BILLIE JEAN ( eddie munson.. ) ✔

021. Sweet "Dreams" Are Made of This..

Foulness in the air danced particles of ash, of dust, of poison, between the icy hue of a frozen atmosphere. The ground was alive, the death of the town was strangled beyond repair by vines, veins of the conqueror of this earth. It was a parasite, a disease to the land now completely his and any trespasser immediately felt: they weren't welcome there.

What had once been a road surrounded on both sides by forest, now was a highway of destruction, in the middle of which the asphalt was torn open. In the crack, above which, on the other side, Fred Benson floated to his end by the claws of this Hell's favorite puppet, pulsed red.

This was the gate Billie decided it would be most beneficial for them to get through. If they went for the closest one to the lake, at Eddie's trailer, they might have to deal with explaining to Wayne about everything too. They dodged a bullet by not going there that night and instead letting Barry drive full speed.

"Yeah," Billie looked ahead and buckled up her seatbelt. She was shotgunning next to Barry. In front of them was the red pulsing gate to the Upside Down, right into the asphalt, ruining the great work which went in it. "Big enough for us to go through."

"Are you sure we should be going this fast?" Barry didn't mind pushing the pedal to the floor.

"Just remember to hit the brakes when the front wheels are over it," she already braced herself by tensing her shoulders.

On the backseat, Devin wore two seatbelts, just in case his sister's math tried to kill them. She was quite literally sitting on the paper on which she drew out the issue of how they could pass with the car through that fissure between dimensions.

"Here goes nothing," Barry, wearing a bandanna on his forehead, muttered one second before he knew the wheels were supposed to be over the gate. He grabbed the handbrake and pulled it up. The wheels locked, stuck and all the kinetic energy turned the car into a projectile right through the gate.

Billie miscalculated the size of the gate though and, going through, the doors on both sides were cut off, some remaining on the side of the road, others lost forever between dimensions.

The Carter's Chevrolet was spit into the Upside down, their suspensions cracked and the car rolled over to the left side, where it started sliding across the vined ground. The three siblings became aware of their own screams only once they started fading and coughing away.

Air tastes different all of a sudden.

It was the small things like the air which are usually taken for granted that they missed the second the conditions changed.

Barry hit his head and though it was pulsing enough to make him feel he was hallucinating about the vines on the ground moving, he shook himself in consciousness enough to get a knife out of his pocket and cut his seatbelt off. His left shoulder fell on that ground through the missing door and shit, the ground was indeed moving, he didn't imagine it.

Hurriedly panicked, he sat up, hunched and held his sister so that when he slit the seatbelt off of her, she fell, but first in his arm and only second in the very odd narrow place. A vine tried to grab Barry's ankle but Billie stepped on it.

"Devin," she called after that and reached between the seats to help cut him off the seatbelts. Barry grabbed his brother's collar and stopped him from falling on the weirdly dark and rotten ground.

Dust immediately stuck to their skin, got them dirty, but a true face of terror stained the three when a distant screech, an animalistic sound, filled the infinite night above, storming angry clouds, forever storming.

"What is this?" Devin hit a vine too, as it tried to rise off the ground and hold onto his whole left leg.

"Let's get out," Billie pointed up at the doors on the other side of the car, now above them, also missing and leaving a way out of this claustrophobic space for them. Acting on her words first, Billie stepped on the side of her seat and helped herself to stand taller enough to grab the edge of the door which once had been to her right. She pulled herself up balanced on the front right wheel then jumped out.