Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Shadows of the Night

"Shadows of the Night"

You know that sometimes it feels like it's all moving way too fast

- Pat Benatar

Joyce and Murray, with Yuri behind them, followed the Warden from the dirty room with the cots where they had been held through halls of dingy cement walls, past rusty iron doors, and into a room where the clean plastic of the computers was a sharp contrast to the bars with their peeling paint and the floor with its patches of caked-on dirt.

Everyone in the room snapped to attention when the Warden entered. He spoke to them in Russian. One of them smiled and answered him even as Yuri resumed yelling through his gag. Joyce was impressed with Murray's skill at gagging—you couldn't understand a word Yuri was saying.

Yuri stopped to yell at one of the guards, and the one who was following them all shoved him forward, shouting at him in Russian.

They went through a door and out into a courtyard where fresh snow was falling. A central pit was lit up like ... like a wrestling cage, Joyce thought.

*****

The Russians came for them at night. Full dark. They made a better show under the spotlights, he imagined. Well, he'd give them a show. He'd give them the best damned show they'd ever seen, and he'd hope to hell it was the last one, that he could kill that thing.

The cell was emptied, all the men trooping out of it and down the stairs, silently, in single file. They knew what was what now. They probably hated Hopper for telling them, for spoiling what was almost certainly their last meal, but he had never been a man who enjoyed illusions.

The guards spread them out in a line on the floor of the pit and had them kneel, hands behind their back, with dark warnings of what would happen to them, the slow and painful death, if they moved before they were told to.

The most sadistic of the guards, the one Hopper had stolen the lighter from, paced back and forth in front of the line, shouting the rules at them. Hopper heard something about a key, which was unnecessary, because he could see it gleaming there in the guard's upraised hand. And maybe weapons? Were there weapons—no doubt old, and broken, and there only to provide entertainment for the guards, but still, weapons?

*****

Below them, in the pit, Joyce could see a line of men in identical blue coats, their heads shaved. Prisoners, then. What were they doing with them? Executing them?

Her eyes traveled over them in sympathy for the unimaginably brutal life they must lead. And then ...

It was him. Jim Hopper. Head shaved bald, the way she remembered seeing it briefly before he left for Vietnam. Thin. Terribly thin and gaunt. But ... he was alive. Hopper was alive.

She nearly fainted. And only the knowledge that she was needed to get him out of this kept her on her feet, kept her from giving way entirely and ruining the plan. She was glad for the gag, which kept her from calling out his name. Whatever was happening down there, Hopper was going to need his wits about him, was going to need not to be distracted.

Next to her, Murray spoke hesitantly to the Warden in Russian. She wondered if Murray had seen Hopper, too. She didn't dare try to show him, or indicate in any way that she had seen him, or that Murray wasn't who he appeared to be.

Whatever the Warden's answer was, Murray didn't like it. He forced a laugh, but it was weak, and there was panic in his face. God, what were they about to do to Hopper? Had she arrived just in time to watch him die?

*****

The sadistic guard was still talking, still belaboring the point that if they moved, they died. Which even Hopper, with his limited command of Russian, had gotten thoroughly by now. Damned guard just liked the sound of his own voice. Liked prolonging their torment even better. Hopper hoped he got a chance to feed the guard to the demogorgon. That would feel good.

Like the others, he knelt there, ignoring the pain in his knees and in his ribs. He'd learned to ignore a lot of pain since he'd been here—and without booze and pills, too. The Russian diet plan and detox center. Maybe he'd recommend it to his friends. Assuming he had any left. Assuming he got out of here.

"Is that understood?" the guard said at last.

All the prisoners muttered "yes".

The guard just stood there, dragging it out that last little bit longer, before he spoke again. Something about luck. As if luck was going to help them here.

Then he dropped the key, casually, like it was nothing, and turned to head up the stairs. Slowly. Taking his sweet time about it. The other guards following him, also slowly. If Hopper wasn't so certain he was about to die, he'd have been seething right now. As it was, their pathetic attempts to maintain superiority over dead men amused him, as did his own calm in the face of their deliberate attempts to rile him and the others up and put them off whatever game they could manage in their current condition and with the deck stacked so heavily against them.

"Let us hope your prayers have been heard, American," Antonov muttered.

Then they all heard it. A scream from behind the locked door. Hopper had never seen a full-grown demogorgon, but he'd seen the little ones, the dogs, and heard them. The tiny bit of hope he'd had left that maybe he was wrong, that maybe it wasn't possible that the Upside Down had followed him all the way across the world, died.

*****

Joyce heard the scream, too, and she knew what it was with a chill that overrode the Siberian cold. This was one of those things that had killed Bob. She could see them in her mind's eye, see his hand reaching out for her. Only now she knew what was about to happen in the pit below her, and her mind put Hopper's face, Hopper's hand, on the image.

Was this her destiny, to watch the men she loved die in front of her? Had she done something to personally piss the Upside Down off, that it felt the need to come after the people closest to her?

She tried to breathe, tried to think, but everything in her was pure panic.