206. SIX SEVENNNNN

Chapter 206, six sevennnn

The last thing Lucy wanted to do was hash things over about Jonathan forgetting her birthday, given all that was going on. Lucy still had not been fully briefed on all that had gone down in Hawkins over the past year, but she was beginning to understand it was much more complicated (and supernatural) than she could have ever even imagined. What she understood now was that Will—her little brother's sweet, caring, D&D-loving best friend—had to have been sedated upon leaving the lab because he was possessed by a literal monster from another dimension—the same monster that had been the ringleader of all the smaller monsters that had attacked Lucy, Steve, Max, Dustin, and Lucas at the junkyard.

And Jonathan still wanted to talk about Lucy's feelings.

Once Hopper had skidded to a stop in the Byers's driveway and all of the kids had spilled out of the car, Lucy was the second-to-last inside. Her lips parted out of confused shock when she entered the living room; some sort of blue scribbles drawn on plain paper were draped over the entire house's walls, all connected by both sides. It almost looked like a tunnel, if Lucy squinted.

"How's he doing?" she asked, kneeling by Jonathan's side to watch over Will. "Is he okay?"

Jonathan held a hand to Will's forehead, his eyes glued to his brother as he pursed his lips and shook his head. "I have.. no idea. I just... I should have been there. I should've been there for him."

"Jonathan, it's okay," Lucy said, though she was not sure how much she believed her own words. She watched Will as she spoke. "He'll be okay. He's a strong kid."

Jonathan looked up for the first time and met Lucy's eyes for a split second, then lowered his gaze and twisted his lips to the side. "Lucy, about your b—"

But Lucy stood up, shaking her head. "Let's... talk later, okay?"

He gave her a sad smile and a nod. "Okay," he said, then returned to caring for his brother.

"...I don't know how many people are there!" Hopper was yelling into the phone as Lucy rounded the corner from the living room. He had one hand on his hip, the other gripping the phone furiously as his voice rose. "I am the police! Chief Jim Hopper! Yes, reach me at the number I gave you; 6767—I will be here."

And with that, he slammed the phone back onto its base, then ran a hand through his hair frustratedly. Lucy took a seat at the dinner table between Dustin and Leo. She gazed up at Hopper, but she knew the answer to her question before she even asked it.

"Nothing?" she said, stupidly. "They didn't believe you, did they?"

He turned over his shoulder and looked over the kids sitting around the table. "We'll see."

"We'll see?" Mike repeated, standing from his chair angrily. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"

"We stay here," Hopper said through grit teeth, "and we wait for help."

The six of them watched as Hopper stalked back into the bedroom to find wherever Joyce had gone. Mike dropped his head onto the table, Lucas ran a hand down his face, Max leaned back in her chair and exhaled a heavy sigh, and Dustin cursed to himself. Without warning, Leo stood so suddenly his chair scraped against the wood floor. He stormed out into the living room to sit by Will's side some more. Lucy watched him go, staring at the doorway with a pitying gaze until Mike's voice stole her attention.

"Did you guys know Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?" he asked, staring at some technical toy in front of him.

That got the rest of the kids' attention. Dustin picked up his head. "Really?"

Mike nodded, turning back to the rest of them. "He petitioned the school to start it and everything. Then he had a fundraiser for equipment. Mr. Clarke learned everything from him. Pretty awesome, right?"

He set the box down on the table, staring over everyone with earnest eyes. "We can't let him die in vain."

Dustin stood, throwing his hands in the air. "Well, what do you want us to do, Mike? The chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demo-dogs on our own."

"Demo-dogs?" Max and Lucy repeated at the same time, leaning forward in curiosity.

Lucy scrunched up her nose. "Is that what you call those things?"

Dustin shared a glance with Lucas, then shrugged. "Demogorgan. Dogs. Demo-dogs. It's like a compound, like a play on words—"

"Okay." Max's voice was sharp. "Yeah, I get it."

Dustin turned away from Max, clearly not even dejected by her bluntness. "I mean, when it was just Dart, maybe..."

"But there's an army now," Lucas pointed out.

"Precisely." Dustin leaned back in his seat as if giving up.

"His army," Mike said, suddenly intense. "His army!"

Steve raised his eyebrows. "What.. d'you mean?"

"Maybe if we stop his army, we can stop him, too," Mike said, his voice raising in volume and almost too quick for Lucy to follow. "The shadow monster—it got Will that day on the field. The doctor said it was like a virus, it infected him."

"And so this virus," Max guessed, "it's connecting him... to the tunnels?"

"To the tunnels, monsters, the Upside Down, everything," Mike confirmed. "Listen, so, the shadow monster's inside everything. And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."

"And so does Dart," Lucas ventured.

"Like what Mr. Clarke taught us," Mike said. "The hive mind."

"The hive mind!" Leo's voice came from the doorway, and he spilled into the kitchen, pointing at Mike like he'd had a scientific breakthrough. "It's a collective consciousness. A super-organism. It's what controls everything—the brain of the operation."

Lucy raised her eyebrows. She knew her brother was a nerd, but she had never really seen him in action before. And this—this was nerd central.

"Like the mind flayer," Leo continued, picking up one of Will's drawings. It was a shadowy monster, long legs protruding from some sort of large body-like figure at the top of the page.

Lucy and Steve shared a look, then said at the same time, "The what?"

Dustin found one of Will's D&D textbooks and ripped it open to find a specific chapter, flipping through pages faster than Lucy's eyes could move. He found what he was looking for and threw the heavy book down onto the table, then looked around at everyone to get their attention. All of the adults and the rest of the elder teens had joined in once Dustin had yelled that he had an idea.

"The mind flayer," he explained, pointing to an illustration of a humanoid monster.

Hopper's arms were crossed, his expression unconvinced. "The hell is that?"

"It's a monster from an unknown dimension," Dustin read aloud, trailing his finger beneath the description from the book. "It's so ancient that it doesn't even know its true home. It enslaves races of other dimensions by taking over their brains using its highly-developed psionic powers."

"Okay, I don't understand," Lucy said, peering around Steve's shoulder as she rested her head on his arm. "It's a kids' game. What does any of that have to do with Will?"

"None of this is real," Hopper agreed, nodding to Lucy. "Do you have any ideas that aren't fictional for me to give to them? That aren't from a story book?"

"No; this is a manual," Dustin said, glaring at them both. "And it's not for kids."

"Right," Steve said, frowning sarcastically, "which is why all you kids play it."

"Unless you guys know something that we don't," Dustin yelled over Steve's voice, "this is the best metaphor—"

"Analogy," Lucas corrected.

Dustin stared at him. "Analogy? That's what you're worried about? Fine! An analogy for understanding whatever the hell this is."

"Okay," Nancy said, waving her hands. "So this mind flamer thing—"

"Flayer," Dustin corrected. "Mind flayer."

Nancy flared her nostrils, but kept her mouth shut. "What does it want?"

"To conquer us, basically," Dustin explained. "It believes it's the master race."

"Like the.. like the Germans?" Steve suggested, nodding.

Lucy picked her head up off his shoulder and scrunched her eyebrows together. "The Nazis?"

He stared down at her, then looked around and shrugged a nod. "Yeah, yeah, the Nazis."

"If the Nazis were from another dimension," Leo said, his eyes narrowed at Steve. "God, could you be any more stupid?"

Steve put his hands on his hips. "Okay, you're, like, ten, so I don't—"

"Stop arguing," Lucy said, putting a hand over Leo's mouth and shoving Steve's shoulder. She looked back to Dustin. "So, basically the... mind flayer.. thinks it's better than us?"

"It views other races, like us, as inferior to itself," he continued, nodding intellectually. "It wants to spread, take over other dimensions."

"We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it," Lucas said, spreading his hands out and speaking emphatically.

"The end of the human race." Leo pantomimed an explosion and even added a sound effect, his eyes widening for effect. "We're done for."

"Oh, yeah, that's amazing," Lucy said, running her hands through her hair.

"Okay, so if this thing is like a brain that's controlling everything," Nancy said, leaning over to read the description in the text book. "Then if we kill it...?"

"We kill everything it controls," Mike finished, nodding. "We win."

"Theoretically," Dustin confirmed.

"Woah, wait." Leo held up his hands, looking around. "No, we can't kill it. Not yet."

"We can't kill it," Lucas agreed. "The only way to kill the mind flayer is with an undead army, because—"

"—because they don't have brains," Dustin supplied. "And the mind flayer, it—it likes brains."

"No! God," Leo exclaimed, running his hands down his face. "None of you are listening to me! We can't kill the mind flayer because it's connected to Will. And you said anything the mind flayer's connected to—it'll kill it. That includes Will. We can't kill the mind flayer. Not because we don't have an undead army or anything—we can't kill it because we'd be killing Will. Am I the only one that cares about him?"

"Leo, that's not what we're saying," Mike said after a beat of silence. "We care about Will. We just—"

"Oh, of course you care about Will," Leo said, glaring at the dark-haired boy and standing up straight, no longer leaning on the table over the textbook. "That's why you didn't say anything when you knew he was having episodes. That's why you didn't notice when he wasn't being himself. That's why it took a week before anybody could even begin to do something to help him—because nobody fucking cared enough to look closer! But I did, okay? I checked on him. And now that we know what the hell is the problem, I'm not going to sit here and let you guys make plans for how to kill Will! You might be resigned to that, but I'm not. I'm putting my foot in the goddamned door."

"Hey, Leo, calm down, okay?" Nancy said, glancing sideways at Mike to see his reaction to the explosion. Mike's eyes were clouded over, his face stubbornly blank. Lucy wished she could read his mind. Nancy seemed to, too. She pursed her lips and shrugged loosely. "Nobody's... closing any doors. Not officially."

"We need to kill the mind flayer," Hopper said. "But nobody knows how to do that, okay? None of us know what we're dealing with. And don't even start about the undead army, kid—this is real life, not some kids' game."

"Will knows," Mike said suddenly, his eyebrows shooting up on his forehead. "If anyone knows how to destroy this thing, it's Will. He's connected to it. He'll know it's weakness."

"I thought we couldn't trust him anymore," Max said, her brow furrowed. "That he's a spy for the mind flayer. Killed everyone in the lab, didn't he?"

"Yeah," Leo said, his angrily pink cheeks fading away as he settled down. He stared at Will, his gaze tapered in thought. "But... he can't spy if he doesn't know where he is."

Via Chatter

Yeah call chief hopper at 676767676767