STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED_JIM HOPPER

060

"Okay, I...I see the mood here is bleak," Murray started carefully, eyes bouncing from one worried face to another. "And understandably so. But I do think we need to consider the very real possibility that this mystery woman is, in fact, KGB. And she's—"

He didn't get to finish his conspiracy theory before Joyce was trampling all over the suggestion. "No. She's telling the truth. When we were in the lab, those particles we saw, they were alive. And if they're alive, that means a gate's open in Hawkins."

"Gate? What does this mean?" Dimitri inquired in bemusement.

Ana could only shake her head in exasperation as Hopper's touch disappeared when he stood and began pacing. "For us, gate translates to fucked," she remarked to the disgraced guard, causing his eyes to widen.

"It means we have to go home right now," Hopper pressed with finality. "What is taking so long? I thought you said he was close."

When it came to Yuri, close likely meant he was biding time to concoct an alternate plan for betrayal. Yet, everyone had lifted from their seats to trail after Hopper as he lumbered towards the window to overlook the smuggler's tinkering.

Murray seemed to hold the same disbelief because he scoffed loudly and grumbled, "yeah, close to sabotaging us, you mean."

"We think he's playing us again," Dimitri said, paralleling his pessimism. No one held any belief that the pilot was out in the snow doing his absolute best.

"So put a goddamn gun to his head," Hopper asserted through gritted teeth, restraint wearing thin to the point of snapping.

"And then what? He just spits out more lies," Dimitri countered, and not without reason. Yuri had double-crossed them all too many times to count. It was understandable that any measure of faith they held in the criminal was a little shaky.

This observation seemed to deflate some of Hopper's palpable anger, to be replaced by an exhaustion that drew down his eyes. He busied his hands with unwrapping a cigarette pack as Murray mused around them, pulling out two thin white sticks to pass Ana one, the other finding its home behind his ear.

"It's moot anyway," the bespectacled man reasoned. "If your kids are truly in some kind of imminent danger, even if we were to leave at this very moment, we wouldn't make it in time. The earliest we can get there is late tomorrow." And that would be far too little too late.

Their one voice of confidence, the only one of maintained conviction, really, came from Joyce. "No, we...we don't have to make it back. Not tonight," she rationalized. "Whatever this evil is, we know it's connected to the hive mind. And now we know part of that hive mind is in Russia. So we don't need to get back to Hawkins to fight it." Hive mind, like peanut butter, was another thing Ana hoped to forget existed one day.

"All we need is to destroy those particles," Hopper surmised, the understanding bringing some of the sureness back into his blue eyes.

At this, Joyce vehemently nodded her head in confirmation. "And if we're lucky, it'll hurt it enough to give the kids the upper hand." What they could do was buy their children more time, if nothing else, and hope their labors weren't in vain.

This plan seemed plausible enough to Joyce, Hopper, and Ana, but Murray certainly wasn't sold. "Wait, time out," he barked, dramatically waving his arms about. "We're talking about the particles inside the prison? The prison that we just narrowly escaped from?"

"We broke out. We can break back in," Hopper stated as if it were that simple.

This dismissal had Murray careening his head towards Ana, and she thought she might've heard his neck crack with the way that it whipped towards her, his stare begging for support. However, he only received a noncommittal shrug in return. "Like he said. Easy peasy."