"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Chapter Thirty-One: Battle Strategy
(The Battle Of Starcourt, Pt. 2)
***
Alistair worried his lip so much he was sure blood was dripping down as he stayed next to Will, as the Party stood and listened to Mike talk about everything that had happened in the past few days, of the Mind Flayer's return, it possessing and melting the Flayed... and now it's latest plan.
"The Mind Flayer. It built this monster in Hawkins to stop El. To kill her and pave a way into our world," Mike recounted, and Alistair flinched, remembering the pain, the agony of melting over and over again. Will put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and Alistair relaxed into it.
"And it almost did—that was just one tiny piece of it," Max pointed out as Cami nodded.
"A second longer and it might have," Cami admitted, saying what everything was thinking, and Alistair looked at El, sitting on a bench next to Hopper, her adoptive father stroking her hair. Her leg had been re-bandaged, the wound cauterised thanks to his sister's lightning. In an ideal world, El would definitely head to a hospital, but this wasn't an ideal world. And the Mind Flayer would be gunning after her soon, once it recovered the strength to do so.
"How big is this thing?" Hopper questioned, voice gruff as he continued stroking his adopted daughter's hair.
"It's big. Thirty feet, at least," Jonathan answered.
"Yeah. It sorta destroyed your cabin. Sorry," Lucas revealed, wearing a sheepish look as Hopper stared at Lucas.
"Okay, so just to be clear," Steve said, making all eyes turn to him, "this big fleshy spider... thing that hurt El is some kind of gigantic... weapon?"
"Yes," Nancy confirmed.
"But instead of like screws and metal, the Mind Flayer made its weapon... with melted people."
Alistair flinched again, the memory of the pain and screams flashing in his mind, especially as he thought about the missing ghosts, what the Mind Flayer could have done to them. Hugin cawed comfortingly and Will held him even tighter. As Robin's eyebrows raised and Valerie looked torn between shock and horror and Rowan muttered, "Fuck."
"Yes, exactly," Nancy affirmed, exasperation in her tone.
"Yeah, okay. I... Yeah, I'm just making sure," Steve mumbled, looking sheepish. Rowan put her hand on Steve's shoulder and shot a glare at Nancy, before it faded as she breathed, "Shit, this is bad. This is... fuck."
His sister looked on the verge of panicking, but before Alistair's eyes Steve put a hand on her back, moving in slow circles as she turned to him, before relaxing into it.
Again, Alistair's eyebrows raised, at this new change in the relationship between his sister and Steve.
"Are we sure this thing is still out there, is still alive?" Joyce questioned, pulling Alistair's attention back to the Mind Flayer being after El.
