The Long Game━ (l. sinclair)

all colors lead to gray (get it?)

In their defense, they'd just biked from one side of town all the way to another. The fact they're still upright should be honored.

"I think we lost them!" said Dustin, but he spoke too soon.

Sam looked around, and right behind her, she immediately saw a multitude of the white and blue vans on Gloucester and reaching Cherry.

She whipped her head back towards Dustin, sarcastically snapping, "You think?"

"GO, GO, GO, GO, GO!" Mike yelled.

He was the first to start peddling in desperate attempts to get away from the Bad Man. Sam, Lucas, and Dustin were right on his trail, biking in fear. The vans were coming onto them so fast that their wheels squeaked loudly when they turned onto Cherry.

"Faster, faster!"

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!"

"If we die, I want you guys to know I love you!"

The Party members biked forward, knowing there were three vans literally right behind them. They wanted nothing more than to evade getting stopped.

But the odds were not in their favor.

Right in front of their eyes, another large van turned from Cherry Oak onto Cherry at top speed.

It was heading right towards them.

They couldn't stop biking, because of the vans behind them, but they couldn't ride forward, because of the van in front of them. The kids were effectively being caged in.

The front van came hurtling towards them, and Sam tried assuring herself that it would have to stop — that they wouldn't purposely run over a bunch of innocent kids. And then, she remembered, that this was the Bad Men, and that they had done far worse to far younger.

And that's when the panic set in.

"SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!"

"TELL MY UNCLE I HATE HIM!"

But they didn't die, not actually.

The second Sam looked to Eleven, Sam knew they weren't going to. At least, not by bike-on-van collision.

Eleven looked nothing short of determined, and if Sam had learned anything about her in the near-week Sam had been in her presence — it was that she got shit done when she wanted to.

Which is precisely what happened when her gaze locked in on their pursuer, those doe, brown eyes becoming empty, pitch black holes in a heartbeat. Eleven jerked her head upwards, sending the thousand-pound commercial van soaring over their heads before finally coming to a rough landing behind them. The loud CRASH resonated through the barren streets.

"Holy shit!" Lucas cackled, turning to look at Eleven with wide eyes as she wiped the blood from her nose.

It was awesome as fuck, of course, but they didn't have time to dwell on it. They couldn't bet on not being followed again, so the Party continued biking like their lives depended on it — their lives did depend on it.

"What's the plan — where can we go?" Dustin called out, pushing aside his own we to focus on the fact they were being tailed by the Bad Men.

"The junkyard!" Sam blurted, reiterating her plan from earlier. She barely skimmed a battered mailbox as she darted into a stranger's backyard so that they could enter the woods through the gap in the trees behind their house. "Through the woods to Mulberry and cut through Oak!"

"What the hell did we get ourselves into?!"

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