"this tainted love you've given,
I give you all a boy could give you,
take my tears and that's not nearly all,
oh, tainted love,
tainted love."
Hawkins was a place where nothing happened. Everything was routine. High school football ga...
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HAWKINS WAS A place where nothing happened. Everything was routine. High school football games were held every Friday night, baseball the following morning. Teenagers spent hours upon hours at the movie theatre, stealing heated kisses in the back row and lying to their parents when they came home late before hurrying to their room to finish some last minute homework. This town was a pit stop. No one ever left, no one ever moved there. Nothing ever happened.
But that was all about to change.
It started on a bone-chilling, cold night. Mallory O'Neil had a Spanish test the following morning and slept restlessly. Her fat, grumpy ginger cat, Cheshire, hissed in annoyance as she suddenly and harshly pulled the covers to her chin, disturbing the feline.
Downstairs, the front door slammed, causing the restless teenager to jolt awake and Cheshire mewed in irritation. Mallory slowly sat up and rubbed her tired eyes, the hair on the back of her neck suddenly standing on end. The brunette pushed back her sheets, exposing herself to the cold and swung her legs around, her bare feet meeting the soft white carpet.
With another mew of protest, the ginger cat was scooped into the girl's arms as she left the room and began to creep along the hallway and down the stairs. She had made it to the last step when she finally heard her father's voice from the kitchen. He spoke hurriedly and through baited breaths.
"We-we lost the girl," he explained, his nervousness clear to Mallory from the sound of his voice.
No one responded. Mallory concluded her father was on the phone, perhaps to a colleague. Mallory glanced at the clock opposite the stairs. Three a.m. She wondered why her father was home so late, his shift was supposed to end three hours ago. Mallory knew not to ask questions about her father's work. Whatever they did at Hawkins Lab, it was top secret. But that never stopped her from being curious, even as a child.
"No, no, eleven," Doctor Andrew O'Neil corrected whoever he was conversing with.
Cheshire began to squirm in Mallory's grasp and she moved from the last step and closer to the kitchen wall, pressing herself against it.
"She's still secure, for now," Andrew said. Even from where Mallory was hiding, she could hear furious, yet indistinguishable, shouts from the person on the phone. "Yes, yes, I know, we'll find her. She won't get far, I promise."
Her father promptly hung up the telephone, leaving the room silent apart from his fast, heavy breaths. Mallory heard him hiss in pain and carefully craned her neck around the corner, peering into the dimly lit kitchen. Dr O'Neil was leaning over the kitchen counter, clutching his arm tightly. Mallory's dark eyes widened at the sight of a large bloodstained smeared across the arm of his pristine white lab coat. Andrew tossed his thick-framed glasses aside and painfully shrugged his lab coat off, revealing the wound.
Mallory almost stepped forward out of the shadows at the sight of it. But her head told her she would get in more trouble for eavesdropping than she would for not helping. There was a long, thin gash across his bicep. It was turning an abnormal purple colour around the edges and seemed to be... smouldering?
