Embrace Degeneracy

Chapter 2

Eddie hadn’t been able to sleep, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. After Henderson and his friends had left him at the boathouse, and his mind had wondered as far as it possibly could, it shut off. As he was crouched in the corner and the sun started to peek through the boards of the aging shed his mind kicked back into gear, this time thinking about his uncle who would usually be making his way into their shared trailer soon.

It was something that Eddie hadn’t considered when he took off like a bat out of hell, his uncle arriving home. Finding Chrissy on the floor between the living space and the kitchen space.

Cold.

Broken.

Alone.

Wayne was a good man, who always did the best that he could for himself and his nephew. He lived in a town that all but despised the family name attatched to him. That looked down their nose at any Munson, like they weren't worth the light of day.

Eddie remembered when he was seven and Wayne had moved back to Hawkins. Eddie's father, Wayne's brother, had been less than pleased, and he had not been afraid to make sure that anyone within earshot knew it.

Roy Munson Jr. may have been the culmination of aggression and brutality, just like his old man before him, but at least he was a real man. Unlike his younger brother. Something he had practically beat into his son.

Wayne did everything he could to teach Eddie that he wasn't like his father, but did he believe that to be true anymore? His uncle had given up a life to come back to this town that had their own issues with him. He had pushed Eddie to be a better person, to go back to school and actually graduate. Something Wayne himself had missed out on when he dropped out at sixteen.

Now Eddie was doing his best to remind himself that he didn’t kill Chrissy, he didn’t hurt anyone, but it didn’t feel true. Not when he had to have hurt Wayne by leaving him alone to deal with the mess that had made it’s way to the Munson trailer. A mess that someone like his uncle didn’t deserve.

While luck wasn’t on his side, it did seem that someone was.

Well, a group of literal children and a nineteen year old he had held up with a broken beer bottle, at least, but there were people that believed him, even if one of them was Steve Herrington.

He didn’t know what to make of that. They had told him that this wasn’t the first time these monsters had come to Hawkins, that they had beaten them before, but how many times? How often was Hawkins under attack from an alternate dimension? When?

Were there people aside from these kids that knew about it? Did those people think that somehow Eddie was behind it? Maybe that's why everyone was so sure he was in league with the devil.

Without a moment’s notice the silence of the boathouse that was sending him into another downward spiral was interrupted. The door burst open quickly and with a force, slamming into the wall and jostling nicknacks and trash to the floor in a clatter. Eddie jumped up from his position on the floor with a yelp, the air quickly leaving his lungs in relief as Dunstin Henderson himself, with a goofy overly happy smile, shouted out “Delivery service!”

Having gone more than a full day without eating or drinking anything Eddie was swift to take a bag from the boy and pull out cereal and a yoo-hoo. He was stressed. Water could wait.

Eddie took a seat in the boat shoving the Honeycombs in his mouth and paid rapt attention to the others as they laid out what they had learned. What they said could be the difference between life and death, so he hung onto every word. But despite asking how he preferred his news, they didn’t actually have any good news, reminding Eddie that this was the real world, and a poor girl was found dead in his trailer.