Chapter 3

Koren put aside her curiosity about the magic Scout had found as she pulled to a stop just outside the cemetery and put the car in park. Fortunately, there were no walls or guards to deal with, and the cemetery wasn't extremely large. Unfortunately, it was right on the back side of a church with no cover to hide what she was doing if the pastor or anybody else came out. She'd just have to hope that it was late enough that nobody would come outside and see her.

After a quick search of the cemetery, Koren found the grave of Will Byers. Then, she went back to the car to pick up one of the shovels they had brought. As she returned to the grave, she reminded herself why she had to do this. Like she had told the others, they'd be poor investigators if they didn't check the central claim that had brought them here. On the other hand, maybe now that Scout had discovered magic, it wasn't necessary? Still, it was best to be thorough, and in the absence of more detail about what magic Scout had found, digging up this body was the right thing to do. No matter how disrespectful it seemed. And the other two girls certainly weren't going to do it, so Koren had to. She looked around once more to make sure nobody was watching, then took a deep breath and plunged the shovel into the soil.

Finally! Sands saw several flashlight beams moving in the distance, so she pointed her light at them to get their attention and headed that way. Sure enough, as she approached, she found Scout walking with a boy and a girl about their age. She waved and called out, "There you are!" They kept walking until they were more in talking range than yelling range. Then, Sands figured it was time for introductions. "Hi, I'm Sands, and Scout is my sister. We're here for our school newspaper; we heard about the missing kid too late to join the search party, but we thought we'd take a look around and see what it was like anyway."

The boy scowled and took a step closer to her. "My brother going missing is serious! I can't believe you think it's just something to get a good story out of!"

Sands raised her hands in surrender, "Whoa, hey, we'd help if we could, but we heard about it too late. Wait a minute, missing? I thought they said he was dead."

The boy seemed to slump into himself. "I don't know any more. We had a funeral, but my mom said the…the body wasn't him. I didn't believe her, but then I got a picture of a monster, and then we came out here looking for it and it almost got Nancy, so something strange is going on. Maybe he is still alive."

"We'll help any way we can," Sands promised. "Anyway, I never got your names. Are you Nancy?" she asked the girl.

"Oh, sorry," said the girl, who was covered in drying slime and still looked somewhat shell-shocked. "Yes, I'm Nancy Wheeler, and this is Jonathan Byers. And did you say you are Sands and this is Scout?"

"Yes, that's us."

Meanwhile, Scout had walked closer to Sands. She tugged on her sister's arm and whispered in her ear, "They remember." Sands thought about that for a second before realizing with a jolt—they had remembered encountering a monster, hadn't they? But they weren't triggering her Stranger sense, so were they Heretics?
"Have you ever heard of Heretics who hunt Strangers?" Sands asked.

"No, why? Your sister asked about Heretics too," Jonathan said.

"I'm just surprised you remember being running into the monster," Sands admitted. "Okay, this is going to be a weird question, so bear with me. Have you ever mixed your blood with a monster? Like maybe you made one bleed, but you were also bleeding, and you got its blood all over your cut? Or, like, it was biting you and you tore out one of its teeth?"

Jonathan and Nancy looked at Sands like she was totally insane. "What? No!" Nancy proclaimed.

"Why would you even think that?" Jonathan asked, sounding a mix between confused and horrified.

"Well, Bystanders—non-Heretics, I mean—can't remember running into monsters, so I thought maybe you were Heretics without realizing. And mixing your blood with a Stranger is one way to become a Heretic."

"What is a Heretic? And mixing your blood with a Stranger? What are you talking about," Jonathan asked, sounding exasperated.

"We're really not supposed to talk about it," Sands said. But then again, they were already mixed up in this if they could remember fighting a monster, so it wouldn't really be fair to keep them in the dark, would it? Sands decided to try to explain at least the basics of the Heretic world to them.

However, to her confusion, the Bystander Effect did still seem to be affecting them. She could talk about "monsters" and "hunting monsters" in general, or anything specific about the situation they had found themselves in with that weird tree portal and the monster that went through it, but any time she tried to talk about Crossroads, Strangers, or what Heretics did more generally, Jonathan and Nancy either wouldn't understand or would forget immediately. Eventually, Sands concluded that whatever was going on here seemed to be ignoring the Bystander Effect locally, but hadn't actually brought Jonathan and Nancy into the Knowledge.

That was interesting enough that Sands filled Koren in on what she had found, and the three of them considered telling Professor Dare immediately. On the other hand, nobody was in danger of being hurt by it, so there was no real reason to lose points and bother Professor Dare quite yet. Plus, this was shaping up to be quite interesting, and the girls wanted the chance to solve it themselves.

With that conversation over, Nancy said that she needed to get home before it got even later and her mom got too worried about her. Plus, she really wanted to clean herself up from all the slime from the portal. She just hoped she'd be able to get in her house and into her shower before her mom saw her. Scout (through Sands) tried to reassure her that she could listen and make sure her mom wasn't somewhere she could see her, but it turned out that the Heretics' powers were one of the things the Bystander Effect still worked on, so they couldn't bring it up. That didn't mean they couldn't work around it by not letting Nancy into the house until her mother was out of the way, just that they couldn't tell Nancy about the plan.

While the four of them were walking, Koren spoke to Sands and Scout over their magical communicators. "It's not him. The body's a fake. A surprisingly realistic-looking fake, but still a fake." Sands relayed the information to Jonathan. His first response was, of course, outrage.

"You had your friend dig up my brother's grave?!"

"We didn't want to, but we needed to know if your mom was right," Sands said. "And it wasn't actually him in there anyway."

Jonathan started to say, "That's not…" but Nancy interrupted him, putting her hand on his shoulder calmingly and saying,

"Jonathan."

They looked at each other for a second before Jonathan exhaled, turned, and continued walking. "Let's get going." The others followed, but Sands had to speak up.

"Wait! Aren't you going to go tell your mom?"

"I don't want to worry her. She's been through so much already."

"Worry her? You don't think she should know that her son might still be alive?"

Jonathan stopped walking again and turned aggressively. "Might! We still don't know where he is or even if he's dead somewhere we haven't found yet! I don't want to get her hopes up before we're sure."

Sands had to take a few deep breaths to calm herself. Clearly she'd been spoiled by how much Flick shared information with her team if this was how people normally acted. Still, she wasn't just going to let it go. "Okay, I get it, you're her son, so it's your choice. But I really think you should tell her. If your mom was so convinced that Will was alive that she yelled at you in the middle of town about it yesterday, I really doubt she's just given up on him today. All you'd be doing is confirming that she's not crazy. And I'm sure it's just eating her up inside, wondering whether she might actually be crazy, or if her son's still alive but she doesn't know how to find him. Believe me, I know how bad it feels to have your entire view of the world challenged, and I really think she deserves to know for sure that she's not insane."

Jonathan just stared at Sands for a few seconds, thinking things through. Then, he turned slightly to look at Nancy. She nodded a bit and said, "I think she's right. Your mom deserves to know."

Jonathan nodded. "Alright. But you should keep going. You've got to get back to your house before it's too late, right?" Nancy suddenly looked really uncomfortable. "What is it?" Jonathan asked.

"I don't…really want to be alone right now," Nancy said. Sands and Scout looked at each other, and Scout whispered in Sands's ear.

"Scout can go with you to your house," Sands offered.

Nancy didn't seem too reassured by the offer of the shy, petite girl as a bodyguard, but eventually she accepted, and the two groups split up again.

Scout and Nancy stood not too far from their destination, but Nancy had stopped before she got there. Scout could see she was terrified, unwilling to split up. So she did what she could to reassure the girl, pulling her massive sniper rifle out of the extradimensional storage space on her belt and saying, "I'll keep watch. I won't let it get you."

Whether it was because she was traumatized, tired, or just befuddled as the Bystander Effect kept her from wondering where the gun had come from, Nancy didn't have it in her to react with more than just dull shock. "That's a big gun."

Scout just tried to reassure her. "I'll keep you safe." A second later, Nancy nodded and continued sneaking into her house to take a shower. Scout watched her go inside before turning and jogging lightly back into the forest. A short ways away, she lay down on the ground and settled into a little alcove she had spotted on the way in. Dirt walls shielded her on three sides, and a fallen tree trunk concealed her from the top. With her left hand, she flicked a switch near the front of the gun. Then, she aimed into the air above the tree line, turned a dial to adjust the focus of her shot, and pulled the trigger. It was too dark to see the slight flicker of light in the air that heralded the formation of a portal.

Looking through her scope, Scout could see from the point-of-view of the portal. She adjusted the dials on her gun until she was aiming for a point directly above the Wheeler house, then fired again. A puff of practically invisible energy left the barrel of her gun, traveled through the first portal to the spot she had aimed at, and formed a new portal. Continuing on from there, Scout set up a network of portals around the Wheeler house so she could see anything that approached it from any direction.

It wasn't long before her enhanced hearing caught the sound of three teens driving a car up the street to the house, music blaring. Scout switched viewpoints until she could clearly see the approaching car. The driver stopped the car, got out, and approached the Wheeler house. Scout zoomed in on him, and he looked human, so she let him pass. When he started climbing onto the roof of the garage and into Nancy's window, Scout activated the communicator pin and said, "Someone's climbing into Nancy's room. Looks human." Sands offered to come help, but Koren asked where the house was. When Scout told her the address, she revealed that she was almost driving and was near there anyways, so she could come help. In the meantime, Scout kept a close eye on the strange boy in Nancy's room through her network of portals. He wasn't doing anything too suspicious, like stealing anything, so Scout thought it would be safe to let him be for a minute or too. Nancy wasn't in the room, so she was probably taking a shower. If she came back before Koren arrived, and the boy caused trouble, Scout could always just shoot him.

Koren pulled up in front of the house, stopped her car, and got out, checking the address one more time to make sure she was at the right place. "Which window?" she asked Scout.

"Over the garage, on the left."

Koren took a step towards the house before she heard, "Hey!" She turned to look back towards the street, where there was a car with a boy and a girl in it. "Who the hell are you, and what do you think you're doing here?" the boy asked rudely.

"That's none of your fucking business, asshole." Then she turned around and kept walking to the house.

"Hey, don't turn your back on me!" the asshole said. Koren refused to dignify him by acknowledging him and kept walking. "Get back here! I'm talking to you!" There were two door slams, presumably as they got out of the care.

"Following you," Scout reported.

"Yeah, I heard," Koren muttered back. "Just let them lay a hand on me, we'll see what happens." But apparently they didn't expect her to keep ignoring them, or at the least they didn't move quickly enough to reach her before she made it to the house and started climbing up, using one hand to fold her skirt under her so the asswipe wouldn't get an eyeful. She slid the window open and crawled through, coming to her feet to stand face-to-face with a somewhat-handsome brown-haired boy.

"Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in Nancy's room?" he asked in an urgent whisper.

"I think that's my line," Koren said with a wry smile.

"I am Nancy's…friend, and I'm worried about her. I've never even seen you before!"

"What kind of friend sneaks into a girl's room at night? Because let me tell you now, the movies may say it's romantic, but it's actually really creepy."

"Nancy didn't have a problem with it the other day! And that's not the point!"

The door swung open to reveal Nancy, her hair damp from the shower, dressed in pajamas. "Steve? What's going on?"

"Nancy! Who is this?"

"I'm Koren. Sands and Scout are my classmates. Scout saw somebody climbing in your window and sent me to make sure it was okay. So you know this guy?"
"Uh, yeah, this is Steve."

"'Sands' and 'Scout?' Are those supposed to be names?"
"I know, right? Okay, 'Sands' is a better name for a girl than 'Sandoval,' but I don't know what Scout has against 'Sarah.'"

"And 'Koren' isn't much better."

"Hey, there's nothing wrong with my name! Just because you have the most boring-ass, vanilla name possible. I mean 'Steve,' really."

"Quiet! You'll wake someone!" Nancy hissed. She stepped inside the room and closed the door. "Let's just sit down and talk this out." They all found somewhere and sat down. "Steve, Koren, Sands, and Scout are in town reporting for their school newspaper, and I told them I'd tell them a little about what's been going on. Koren, thank you for checking up on me, and tell Scout I said thank you for watching out for me when she happened to see something suspicious, but I'm okay now that Steve's here, so you two should probably get back to—wherever you're staying."

"Are you sure?" Koren asked.

"Well…Steve, why are you here?"

"You were acting really weird earlier today, and, well…"
"Just because I didn't want to go to a movie with you doesn't mean I was acting weird! I told you, I just didn't feel up to going out!"

"That didn't stop you from meeting some strangers from another town!"
"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I just, ughh." Steve wiped his hand down his face as he tried to find the words. "Dammit Nancy, I was worried about you!" They both sat there, staring intently, until Koren coughed to break the awkwardness.

"I'm okay, Steve," Nancy said. "But…I wouldn't mind the company if you want to sleep here tonight. It's just, with everything going on, I don't really want to be alone."

"Yeah, sure, of course, just let me tell Tommy and Carol to go." Steve stuck his head out the window to loudly whisper to his friends outside.

Meanwhile, Koren moved until she was sitting right next to Nancy on the bed. "Are you sure about this?"

"Yeah. Thank Scout for me for watching me, but…I know Steve. I just met you."

"If you're sure."
"I am. You two should go meet up with Sands and Jonathan." A few seconds later, Steve finished talking to his friends and pulled his head back in the window.

"Alright. I'm good to go."

Koren gestured to Nancy in goodbye and started to climb out the window. She saw that the boy (Tommy, apparently) was still down there. Flipping him off with both hands, she hissed, "What, you waiting for a show? Fuck off." He laughed and walked off to join Carol, and Koren climbed down.