Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Voices Carry

"Voices Carry"

I'm in the dark, I'd like to read his mind

But I'm frightened by the things I might find

- Til Tuesday

The three of them made their way slowly down the steps into the control room. The white-coated man was sprawled on the floor, his coat bloodied. Soldiers lay scattered around the room, and smears of blood were on most surfaces.

From somewhere came a gurgle that Hopper was all too familiar with—the last gasps of a man whose lungs were filled with blood. Coming around a desk in the middle of the room they saw the commandant lying there, his eyes open, his chest heaving with the effort of breathing.

Murray knelt next to him, laying his rifle on the floor, and spoke to him gently in Russian.

The commandant's eyes were wide with horror, and his voice was faint, but Murray translated for them the words he managed to get out.

"The monster got in. The guards, they tried to stop it. The gunfire shattered the tanks. The others came alive."

Murray's flat voice repeating the words he'd heard was almost creepier than if Hopper could have understood the commandant's Russian.

"The particles!" Joyce whispered. "Ask him about the particles."

If possible, the commandant's eyes got wider, and more frightened, after Murray's question.

"He says they call it 'the shadow'. The shadow ... went into them."

"Into who?" Hopper asked. Whoever was infected with the Mindflayer, they needed to know, to be prepared.

The commandant tried to answer the question, but it was too much. His eyes widened even further in horror, his voice rasped and rattled, and then he was silent forever.

Murray's head dropped, and he heaved a great sigh. Hopper wondered if he had ever watched a man die like that before, slowly, and in great pain. He had, too often to remember or think about, except in the dark of night with a bottle of very cheap booze at hand.

A scream shook the prison, a chilling otherworldly scream that had not come from a human throat.

Hopper reactivated the flamethrower, and Murray stood up, retrieving his gun from the floor. Somehow, incredibly, the power was still on, and the monitors were working. From what he could see, the demodogs were ... everywhere. It reminded him of Hawkins Lab, and he felt a fear he'd thought he was no longer capable of. He didn't want to die. Not now, not with Joyce here, not with, somehow, incredibly, a future still beckoning him from outside this godforsaken prison.

They had made it out of Hawkins Lab, he reminded himself. But at the cost of Bob's life; Bob's bravery had made that possible. Whose life would today cost? His? Murray's? Not Joyce's. Anything but that.

"I think this answers your question, Jim," Murray said. "The shadow is in them."

Well, that was nothing new. They would already have been connected to the hive mind, so it didn't change much. It just meant that if they killed the demodogs, they killed the particles, too. Or so Hopper hoped.

The three of them left the control room, going down through the corridors and out through the cage where the Demogorgon had been kept into the arena. Nothing remained in there but bodies.

"You shut off this fence, right?" Hopper asked, gesturing with the flamethrower at the electrified barbed wire that circled the top of the enclosure.

"Yeah."

"Good. So you can turn it back on again."

Murray chuckled nervously. "Jim, you want to clue us in on what you're thinking here, or are we just supposed to read your mind?"

He was still working on the plan in his head, letting the pieces fall into place as he surveyed the area. Enclosed space, lure them in, take them out. "This pit was designed to trap monsters," he said. "We get 'em in here, we lock it up, we rain fire from above, and we hope to hell that gives El and the kids an upper hand."

"Okay. I'm with ya," Murray said, in the tone of a man who might as well go along because what other choice did he have. "Except the whole, uh ..." He laughed again. "'Getting them all in here' part."

Hopper turned to look at him. "It's a hive mind. You draw one, you draw 'em all." He unhooked the straps of the flamethrower from his shoulders, handing it off to Murray and taking the rifle instead. "You're the grill master."

"Okay." Murray sounded a lot more enthusiastic with the flamethrower in his hands.

Turning to Joyce, Hopper added, "And you, you're the jailer. You get that fence turned on. And once they're all in here, lock that door behind them."

"What about you?"

"I'm the bait."

He could see the memory of Bob in the way her eyes widened in her small face, and he hated to do this to her. If he could have left her out of this, left her safe and sound back with Antonov and Yuri, made himself feel certain that she, at least, would make it home, would live through this, he would have. But Joyce herself would never have allowed him to do that. She would have insisted on being here, on taking risks right next to him. And she had earned that right. She had fought for Will, for El, for all of them, all this time; she was always one step ahead of everyone else in figuring out what fresh horror the Upside Down was going to throw at them.

He couldn't do this without her. And she wouldn't want him to. Gently he reached out with one finger to touch her cheek. "Trust me, okay? I know what I'm doing."

Reluctantly, she nodded. "Okay. Tell me every step. Don't leave anything out."