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The boys collect their trays and toss them out and rush toward the nearest exit doors. They run outside to the old picnic bench surrounded by trees in the back of the school. Leaves crunch and break as they're stepped upon, the wind chilling their noses and fingertips.
Mike slams the game plan down on the table. Lucas and Dustin stand at his side while Will and Ethan sit their knees on the seat across from them. He pulls out their respective pieces and refreshes the others on their respective parts of the crawl.
"Okay, so we should be ready to go by ten. Lucas, we'll take our usual observation post." He places his and Lucas' D&D pieces on the map of the main Hawkins area they'll be moving around, from the library to the farm.
Will takes notice of Ethan biting the inside of his cheek.
"Once the burn starts and there's sufficient cover, we'll signal Hopper and Enzo, they'll make their move." Mike then places two pieces representing Hopper and Enzo on top of a little toy military truck. "So, Hop and Enzo are in the Upside Down," he rolls the toy truck down the map, "So, Dustin and Steve, you follow along with them in the Rightside Up." he moves a car with a handmade disc on top to represent the WSQK van next to the military truck, "Just remember, try to keep the telemetry signal within..."
"Negative sixty and negative seventy dB," Dustin finishes, "Easy-peasy."
Mike continues moving the pieces. "You're gonna travel up Cornwallis for about six miles," he flips the page back, showing some more extended map surface, "And as the convoy reaches this Shell station here... we radio Hop to disembark, which will drop the old man and the Russian at the border of G1."
Dustin shrugs, "I mean, what's even in G1? Big Buy? What's the chance Vecna's shopping for Lucky Charms?"
"It doesn't matter," Mike replies, "We stick to the plan. We break into the Upside Down the only way we can, through the MAC-Z gate, under the cover of a burn. Once inside, we search one zone at a time, methodically, until we figure out where the hell he's been hiding."
"Doesn't this seem a little useless?" Ethan wonders aloud, "We haven't seen a single sign of him in the thirty-something crawls we've commenced, El can't find him in the bath, Will hasn't felt a thing since the chasms started leaking black smoke. What if he tried to run after we lit him on fire and pumped him full of lead and he fell three stories? Maybe he managed to get away and die in some bushes, and the smoke was his final death call, or the rigor mortis slash death rattle of evil-demon-Henry." he suggests with a doubtful shrug.
Mike furrows his brows. "We don't stop looking. Even if it takes a hundred more crawls, a thousand. We don't stop until we're god damn sure that wrinkled, noseless, rotting bastard is dead and gone and never coming back."
Mike gives him a look, a silent one, telling him 'you, of all people, should get it.'
Ethan bites his tongue, looking down at his previously injured hand. In the long run, he was going to deal with some serious post-traumatic arthritis in the future, no matter what he tried to do. Chronic pain and aching plagued him, fuck, he couldn't even zip up his jackets himself, he needed help with anything that required using two hands. His grip strength was absolute shit. Not to mention the deformities since they'd waited so long to get him to a hospital. Some of his knuckles were permanently popped out of place slash popped in and out by themselves, and he frequently had to try and snap them back into place. He was born deaf, gained a sense of hearing, and he barely had a hand left now, stolen by Vecna.
