"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter Seventy-One: Recuperating
(The Mind Flayer, Pt. 3)
***
The Byers house is numb.
Maybe that's because that's how Rowan feels—she just feels so numb, with grief, with guilt. She didn't know Bob—she had talked to him last Christmas to buy Alistair's Super-Comm and he'd taught her and Aunt Aco how to set it up, so gentle and kind and patient, when Alistair told her about him and when Rowan occasionally saw him and Joyce together and how happy they both looked—but his death had rattled her because she couldn't save him. She had her lightning, her teleportation, he was right there, all she had to do was throw that Demogorgon off and jump him to safety, and yet she still couldn't save him, and the guilt was eating at her, flashing her images of his brutal, painful death on a constant loop, her mind chorusing Another person you couldn't save another person you couldn't save another person you couldn't save and it left her so numb to everything else.
Ironic, that the girl who felt so much, who felt anger and joy so viciously and vibrantly, was a storm of emotion as much as she was a storm of lightning, has become so numbed.
Around her, the Party isn't faring better. The kids have grouped together in the kitchen, broken, thousand-yard-stares on their faces; Joyce had retreated to her room, wrapped in a blanket and lost in her own grief; Jonathan and Nancy were next to Will, Jonathan murmuring tearful apologies to his brother, Alistair next to them and barely keeping himself from crying, the guilt of not being there with his friend, at stopping what has possessed him, eating him away just as much as Bob's death was eating away at Rowan from where she sat in the hallway, staring into the distance; Steve stood there in the hallway before wandering aimlessly into the kitchen, giving a defeated, broken-sounding sigh; and Aunt Aco was with Hopper, leaning against the wall as Hopper was on the phone, talking to the person who was on the other end, her face torn between grief and concern for Rowan and Alistair.
The carnage at Hawkins Lab, the horrific, tragic death of Bob Newby, hitting them all harder than anything has had in the past, and it shows.
"Dr. Sam Owens," Hopper said into the phone, his voice edged with irritation, seconds from snapping. "I don't know how many people are there! I don't know how many people are left alive! I am the police, Chief Jim Hopper! Yes, the number that I gave you, yes. 6767... I will be here."
With that, he hung up as Dustin asked, "They didn't believe you, did they?"
"We'll see," Hopper said gruffly.
"We'll see?" Mike repeated incredulously. "We can't just sit here while those things are loose!"
"We stay, and we wait for help," Hopper said sternly before he walked away, heading to Joyce and leaving them alone.
