506. singing killed my grandma

506 / SINGING KILLED MY GRANDMA!! OKAY!!?

Lucy had been to the Upside Down before, but something felt different this time, as though the world itself had been waiting for her return and was now pleased she had finally made it.

Steve drove more leisurely now, with the Upside Down being much more relaxed when it came to the rules of the road; that, and the fact that Dustin's tracker was reading a steady 90db signal on the Demo no matter how slowly they followed it. Steve responded to her directions as she turned the wheel overhead, and together they navigated through the Upside Down.

It was weird to be back, that was for sure.

"Looks like our boy's taking us on a shortcut through Roane Cemetary," Steve said, glancing around as they passed the old stone sign for the place.

"We're almost at the edge of Hawkins," said Lucy uncertainly. "Surely it doesn't bleed into other counties..."

"Doesn't this thing get tired?" said Jonathan, peering through the windshield.

"No, actually," said Dustin, still watching the screen over Lucy's shoulder; he grabbed onto her seat and pulled himself forward to get a better view of the decreasing number. "He's speeding up."

"What?" said Steve, glancing over at the tracker before slamming down on the gas again.

"I'm losing signal," Lucy stammered.

"You've gotta be shitting me!"

"Can you go faster?" Nancy urged.

"Let's see," said Steve, and he threw the car into gear and pressed down with both his feet. "Luce, what's going on? I need you to talk to me—"

"I'm—I'm trying," she said, panicked, messing with the device and trying to stop the red number from sinking—nothing she tried worked. "Shit—shit!"

"Lucy, what's is it?" said Nancy, craning around the back of Lucy's seat. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know!" she cried. "It's like I'm picking up some interference, I don't know! Something's messing with the signal!"

"That can't be right," said Steve, glancing over at the screen, which had begun to blink. The red numbers were flickering angrily and displayed for no more than a millisecond before replacing each other until they had begun to look, to Lucy, like hieroglyphics.

"It's right, Steve, I'm looking at it!"

"Look again!" he demanded, turning toward her and gesturing madly to the screen. "Fix it, Lucy! We can't lose our guy!"

"Might I remind you I have no idea what I'm doing, Steve!?" she shot back, whipping her head toward him. "I don't know what the hell any of these buttons or knobs do and Dustin can only tell me so much—"

"Is he ahead of us or not!?"

"I'm trying to tell! Slow down!"

"I CAN'T SLOW DOWN—"

"You SHOULD! God, Steve, if you would just give me a second—"

"STEVE!" Jonathan, Dustin, and Nancy cried together, desperately clutching at his arm as they had been attempting to get his focus for a while; they stared out the windshield in earnest fear. Steve had become so engrossed in his argument with Lucy that he had lost sight of the road. They were about to barrel straight into a wall, mere feet away from collision.

The five of them burst out in a steam of incoherent swears, and Steve put all his force into slamming on the brake, but the hood of his BMW careened into the fleshy substance that made up the wall before them—the car burst into a smoky explosion and came to a stop all at once.

Lucy splayed her hands on the dash to stop her head from hitting it—she felt Steve's arm out in front of her, catching her from falling forward. Behind them the others groaned as they rammed into the backs of their seats.

"Jesus... Christ," muttered Jonathan after a long, tense moment.

Panting, Lucy turned toward the others, eyes wide. "Is—is everyone okay?"

They responded with a mumbled chorus of confirmation after assessing themselves for wounds. The worst Lucy felt, beyond the racing of her heartbeat, was a little stinging where the seatbelt had tightened across her chest, but that was it.

The car, however, was totaled. Steve's poor Beemer. The front was smooshed into a pancake at the front, buried hood-deep into the fleshy wall that Steve had missed before. The four of them crawled out one by one, each sighing at the damage.

"Jesus," Jonathan said again, running his hands through his hair. "What do we do now?"

"We shouldn't just stand out here," said Nancy wisely. She looked around their surroundings, lips pursed, before her eyes landed on something in the distance. She jerked her chin toward it. "Come on. Let's get inside and... um, figure things out from there, I guess."

They grabbed the necessities out of Steve's car and headed off toward the cemetery church, which, in the regular world, was creepy enough on its own—but in the Upside Down, was downright terrifying. Pulsing vines crawled up and down the crackling white walls of the church and covered the entrance. As they approached it, the closer they got, the less Lucy was interested in going inside that place.

She looked down at her own personal haul from Steve's car: The radio. That was all she had deemed herself likely to carry from the car to the church. She knew Dustin was likely upset by the fact that they had to leave his precious tracking system in the hands of the Upside Down, but hopefully he would understand. Luckily the radio was fine, she thought sardonically. They could try calling Henry at the very least.

"Hey," she said, slowing to a stop as they approached the church, her eyes glued to the radio in her hand. She frowned. "Is there someone we could call? Anyone?"

"There's a million people we could call," said Steve smartly, throwing up his hands. "I'd probably start with the girl who has superpowers, but, to be honest, any help right about now would be great. Henderson, Robin, Sinclair—"

"We can't reach them," said Jonathan impatiently. "How are we supposed to get any help here?"

"Well," said Nancy, her eyes unfocused in thought as she stared at the radio in Lucy's hands. She looked up and met Lucy's eyes, raising her eyebrows. "Hop and El are in here somewhere. Dustin, could this radio reach all over Hawkins?"

"Uh, duh," he replied. "It's only been our main form of communication for literally ten years, Nancy."

"Great," she replied. "That means it can reach all over the Upside Down, too. Lucy and Dustin, you guys try to contact Hop and El. You two—" she gestured to Jonathan and Steve— "help me see if there's a way in this place."

The others, who had long since learned not to disagree with orders if they had been given by Nancy Wheeler, nodded and obliged; Steve and Jonathan followed Nancy toward the church and began searching the perimeter of it for a way inside. Lucy turned to Dustin, holding up the radio.

"It hasn't been working well," she admitted, tossing it to him. "Not since the initial technological freak-out that happened at the crawl, I guess. But it's worth a shot."

He pulled out the antenna, looking determined. "Hopper, do you copy? Over. This is Dustin."

They waited in silence, Dustin holding the radio between both of them and twisting the volume knob up to max. After a few seconds, he groaned and spoke into it again.

"Hopper! This is Dustin! Do you copy? Over!"

"Hey, hey," said a gravely voice. "It's Hop. I copy."

"Holy shit!" cried Dustin, turning back toward the church to get the attention of the others. "They're alive!"

"Is El there?" Lucy demanded, taking the radio.

"You have to say 'over'!" Dustin reminded her urgently.

"OVER!" she added too forcefully, glaring at him.

"Yes," came another voice from the radio. "I'm here. Over."

"Yay!" said Lucy, looking around at Nancy, Steve, Jonathan, and Dustin, who had all circled around her and now huddled over the radio. "Okay. This is great. Um.. Dustin, you talk."

"Me talk?" He stammered and took the radio, struggling to get words out. "Okay, sure—uh, I don't know if you guys are caught up in something important, but—just meet us at Roane Cemetery church, please."

"Roane Cemetery?" repeated Hopper. "How the hell are you contacting us from there?"

"Right," said Dustin, putting a hand on his head and exhaling an awkward laugh. "Yeah, I forgot you don't know. We're in the Upside Down!"

"What?"

"Long story short, we're here to track a Demogorgan using our telemetry tracker, only to then hit a wall. Now Steve's beamer is stuck, so we need El to come pry it loose using her powers so we can then resume the search for said Demogorgan which will then, in theory, lead us to Holly. Does any of this make sense? Do you need additional details? Questions? Concerns? Over."

"You hit a wall?" Hopper clarified. "What kind of wall, exactly?"

"Uh.." The five of them turned to face the wall which Steve's car now protruded out from, and Lucy's lip curled in disgust at the fleshy tendrils and how tightly they were pressed together to create such a thick border.

"It's a bit hard to describe," Dustin admitted, shining his flashlight at it. "Sort of..."

"Huge?" suggested Nancy.

"Disgusting," said Jonathan.

"An eyesore," added Lucy.

"Smells like Henderson's armpit," Steve finished.

"Yeah," said Hopper, as though these descriptions made complete sense. "We hit the same thing, but not at the cemetery. We hit it about a quarter mile southeast of the old Hagen Bridge."

Dustin lowered the radio slightly, confused, and Nancy said, "That's... the opposite side of town."

"Fascinating," Dustin said slowly.

"We don't know what it is," Hopper continued, "but we think that Holly's behind it. Don't bother trying to break through. You can't. We're working on a solution."

Nancy suddenly grabbed the radio out of Dustin's grip and stormed off with it, ranting into it. "Solution? What kind of solution?"

She waited tensely for a reply but none came. "Hopper, what kind of solution? Hopper!"

"Listen, we gotta keep the airwaves clear, alright?" he replied. "We'll come get you. Just stay put."

He turned off the radio and Nancy spun around to face the others, fuming, then began to stalk off back toward the church, leaving the others to follow in her path. Steve and Jonathan did, and Lucy walked next to Dustin, taking back the radio from him as he offered it.

She slid down the antenna. "Now you see why I don't want to talk to Hopper? He's so scary."

He rolled his eyes, shooting her a bullshit look. "I don't think you think he's scary, I think you just have literally no idea what's going on and couldn't explain it if you tried."

Lucy paused, brow furrowed in offense, but she had nothing to say in her defense and instead wordlessly trailed after him toward the church.

Time passed slowly in the Upside Down, Lucy had come to understand. Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days. She and the others lazed around the cemetery church, brainstorming aloud different ways they might get themselves out of this mess without El's help—since it was beginning to be increasingly clear that she and Hop were, in fact, involved in something important and wouldn't be out to rescue them for a while.

"I mean, we could try pushing it," said Lucy, spreading her hands. She was strewn across a pew, long ago having been unbothered by the black otherworldly vines that sprawled over every inch of the church. She hung one leg over the side of the pew and kicked it as though pushing something very heavy, screwing up her face for effect. "Really, with all of us, I think we could make it work."

"Hey, no bad ideas, right?" said Nancy in a determinedly positive tone, glancing at Steve and Jonathan before they could open their mouths. In the pew across the aisle from Lucy, Nancy tapped her foot. "But I do think it would take more than five of us to push a car, Lucy."

"No bad ideas," Lucy repeated in a mutter, going back to inspecting her fingernails.

"I still don't understand what Hopper meant by working on a solution," Nancy continued, standing from her pew to return to pacing across the front of the sanctuary, as she had been doing for the majority of their time stranded. "I mean, if he has a solution to get through this and get to Holly, he should share it with us!"

"I just say we ignore the old man," said Steve, gesturing vaguely with his hands, as his arms were stretched out over the back of his pew; he sat behind Lucy. "We keep moving. Look for a door, or something."

"Yeah," scoffed Jonathan, his head hanging down as he sat on the steps before the altar. He looked up, fixing a judgmental glare on Steve. "Tell me something. This door of yours, is it soft, kinda like a peanut butter Bopper?"

Steve frowned, affronted. "You got something to say, Byers, why don't you just come out and say it?"

"I'm just saying," said Jonathan, standing forcefully, "that maybe you shouldn't be making the calls from now on!"

"It wasn't just his call," Lucy reminded him, sitting up straight now. "Nancy and I agreed with him. We had to save Holly."

"And we still have to save Holly," he shot back. "We haven't made any progress—"

"And we won't," agreed Steve, "if we keep sitting here doing nothing! All I'm saying is we try to find a way around this wall, walk its path for a mile or two—"

"We're in the Upside Down, Steve," said Lucy, shooting him a glare. "Walking out there with no protection for a mile or two might very well be the last thing we ever do. I say we sit here and wait for Hop and El, right?" she added, looking to Jonathan for support.

"They can't be much longer," he said, nodding.

"I agree with Steve!" Nancy said, spreading her hands, looking as though it hurt to get those words out. "We can't just sit here. I don't know about a.. a Peanut Butter Bopper door, but this wall can't go on forever. There has to be a way around it."

The double doors at the back of the sanctuary spilled open and Dustin crossed the threshold, bearing a large map which billowed in the wind as he flew down the aisle.

"There isn't," he assured the others, coming to a stop at the end of the aisle with them. He shined his flashlight on the map of Hawkins and presented it to them. "This wall is a circle. It completely surrounds the Upside Down."

"Yeah?" said Steve, sounding unconvinced. "How exactly do you figure that?"

"Because unlike you," replied Dustin, "I didn't sleep through Algebra 1."

He spread the paper map on the altar and displayed it before the others, gesturing to the marks he had made on it. He had a few small circles on there indicating what Lucy understood to be the places that either they or Hopper had come into contact with this wall, then worked out the fact that they together formed points of a circle.

"My telemetry tracker picked up a weird frequency coming from the wall," he explained, pointing to the circle around Roane Cemetery on the map. "It took me a while to place, but I've heard it before. Rather, all of us have. Remember when we were out looking for Hop, and you heard that sound off Irwin Road, Jonathan?"

"Yeah," he said, shrugging. "You said it was interference."

"It was. But this interference, it wasn't coming from a military broadcast or an EMI. It was coming from this wall. Which is important, because that gives us three known locations. So I connected the dots, measured the midpoints, drew the perpendicular bisectors—"

"Alright!" interjected Steve, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, we're not your teachers. We don't need to see your work. You think it's all a big circle."

"I don't think," spat Dustin. "I know. I triple checked, and my calculations are correct."

"How did you figure this out, Dustin?" muttered Lucy, peering at the map and closely inspecting his work, much to Steve's chagrin as he collapsed into a pew. "I mean, this is... really impressive."

"This is basically nothing," he admitted breezily. "I've been doing this since we were in fifth grade. Leo, actually, was the one who... originally taught me."

The name landed heavy in the sanctuary, and the words that seceded it came out slowly, as though Dustin realized his mistake after having already committed it.  Lucy's head picked up. Steve straightened where he sat. Even Nancy and Jonathan went still, their eyes glancing toward Lucy.

"He helped me," Dustin went on, voice steadier the more he spoke, like he was anchoring himself to the memory. "I originally hated Algebra 1 'cause I was so bad at it, but he sat with me for three straight nights explaining all this."

Lucy's chest went tight. She vaguely remembered when the boys were in fifth grade, seeing Dustin over at their house more often than not; she always wondered why they were doing such advanced math in fifth grade. As it turned out, they weren't. Leo and Dustin were just having fun.

"He told me that math is just patterns," Dustin continued, tapping the map. "That once you see the pattern, you get the math. And when I put down these points on the map and actually saw them laid out, I heard his voice in my head, telling me to stop panicking and actually look at what I had."

Steve swallowed hard, eyes fixed on the altar.

"So it was Leo," Dustin finished, lifting his chin, eyes bright and wet. "I know it's a circle because Leo taught me. And because of that, we're not walking blindly into this thing."

Lucy pressed her lips together, hating the way Leo's name echoed through the empty, haunted church. Somewhere she found it gravely laughable that the first time any of them had mentioned his name was inside a graveyard church deep within the Upside Down.

She raised her eyebrows and managed a smile just so that the tears welling behind her eyes did not spill out. She nodded. 

"Okay," she said, too brightly. "Then we trust the math."

"I still don't see how this gets us any closer to... finding Holly," Steve said slowly, after a long moment in which Lucy pretending not to notice the others all staring at her.

"Because," said Dustin, his bitter attitude back now that he spoke to Steve, "it's not about the circle, it's about the center."

He pointed at the very center, where all of the midpoints bisected and the red lines crossed; Jonathan, Nancy, and Lucy bent over to get a closer look.

"The D.O.E.," Jonathan read aloud. "The Department of Energy."

Nancy's eyes widened. "That's..."

"Hawkins Lab!" Dustin exclaimed, bursting between the three of them to point at it on the map. "What are the chances that the center of this wall just so happens to be in the very place where all of this started? Where the Upside Down was created?"

"So the lab created the wall?" said Jonathan.

Dustin raised his shoulders in a giant shrug. "No idea. But I think we should find out. Don't you guys think so?"

The others glanced around, the air between them all tense and energetic.

Finally Lucy raised her eyebrows, bracing herself. "I get the feeling we're going to go no matter what I say, so I'll just cut out the middle man and say sure."

Dustin gave her a grin. "Good answer."

Via Chatter

Dustin being a moody teenage boy who hates his dad's guts but still loves his mom like it's nobody's business Dustin it's me your #1 fan

Not much happened in this chapter and for that I apologize but more to come. Enjoy this tweet