The Girl With The Flamethrower

I.III.II

Kimberly sighs and goes back to where she was last night, following the once constantly used trail. She tried to see if a few trees had the weird rotting on them, and one of the bigger ones looked like it was starting to form on it, but solidified.

"Hmm, why is it random? Different tree types, it's not an infection through plant otherwise a whole area would be contaminated." She sat down and pulled out her notebook, documenting what she saw. It took her a few hours, trying to come up with theories and explanations, she had come to the conclusion that it had to be spread by animals rather than a regular plant rotting as she previously thought. Now she was just trying to figure out what animal.

She'd examined the one rotting tree and tried to find some sort of animal's nest, or even traces of an animal, but came up empty.

A little bit after the sun had set, and Kimberly had switched to her flashlight, she heard that same noise from the night before. She pressed her back to a tree and focused on her hearing. It was far, closer to the edge of the forest than she was.

She shut off her flashlight when she heard movement again. A few moments later she could hear rustling coming toward her, so she did what any logical person would do. She climbed the tree.

She paused on the lowest branch, careful to stay quiet when the same creature sped into her view.

It was hunched over, but larger than she thought, closer to nine feet she guessed. Its coloring was pale and gray. But the noises, the noises it made caused her stomach to drop and her heart to race.

She watched as it moved back and forth looking for something, it must have caught onto it because it took off running. Not giving her a chance to look at its face, but she knew now that what she saw was no animal, nor human.

She wanted to run after it but it was too quick, but she did immediately pull out her notebook and get everything down.

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Kimberly trudges into the house, mind racing. She went to go check on Dustin after her mom had filled her in on what happened when she walked in. About a few cops finding Will's body in the quarry. She gently knocked on his door, "Hey."

He sniffled, "Hey."

"You ok?"

"No."

"You want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Ok, we don't have to talk about it," Kimberly just took a seat next to her brother, and took him into her arms, leaning her head on his. "But I'm here for you."

He returned the hug and tightened his grip on her.

After a few minutes of silently hugging, Dustin spoke, "We should have taken you with us. Then you would have known about Eleven and her powers, and maybe you would have been able to keep everyone calm and maybe we could have found him in time and maybe-"

"Hey, hey," she gently pulled away and wiped his tears, holding his face in her hands, "There is no way to know me being there would have made anything different. In all likelihood, nothing would have changed. But I do know that it hurts right now, losing someone you love, someone you care about. But the best thing to do is to remember all the amazing things you guys did together because that means they never leave us."

"Easy for you to say, you remember everything, literally."

"Just means that I can remind you of the times I was there too, without having things be fuzzy. If it helps I can give you a notebook of your own and you can write down everything you remember about him. That way the memories won't become fuzzy."

"No, I'm not dorky like you. I don't need a notebook."

"Hey my notebook is not dorky, it's full of scientific discoveries!"

"Not new ones, everything in there is about trees, and plants, and animals that we already know about."

"Perhaps, but there's nothing quite like being able to correctly identify a plant based on your observations alone."

"Only because you've read every plant book out there and remember every page, it's cheating."

"It... it is not cheating! It's not my fault I have photographic memory. Plus a lot of the books don't even have pictures in them, so I go off of description alone. So not cheating."

"Whatever you say."

"Oh shut up!"

Dustin gently chuckled, Kimberly smiled glad that she could take his mind off of things, at least for a little bit.

"Hey what was that thing you said about Eleven having powers?"

"Oh! Ya! She can move things with her mind!"

"Wait like Jean Grey style?"

"Exactly!"

"Whoa, that's so cool!"

"I know! We don't really know how she can do it, but we've seen it. She slammed a door shut from across the room!"

"Man, no wonder she was so spooked when we found her. I wonder if she ran away from somewhere testing on her, or maybe somewhere like Xaiver's school?"

"My bet: she was a lab rat and ran away."

"That's my guess too."

The two siblings chuckled. 

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