"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...
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Chapter Eighty-One: Into The Upside Down
(The Piggyback)
***
Alistair resisted the urge to anxiously pick at the skin around his nails as he sat in one side of the booth, Dustin beside him and Eddie standing behind them. In front of them, on the other side, was Robin and Valerie while standing next to them was Rowan and Steve. And at the front was Nancy, ready to pace down the corridor again—and go over the plan one last time before they went into the Upside Down.
The RV was parked a few metres away from the trailer park, decently hidden but close enough that they could walk into the Munson trailer and get inside and through the gate without anyone spotting them—and, more specifically, anyone spotting Eddie and either calling the cops or enacting mob justice on him. Hopefully.
They just needed to go over the plan a final time, to make sure nothing could go wrong. That it was iron-tight, without any chance of failing, before they descended into hell and killed the devil inside it before he could succeed, before he could kill Max or him.
Alistair banished the thought away the moment it came. No, everything was going to work out, Max was going to be okay and he had Eddie and Dustin with him. It was going to be okay. They were all going to be okay and make it out.
"Okay. I wanna run through it one more time," Nancy stated as she turned to them. "Phase one."
"We meet Erica, Cami and Leo at the playground," Robin said, reciting it from memory by now. "They'll signal Max and Lucas when we're ready."
"Phase two."
"Max baits Vecna. He'll go after her, which'll put him in his trance," Steve responded before he gave Rowan's shoulder a comforting squeeze at the look on her face of Max being in danger—as Alistair tried to hide his own look of Max being in danger, of what would happen if it went wrong, if Vecna got Max, if she—
No. She's gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay. We're gonna kill Vecna and make it through this alive. All of us.
"Phase three?" Nancy asked as she looked at him, Eddie and Dustin—the group meant to be the distraction, the decoys. The ones in marginally less danger than the group going to kill Vecna was.
"Me, Al and Eddie draw the bats away," Dustin answered as Eddie gave Dustin an affectionate head-ruffle and Alistair added, "And if Vecna goes after me, either I'll call in Elton again, or Eddie and Dustin will."
He hoped that they could call Elton in before it was too late—that Vecna wouldn't go after him if he was distracted by Max. But they didn't know, and that terrified him as much as heading into the Upside Down did, as much as the ghosts once did.
"Four," Nancy said as she looked back at Robin, Steve, Valerie and Rowan.
"We head into Vecna's hopefully newly bat-free lair and..." Robin replied, rattling an unlit Molotov cocktail as Rowan's fist flashed with sparks, "... flambé and fry."
