"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...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Chapter One-Hundred-And-Nine: This Is Really Bad
(E Pluribus Unum)
***
Rowan couldn't stop staring at it.
It was a mixture of horror and fascination that were her eyes were drawn to the glowing red crack of worlds being torn open when they shouldn't be, of witnessing what was part of the reason why all the shit of the past two years—Will going missing and then being possessed, Barb, Bob, the tunnels, all the trauma and nightmares and pain—had happened being reopened again, glowing like an inflamed wound. And that was what it was—a wound of worlds being opened when they shouldn't be, of the rot and cold and monsters from the other side being given an entrance to her world.
A wound the Russians were purposely making, cutting apart the barrier between worlds and risk killing their world, risk undoing everything she, El, Steve, the kids, Hopper, Joyce, Aunt Aco, Alistair, Jonathan, and Nancy had done to make sure it never opened again and stop the Mind Flayer, just to have a leg-up on America.
Fuck.
As one, Rowan, Steve and Dustin looked at each other and said, "The gate."
Nothing more was said, because they knew if they didn't get out of here—if they didn't tell everyone immediately what the Russians were doing—then the gate could be fully opened. The Mind Flayer could come back out and resume its plans to take over the world.
That couldn't happen.
"We need to go. We need to go now," Steve said, making Robin, Valerie and Erica look over to them.
"What? Why?" Erica demanded.
"Doesn't matter. We need to go right now," Steve insisted, firmer.
"Wait, you know what the fuck that is?" Valerie demanded, pointing to the gate.
Rowan, Steve and Dustin looked at each other before Dustin admitted, "Yes."
That caught their attention, but the trio were already racing back down the stairs, the gate hurrying their movements and making Rowan forget the pain of the gate-opening machine's electricity.
Behind her, Rowan heard Robin ask, "I don't understand. You've seen this before?"
"Not exactly," Steve admitted.
"Then what, exactly?" Robin pressed.
"Yeah, we need more than that, Steve," Valerie insisted.
"All you need to know is it's bad," Dustin replied vaguely.
"It's really bad," Steve agreed.
"Like, super fucking bad," Rowan added on, voice hoarse from internal screaming.
