"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-Two: Barricading The Trailer
(The Piggyback, Pt. 2)
***
Alistair, Dustin and Eddie immediately set to work on barricading the trailer.
First, they ripped off the wire from a fence sectioning off a part of the trailer park that kept dogs behind it and carried it to the trailer to serve as a barrier between the door and the outside world by wrapping it around the door and front of the trailer. After, a tarp was pulled out to carry rusted sheets of metal they found lying about to strengthen the walls of the trailer—because if the walls of trailers in the real world were notoriously thin, then Alistair was very doubtful of the strength of the walls of Upside Down trailers. Maybe the sheets of metal wouldn't do much, but it was better than just relying on the trailer walls alone.
It made Alistair remember barricading the bus back at the junkyard, when he thought all he had to worry about was Dustin's pet Demogorgon being loose and on the verge of eating more than cats. If only it could have remained that simple.
Banishing the memories away, Alistair focused on dumping as many sheets of rusted metal onto the tape before he, Eddie and Dustin dragged it back to the Munson trailer and got to work on what might be the most challenging thing on barricading it—drilling the sheets of metal in without disturbing the vines and alerting through the hive mind the Demobats or Vecna and risking the other group's lives with some power tools they'd found that Alistair hoped would work.
They, surprisingly, did, coming to life when they plugged them in and turned them on, so now it was time for Alistair to keep them in place, avoiding the vines crawling across the trailer, while Dustin and Eddie drilled them in at the corners, securing the metal sheets against the front trailer wall. The harsh noise of the drill going through scraped at Alistair's ears, but it was a welcome noise from the emptiness of the Upside Down, the cold and unnatural feeling that had every single bit of his power shudder and recoil from it, to have him forget that with each breath it took, it felt like he was inhaling knives, the cold seeping into him and warring with the natural cold in him, the rot clinging to him as the ash did, sticking in the back of his throat and making him nearly gag on it.
It had Alistair admire Will all over again—his boyfriend had survived in here for a week. While he'd narrowly escaped with his life thanks to being rescued by Joyce, Hopper and Aunt Aco and it lead to him eventually being possessed by the Mind Flayer, Will had still survived in this hell for a full week before the rescue finally came, alone and with no food and water, breathing in this air and relying on lights and the hope his mom could be able to get him out and avoiding the Demogorgon until he couldn't. All while not knowing where the hell he was, but that he still managed to survive and get out with his life—something that not all who'd been taken into the Upside Down could claim.
