Chapter 33: Running Into Each Other
The bedroom was dim.
Will lurched upright in bed, gasping like he'd been held underwater.
Cold sweat had plastered his bangs flat against his forehead. His eyes darted around the room, wide and wild, still chasing whatever he'd seen on the other side of sleep.
"It found him."
His voice came out raw, barely above a whisper.
He was gripping the blanket so hard his knuckles had gone white. His gaze drifted toward the far corner of the room like he could see straight through the wall, like whatever was down there in the dark underground was still staring back.
Mike had been sitting by the bed, keeping watch over him. At the sudden shout, he flinched hard, then immediately leaned forward, hands firm on Will's trembling shoulders.
"Found who? Will — hey. Look at me. You with me?"
He kept his voice level, the kind of steady that didn't come easy to a kid his age.
"Was it another nightmare?"
Footsteps thundered down the hall. Joyce didn't knock — she never knocked when it sounded like that — she just shoved the door open and was inside before the handle had stopped moving. Her face was tight with the particular kind of fear that never fully went away anymore, not since last year.
"Baby! What happened? What's wrong?"
She crossed to the bed in three steps, eyes sweeping between Will and Mike before locking onto her son's face. She covered his ice-cold hand with both of hers.
The warmth of it seemed to reach him. Some of the raw panic in his expression loosened its grip, replaced by something more focused — something urgent.
He swallowed.
"Hopper."
A beat. Like he was confirming something only he could hear.
"It found Hopper."
Joyce and Mike both went still.
Joyce's stomach dropped. She thought about the drawings. She thought about last night at the school. She put it all together fast, the way she'd learned to. Whatever Will was connected to — whatever was still living inside him from the Upside Down — it was telling him that Hopper was in danger.
Meanwhile, across town, Andy shoved himself up out of the bathtub so fast that saltwater sloshed over the sides and hit the floor in a cold wave.
He ripped off the soaked blindfold. His chest was heaving. His face had gone pale from the double hit of mental shock and whatever the hell had just surged through his head when the connection broke.
He didn't dry off. He barely slowed down.
He stumbled to the corner of the basement and grabbed the clothes off the stool, yanking them on while his brain was still replaying it — the black particles, the seething hate behind that gate, and Hopper's boots stepping down onto the vines like he had any idea what he was walking into.
He grabbed a handful of chocolate bars off the shelf, tore the wrappers off with his teeth, and started shoving them into his mouth as he moved. Sugar. He needed sugar. His hands were shaking from the psychic drain and he needed something in his system now.
He hit the basement stairs at a run.
Outside, the afternoon sun was bright enough to make him squint after all that dark.
He got his bearings fast. The pumpkin farm was south. He started running.
His sneakers slapped the blacktop hard and steady. The wind was sharp and cold against his still-damp skin. He didn't care. He couldn't shake the image: Hopper trapped, those vines alive and feeding, and whatever those black particles were — they weren't just dangerous, they were hungry. That much had come through the connection loud and clear. They didn't just want to defend themselves. They wanted to kill everything warm.
Hopper had no idea.
Andy's lungs were starting to burn. He didn't slow down.
Back at the Byers house, Bob Newby had been trying to leave for the past twenty minutes.
He'd shown up with some puzzle books and a board game, planning to spend a quiet afternoon with Joyce and Will — who was supposedly home sick. It was going to be nice. Normal. His specialty.
But normal had a way of not sticking around this house.
Joyce had been about to send him off with a gentle but firm goodbye when he'd mentioned something offhand about his old nickname — "Brainy Bob," middle school math league, two-time regional champion, not that he was bragging — and something in Joyce's expression had shifted.
She'd called him back.
She'd spread Will's drawings across the kitchen table and asked him, quietly, if he could figure out where they were pointing. She made it sound like a puzzle. She was good at that.
Bob was better at puzzles.
Twenty minutes later, using Lover's Lake as his anchor point and measuring angles with a protractor he'd found in a kitchen drawer, he'd placed his finger on a spot south of town with more confidence than anyone had any right to feel about something like this.
So now they were in Joyce's car — Joyce driving, Bob riding shotgun with the map spread across his knees, Will in the back with his eyes half-closed like he was listening to something none of them could hear. Mike sat next to him, scanning the road out the window with the focused intensity of someone who'd appointed himself lookout.
They were moving fast. Nobody was talking much.
Then Mike said, "Stop the car."
Joyce looked in the rearview mirror. "What?"
"Stop! That's Andy!" He was already half out of his seat. "That's Andy running down the road, stop the car!"
"What?!" Joyce hadn't processed it yet, but her foot was already on the brake — a trust she'd built up over the last year for the kids' instincts, even when she didn't follow the logic. She braked hard and reversed, the back end swinging a little wide.
She vaguely remembered the kid. The one who'd shown up out of nowhere last year. The one who'd pulled Will and Barbara out when nobody else could reach them. Andy.
Andy heard the engine before he saw the car — a vehicle, coming from ahead, slowing down wrong for this stretch of empty road. He tensed up immediately. His right hand came up instinctively, telekinesis already coiling at his fingertips. Lab transport. Government plates. Could be anyone. He was not going back.
But the car didn't speed up or swing wide to cut him off. It braked hard, slewed around, and reversed straight to him, the rear bumper stopping about a foot away.
The back door flew open.
Mike Wheeler leaned out, his face a collision of pure disbelief and pure relief.
"Andy?! Oh my God — get in, get in the car, right now!"
Andy stood there for a second with his telekinesis half-cocked.
Then he saw Will's face through the window, looking at him with this tight, anxious expression that meant he already knows something too, and behind the wheel Joyce Byers with white knuckles and dark circles, and some guy in the passenger seat Andy didn't recognize who looked like he'd wandered into the wrong movie and hadn't figured out how to leave.
Andy let the gathered energy dissolve.
"I need to find Hopper," he said.
"That's where we're going! Get in!"
Mike didn't wait for more of an answer. He grabbed Andy by the arm and pulled him inside. The door slammed.
The car was cramped. Andy ended up wedged between Mike and the door, and before he could say anything Mike had thrown both arms around him in a hug that was more collision than embrace, slapping him hard on the back twice.
"Dude, we've been trying to figure out what happened to you all year. You just — you disappeared. Are you okay? What's going on?"
Andy felt something he hadn't expected: warmth. Actual warmth, rising up through all the cold and the dread and the drain of the last few hours.
He didn't know what to say. How to explain any of it — the hiding, the argument with Hopper, what he'd found out about his mother, what he'd seen at the bottom of that underground network. Too much. Too complicated.
"I'm..." He stopped. Looked out the window instead.
Joyce was watching him in the rearview mirror with an expression he couldn't quite read. Not suspicious — more like she was filing things away, adding this piece to a picture she was already trying to put together.
She didn't ask.
A moment later, Andy caught something in his peripheral vision — a direction, a pull — right as Will leaned forward and said, quietly but clearly: "Turn right."
Joyce looked up. "What?"
Andy was already nodding. "He's right. Turn right. Now."
Joyce didn't second-guess it, didn't even check the road signs. She just cranked the wheel.
The car swung hard, tires screeching, and then they were bouncing off the highway and straight into the pumpkin field — no road, no path, just dead vines and scattered pumpkins and the frozen rutted ground underneath.
The car bucked and jolted like it was trying to throw them all out. A scarecrow materialized in the headlights and Joyce hit it dead center without flinching, straw and burlap exploding off the hood. Pumpkins crunched and burst under the wheels, orange guts spattering the undercarriage.
"Hold on!" Joyce shouted, fighting the steering wheel.
Everyone grabbed something. Bob, white-knuckling the handle above the door, made a sound that was somewhere between a prayer and a yelp.
Then the headlights found it — Hopper's police cruiser, sitting in the middle of the field like it'd been planted there.
Joyce hit the brakes. The car skidded through the mud and stopped with about four inches to spare before the rear bumper of Hopper's car. The engine shuddered and cut out.
Silence. Just their breathing.
"Is everyone okay?" Joyce said, scanning the back seat.
Andy was already gone.
He'd pushed the door open before the car had fully stopped and was moving across the mud at a jog, his attention locked ahead — not on the police car, on the ground past it. His mental perception reached down through the soil without him consciously deciding to use it.
He found the entrance. He found Hopper's presence, warm and alive but stressed, somewhere below. He found the network of vines, coiled and hostile, pressing in from all sides.
Alive. Hopper was still alive. But not for long if Andy didn't move.
"Andy! Wait!" Joyce had her seatbelt off and was already out of the car behind him. She called back over her shoulder, "Bob, stay with the kids — don't get out!"
The hole Hopper had dug was almost completely sealed over. Thick, dark red vines had woven themselves across the opening in a mesh so dense there wasn't a gap to see through. The soil around the edges was slick with some kind of organic mucus. The smell coming up from below was sweet and rotten and wrong in a way that made Andy's jaw tighten.
He didn't have time to think about it. He didn't have time to think about Joyce coming up behind him, about what she'd see.
He planted his feet, spread both hands toward the vines, and pushed.
Not physically. The telekinesis hit the vines like a wedge being driven through wood — massive, focused, precise — and then Andy wrenched his arms apart.
The sound was horrible. Like tearing something that was still alive, because it was still alive. Dark red sap burst from the severed ends. The vines ripped apart in both directions, dragging chunks of soil and root structure with them, opening a gap that was twice the size of what Hopper had originally dug.
Andy lowered his arms. Stared at what he'd done for about half a second.
Huh. That had been easier than expected.
He filed that away and jumped in.
The telekinesis cushioned his landing at the bottom — soft touchdown on wet, vine-covered ground. The air down here was cold and damp and smelled like a greenhouse that had gone badly wrong. The cave walls were threaded with moving vines, thin tendrils constantly reaching, searching.
Any vine that got within arm's reach of him got cut.
He moved fast, following Hopper's presence like a signal, weaving through the branching tunnels while smaller vines slapped at his arms and legs and got sliced apart before they could get a grip. Dark red sap flecked his jacket. He kept moving.
He heard Hopper before he saw him — the strained, labored breathing of someone fighting a losing battle against something that was slowly crushing the air out of him.
Andy rounded a bend in the tunnel and stopped.
Hopper was pinned against the earthen wall like a specimen, four thick vines wrapped around him — one coiling around his neck, two more locking his arms to his sides, the rest binding his legs. His face had gone red from the one at his throat. He was still fighting, still trying to work his fingers under the vine at his neck, but his movements were slowing down.
Andy didn't say anything. He raised both hands, aimed, and tore.
The vines came apart all at once. Sap sprayed the walls. The severed ends flopped and writhed on the tunnel floor before going still.
Hopper lurched forward, catching himself on one knee, and spent the next several seconds just coughing — deep, ragged coughs that sounded like he was trying to get his lungs working again from scratch.
Andy stood back, keeping his mental focus spread out around them, watching the remaining vines in the tunnel.
Hopper finally looked up.
"Oh, my God, kid." His voice was wrecked. He stared at Andy for a long moment. "How the hell did you know to come here?"
"I was... doing something. Psychically." Andy kept it short. "I saw what was down here, and I saw you go in."
Before he could say more, Joyce's voice echoed down the tunnel: "Hopper! Andy! Where are you?"
Hopper's eyes sharpened immediately. He straightened up, still a little shaky. "Joyce is down here? Who else?"
"Mike, Will, and some guy I don't know. They were already looking for you when I ran into them on the road."
Hopper's expression went grim. He bent down, picked up his mud-caked cowboy hat from the ground, and without any hesitation — without explanation — settled it onto Andy's head instead of his own.
The brim came down over most of Andy's face.
Then Hopper straightened up and called out in a rough, carrying voice: "Over here! Joyce, we're over here!"
Flashlight beams sliced through the vine-covered dark. A few seconds later Joyce appeared, scrambling through a low section of tunnel with Bob right behind her, both of them covered in mud and looking like they'd had a rough thirty seconds getting down there.
Joyce saw Hopper standing upright and visibly deflated with relief. She crossed the distance and hugged him — hard, unsentimental, the hug of someone who'd been genuinely scared — then immediately pushed back and started looking him over.
"Are you hurt? What happened? What is all this?"
"I'm fine." Hopper's voice had some of its usual roughness back. "Thanks to—"
He glanced at Bob. Then at the small figure standing quietly beside him, hat pulled low, face mostly in shadow.
He didn't finish the sentence.
"What are you doing down here?" he said instead, sharper. "It's not safe."
Joyce had already spotted Andy in her quick scan of the tunnel. Her eyes lingered on the oversized hat for exactly one second — the kind of second where a person adds something up and decides not to say it out loud. She looked away.
Bob was shining his flashlight around at the wriggling vines with an expression caught somewhere between horrified and scientifically fascinated.
"Hey, Bob," Hopper said.
"Hey, Jim," Bob said, not taking his eyes off a vine that was slowly reaching toward his ankle.
Then other footsteps — faster, more of them — came echoing down from the entrance above.
"Move! Clear the area! Prepare to execute cleanup procedures!"
The voice was flat and official, run through a loudspeaker, all the human warmth processed out of it.
Hopper's face went tight. The Lab. Of course.
"Go. Now." No explanation needed. He grabbed Joyce by the arm and got moving, eyes cutting sideways to make sure Andy and Bob were following. He dropped his voice, specifically to Andy: "Stay close to me. Keep your head down. Don't make a sound."
They scrambled back through the tunnel, back up through the widened opening, and pulled themselves out into the cold night air.
They were immediately lit up by headlights.
Three black SUVs with Hawkins National Laboratory stenciled on the doors were parked in a semicircle across the field. A team of personnel in white hazmat suits and gas masks were moving with practiced efficiency, rolling out caution tape, unloading heavy equipment, getting into position.
Hopper stepped in front of Andy without making it look deliberate — just shifted his body, using the bulk of his frame to block the view from the Lab's direction. Joyce and Bob moved in instinctively, closing the gap.
The hazmat team leader spoke through the gas mask in a muffled, bureaucratic drone.
"All unauthorized personnel, evacuate immediately. This is a controlled decontamination procedure. Clear the area."
Then the flamethrowers lit up.
The jets of fire were almost white at the core. They roared into the cave opening with a sound like the air itself catching, and the heat hit everyone standing nearby like a door being opened on a furnace. The vines at the entrance carbonized and curled within seconds. The fire chased itself down into the tunnel network, and the whole underground cavity became a chimney.
And then, from across the field near Joyce's car, Will started screaming.
It wasn't a scared scream. It was a pain scream — the kind that cuts right through everything — and it didn't stop.
Mike's voice layered over it: "Will! Will, hey, Will—!"
Joyce snapped around like she'd been hit. Her whole body turned toward her son's voice. She was moving before anyone could say anything, Hopper reaching for her arm a half-second too late.
Andy saw it from where he was standing. Will had collapsed into the mud beside the car, convulsing, limbs going in all directions. Mike was on his knees next to him trying to hold him still and getting thrown off with each spasm. Even from this distance Andy could see the angry red marks spreading across the skin of Will's neck and wrists, like he was being burned from the inside.
Andy understood it immediately. The vines. The underground network. Will still had a connection to it — the same connection those black particles had exploited on Halloween, the same thing Andy had seen threaded through Will's consciousness like dark roots. The Lab's fire wasn't just burning the vines. For Will, it was like the burning was happening to him.
Andy was already moving.
His hand came up, mental energy already gathering, already reaching for the connection he could feel between the flames and the invisible thread running straight into Will—
A hand closed around his wrist.
He stopped.
He looked down at the hand, then up.
Hopper.
There was no anger in his face. No blame. Just this absolute, focused gravity — the look of a man who had already thought through every version of what happened next and knew which one ended worst. His eyes were sharp and steady in the firelight.
He shook his head. A tiny movement. Barely visible to anyone more than two feet away.
But completely clear.
Andy stood there and felt the energy in his hands with nowhere to go.
He watched Will convulsing in the mud. He watched Mike trying to help and not knowing how. He watched Joyce running across the field toward her son, and he watched the Lab personnel standing at a clinical distance, and he watched the fire roaring in the ground behind all of them.
He stood still. His hands dropped to his sides. His jaw was tight enough to ache.
Hopper felt Andy stop fighting the hold. He relaxed his grip — a little — but didn't let go.
He turned his face toward Will. The muscle in his jaw jumped.
He knew. Andy could see that he knew exactly what was happening to Will right now. He wasn't stopping Andy because he didn't care. He was stopping Andy because he'd already run the math on what exposure would cost Eleven. What it would cost Andy. What it would cost everyone the Lab could then reach.
The fire crackled and roared behind them.
Across the field, Will's screams carried thin and sharp through the cold Indiana air.
Andy stood still. He didn't use his abilities. He breathed, slowly, through the helplessness and the fury, and he kept his eyes open because looking away felt like abandoning Will entirely.
The night burned on around them.
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