A Deal With God

Chapter 16: The Hunt

Hopper's parting words to Joyce as he rushed out the door didn't make all that much sense to her, but she did as he asked and intercepted Quinn when the girl came home after school later that day. It wasn't hard to do: the teen was half frozen in the living room, eyes following the twists and turns of drawings that Joyce and Hopper had managed to piece together, and that Joyce had subsequently been adding to since Will was still making more.

"Hopper said that this is related to the pumpkin patches? That it could be related to what you found in the woods...?" Joyce whispered to her. Quinn's face changed from one of pure befuddlement to one of understanding within seconds at those words. She simply nodded and silently made her way to her room, emerging a few minutes later having changed into her "afternoon wandering" clothes: a dark tee, a pair of looser fitting jeans, and a hoodie. She wasn't taking the little backpack she usually carried on her outings, Joyce remarked. Before Joyce could ask for an explanation, loud knocking at the door got her attention. In the time it took to answer the door and talk to Mike on the porch before letting him in, Quinn was already gone.

That was yesterday. Joyce hadn't heard anything from Hopper or seen Quinn since. She was starting to get used to Hopper being difficult to reach by phone, but Quinn was so consistent — going out in the afternoons then always being home by dinner — that Joyce hadn't considered the possibility of something happening to her, and now that something seemingly had, she didn't know what to do about it. To make matters worse, Will had emerged from his room to tell her that he had seen Hopper in his now-memories, that Hopper was going to die. She decided against asking if he had seen Quinn in his now-memories as well.

— • —

Quinn headed out without waiting for Joyce to be done with whomever was knocking at the front door because she assumed that she would be back in time for dinner, like nearly every day for close to a year now.

According to Joyce, Hopper believed that what was happening to Will was related to the rotted pumpkin patches and possibly even the blackened trees Quinn had stumbled across on her wanderings. As she sprinted through the woods in the direction of Merrill's farm, the growing silence caught her attention. As she continued forward, it was like she was moving away from the natural cacophony of the forest. She slowed to a stop in a small clearing. She turned to look back, hearing bird calls and the sound of leaves lightly blowing in the trees from where she came. Then she looked forward, there was a stillness ahead that felt ominous, threatening even.

She treaded quietly until she was at the edge of the trees, where the forest ended and Merrill's farm began. The silence here was deafening. The smell of the rotted pumpkins putrified the air, but there was a total absence of flies. Whatever had affected the pumpkins had also extended to the corn field, the stalks turning black and drooping towards the ground. There were no fresh tire marks in the dirt road so Quinn deduced that Hopper had gone to Eugene's farm instead. Just as she was about to turn back into the woods, she heard a sound from the corn field, almost like a chittering.

Her eyes moved back and forth across the wilted crops, looking for any sign of movement. When a stalk shifted ever so slightly in the middle of the field, she narrowed her eyes and started making her way towards it. As she moved further into the corn field, she realised that the stalks were drooping outwards, in a concentric formation. Indeed, in the center of the field, there was what she assumed at first glance to be some kind of a burrow. But it was a large opening, and as she crouched down to get a better look inside, she realised that it wasn't a hole in the dirt, it was a tunnel of vines.

Before Quinn could weigh her options, she heard the same chittering sound coming from the woods. She'd been waiting — rather patiently, in her opinion — for this kind of hunt, and as such she couldn't help the excited grin that lit up her whole face as she stealthily made her way out of the corn field and back into the woods to start tracking what she knew was an unwelcome visitor from the Upside Down.