Chapter 43: Eve of the Storm
Billy filled the doorframe the way certain people fill doorframes — not just physically but with the specific weight of someone who has learned that taking up space is a form of control. His gaze moved across the room slowly, like he was doing inventory.
"Well," he said. "Look at this."
His eyes went to Nancy first, then Jonathan, then Steve — who had made it back inside and was standing near the kitchen doorway with his hair wrecked and his shirt untucked and a look on his face that was doing its best. Then Billy's gaze slid to the dining table.
Lucas and Max, sitting two feet apart.
The casual amusement in Billy's face switched off.
He took a step into the room. Then another. His boots were loud on the old floorboards.
"Lucas Sinclair." He said the name like he was reading it off something. "Funny seeing you here."
Max stood up. "Billy. This isn't—"
"I told you to sit down." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
Max stayed standing.
Jonathan moved to intercept him — not dramatically, just stepped into his path with one arm out. "You need to leave."
Billy stopped. He looked at Jonathan the way you look at something that has just made an unexpected sound.
"Byers." His head tilted slightly. "Why is my thirteen-year-old stepsister sitting in your house at—" he glanced around "—whatever time this is, with this particular group of people?"
"That's not your business," Jonathan said. "Get out."
Billy almost smiled. "She's my sister, man. That makes it my business." His eyes went back to Max. "You didn't listen. You know what happens when you don't listen."
"Go home, Billy." Max's voice was steady. Her chin was up.
Billy's expression went flat.
"I'm going to cause some damage," he said, and then he moved.
It happened fast. Jonathan stepped in and Billy hit him once, hard, in the stomach — the kind of punch that has no hesitation in it, the kind that's been thrown many times before. Jonathan folded. Billy grabbed his hair and used the momentum to put him into the wall.
Jonathan slid down it.
Barb screamed. Nancy grabbed Mike before he could move. Billy was already past Jonathan and heading for Lucas, and Nancy stepped into his path and he put one hand on her shoulder and shoved her sideways into the doorframe. Her head connected with the wood and she let out a sharp sound and went down to one knee.
Lucas had gotten himself in a defensive stance — weight back, hands up — which showed some awareness of what was coming even if it didn't help much with the outcome. Billy was bigger, faster, and had been in significantly more fights. He got Lucas by the collar and drove him back into the kitchen cabinets hard enough to rattle everything inside them.
Lucas looked up at him from two inches away.
"You keep away from her," Billy said. His voice had gone very quiet. "You hear me? Every time I see you with her, this is what happens. Every time."
Lucas held his gaze. His jaw was tight and his hands were on Billy's wrist and he was scared, which he would have denied to his grave, and he said: "No."
Billy's eyes went still. "No."
"No," Lucas said again.
Billy let go of his collar. Patted his cheek with just enough force to sting. "You're brave, man. But brave doesn't actually help you."
He pulled his fist back—
"Hey."
Steve's voice came from behind him.
Billy turned.
Steve's right hook caught him on the left cheekbone with the clean, heavy sound of a solid connection, and Billy staggered into the counter and grabbed the edge to stay upright. He touched his face. Looked at his fingers. Then he looked at Steve and something changed in his expression — the anger was still there but underneath it something almost like satisfaction had appeared, the look of someone who has just found what they were looking for.
He laughed.
It was not a comfortable laugh to be in the room with.
"There you go, King Steve." He rolled his neck. "I've been wondering what happened to that guy."
He moved toward Steve, who held his ground, and they traded — Steve landing two body shots, Billy slipping the third and countering to the ribs. Steve got pushed back. Kept his feet.
He landed a proper uppercut that snapped Billy's head up and drove him backward into the dining table. Things went off it and clattered across the floor.
In the back seat of Hopper's cruiser, currently doing sixty on the highway to the Lab, Andy's fists came up.
"Yes!" he said, to nobody. "Hit him again!"
Hopper looked in the rearview mirror. "Hit who?"
"Billy," Andy said, eyes closed, eyeballs moving behind the lids. "Max's brother. He showed up at the house and went after Lucas and now Steve is — oh, that was good."
Hopper stared at the mirror for a second. He looked at the road. He looked at the mirror again. "Are they going to be okay?"
"Steve's holding his own." Andy paused. "For now."
Hopper rubbed his face with one hand. "I cannot deal with this right now."
"Then don't," Andy said reasonably. "I'll keep an eye on it."
Hopper muttered something under his breath that didn't come out as words.
Then Andy's body lurched forward — sudden, hard — his forehead connecting with the back of the front seat with an audible thud.
"Andy—" Hopper hit the brakes.
Andy's hand came up. Don't stop. He sat back slowly, pressing three fingers to his cheek, working his jaw.
"Steve just got hit," he said. His voice had the tight quality of someone breathing through localized pain. "I was in his perspective. When it happens to him, it—" He gestured vaguely. "It happens to me too."
Hopper looked at him in the mirror. "You felt it."
"Yeah." Andy tested the inside of his cheek with his tongue. "Yeah, I felt it."
"Pull back," Hopper said. "Save your strength. Those kids aren't going to kill each other, and we have Demodogs waiting."
Andy sat with it for another second, then exhaled and let the connection drop.
Hopper pressed the accelerator and the cruiser picked up speed again, the Lab's perimeter fence visible now in the distance, a line of darkness against the dark.
Back in the Byers living room, the situation had deteriorated.
Billy had taken real damage — left eye swelling, lip split, something in his expression that had gone past calculated cruelty into something more chaotic and less predictable — and it hadn't slowed him down. If anything it had done the opposite.
He and Steve were both breathing hard. Steve had landed the better punches but Billy had more gas in the tank, or something like it, the specific endurance of someone who had been trained by a life that hit harder than anything in this room.
He threw a feint high and when Steve moved to cover it, drove his other fist into Steve's ribs. Steve's breath came out in a sound that wasn't a word. He doubled forward.
Billy grabbed a bowl off the counter and broke it over Steve's head.
Steve went down to one knee, then one hand, the world doing something unsteady around him. Billy was already on top of him, getting his weight into it, and the punches started landing in the particular mechanical rhythm of someone who has stopped being angry and started just working.
Steve got his forearms up and took most of it there but not all of it.
"Billy, stop!" Max was screaming from somewhere. He could hear Dustin and Mike holding her back.
Jonathan had gotten up. His nose was bleeding — it had been bleeding since the first wall impact — and he was upright through willpower more than anything else. He came across the room and got both arms around Billy from behind, pulling him off.
Billy swore and drove his elbow back into Jonathan's ribs. Jonathan lost the grip. Billy turned and hit him twice in the face — one-two, automatic — and Jonathan went down again, slower this time.
Billy crouched over him.
"You're not bad," he said. He was breathing hard, blood and sweat on his face, and he almost sounded genuine. "I don't have a real problem with you, Byers. But you're letting people walk on you and it doesn't stop unless you make it stop." He grabbed Jonathan's collar, lifted his head. "I'm going to make sure you remember that. And then I'm going to do the same thing to that kid over there."
His eyes went to Lucas.
He raised his fist.
BANG.
The shotgun blast hit the ceiling and the sound of it in the enclosed space was physical — it went through everyone's chest at once, like the air had been briefly removed from the room.
Billy's fist stopped. He went completely still.
Nancy was standing in the middle of the living room.
She hadn't come from anywhere dramatic. She'd just gotten up and gotten the shotgun from where Hopper had left it and racked a shell and fired into the ceiling, and now she was standing there with the barrel lowered and pointed at Billy's center mass and her face was completely steady.
The smoke from the shot curled toward the ceiling. The shell casing had rolled across the floor and come to rest near the couch.
"Get up," Nancy said, to Billy. "And get out of this house."
Billy looked at her. The wildness in his eyes was still there but something else had moved in alongside it — the calculation of someone reassessing a situation. He stood up slowly.
"You're going to shoot me," he said. Not a question. Testing the weight of it.
"I will shoot you in the leg," Nancy said. She said it the same way she might say she'd made dinner reservations. "And then I'll call Hopper and tell him you broke in and attacked four people and I'll have the witnesses to back it up." She tilted her head slightly. "Do you want to find out if I'm serious?"
Billy looked at the barrel. He looked at her face.
He'd encountered a lot of things in his life. He hadn't encountered this exact configuration before.
From his left: Max.
She'd gotten clear of Dustin and Mike while everyone's attention was on Nancy, and she'd moved around the edge of the room to the side cabinet where the medical kit had been sitting since Will's treatment. The syringe was still there — the last one, still capped, still full.
Billy caught her movement a half-second too late.
"Max, don't—"
She put the needle in his neck and pushed the plunger and stepped back in two seconds flat.
Billy grabbed for the injection site. Pulled the syringe out and looked at it. He looked at Max, and whatever was in that look — the shock, the anger, and underneath both of them something that might have been hurt — lasted about four seconds before his legs stopped cooperating.
He grabbed for the back of a chair. Missed.
He went down like a tree — forward, heavy, no broken-fall instinct — and hit the floor of the Byers living room and stayed there, breathing slow and deep, eyes open but tracking nothing.
The room didn't move for a moment.
Then, all at once, it did.
Nancy went to Jonathan, who was sitting up against the wall with his hand pressed to his nose at an angle that meant the nose was broken. She crouched in front of him and looked at his face and said his name and he looked back at her and said he was okay, which was clearly not completely true.
Steve was sitting up on his own, touching his eye experimentally, wincing. The cut on his forehead from the bowl wasn't serious but it was bleeding steadily and he had the look of someone whose various parts were going to feel much worse in the morning.
Barb checked Billy's pulse and his airway and confirmed he was unconscious and would stay that way for several hours. She said it with the clinical efficiency of someone who had looked up what the sedative dosage chart said, back when they were using it for Will.
Lucas was standing near Max. He'd walked over while everything was still in motion and stopped about a foot away, and she hadn't moved away from him, and after a moment he reached out and took her hand. She held on.
"That was extremely competent," Dustin said, looking at Max.
"Yeah," she said.
"I mean genuinely. The timing, the approach vector—"
"Dustin."
"Right, sorry, I'm just—"
"I know," she said.
Nancy looked at her watch.
Time had moved in the way it always did when things were happening — faster than it should have.
She looked around the room. Jonathan had his head tipped back and a wad of paper towels pressed to his nose. Steve was going to have a spectacular black eye by morning and possibly a mild concussion. Billy was on the floor.
"Okay," she said. "Here's how this goes. Barb, you stay. Watch them." She looked at Billy's prone figure. "That dose kept Will under for a while. It'll do the same for him. But if anything changes, you have the shotgun and you know how to use it."
Barb took the gun when Nancy offered it. Checked it. Nodded.
"The rest of us go," Nancy continued.
"Finally," Mike said.
"Mike's giving me directions," Nancy said, preempting the argument about whether the kids were coming. "He's the only one who knows where Hopper marked the tunnel entrance on the map."
"I know where it is too," Lucas said.
"And I have the map in my backpack," Dustin said, already pulling the straps off.
"Then you're all coming," Nancy said, and if there was a trace of reluctance in it, it was small. "But you listen to me when I say move and when I say stop. No exceptions."
"No exceptions," Mike said immediately.
"No exceptions," Lucas confirmed.
"Absolutely no—" Dustin started.
"Dustin," Max said.
"No exceptions," Dustin finished.
Nancy looked at Jonathan.
He'd gotten to his feet and was holding a wad of paper towels to his nose and looking at her with an expression that said he was going and she already knew it.
She handed him the nail bat — Steve's, the one with the nails, the one that had already proven itself tonight. He took it.
Steve raised his hand from the couch.
"I'm going," he said. His voice had the quality of someone who has recently been hit in the head but knows what they're saying.
"You have a concussion," Nancy said.
"Probably," Steve agreed. "I'm still going."
She looked at him for a second. He looked back steadily, with the particular stubbornness of someone who has already lost several things tonight and is holding on to the things he can still affect.
"Fine," she said. "Can you drive?"
"No," Jonathan said.
"I'm driving," Nancy said.
She picked up the flashlights — two of them, fully charged, checked them both — and Jonathan got the keys from the floor where they'd fallen during the fight, and they moved toward the door.
Max paused at the threshold and looked back through the window at the house. Inside, Barbara had already moved the armchair to face the room, the shotgun across her lap, the three unconscious men arranged on the available flat surfaces.
Billy was on the floor in front of the fireplace. Even unconscious and face-down on the Byers rug, he looked like someone who had been through a lot of things he hadn't asked for and had found the worst possible responses to all of them.
"He's going to be okay," Nancy said, quiet, from beside her.
Max watched him for another second.
"I know," she said. She didn't sound like she thought okay was the right word for it. She sounded like someone who understood the difference between okay and fine and safe and none of them meaning the same thing.
She got in the car.
Jonathan's car took the road east through Hawkins, headlights cutting through the tunnel of bare November trees. Nobody talked much. The radio was off. Dustin had the map on his knee and a flashlight pointed at it and gave directions at the intersections.
In the back, Mike stared out the window at the dark shapes of fields and tree lines, doing the math on Eleven and Andy and Hopper and what they were walking into, and working very hard at not arriving at any conclusions.
Back at the house, Barb sat in the armchair and didn't move.
The fire had died to coals. The room was cooling. She could hear the wind in the trees outside, the branches moving against the siding, the particular small sounds of a house that has been through something and is settling back into itself.
She had her hand on the shotgun.
She reached up with her other hand and touched the scar on her stomach, the one that lived under her shirt on her left side, the one that had been there since the night in the Upside Down. Not the kind of scar you get from a surgery. The other kind.
It didn't hurt anymore. Hadn't in months.
She'd spent a long time after — the recovery period, the weeks where she didn't leave her house, the months where she'd had to learn how to be in a room again without checking all the exits — she'd spent all of that time trying to figure out how to get back to the person she'd been before. The careful one. The sensible one.
She'd eventually stopped trying to get back there. Started trying to figure out where she actually was.
She looked at Billy, face-down on the floor. She looked at Steve and Jonathan on the sofas. She looked at the window.
She waited.
Hopper cut the headlights a quarter-mile out and let the cruiser roll the rest of the way in the dark.
The Lab's fence line was visible — chain link, topped with wire, the perimeter lights running off the emergency grid that had stayed active even through everything. The buildings behind it were dark except for the emergency lighting still running in the lower levels.
He let the car stop and sat with the engine off for a moment.
"What are we looking at?" he said.
Andy's eyes were closed. He had the focused stillness of someone reading something very dense at high speed.
"The lower tunnels still have activity," he said. "But less than before. A lot of them were drawn toward the house earlier." He paused. "Owens is inside. He's near the main corridor, east wing. He has people with him — the hazmat team, a few others. They're armed."
"They're waiting for us," Hopper said.
"Feels like it."
Hopper picked the shotgun up from under the seat and checked it. Racked it once, confirmed the load, put the safety on.
He looked in the mirror. Andy's eyes were open now, pale blue and steady in the dark.
In the front seat, Eleven was looking at the building with the expression of someone looking at something they know they have to do and have already accepted the cost of.
"If anything goes wrong in there," Hopper said, and both of them were listening and he meant both of them, "we don't push through it. We pull back, regroup, find another angle. We don't sacrifice the mission trying to be heroes." He looked at them both. "Understood?"
"Understood," Andy said.
Eleven nodded.
Hopper opened the door. The cold air came in, sharp and clean and smelling like November.
They stood outside the car and looked at the Lab — the fence, the dark buildings, the emergency lights throwing yellow pools across the parking lot where Hopper's cruiser had been parked just a few hours ago.
All three of them had bad memories of this place. All three of them walked toward it anyway.
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