Stranger Things: Beyond the Silver Rainbow

[45] (Jonathan)

Jonathan awoke to a heavy ka-chunk, and the squeak of his door opening. The engine was off. Freezing air seeped into the cab. Hopper reached in and slapped a cold handcuff onto his wrist.

"Wuh―" The hell? "I never said I wouldn't go."

"I'm not making sure you go in there." Hopper closed the other cuff around his own wrist, crik. "I'm making sure you come out again."

It was pointless for Jonathan to change his mind now that he was handcuffed to a man the size of a train car, but the change had come on its own. He curled up where he sat, his feet on the seat and his forehead to his knees again, his throat raw and his aching insides awash in a returning tide of terror. He checked whether the keys were still in the ignition. They weren't. "No," he said.

"You can't walk?"

The scratching noises in the back seat grew from interested to excited.

"I don't know."

Hopper got shorter in Jonathan's peripheral and crouched beside him. "...You think they'll shoot you in the head like they did to Benny?"

"I don't know," or forget me in a cell, or cut me up while I'm awake, or put that thing back inside me just to see what happens. One arm dangled lamely out the open door between Jonathan's shoulder and a little chain, an easily broken chain. He tried to put his feet back on the floor but they wouldn't go. "I can't move."

The monster in the pillowcase was going haywire.

Hopper spoke slowly: "They're not going to shoot you in the head like Benny. The folks who shot Benny, chased the kids, hassled me and your mother, they were panicking. They were in deep shit and they were panicking, and now they're gone. These people, working the night shift in this building?" He waited until Jonathan looked up. The facility was just a cement shack, standing in a six-car lot with a fence around it. "The people in this building have next to nothing on the line. They're science guys, just grunts doing their jobs. That means they're honest, they're predictable and they're boring. And they need me. The worst they can do is tie us up in red tape for a while."

"Then―" Jonathan tugged. The anchor didn't budge. "Why this?"

"Because there's a one in a hundred chance I'm wrong, and I made a promise."

"I want this to be over."

"Me too, trust me." A heavy hand fell onto Jonathan's knee and squeezed, swaying him. "Trust me."

Jonathan decided to go somewhere else for a while. He began to walk.

He tried to go to a concert but he had never been to one before, and a few music videos weren't enough to fill in the gaps in his imagination. He ended up focusing on the gunk on his shoes, the black blood leaked from a forest of grasping limbs whose sapling had almost turned him to fertilizer.

The ground under his feet changed from dark asphalt to grey cement, then bleached tile, then shining linoleum. An elevator lurched him up and down and almost knocked him over. He descended to kindergarten, chewed on the crayons, caught trouble for staining his teeth red, got lost in the taste of wax and the texture inside his old lunch pail.

There were a lot of people around.

Sit here.

He answered closed questions. Yes, no. Yah. No.

This way.

Left, right, left, right.

Lay there.

Bright lights. He shut his eyes tight.

He would have tried going into a porno next but these weren't imaginary hands all over him, stopping him from going anywhere at all. They jabbed him way more painfully than Eleven ever did and fighting them off only brought more. Jonathan went back to Nicole's basement, where he needed to scream and couldn't breathe.

"Put him out."

Lone words rose up from a cloud of muttering. Budget. Boss. Peritonitis.

"Are you deaf? Debate later. Put him out. Now."

The muttering ceased. The hands eased up and vanished.

"Thank you."

There was a squeaking to Jonathan's right, and his arm got pulled around a little by the handcuff. There were busy clangs and mumbles, rolling wheels, shifting lights. He realized he didn't have a pillow and that most of his clothes were missing, so he retreated from that feeling, climbed into his own bed and gave himself a new set of headphones. Good ones. Top of the line. Discographies lined up to the end of the world.

It didn't matter what these people did to him. It was too late to do anything about anything. More monsters would come, in a week or a year. You couldn't kill fear and you couldn't hide from a psychic predator that didn't need eyes or ears. Fear was older than the dinosaurs. It was the best weapon life on Earth had to defend itself. If these things survived by sniffing it out directly, that meant they always won.

Will was only a kid. Elle was only kid. Jonathan himself was only a kid.

We're seventeen, and this? Is complete horseshit.

Somebody gave Jonathan a new gas mask.

They were going to lose. The other place would seep into the world and absorb it, and its monsters would eat up all the people, the animals and the trees, and everything would die―but they could try to slow it down. All of this was ending but if they figured out how to fight back somehow, and fought hard enough, they might not still be kids when they died.

Somebody gave Jonathan a prick in the arm.

Nancy would not still be a kid when she died.

All of this was ending, but it wasn't over y―