming fainter and fainter, which they were. When she felt they were at a safe distance, and getting safer, she mentally shook herself awake and returned her focus to the here and now.
The flood of noise and light washed over her as she looked around and really got her bearings. The ornate old bridge over the Chicago River was strewn with the burning hulks of what had once been police cars, government black sedans, and those white vans that the agents used for all sorts of purposes. A few people still ran around in some semblance of order, firing their guns from whatever cover they could find. Many more people, though, littered the ground, along with burning scrap metal and other debris from the battle.
El felt a deep sadness in the pit of her stomach. Maybe some of the dead had been bad people, the type of people who would take her little girl away and keep her in a little box while they tested and experimented on her gifts. But most of them would have been good people: cops, like her friend Hopper, or Army men, like her friend Lucas.
She didn't know if she, or really her baby, was the reason why all this had happened. That thought alone would have made her feel guilty enough, though Allie's safety overshadowed all of that. If the only way to keep her baby safe was to let all these people kill each other in the street, then El would have sadly done it. But she didn't know if the situation was that black and white, at least not yet. She didn't know what the agents would do tomorrow, if they would keep chasing her, or leave her alone. She didn't know who these two men with abilities of their own were, or what they really wanted to do. It was possible they also wanted to take Allie and raise her to be like themselves, which was something El would never let happen. She didn't know if that was true, either. She only knew what Smith had suggested to her, and he might or might not be trustworthy.
Though she didn't know any of those things for certain, she DID know that a lot of people, many of them good people, were dying right in front of her. She couldn't walk away from that.
The obvious threat was the lone man, still slowly making his way across the bridge. By himself, he didn't look unusual or threatening, but by simply pointing his hand at a target, he conjured up angry orange flames and shot them in great jets to blast away whatever he wanted. This man wasn't the only psychic nearby. El knew there was another, but that one wasn't out in the open, and he wasn't blowing up cars and burning people.
El wasn't fireproof. In fact, she had a semi-happy memory of burning herself on a candle the first time Mike had introduced her to birthday cake. But the firestarter didn't know she was even there, let alone what she could do. Lowering her chin and glaring at him, El took a few steps in his direction. He didn't notice her approach, amid the noise and wreckage. It took almost no effort. She flicked her head up and to the left. With bursts of flame still erupting from his hands, he was tossed like a rag doll over the railing and off the bridge.
There was too much noise for El to hear him hit the river below, but she knew he had. If he knew how to swim, he'd survive.
Everything changed at that moment. The sound of gunfire stopped as the agents and police and soldiers stared in surprise. What she'd done seemed to be enough to bring the other psychic out of hiding. El felt him approaching from the other side of the bridge. His presence was unmistakable, like a tiny black hole in her mind's eye, sucking in all the light around it and leaving only cold emptiness. She turned around to face him.
El had seen some frightening things in her life. Next to the demogorgon, this was the most disturbing thing on two legs she'd yet laid eyes on. It wore clothes, but it wasn't really a man. One arm was larger than the other, ending in long tendril-like fingers that hung nearly to the ground. The skin on that arm was gray and scaly. His head wasn't round. One side was swollen, and covered in patches of that same scaly gray skin. One eye was nothing but a tiny speck of light gleaming out of an otherwise black pit.
As she stared at the monster, repellent as he was, she found that she couldn't look away. Some kind of tunnel vision had fallen over her, and the monster seemed to grow in perspective even as the bridge and flames and ruined police cars seemed to shrink into the background. Her vision began to blur, and a growing sense of dizziness crept over her. She felt unsteady, and wanted to take a few stumbling steps to regain her balance, but her legs were sluggish and barely responded. Then she heard a voice.
The voice was inhuman, both too low and too high pitched for her to really hear, but it washed over her mind like water. She felt submerged in the droning whisper. Though she couldn't make out individual words, she understood what the voice was asking her, telling her, to do. She wanted to go over to the monster. She wanted to cross the bridge and walk beside him. She wanted to lift his firestarter back out of the river, and the three of them would walk the streets, invincible and unafraid of the men with guns. She wanted to lead the monster to her baby, so that he could extend his influence to little Allie as well.
El's eyes snapped open wide. She wanted to shake herself awake, but her body didn't want to respond.
Get out! She thought, pushing back against the words in her mind.
That tiny speck of light that the monster had in place of one eye seemed to glow brighter. El felt the voice in her head stronger than ever. Where the words had washed over her like a calm wave before, they now hit her with an oppressive force. She wanted to ally herself with the monster. She wanted to do whatever he commanded. She wanted to tell him where Mike had taken their baby.
"No!" She said out loud, her voice finally obeying her brain. She shook her head and tried to squeeze her eyes shut, but she still found herself unable to break eye contact with the monster. He turned up the intensity even more, and El physically staggered, as if a weight had been dropped on her shoulders from above. She slapped both hands to her temples and tried to squeeze her eyes shut so she wouldn't have to look at the monster. Even though he was still some distance away, he seemed to loom larger and larger in her eyes. The voice in her head was bellowing now, instead of whispering. The voice wanted to know where her baby was hiding. The voice wanted El to give her up.
"Get out!" She screamed, the words scratching the inside of her throat. The monster stumbled backward a few steps, hit by the force of her mental scream. Everything was clear again.
El blinked her eyes once. She could see. The voice was gone. The monster was out of her head.
She felt a small trickle of blood begin to run from her nose.
The monster's malformed jaw opened in a sneer. She both felt and heard a low rumble from his throat, like the growl of an animal from some other world. His shoulders tensed, and his one un-mutated hand curled into a fist. El felt a different kind of pressure inside her mind. There were no words this time. She felt no suggestion or command. It was only a pressure. A pressure that was quickly turning into pain.
With a jolt, El recognized the sensation. She'd never felt it before, but she'd inflicted it on others once in her life. The night that agents from the Lab had captured Mike and her friends at Hawkins middle school, El had reached out and touched their minds, and she had squeezed and squeezed until-
She felt the pain inside her head, like a vice crushing her from the inside, barely a second later. The pressure was unbearable. She thought her skull was going to split open.
El screamed again and pushed back against the pressure. She felt it weaken as she pushed it out and away. The monster pushed back, and El pushed back harder. It felt like two enormous metal hands were pressing in on her from either side, but she pushed them away, inch by inch until they couldn't reach her. Her head was pounding from the effort, and more blood came from her nose, the first drop falling off her lip to land on the pavement.
She flicked her head toward the monster, trying to toss him off the bridge like she had with the other one, but he resisted her. El lowered her chin, glaring at the monster, and pushed hard. He was shaken and staggered from her push, but he dug his heels into the ground and pushed back. El screamed, stretching out both hands toward the monster. She pushed with all her mind across the yards of distance between them, but he pushed back, arresting her efforts. Debris and scraps from the earlier battle were kicked up by by El's mental storm and flew around like leaves in the wind. The monster refused to give in.
El screamed without words, her eyes blazing as she drew on everything she had. Wrecked cars and broken slabs of cement floated up from the ground around her. For a moment, El was surrounded by a gently whirling mass of wreckage from the earlier battle, and then she threw those, too, against the monster, along with her mental assault.
The wrecked cars and cement boulders crashed against an invisible wall before they touched him. With one wave of his hand, the monster swept El's projectiles from the sky. With another hand motion, he sent a wave crashing into her.
El felt it hit her in the chest. The air went out of her lungs and she was knocked off her feet. She fell back to the ground hard, feeling every sharp bit of debris biting into her back as she landed. She tried to gasp for air, but her lungs wouldn't draw breath.
She had almost scrambled up to her knees when he swung at her again, as if trying to strike her across the face, even from the opposite end of the bridge. El had no time to fight back. Her arm instructively flew over her face to protect against the bits of scrap metal and rubble the came flying along with the Monster's invisible shockwave. The one defensive instinct must have triggered another, because El felt her mind pushing back against the attack before she was conscious of doing so. Her own defenses were too little, too late. The shockwave hammered into her, tossing her along with a big pile of wreckage into the air and further down the bridge. The instinctive use of her powers had been enough to save her body from being crushed flat, or sliced to ribbons by flying bits of metal, but she was far from unhurt, and her lungs still didn't want to work. Her head throbbed and spun at the same time. Her body ached from the blows and stung from a few stray cuts.
She knew another attack was coming, and this time she had enough presence of mind to protect herself as best she could. She wrapped what felt like a solid cocoon around herself. As the monster's next strike blasted her and whole chunks of the bridge's pavement into the air, she was at least mostly unharmed.
She crashed to a stop against the marble wall of a building. If not for her insulating cocoon, she would probably have split the back of her head wide open against the marble. Her feet touched the ground as she fell, but she was too tired to catch herself. Her legs folded and she dropped briefly to her hands and knees amid the painfully sharp bits of metal and concrete that littered the street.
El had been pushed back, all the way back off the bridge and onto the city street that ran next to it. The monster leered at her from the bridge, barely a few steps away from where he'd begun their fight. El felt completely drained of energy. She slowly pushed herself back up to her feet. She could hear the voice in her head again, but this time it meant nothing to her. The monster could ask, could persuade, could command all he wanted. El would gladly have died before giving up what he wanted.
That upset him. She felt his anger, and she also read that he wasn't used to his powers failing. She felt him tensing, ready to hit her again.
The feeling of tiredness hit El harder than ever. She could try to shield herself again, and maybe, probably, she'd survive his first strike, and maybe the next one, and maybe the one after that. Maybe. But she felt to very tired.
She could attack him again, but she'd already thrown everything she had, and he'd held firm and pushed back. She didn't expect now, as weak as she was, she'd be able to do any better. El had very little left in her, and it seemed the monster wasn't tiring at all. She had no idea if his powers were limitless, or just greater than hers, or just different from hers. She was drained. And she was afraid.
The monster's glowing eye flashed as he gathered a big surge of energy and threw it across the bridge at her. El did the same. She had no time to gather anything extra, and she probably had nothing else left to gather in her entire body. So she struck out with what little she did have.
She didn't want to waste her last shot by trying in vain to hurt the monster. He was too strong for that. Instead she blew out the support pillars that held up the bridge.
His own attack smashed into the four story marble building behind her, turning it into a few million pounds of cascading rubble. El was conscious long enough as the huge chunks of marble fell on and around her to see the bridge collapse under the monster's feet, enveloping him as he fell out of sight.