Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[25] (Mike)

Mike kicked Nicole's dead phone out of his way and fell to a crawl to project his voice under the bed: "Will. Some retarded friend of Steve's stole Nancy's gun and he's being a retard with it. Come on, we can go out the window."

"Nancy has a gun?"

"Had  a gun."

"Why don't you stay down here instead?"

"I can't, I have to go."

"What if the retarded guy sees you out there? What if he shoots you?"

"He won't," but Mike didn't technically know that.

"There's room for at least three more people to stay in here," Will said.

Another day, Mike might have accepted the invitation. "I can't. I'm going. Don't make any noise."

"Thanks for the advice but I kinda know what I'm doing."

Will had a point. So did Mike. "Get out as soon as it's safe enough, okay?"

"I know."

People were arguing in the front room but Mike didn't have the space in his head to listen to what they were saying. He pulled the cord on Nicole's bamboo blind, shoved up the window and kicked out the screen.

"Hey Mike?"

"Yeah?"

"Jonathan said there's no Deomogorgon. He's just sick. We've got time to find him."

How sick? How much time? How long had it taken Barb's face to unglue from her head? "I won't wig out if you won't," Mike said.

"Deal."

Mike sat down on the sill, swung his legs out, slid out into the cold, stomped directly on the screen because it really did not matter, and ran for Steve's car. The folded sheet of typewriter paper in his pocket crinkled at every bend of his leg.

mike i care snow ball no place like home not safe bad men secret

That was all it said, and it said everything. Mike had memorized it while Nancy was yelling, before the phone crashed to the floor. Now the message looped in his head with the turning of his legs, spitting out another word for each beating footstep.

bad men secret mike i care snow ball no place like home not safe bad men secret mike i care

Steve's headlights were off. The tires were flat, drooped into sad semicircles on the road, but that didn't matter any more than the screen did. Mike could get home fast. He'd been practicing. He caught himself with both hands on the freezing cold ledge of the trunk and tried to pull it open, but of course it was locked. The nearest rear door was locked too. So was the driver's door. So were the other two doors, and all the windows were rolled up.

"Seriously?"

Mike dropped a halfhearted hand on the nearest window. He looked back at the house. Steve was leaning on the front curtain making wild gestures, raising his voice, muffled, rambling. It was not safe to interrupt. This was bad.

Mike hopped back and forth between his feet, stuck. His bike was locked up in the trunk and Steve had the keys, but Steve and Nancy were in the middle of an argument with a lethally armed retard.

Will's mom was home, but she was passed out from a sleeping pill, maybe even more than one. What was it like to take a sleeping pill? Mike bet it was like taking cough syrup or allergy medicine but for adults, which meant it would be even stronger. He bet if he woke her up and told her what was going on she would get really upset and not be able to think straight. What if she ran into Nicole's house? What if she got shot?

Mike had to get home. He had to get Lucas on his radio and then get Dustin, or maybe bypass home totally in case he woke his parents―Could he even get back into Nancy's window by himself?―and they had to come up with a plan. Maybe one of the guys knew where Hopper lived, or something else, anything else. The police? What if they shot somebody? What if more bad men found out about Elle and they  shot somebody?

Mike couldn't do this himself. He couldn't strategize all by himself. He couldn't even get his stupid bike  by himself.

Wait, yes he could.

It took him three tries to smash Nancy's rock through Steve's rear passenger window.

"Blame it on the retard," he mumbled.

He took off his coat and wrapped it around his arm to safely clear more glass out of the way, shredding lycra with no regrets, and pulled up the front passenger lock. Leaning in through that door to the dashboard, he patted around until he was pretty sure he found the right thing to pull and pulled it. It wasn't the right thing, so he pulled another thing and the trunk popped open.

He closed the trunk very carefully after retrieving his bike so he wouldn't make any more noise, and just then, as he was listening closely to the silence in fear of breaking it, he heard a roar of rage, Nancy's rage, angrier than he had ever heard her in his whole annoying little brother life.

Steve wasn't in the window anymore. It was really hard to see through the curtain, but there was movement. A lot of it.

Everyone was in that house―Nancy, Steve, Will, Jonathan, Eleven―and Mike was running away?

"Screw leaving." Mike dumped his bike on the ground and jogged back toward Nicole's bedroom window. "Screw it, screw it, screw it." If Elle could hit typewriter keys from the upside down, she could do other things too. It would be good to talk to her. Really  good. He might even get to see her again.

Mike stopped, nearly tipping forward over his toes, and boomeranged back to the car. By the time he returned to Nicole's bedroom window he had shaken all the bits of glass off Nancy's backpack.