Briggs is restless, bored with the mundanity of Hawkins and the drag of rural Indiana November. That energy is channeled into laps up and down the Hawkins High pool, where he's worked his way up the ranks of the swim team and found a rival in one of...
BRIGGS COUNTS HIS breaths, entirely certain that he won't make it to ten before he draws his last.
Eyes scrunched shut against the rancid breath of the Demogorgon, he waits for the killing blow and hopes he won't feel it. Something sticky and cold drips from its skin, not drool but some otherworldly fucking goop that might kill him if the claws don't, and he vaguely registers that he's shivering. He doesn't think he's cold.
Nancy's shooting, she must be, because bang, bang, bang cuts through the fog of Briggs's pain and she's screaming, "Go to hell, you son of a bitch!" Briggs is pretty sure hell is exactly where this thing came from. Maybe if the Demogorgon goes back, it'll take Briggs with it.
It starts to loosen its grip, to turn its head like it's going to go after Nancy, after the bullets. And suddenly Briggs tastes the copper in his mouth, and he thinks, No.
He spits blood in the demon's face.
"Briggs!" Nancy screams as the monster turns back to him with a roar, a scream, a screech, something, some unnatural sound that Briggs feels as though he'll hear forever.
I hope they find Will, he thinks. Then, a little hysterically, At least I don't have to do the English reading.
But then a searing heat ripples from the joint of his shoulder, a sluggish injection of molten lava into his veins that breaks through a dam and surges through the rest of his body in a wave as the monster's claws rip out of him, and then he's on his side, gasping for breath as the thing's weight disappears entirely.
Blinking furiously, Briggs watches as Steve Harrington flips the nail-studded bat in one hand, blood-stained face and all, and swings again.
Lord help me.
"Steve!" Nancy cries, and the lights are going crazy, flickering red and blue and a thousand rainbows all over the place like a fucking Christmas club.
It feels like it should be louder than this.
The monster is loud, sure, and Nancy is shrieking and Steve is riling it up and Briggs thinks where the hell is Jon, where is he, and everyone is moving but the only thing Briggs processes is that the end should be louder than this. Louder than the suffocating space between the pounding footsteps of a thing out of hell, the sound of Nancy's panic cutting the air like a blade. Steve forces the monster out of the main room, into the hall—
