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Nancy woke from too few hours of sleep to someone banging on the door of the cabin. She threw back the blankets and Robin’s arm, swung her legs out over the edge of the mattress, grabbing for the gun that lay besides the bed. There were barely five seconds between waking and levelling the barrel of the sawn-off at the door.
The banging hadn’t stopped.
Careful steps in heavy boots she hadn’t had the luxury of taking off, across the floor of the cabin. A glance to the armchair Steve had collapsed in before they’d slept. Empty. The absence made her heart beat a little faster.
The door stopped rattling. Was that a monster, giving up? Or was it a soldier, trying to lure them out?
She heard Robin stir. She spared another glance behind her, a look that said be quiet, and get ready. It wasn’t needed. Robin was already reaching for her axe.
From the door, another tap. Less frantic this time. And something else, something human. Maybe a whimper.
She crossed the last few feet of ground quicker, louder, not quite a sprint. One hand to fling the door inwards, before going back to steady the shotgun, levelled at head height.
Empty air greeted her, and a barely stifled scream.
She swung the barrel down towards the sound. Some snot-faced kid stared back at her from behind a mess of short black curls.
The sight was as far from threatening as anything short of her little sister could be. It still took her longer to drop the barrel down to point at the ground then it had to pick it up and aim it in the first place.
It was just as difficult to decide to take him inside. She couldn’t leave someone out there, it wouldn’t have been safe for any of them, to have him so visible, but there had been a sanctity to the cabin she’d wanted to preserve, no matter how recently they’d started staying there.
She grabbed the kid by the arm, and dragged him inside, shutting the door behind them.
“Message from Dustin, message from Dustin!” He sounded older than she’d expected. Closer to Mike in age than to Holly.
“Did he forget we have radios?” She’d snapped off the response before she remembered that her’s had stopped working, and Steve, if he had left for any length of time, would have taken his.
“He said you weren’t answering, please-“
Please what? She thought. Please let me finish? Please don’t get mad? Please don’t hurt me?
“Hey, it’s alright.” Robin’s voice. It had the desired effect, or at least went some of the way. The kid got most of the way to his feet, took an unsteady step towards where Robin stood, her hair still a mess, eyes still blinking away the last dregs of sleep. It was only when Nancy looked that she realised that the words had been directed at her.
“What’s the message?” Robin asked, bending down, one hand resting against the axe, which stood head down on the floorboards.
“He said.” A shuddering breath, a wait just long enough to make Nancy want to hurry him along. “He said you weren’t answering your radio, and that there was a transmission, and that he needed you to go to it. Out on Chestnut.”
“What transmission?” Nancy asked, not nearly as gentle.
“Asking for help, that there were monsters, that they couldn’t get out, that they were stuck.”
Nancy had to bite her tongue, before she started screaming.
“Any other details? Did he tell you who it was? How many people? What kind of monsters?” She did her best to keep the impatience out of her voice.
The kid looked to Robin for reassurance before answering. “Um. He didn’t say who, he didn’t know, I think. He said there was interference, something on the frequency. Didn’t say how many either, but more than one, I think? They kept saying ‘we’. He said it was all standard, that you would know what to do.”
He stopped. He looked a little like he was about to start crying again. He was right, that the message was familiar. She’d had half a dozen like from Dustin, people in trouble, that the soldiers were too busy chasing El to help with. She wondered if it was his first time leaving the camp, since everything had gone to hell. She wondered if he’d do it again, if passing on a message was too much.
“Bats.” The kid managed, eventually. “He said that there were bats. Two at least. They were outside, circling, looking for them.”
Two bats. They could handle two bats. She felt a little tension bleed away. Two bats outside, some people inside. Not urgent yet, hopefully.
“Thanks, that’s great, really.” Robin said.“Was there anything else that Dustin said to tell us? Anything at all?”
“That Steve was out looking into the radio problem.” His eyes, flicked to the gun that Nancy still held loose at her side. “That’s all.”
“Why the hell didn’t he wake us up?” Nancy asked Robin, more of a complaint than an actual question. “Why the hell is he going out on his own?”
“Beats me.” Robin shrugged, smiled a little, gave a tilt of her head. A movement so very Robin. She couldn’t stop the ghost of her own smile answering. “Are we gonna go now, or do you want to eat something first?”
Nancy did the math in her head. Five minutes for Dustin to find someone to run over with a message. 30 minutes for the message to arrive. Another five spent standing round talking about it. Then 30 minutes to get to Chestnut Avenue, if they could get there without any trouble.
She shook her head. “Grab something, we’ll eat on the way.”
“So much for breakfast in bed.”
That left her closer to an actual smile, but it fell away an instant later, when she felt the kid watching, wide eyes still watery. She’d almost forgotten he was there. That felt worse than the shock of fear she’d had waking up to the knocking. That was a fear that promised a fight, but this was something harder to grasp, like being drenched in ice water, like being called to the principals office. Observation, and all that it promised. The single, unmade bed behind them. The clear depression in the mattress where their bodies had lain together. She’d come to conclusions based on less. Would the kid do the same? She knew how much Hawkins liked to gossip, even now.
She rounded on hm, his eyes open wide, fear threatening to send him spiralling into panic, again.
“You don’t tell anyone where we were, right?” She didn’t point the gun at him, even as she felt her hand clench tight around the stock. “You don’t tell anyone, anything, apart from Dustin, right?”
The kid nodded. She hadn’t even asked his name. “I swear. I won’t- I won’t say anything.”
“Great.” Nancy tried to smile, but from the look on his face, it wasn’t close to reassuring. “You should head back. Tell Dustin our radio’s broken, but that we’ll go out and deal with whatever's happening on Chestnut.”
He nodded again, turned, ran, almost stumbling, back out the door.
Nancy grabbed her bag, still packed from their last expedition into town, and followed him to the threshold, watched as the kid grabbed his bike, and began the ride back to Hawkins High. More than half the people left in Hawkins had gone there in the weeks since the stain of black smoke and red lightening had spread out across the sky.
There was still the occasional hint of blue sky behind it, and the sun did its level best to breach the clouds that covered their town, but she would have to go well past the perimeter if she wanted to be out from under the shadow of the Upside Down.
“Are you okay?” Robin asked, joining her by the door, a pair of foul protein bars in hand. She held one out to Nancy, who took it reluctantly.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Really? Cause you kinda took that kid's head off there.”
“No I didn’t. I was just being careful. That’s all.”
“Careful of what? I think the soldiers are probably a little bit busy trying to stop the hell that is Hawkins from spreading to the rest of America to still waste time looking for us.”
“Dustin said they're passing out pictures with the supplies they’re bringing in, and they definitely know we’re helping El. Not the kind of thing I want to take chances about.”
“Hey, I get it. I did get kidnapped and tortured by Russians one time. I just don’t think he was gonna inform on us. He’s running errands for Dustin anyway, unless you think that he’s some kind of double agent?”
Nancy opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find the words to explain. Couldn’t find the words to speak the fear she felt, or the joy that hid behind it. Like with so much of what she felt about Robin, she decided it was better not to speak about it at all. Better to leave it unsaid.
“Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
“Work? Does that mean someone’s paying us for this? Because if they are, I think my check must have gotten lost in the mail. Or maybe I put the wrong address down? This is 6, Creepy cabin in the woods, right?”
She started walking before Robin could see the smile that crossed her face.
Gasoline was too valuable as a weapon and too essential for emergencies to waste on running a car. Bikes had become the default option; the fact that they were quiet helped make up for their slowness. They rode in silence, avoiding the roads they knew were blocked by car crashes, or by the ever spreading reaches of the rift itself.
It’s growth wasn’t something they had to work around. Most of the time, the worst would be a small tremor, and another few feet of Hawkins lost to the upside down. Today, it was a non issue; Chestnut was far from its edges.
They rounded the corner, watching the skies above the street for the swift circular movements of the bats, listening for the sounds of screaming, human or otherwise. Nancy heard those distant shrieks soon enough.
They slipped off their bikes, and lay them down on the lawn’s dead or dying grass. They armed themselves, making ready knives and guns, and axes, and then headed towards the house.
There were no human screams that she could hear, and the fact that the bats were screeching still meant that they hadn’t started to feed, not yet. Whoever they were looking for, the bats hadn’t found them yet.
Nancy stopped at the threshold, by the ruined remains of the door. Robin stopped across from her. They couldn’t speak, not this close, but at this point, they didn’t really need to. A look was enough to agree on the plan they’d made, weeks ago, that they’d executed a dozen times since. There were other variants, if Steve was there, or Johnathon, if they were trying to save someone, or if the bats were already feeding. Pieces that would fit into place, depending on what the situation was inside. She’d toyed with the idea of writing it all down, in a few precious moments between sleeping and wakefulness. Of having the time, and the space, to relax, and write something that might out live her. She wondered if it was the kind of thing she could get a book deal for. Or maybe a Pulitzer, if she could find a newspaper to print it.
Robin, across from her, was moving her eyebrows in increasingly frantic patterns, increasingly contorted shapes. Had she been daydreaming that long?
Nancy nodded, tried to give some sign that she was here, that she was paying attention to the right things, and led the way into the house.
It looked like home, in the same way that most of the houses in this part of Hawkins looked roughly the same, like variations on a theme, a place and a people with no interest in bold deviation, even when it came to interior decorating. Beige walls, lined with oak skirting board. A few dead plants. More lamps than anyone could possibly need.
The carpet in the hall was already showing signs of growth, spores cracking and shifting beneath her careful steps. Nothing so developed that the hive mind would feel it, although she imagined in time that all houses would look like Creel’s, consumed by the Upside Down, as fully a part of that place as he was.
She stepped into the living room. A home projector, still trailing film from its reels, stood on top of a pile of books, balanced on the coffee table. If it weren’t for the sounds coming from the next room, if it weren’t for the reality of their lives, and the world, she could imagine sitting with Robin, watching something terrible. When was the last time she’d sat down to watch a movie?
The shrieking of the bats was closer now. She could hear the steady thump of their bodies against wood. A door, or some other barricade. Two of them, at least.
Another wordless glance towards Robin. A gesture, to the doorway. Robin nodded, moved into position, standing opposite her. The doorway between them, again. Nancy set the shotgun down, leaning against the wall, then reached for the bookcase behind her, pulling out something thick and heavy.
Christine, by Steven King.
She threw it underhand at the projector. Just hard enough to send the whole structure crashing down. She drew her knife from its place on her belt.
The thumping stopped. A long, drawn out screech. Not communication, as far as she could tell. A hive mind wouldn’t need to talk to the other members of the swarm. Either it was something vestigial, evolved before they’d joined into one, or its only purpose was intimidation. Given how effective it could be at that, she wouldn’t be surprised.
A handful of high tension moments, then an impact in the next room. Then, flying almost faster than Nancy could react to, the first of the bats.
It saw them as it passed, beady eyes taking them in, but as fast as they were, there was only so much they could do against momentum. They could only turn so fast. The first one flew past, crashed into the tower of books that had once held up the projector. All tumbled to the coffee table and the carpet around it, a heap of limbs, wings and pages.
The next one followed a moment later, and Robin caught it with her axe on the downswing.
That was the trick to hunting the bats, when they were in small numbers, at least. If you went for one, the other would attack while you were distracted. It was all about timing, hitting one while the other was still turning around.
The axe, still embedded in the bat, hit the carpeted floor with a satisfying thunk, and Nancy was already moving towards it. It had been a challenge, at first, throwing herself at something that was screaming that loud, when every part of her wanted to cover her ears and run the other way. As with all things, practice had made it easier. The fact that Robin had almost severed the tail with the first blow helped, made it easier for her to pin its neck in place with one boot, and stab down with her knife, once, twice, and then a third time, when it finally went still.
Robin had already moved on, stepping past her and swinging the axe out in broad strokes, with no intention to hit, only aiming to keep it away while Nancy finished off the other. It worked, but only until the second bat’s long tail flicked up, aiming for Robin’s wrist, but settling for the axe’s handle instead. A tug of war, but it kept it tethered in place, limited its movements to the point that it was far easier to draw and aim the Makarov holstered at her side. The only problem was that it kept Robin in the line of fire as well.
“Down!” She called, loud enough to be heard over the screeching.
Robin dropped, letting the axe slip from her hands. With nothing pulling on the other end, the bat sailed upwards, hitting the ceiling, stopping there for just a second as it turned around.
Long enough for Nancy to fire, four shots for good measure. One last shriek, strangled and guttural, before it dropped to the floor as well.
Nancy took in a breath, stale with spores, but still a relief. Her ears rang, and her heart, already pumping in her chest, quickened a little, when Robin smiled up at her.
It was when that smile fell away, when those lips opened to shout some warning, that Nancy heard the sound of small footsteps rapidly approaching.
She turned, and saw the petal mouth rushing towards her. Enough time to get her arms out in front of her, to think the start of something unpleasant about Dustin and his messenger, but not enough time to aim, or to move out of the way.
She caught the dog mid leap, and it still bowled her over, onto her back. Her hands scrambled for purchase, found it just above its shoulders, below where the neck opened up into its segmented mouth.
Distantly, she heard Robin scream her name.
Far closer was the feeling of the cold breath against her cheeks, the thick and stringy spittle, mixed with the remnants of whatever it had eaten last, that spattered out across her face.
She turned her head, barely out of reach of the teeth that longed for her.
Four legs, all sharp, kicked out her chest, scratching against the heavy fabric of her jacket.
“Shotgun!” She called out. She couldn’t see Robin. Couldn’t hear her moving. Couldn't tell what was happening. Had there been more of them? Was Robin pinned as well? Could she last long enough for Nancy to do… something?
The Makarov was still in her hand, but she couldn’t stop pushing up to aim it somewhere useful, not even for a second. She felt her arms start to ache. Saw that gaping, toothy maw inch closer.
Had Barb seen that same sight, before she died? How many people in Hawkins had watched their life end inside those alien jaws? She shut her eyes.
“Nancy!”
Her legs were kicking, aimless thrashing, movement with no goal. Anything to keep from going still.
The shotgun fired, monstrously loud, blissfully bright for an instant, even behind her closed eyes.
The weight at the end of her arms was still there. The legs still kicking against her chest.
Nancy opened her eyes again, saw the Demo-dog’s face, still intact, still alive, or whatever it was that passed for living, snarling towards Robin, who was frantically doing… something, with the shotgun.
A moment of distraction.
With one arm braced against its throat, she pulled her gun back, and fired three shots through its chest, watched with satisfaction as one hit the ceiling above her, sending plaster dust raining down.
The legs stopped kicking. The jaw stopped twitching towards her.
A moment later, Robin was there, helping her throw the carcass back, a weight off her chest, replaced by a different feeling, as Robin pulled her to her feet.
Nancy kept their hands together as she panted for breath. As the ringing in her ears faded. As her heart continued to beat, fast and treacherous.
Robin was staring at her. Eyes filled with worry. Lips parted like she had something else entirely on her mind.
She could only hold that gaze for a moment.
Nancy turned, looking for the shotgun, discarded on the ground. Then at the hole in the wall, about a foot above where the Demo-dog had been.
“Did you really miss?”
“I was panicking! I don’t use guns that often, and I really really did not expect it to kick that much-”
“I really need to teach you to shoot.” Nancy bent down, picking up the shotgun, and the knife she’d left buried in the bat. “But we need to get going. Basement, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what Dustin said anyway.”
They found 4 people, huddled in the dark. They were scared, and they were hungry, and they were miserable, but Nancy couldn’t find it in herself for all that much pity. Almost everyone was all of those things. What really killed her sympathy was the surprise, verging on disbelief, when they’d seen the pair of them on the other side of the barricade.
The father, a man she hadn’t known before, who’s name she’d already forgotten, who’d stood in front of his family at the bottom of the stairs, had gone from grateful to stubborn the instant he’d seen her face. He’d questioned everything she’d said. If it was really safe up there. If she knew what she was doing with the shotgun. Why they’d shot up his dining room. Where the real soldiers were.
Every question had made her dread the long walk back to the school, because even if he was an asshole, she couldn’t stop doing her job just because of that.
Thankfully, it didn’t get that far. The walk through the living room, the dead scattered around it, was enough to shut him up, and when he insisted that they would drive there instead, she couldn’t find it in herself to argue. A car was probably fast enough to avoid most of the trouble, and the drive wasn’t far, even with the rift. Nancy sent them off with a map, marked with all the ruined roads, and only a little hope that the man in charge would listen to it.
Back at the cabin, another message from Dustin, left on paper this time. Steve was busy, needed for something, that they’d be needed too, in the morning, or sooner. Nancy wasn’t entirely sure how far morning was, had lost most abstract notions of time, but she’d take what she had.
Clean up was first, washing the worst of the gore from her face and her hands and her jacket. Robin, who’d avoided most of it, made what passed for a meal. Tinned peaches, another packet of stale jerky, and a little of the baking chocolate they’d stolen from some vacant house.
Whatever time of day it might have been, no matter how tired she felt, Nancy knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep after they’d finished. The face of the Demo-dog, unfolding like a rose, inches away. Another close call to add to the list already too long to remember. She would revisit it eventually, a hundred times, in dreams, or in the scent of bad breath, or the smell of rotting meat or the next time she saw an actual dog, just as she did all the other times she’d nearly died. But not today, not yet.
Instead, she took the empty can of peaches they had split between them, and a handful of others from older meals, and set them out on the fence behind the cabin.
She handed Robin one of her handguns, who took it with a surprising amount of hesitation for someone that had helped her hack monsters to pieces a dozen times in the last week.
“Have you ever fired one before?” Nancy asked.
“Does that time today count?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“Then no. I officially still have my gun virginity.”
Nancy looked at her, trying to see if she could find the place in Robin that let her speak a sentence like that without flinching, or even looking away from the gun she was inspecting. It was a pistol, not the Makarov, but the revolver, that had been Lonnie’s, once upon a time.
“What?” Robin asked, looking up at her, smiling.
“Just try it out. Point and shoot.”
“That easy?”
“That was all the advice I needed.”
Robin held the gun up, about as far away from her body as possible, like she could make enough space that she wouldn’t hear the shot, or feel the kick, not that there would be much, in something that small.
Robin fired, flinching as she did. The four cans remained, and past them, a tree’s bark splintered.
“Just point and shoot, huh?”
“You’re too scared of it. You can’t hold it at arms length.”
“What does that even mean? How else am I supposed to hold it?”
“Closer to you, no not that close. You’ve seen me do it before, haven’t you?”
Robin laughed, weakly. “When I’m staring, I’m not looking for tips on shooting posture. I mean, not that I’m staring, just that I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing, like I’m more just looking at. At all of you, and wait-“
Nancy stepped closer. Robin stopped speaking, swallowed.
“Like this.” One hand went to the inside of Robin’s wrist, the slip of skin between sleeve and hand, straightening her arm out. “And your other hand, you want it wrapped around, just below the trigger.”
Nancy shifted closer still, till she was standing behind Robin, almost flush with her back.
“You want your feet a little further apart.” Nancy nudged the side of Robin’s boot with her own, till it was just past the line of her hip.
Another correction, on the other side. Her knee brushed Robin’s.
She looked over Robin’s shoulder. Her hands hadn’t moved an inch, from where Nancy had positioned them, but her arms were still too low.
She reached forwards, her fingers touching Robin’s elbow, pushing gently upwards. There was no space at all between them now. In that closeness, she could feel the almost perfect stillness that they shared, betrayed only by the nervous heart she could feel beating against her chest. Her’s, or Robin’s. She wasn’t sure.
“You’re too tense.” She said the word over Robin’s shoulder, and watched, felt, the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “You need to breath. It’s not going to hurt you. You’re in control here.”
Robin breathed. Relaxed into her. Nancy shut her eyes.
“Now you need to aim. Focus on the sight, then look past it, to the target.”
These were the only moments that Nancy had really relaxed since the world had ended. Those moments when she had a reason for this closeness. Pulling Robin to her feet after she’d fallen in a fight. Pressed against each other, hiding behind a wall from a swarm of bats. Collapsing together on the bed in the cabin, in each others arms. There had been so many bad days. Days when things had gone wrong, and the only thing keeping her from falling apart had been that contact. She'd needed, to carry on the work she was doing. To carry on saving lives.
This was necessary too. To keep Robin safe. To keep herself safe.
“Keep breathing. Then you squeeze the trigger.”
Nancy breathed in sync. Took in the smell. Took in the feeling of her hand resting on Robin’s elbow. Took in every point of desperate contact. Took in everything she could. Like she keep some part of this moment inside her. That she could remember it so perfectly that she would never feel the need to experience it again.
They were alone here.
Later, who knows how long, the gun fired. A ping, of a bullet hitting a tin can.
Some part of herself that Nancy would never dare name broke, that Robin learnt so quickly. That she hadn’t been able to drag the excuse out any longer.
She stepped away, before she could convince herself that she could stay.
Robin spun to face her, something on her lips, some words that Nancy couldn’t hear. Not now. Not when there was so much else to do. Not when her world, and her life, and her self was already so very fragile.
“See?” Nancy said, trying to fill her voice with a bravery she didn’t feel, a skill long practiced. “It’s easy. You just point and shoot. Nothing else to it.”