Loss - Lucas Sinclair

The Mind Flayer (Part 2)

The house was quiet. The only noises that were heard was Jonathan talking to a passed out Will and Hopper talking on the phone, asking for people who could help them out.

"I don't know how many people are there!" Hopper snapped at the person he was talking to. The kids watched as he argued on the phone for a while before hanging up the phone angrily.

"They didn't believe you, did they?" Dustin asked, looking like he had already knew the answer. Because of course no one would believe them. It was too outlandish for any reasonable person to believe without proof.

"We'll see," Hopper sighed, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes..

"'We'll see'?" Mike raised his voice. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"

"We stay here, and we wait for help," Hopper declared with a note finality. 

The kids watched as Hopper left the room, leaving them in a defeated silence. The only thing they could do now was sit and wait.

After a few minutes, Mike stood up from his seat and walked over to a pile of games. He grabbed one and looked at it.

"Did you guys know that Bob was the original founder of Hawkins AV?" He wondered, mentioning the man that had died in the lab less than an hour ago.

"Really?" Lucas asked.

Mike turned back to the group. "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?"

"Yeah," Dustin agreed as everyone else nodded their heads.

"We can't let him die in vain."

"What do you want to do, Mike?" Dustin asked angrily. "The Chief's right on this. We can't stop those Demo-dogs on our own."

"Demo-dogs?" Max asked.

Dustin looked at her like she was the weird one. "Demogorgon. Dogs." He put his hands together to show the mashup of words. "Demo-dogs. It's like a compound. It's like a play on words-"

"Okay," Max sighed.

"I mean," Dustin continued his original thought, "when it was just Dart maybe..."

"But there's an army now," Lucas added.

"Precisely."

"His army," Mike breathed out, looking like he just solved a problem.

"What do you mean?" Steve asked, his attention now taken away from the window his was staring out of.

"His army," Mike repeated, looking around the table hoping someone would get it. "Maybe if we stop him, we can stop his army, too."

Mike took off down the hallway to Will's room, leaving his friends to follow him. While waiting for them to catch up, he dug through a pile of drawings on Will's desk, looking for one in particular.

"The shadow monster," Dustin said, looking at the drawing in Mike's hands as they entered the room.

"It got Will that day on the field," Mike explained, holding it up for the others to see. "The doctor said it was like a virus, it infected him."

"And so this virus," Max started to caught on, "it's connecting him to the tunnels?"

Mike nodded his head. "To the tunnels, monsters, the Upside Down, everything."

"Whoa. Slow down. Slow down," Steve still didn't get it.

"Okay, so," Mike showed him the picture, "the shadow monster's inside everything. And if the vines feel something like pain, then so does Will."