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As the remains of the makeshift rope into the Upside Down plummet to the mattress below the gate, Chrissy’s heart falls with it. She lifts her gaze to the hole in the roof and grits her teeth together, determination snuffing out the fear making her legs wobbly.
She glances over at Dustin, who looks utterly frantic with the need to get back into the other world, to get to Eddie who she’s got this sinking feeling is about to do exactly what Steve told them not to, and shifts her weight. “Toss me,” she demands firmly.
“What?” Dustin asks, gaze meeting hers.
“Eddie doesn’t have time for us to make another rope or a ladder, so you need to toss me,” she explains. “I do this all the time. I can get back and get him back.”
She gestures for Dustin to crouch and to lace his hands together. “When I put my foot in your hands, I want you to push up with your legs as hard as you can when you try to toss me up,” she continues. “You’ve been to pep rallies, right? You’ve seen how we do it. I don’t want you to think about it, just do it. I’ll do the rest.”
His expression is skeptical, but he does as asked while Chrissy backs up a few steps. She takes the smallest run at him, leaps and almost cheers aloud when her foot lands square in his palms. That’s not a distraction they can afford, though, and she puts all her energy into pushing away from Dustin’s hand as he pushes up.
The toss won’t win any awards and would definitely be grounds for a do-over in any cheer practice, but it does enough. Chrissy flies upwards and enough of her passes through the gate for the strange reversal of gravity on the other side to do the rest. Sticking the landing is all muscle memory and she’s grateful for at as she tears out of the trailer and into the hellish, eternal night outside.
The swirling cloud of demonic bats obscures Eddie from view, but there’s no doubt in Chrissy’s heart that he’s at the center of it. One hand goes into the bag at her hip as she runs toward the danger, yanking out the can of hairspray she’d impulsively grabbed from Eddie’s bathroom counter when they’d been gearing up to come through. The cap comes off with a squeeze, falling behind her as she pushes through the familiar fatigue of too much physical activity with too little fuel. Her other hand sinks into the pocket of her jacket, wrapping around the lighter that Robin had pushed into her hand earlier.
As more bats begin to dive downward, focused on Eddie, Chrissy says a quick prayer and skids to a stop just before the fray. She aims the can and presses downward, hitting a few of the bats with the hissing spray before she flicks the lighter and ignites the stream.
They catch as with shocking ease, screeching and flailing and blindly smashing into others. Chrissy ducks a pair of them that swoop down at her, then dives into the smoking hole the hairspray’s made in the storm.
Eddie’s on a knee, clutching his throat, and Chrissy doesn’t hesitate for even a moment as she aims a spitting spray of the can at the bat before holding the lighter close enough to catch. It lets Eddie go and flies upwards, setting a few more of its brethren alight.
One of the bats flies close to her face, scratching a pair of bloody lines into Chrissy’s cheek and taking a chunk of her hair with it on its way. She screams, but launches herself forward, toward where Eddie’s staggering up from his knee.
The sound he chokes out might be her name and Chrissy spares him a smile as she bends down to snatch up his discarded trash lid shield.
“Hi,” she says roughly, teetering into him as she stands. She feels him brace against her as his spear comes up and she does the same, lifting the shield.
The barrage comes again, bats slamming against the shield and pulling at it in turns, but Chrissy holds on. Eddie’s weight against her is a comfort, buoying her courage even as her sneakers start to slip in the dirt and the bats pull out more of her hair. There’s a brief pang of sadness as one of them sinks its teeth into her thigh, that she won’t be pretty anymore with the scars surviving this will leave, but Chrissy ignores it and brings the lid down hard on the bat’s head, knocking it off her thigh.
Then, just like that, it ends.
It ends and there’s silence enough to hear Dustin’s voice calling them.
Chrissy falls first, bashing her knees on the ground as the relief of being surviving takes her legs out from under her. She hears Eddie, turning her head to look at him as his weight disappears from her side.
“Hey,” he says back, pressing a hand to his midsection.
“Eddie—” she begins.
Dustin reaches them then, frantically checking them both over, though Chrissy insists she’s fine enough.
“I didn’t run away this time, right?” Eddie says to them both, flinching away from Dustin when the younger boy presses his hands over Eddie’s own.
“No, no,” Chrissy replies, giving Dustin a look as she crawls for the bag that the bats ripped away from her during the fray.
Her cheer sweater is still inside, balled up at the bottom. It’s dingy now, from their first trip through the lake, but she hands it over to Dustin anyway and holds back a scream at the red of Eddie’s palms when Dustin shoves the sweater between them and Eddie’s midsection.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” she says, as useless as it is here.
Why had none of them thought to pack a first aid kit in with all the weapons.
“Help me get him up,” Dustin replies. “We’ll get him back to the trailer and wait for the others."
They tie the swiftly reddening sweater around Eddie’s middle, using the sleeves to hold it in place, and each take a side.
Eddie talks the whole way, the sentiments not wholly coherent as he leans heavily on them as they stumble back to the trailer. The bat bite on Chrissy’s thigh and Dustin’s limp mean it’s slower going than they’d like, but they make it.
They all make it.