THE FLEA AND THE ACROBAT
“i have problems too, but i'm not 'mental'”
CHARLIE SIGHED AS SHE PUT ON THE ONLY DRESS she owned, the white collar slightly bent around her neck, the rest of the fabric black. The sleeves went down to her wrists, flaring slightly over her hands and she looked up at herself in the mirror in her bedroom. She could see the bags under her eyes from not being able to sleep last night, the creature from that photo and the woods roaming through her brain and she put her hands over her face, voice muffling through them.
After a second of being annoyed at her exhaustion, she dropped her hands, shook it off, put a brush through her hair and then walked out of her room, coming out into the again-cluttered living room. Hopper was laying on the couch, drool pooling on the pillow beneath his head and his uniform still on. Charlie decided to not wake him up since he was probably having a bad week already, and let him rest, even if it meant he’d miss the funeral.
She walked over to the bowl sitting by the door, going to grab her keys when she found they weren’t there. Frowning, she looked around the dark room, hardly being able to see anything clearly in the dim light, so she reached over, flicking on the switch. Nothing happened. Furrowing her eyebrows, she flicked the switch again, the lamp overhead still not turning on, and she huffed, guessing the power had gone on the off again. She stepped around the room with her hands outstretched in front of her, finally finding her keys sitting by the kitchen sink, and then walking back to the door, grabbing her coat before heading out.
“‘Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. Yes, I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’,” Pastor Charles spoke from his Bible, looking out at the crowd surrounding Will’s grave. The wind blew harsh across Charlie’s face as she looked down at her feet, standing next to Lonnie, who she hadn’t even realized was in town. “It’s times like these that our faith is challenged. How, if He is truly benevolent… could God take from us someone so young, so innocent? It would be easy to turn away from God… but we must remember that nothing, not even tragedy, can separate us from His love. We are here today to find comfort in the truth of scripture, and to surround Will and his family…”
There was some quiet mumbling behind Charlie and she turned her head the slightest bit to see Dustin Henderson whispering to Lucas Sinclair and Mike Wheeler. The curly-haired boy met her gaze, stopping his talking when she raised an eyebrow at him, and he looked down to his feet with a red face. She was slightly confused, but turned back to the grave, swallowing. Right as they put Will’s coffin in his grave, he could actually be out there somewhere, taken by that terrifying creature from the woods. There was no point of this funeral apart from humoring the public who didn’t know any better.
As the crowd started to disperse, Charlie moved her way over to Jonathan, looping her arm with his and he smiled sadly because even though Will was still out there, a funeral for the boy was an awful thing to go through. People walked past the Byers’, giving their condolences that were only accepted by Lonnie. Joyce was standing with her arms crossed, ignoring the crowd around her, only staring down into her son’s fake grave.
The Wheelers’ made their way past, Karen and Ted hugging and shaking hands with Lonnie, before heading out of the graveyard, planning on attending the reception that had been planned afterwards. Nancy was next after her parents, but she ignored Lonnie completely, stepping up to Jonathan and Charlie with a determined expression.
“Come on, let’s go somewhere more private,” Charlie told them, knowing what the girl wanted to talk about and she looked around at all the prying eyes of the town of Hawkins surrounding them. She beckoned the two of them to follow her and they walked a few yards from the funeral, winding around graves before Charlie sat down behind a fenced off area, it having enough cover that no one would question what they were doing.
“Are we sure this… isn’t someone’s grave?” Nancy asked, gulping slightly when Jonathan and Charlie sat down without a thought.
The taller brunette sighed, patting the ground to the left of her. “Come on, Drew. There’s no body here, I swear. No tombstone, right?”
“Yeah… right,” she didn’t seem so sure, but sat down where Charlie was gesturing to, placing her purse gingerly beside her.
“So, what have we got?” Charlie asked, looking between the other two.
Jonathan cleared his throat, taking a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolding it. It showed a small map of Hawkins, red-marker crosses showing on certain parts of it. He passed it to Charlie so she could hold it, seeing as she was in the middle and that meant everybody could see it clearly.
“This is where we know for sure it’s been, right?” Jonathan said, pointing to each of the crosses, Charlie furrowing her eyebrows to tell where they were pointing to.
“So, that’s…” Nancy started, bringing a finger to one on the west of the map.
“Steve’s house,” Charlie stated, being able to recognize it purely on the side of Hawkins it sat on.
Jonathan nodded and then moved his finger to a cross just below it. “And that’s the woods where they found Will’s bike and…” He switched to point to a cross further to the south. “That’s my house.”
“It’s all so close,” Nancy said, surprised, bringing her coat tighter around her as the wind blew past them. The girl, unconsciously, brought herself closer to Charlie and the brunette was hyper-aware of her position, swallowing down some nerves that creeped up from her stomach.
“So, what does that mean exactly?” Charlie asked, distracting herself.
“Well, it means it’s all within a mile or something,” Jonathan explained, looking up at the two girls. “Whatever this thing is, it’s… it’s not traveling far.”
There was a bit of silence before Charlie breathed out, knowing what they were both thinking. “Before either of you say anything, I just want to say how stupid this could be.”
“Yeah, if we aren’t prepared,” Nancy said, giving the other girl a pointed look.
“Jesus…” Charlie groaned into her hand, raising her head after a few more seconds. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Fine, let’s do this. Let’s go and hunt this thing.”
“We might not even find anything,” Jonathan frowned, not seeming that convinced of the other two’s hopeful tones.
“We found something before,” Nancy told him. “We can do it again.”
“So, it’s decided?” Charlie asked. “We’re gonna kill this thing?”
She looked between the other two and they nodded, and the brunette was slightly bemused at the situation she was in. She was about to go and kill a creature in the woods with the help of Jonathan Byers and Nancy Wheeler.
“Alright, then,” Charlie said as she got up, patting off her dress. “Well, I’m gonna go get some things from my house. And get out this stupid dress. I’ll meet you two behind Jonathan’s house at, like… 3:00, yeah?”
“Sounds good,” Jonathan agreed, getting up as well, Nancy doing the same. “I need to get some things, too.”
Charlie nodded and started walking across the graveyard, silently thanking herself for not wearing heels, knowing that they would be sinking into every hole in the mud. As she was about to get to her car, there was a hand on her shoulder, Nancy appearing beside her.
“Could you give me a ride?” Nancy asked, giving her a small smile before briefly looking over to where her mom’s station wagon was, it having driven off to the reception a while ago. “Uh, I don’t really have any other way to get home.”
“Yeah, sure, Drew. Get in,” Charlie chuckled to herself, unlocking the car and Nancy smiled wider, walking around to the other side. “You know, you owe me now, right?”
“Whatever you say, Lottie,” Nancy smirked, opening up her door, about to get in when she stopped herself, looking back at Charlie over the roof. “Your dress doesn’t look stupid, by the way. I thought it looked quite nice.”
“I do not take payment in compliments,” Charlie shook her head, a smile on her own face, much to her will to keep it down. “Good try, though.”
Little did she know, Nancy wasn’t trying to get even, she was just being honest.
“What the hell happened to our house?” Charlie asked as her eyes widened at the sight of everything on the floor or torn from the wall, the ceiling, the floor. She had just dropped Nancy off at her house, going back to the trailer to grab something from Hopper’s bedside table. Hopper was sitting on the ground, back leaning against the partition between the kitchen and the living room, a beer bottle by his feet, it being one of many. He looked up at her slowly, eyes red-rimmed, but a smile was spread on his face.
“Hey, you’re home,” the man slurred and Charlie sighed, putting her keys in her jacket pocket and walking over to him, trying to help him get up from the ground.
“Come on. Up you get,” she mumbled, the man groaning as he let the girl take his arm around her shoulder, moving it over to the couch, before letting him fall down onto it. She sighed, putting a hand to her head as she stared down at her uncle. “Can you please answer my question?”
“It was the…” He hiccuped and pointed up at the ceiling, his arm wobbling from side to side. “Government. Bastards… bugged the place.”
Charlie furrowed her eyebrows, and rolled her eyes out of pure disbelief. “Right, okay, Hops. You’ve been drinking, get some rest. You’ve probably torn out everything that they could have bugged anyway.”
“Yeah, I did,” Hopper mumbled proudly, Charlie passing him a pillow from the ground which he held tight to his chest. She looked at him for a few more seconds, realizing he was completely out of it and she walked into the kitchen, filling a glass of water and grabbing some Tylenol from under the sink. She headed back over, placing them both on the table next to the couch, leaving them there for when he started to come out of his drunk state.
“Tylenol and water are on the side, Hops,” she said, patting him on the shoulder, getting a grunt out of him and then she made her way into his bedroom, knowing he was too drunk to even care. She crouched down in front of the bedside table, opening up the top drawer to find his double-action revolver, picking it up along with a couple bullets rolling around beside it. She put them in her bag, and then moved into her own bedroom, getting dressed into someone much more fitting for a hunt and she was ready to go and meet the others.
The living room was filled with Hopper’s snores and mumbling, Charlie able to sneak past without a problem, only hearing some words make sense from the drunk man’s mouth. “I’m… sorry… hate me… alive… the lab…”
She shook her head after spending a few seconds trying to decipher them and slipped back out the front door, the time just ticking past 2:45.
“I can hear you from a mile away,” Charlie teased, walking up into the clearing behind Jonathan’s house, seeing the boy trying to shoot some cans sitting on tree stumps a few meters away. The sun was rolling towards the west faster and faster as they got further into winter, it stretching out shadows over the grass as Jonathan turned his head to meet her eyes.
“Didn’t think the kickback was going to be this much of a problem,” he sighed, reloading the semi-automatic pistol and aiming up at the bottles again. “I’ve been practicing since I got home.”
He lifted the gun up, Charlie stepping up beside him, and he pulled the trigger, only smoke billowing out from the barrel, the bullet shooting into the dirt between the cans. The taller brunette cheered and clapped, earning her a roll of eyes from Jonathan as he let the gun drop to his side.
“I don’t know why Charlie’s cheering, you’re supposed to hit the cans, right?” Nancy joked, making her presence known as she walked towards them, a baseball in her hand and adorning some new clothes.
“No, actually, you see the spaces in between the cans?” Jonathan asked, pointing to them as she walked over to him and Charlie. “I’m aiming for those.”
“Well, in that case…” Charlie laughed, patting him on the back. “You’re doing a great job.”
Jonathan chuckled, clicking on the safety, looking over to Nancy. “You ever shot a gun before?”
Nancy scoffed, Charlie just barely keeping back a laugh. “Have you met my parents?” Charlie continued to laugh and Nancy hit her shoulder gently with a small smile. “All right, it’s not that funny.”
Charlie calmed herself down, massaging her shoulder while Jonathan reloaded the gun again. “Yeah, I haven’ shot one since I was ten. My dad took me hunting on my birthday.” The boy swallowed as he took a bullet after bullet out of his jacket pocket. “He made me kill a rabbit.”
“A rabbit?” Nancy asked with a concerned expression.
“Yeah,” Jonathan sighed, shrugging slightly embarrassed. Charlie watched him, surprised he was opening up like this with Nancy, but she was complaining. “I guess he thought it would make me into more of a man or something. I cried for a week.”
“Jesus,” Nancy breathed out.
“What? I’m a fan of Thumper,” Jonathan joked.
Charlie rolled her eyes at her best friend’s obliviousness. “She was talking about Lonnie.”
“Oh, right, yeah,” the boy chuckled slightly, the two girls joining in. “I guess he and my mother loved each other at some point, but…” He cocked the gun in his hands. “I wasn’t around for that part.”
He was about to hold up the gun, but Nancy held out a gloved hand, wanting to have a go. He widened his eyes slightly, Charlie not entirely surprised, and he passed it over. “Um, yeah. Just, uh, point and shoot.”
Nancy nodded, holding the gun for a few seconds. “I don’t think my parents ever loved each other.”
The confession continued to surprise Charlie, she didn’t realize she had set up a sharing session when she suggested they all meet up here. Honestly, she was biting back her tongue to speak about her own issues, but she thought she’d ruin the sentimental mood. Her parents story didn’t exactly have a moral or a conclusion, it just ended and even nine years later, she hated thinking about it.
“They must’ve married for some reason,” Jonathan said, trying to make the girl feel better.
Nancy raised the gun, responding. “My mom was young.” She clicked off the safety. “My dad was older, but he had a cushy job, money, came from a good family.” She tightened her grip around the trigger, keeping her hands wrapped around each other. “So they bought a nice house at the end of the cul-de-sac… and started their nuclear family.” Charlie watched the girl with a sympathetic expression, Nancy pushing her tongue to the corner of her lips to concentrate.
“Fuck that, right?” Charlie suggested, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” Nancy scoffed. “Fuck that.” She pulled the trigger and the bullet shot right into the can in front of her, smoke rising in the late afternoon, tree stump laying bare.
Jonathan let out a shocked laugh at what he had seen, but Charlie didn’t say anything, keeping her hand gripped around her own gun in her pocket. Nancy let her arms lower, pretty surprised herself, but she looked over at Charlie. “Your turn.”
Nancy passed over the gun, but Charlie shook her head, taking out her own and waving it in the air. “I’m good, thanks.” The smaller brunette took a minute to process, but nodded, Charlie focusing her sights on the last remaining cans on the tree stumps. “So, I guess it’s my go to share, right?” No one answered, but she could tell they were waiting, and she bit the bullet, no pun intended. “Well, my parents are dead, not much to say there. From the reports, the car crash killed them both instantly… Gone in just a matter of seconds.”
“Charlie, I’m sorry–” Nancy was going to say, but Charlie shook her head.
“Don’t be. I’m sure as hell not,” Charlie said, her voice bitter. She didn’t care what they thought of that because it was how she really felt, she had just never said it aloud before. Not to anyone. “You know, I think I only ever saw them a couple weeks a year. I’d come home from school and find a babysitter waiting for me, telling me my parents had gone away again. I mean, I knew almost every goddamn teenager down my street by the time I was five years old. It’s stupid… but I thought, maybe, my parents were actually doing something important, like, they were spies or something, but no… They were just not bothered at all that their daughter was sitting at home, alone, growing up without them.”
Charlie cleared her throat, aware of the tears that were threatening to spill from her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them because her parents didn’t deserve them. “So when I heard about that car crash, I think… I was happy. Only a little bit… because it meant the loneliness had a better reason than just being left behind.”
Raising the gun, she did as she was taught, held her breath and pulled the trigger three times. There were three clangs of metal, three plumes of smoke and three empty wooden stumps. She had hit all three targets, Jonathan and Nancy staring at them with astonishment.
“I’m happy they’re gone,” Charlie finished, lowering the gun as if nothing had happened. “Now I can get on with my life without the constant thought that I mean nothing to the people who brought me into this world.”
She looked over at the other two, seeing Jonathan biting the inside of his cheek and Nancy looking back with the shock still all over her face. Charlie raised an eyebrow. “What? Too much?”
“No… uh, no,” Nancy stammered, gulping down the thought that if she had stuck around all those years ago, maybe she could have heard that sooner. Understood her sooner. “I just– How did you learn to shoot like that?”
Charlie knew the girl wanted to ask more about her parents, but she was thankful that Nancy didn’t do that, because she didn’t know how she would answer. “Chief of Police, Jim Hopper, is my uncle. He taught me how to shoot by the time I turned ten.”
“But… how?” Nancy questioned, now just out of pure curiosity.
“Okay, come here.” Nancy furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, but walked over, Jonathan staying silent as he watched the two girls. Charlie put her gun back into her pocket, standing behind Nancy and passing over instructions. “Raise the gun like you did before.” The smaller girl did as she was told, her hands squeezing over each other as they aimed at the tree stumps. Charlie turned to Jonathan. “You have any more cans?”
“Uh, yeah,” he answered quickly, grabbing some from where his stuff was lying in the grass, putting three on the stumps before walking back beside them.
“Okay, thanks,” Charlie nodded to him, before putting her hands over Nancy’s straightening the girl’s arms out a bit more. Nancy’s swallowed, her breath getting caught in her throat.
“You need to loosen your elbows, don’t lock them up.”
Nancy followed her instructions, relaxing her body and she could feel Charlie’s breath on her neck. It confused her how it could flip her stomach so much, just that single motion.
“Now, you need to take a deep breath.”
Nancy was already unable to breath so that was not a problem. “Aim at the first can and shoot, then aim at the second and shoot, then aim at the last one and shoot. Don’t waste a second, just go.”
Charlie stepped back and Nancy did as she was told, pulling the trigger at the first can, hitting it, pulling the trigger at the second can, hitting it too, and finally pulling the trigger at the last can, hitting it last. Nancy let out a small laugh, happy with herself and she turned back to Charlie and Jonathan, smiling widely and Charlie returned it.
“Look, you’re a natural,” Charlie told her, and Nancy felt her stomach flipping once again.
Jonathan stared up at the sun, seeing it just hitting the treeline and he picked up his bag. “I think we should get going.”
“Yeah, okay,” Charlie nodded, both her and Nancy grabbing their own stuff and the three of them headed into the woods, ready to hunt a motherfucking monster.
“Why did you take that picture?” Nancy asked as their boots crunched through the leaves of the wood. They had trekked for at least an hour by now, the sun hidden behind the clouds and drowning everything in a gray light, Jonathan now carrying the bat while the girls took control of the guns. Charlie took the lead of the group, deciding the way they were going, and she turned her head at the sound of the other girl’s voice.
Jonathan was startled and just blurted out a quick response. “What?”
“That picture you took of me, you never said why you took it,” Nancy clarified, moving her way up from the back of the group to walk beside the boy.
“Oh, uh… I don’t know,” Jonathan shrugged, looking over at Charlie for guidance, but she merely shrugged and looked ahead. It wasn’t because she didn’t care, but because she didn’t know why Jonathan took it either, so she couldn’t filter anything he said. He thought for a moment, realizing he didn’t have the taller girl’s help. “I guess… I saw this girl, you know, trying to be someone else. But for that moment… It was like you were alone, or you thought you were. And, you know, you could just be yourself.”
There was silence for a moment, and Charlie wondered if they were just staring at each other behind her, so she looked and saw for herself. Nancy looked slightly pissed off if anything. “That is such bullshit.”
Jonathan paused, shocked. “Wh-What?”
Charlie groaned quietly to herself, leaning back on a tree, hoping this would be over as quick as it had started. It didn’t seem it would be that way as Nancy rounded on the boy. “I am not trying to be someone else. Just because I’m dating Steve and you don’t like him–”
“You know what?” Jonathan cut across her, carrying on walking past Charlie, the taller girl raising an eyebrow as she was overtaken. “Forget it. I just thought it was a good picture.”
“He’s actually a good guy,” Nancy called after him, also overtaking Charlie, and the girl rolled her eyes, pushing herself off the tree to catch up with them.
“O-Okay,” Jonathan said back, not sounding like he cared.
“Yesterday, with the camera…” Nancy sighed, stopping Jonathan again. “He’s not like that at all. He was just being protective.”
Charlie had a few things to say about that, but she thought this whole thing would get a bit messy if she added her own issues. Jonathan shrugged, carrying on walking once again. “Yeah, that’s one word for it.”
“Guys, can we just cool it?” Charlie asked, knowing that if a creature was going to come after them, it would be attracted to all this noise and they were trying to get the jump on it, not alert it of their presence.
Nancy ignored her, however. “Oh, and I guess what you did was okay?”
“No, I… I never said that,” Jonathan retorted.
“Charlie had to force you to say sorry, and Steve had every right–”
Jonathan turned on her with a scowl. “Okay, all right. Does that mean I have to like him?”
“No,” Nancy said.
“Jesus… Guys, come on,” Charlie complained, seeing as the two had stopped in the middle of the woods once again. “Can we just keep moving?”
Once again, she was ignored as Jonathan glared at Nancy. “Listen, don’t take it personally, okay? I don’t like most people. He’s in the vast majority. Charlie is in the minority. Pretty simple.”
He turned away from her, Charlie leaning her head on a tree, extremely bored. Nancy stopped the boy walking again. “You know, I was actually starting to think that you were okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Nancy double-downed. “Yeah, I was thinking, ‘Jonathan Byers, maybe he’s not the pretentious creep everyone says he is’.”
“Can you both shut the hell up?” Charlie asked them, the two turning to her.
“No!”
Charlie leaned back on the tree with a groan.
Jonathan turned back to Nancy. “Well, I was just starting to think you were okay.”
“Oh,” Nancy scoffed.
“I was thinking, ‘Nancy Wheeler, she’s not just another suburban girl who thinks she’s rebelling by doing exactly what every other suburban girl does… until that phase passes and they marry some boring, one-time jock who now works sales, and they live out a perfectly boring little life at the end of a cul-de-sac’,” Jonathan snapped, Charlie leaning her head off the tree with one eyebrow raised in shock. “‘Exactly like their parents, who they thought were so depressing, but now, hey, they get it’.”
Jonathan started to walk away and Charlie took one look at Nancy’s clenched jaw to know that he had taken it a step too far. She grabbed his shoulder and frowned when he turned to her. “Jonathan, come on–”
“No, you know what, Charlie? No,” he almost yelled at her, making her hand slip from his shoulder and her feet take a step back. “I have had it with your ‘holier-than-thou’ bullshit. You have your own damn issues, all right?” He stabbed his finger into her chest, pushing her back further. “I mean, you are actually happy that your parents are dead! That is… That is mental, okay? There is something seriously wrong with you. Lonnie might be a piece of shit, but I don’t want him dead… You’re just a terrible person, Charlie. So stop pretending you’re not.”
The two friends stared at each other and Charlie bit down on her lip, swallowing down the venom building up in her throat. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too,” Jonathan said, turning away, unfazed and treading quickly into the forest, away from the two girls. Charlie watched him go and there she was again, feeling happy that someone was leaving her.
Darkness had fallen over the woods and so had silence over the group. Charlie was glaring daggers into the back of Jonathan’s head as he walked ahead of her and Nancy, the smaller girl looking between the two with a wary expression.
Nancy put a hand on Charlie’s arm, getting the taller girl’s attention immediately. “Before you cut me off, I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“What about?” Charlie asked through gritted teeth, not meaning to be harsh towards Nancy, but when she was pissed off about one thing, she was pissed off about everything.
“About when we were seven,” Nancy explained quickly, dropping her hand from Charlie’s arm, and letting it swing by her side. “I was an idiot to just move on when you were obviously hurting.”
“You were seven, Drew,” Charlie shrugged, deciding to let her eyes drop from Jonathan’s head and distract her anger. “Everyone’s an idiot when they’re seven. Even a straight A student.”
“Yeah, yeah, but that’s not what I mean,” Nancy replied quietly, seeing that Jonathan was clearly listening to their conversation. “I mean, I’m sorry that I didn’t come back. That I left you. I’m not pitying you, okay? Don’t think that. I just missed you… I guess.”
Charlie looked over to see Nancy looking down at the ground, bashful. The taller girl sighed into the night air, her breath coming out in a cloud of smoke. “I don’t blame you…. For not coming back. I was a mess. Still am, really. Jonathan’s not wrong when he says I have problems, too, but I’m not ‘mental’. No matter what anybody at school says.”
“I don’t think you’re mental,” Nancy said genuinely, turning her head to look Charlie in the eye, the two sharing a small smile.
Ruining the moment, there was something like a whimper echoing a distant away, and both Charlie and Nancy stopped in their tracks, looking through the trees with confusion. Nancy turned back to Charlie, giving her a questioning stare. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah, I don’t–”
Jonathan stopped with a crunch of leaves, turning back to look at them. “What, are you two tired?”
“Shut up,” Nancy told him quickly, and Charlie turned her head in the other direction, seeing a large bush further along the path, the leaves shivering slightly. It was too harsh to be the wind, and too loose to be anything else.
“What?” Jonathan scoffed, staring between the two of them.
“I think there’s something over there,” Charlie whispered, putting her hand in her pocket and holding the gun tightly. She took a step forward into the night and the other two were fast to follow, Nancy holding her flashlight out for them to see clearly where they were going.
Charlie could hear the whimpering becoming clearer and clearer as she stumbled forward, barely keeping herself upright as they went further and further off the path towards the bush she had seen. After having enough of being at the front and not being able to see, she leaned back to Nancy. “Can I borrow the flashlight?”
“Yeah, sure,” Nancy nodded, passing it over and Charlie felt a whole lot more at ease, but not completely. And her ease went completely off the rails when she finally turned and saw what was the cause of the whimpering.
A deer was sprawled behind the bush, blood dripping from multiple wounds on its neck and stomach, the poor creature continuing to whimper as they got closer. Charlie put a hand up to her mouth, the smell overwhelming and sight horrifying.
“Oh, God,” Nancy muttered to herself, crouching down beside the animal. Charlie stood at her side, breathing in deeply, remembering what Hopper had told her she would do if she ever came across a seriously injured animal. He had told her it would be more peaceful for them that way.
Jonathan sighed, falling to his knees next to Nancy, dropping the bat to the floor to shine his flashlight on the deer. Nancy reached out a hand to it, stroking its fur, trying to calm it down. “It’s been hit by a car.”
“I… I hate to say it,” Charlie swallowed, her body tensing at the thought. The other two turned to her, knowing what she was going to say. “We’ve got to put it out of its misery.”
Nancy looked down at the gun in her hand and pursed her lips together, tears brimming in her eyes as she started to move it upwards with shaky hands. Charlie leaned down and stopped her, seeing how hard it was for her to do it.
“Hey, I’ll do it,” she told her softly, but Jonathan shook his head at both of them.
“Let me,” he said firmly, holding out his hand to take the gun from Nancy. The two of them stared at him, unsure, and he saw that. “I’m not ten anymore.”
Nancy paused for a second longer, but gave him the gun, the boy handling it carefully in his hand. He aimed it at the deer, getting up from the floor with Nancy and Charlie, and almost out of instinct, Nancy pulled herself closer to the other girl. She grabbed Charlie’s hand that was tight around the flashlight, Charlie barely noticing as she watched from Jonathan to the dying deer.
There was a click as Jonathan cocked the pistol, his arm shaking as he stared down the top of the barrel to make sure he hit the deer first time. There was no need to put it through more pain. Before he pulled the trigger, he tensed the muscles down to his wrist, keeping himself steady and just when he thought he was ready to shoot, the deer was dragged out before them.
Charlie jumped backwards and, in turn, pulled Nancy with her, their gasps mixing together with the added snapping of branches as the deer disappeared in front of their eyes. Jonathan was holding onto a tree as he recovered himself, but Charlie couldn’t stop the pounding in her chest and her lung’s constant need for air. She stared, wide eyed at the spot where the animal had just been, its whimpering still ringing in her ears, yet something had taken it so quickly, it was barely like it had been there to begin with.
“Holy shit,” she breathed out into the night air.
“What was that?” Nancy asked what they were all thinking.
Nobody could answer the question and instead Charlie looked down at the flashlight in her hand, seeing Nancy’s hand still holding tight around her own. When she raised her head, it seemed as if the other girl had seen this, too, both of them detaching themselves from each other, distracting themselves.
“We’ve got to follow the blood,” Charlie finally said after swallowing down her feelings, leading the way up to where there was a scarlet red trail through the fallen leaves and broken branches. Nancy was back to holding the bat and Jonathan was holding the gun, but not at all correctly. Charlie was shining her flashlight out in front, her gun over the top, just as Hopper had shown how they learned in police academy. But as they walked further into the woods, Nancy was shining the flashlight everywhere, unable to follow the trail since it had disappeared along with the deer.
“Where’d it go?” Nancy mumbled to herself, walking further forwards, but still not being able to find anything else.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said back, Charlie circling around the group with her gun pointing into the darkness, scared that if one thing made a sudden movement, she would pull the trigger.
“Are you sure the trail just stops?” Charlie asked, slightly preoccupied.
“Yes,” Nancy sighed, still turning around and looking over every piece of land in a five meter radius of them.
The three of them started to walk in opposite directions, neither realizing what the others were doing and Charlie found herself heading further into the forest. Her nose was turning red with cold and she could feel her lungs freezing up, her breath puffing out in smoke before her eyes. Her flashlight shone in front of her, bouncing off every tree trunk and practically working as a beacon for her exact location. Her hands were shaking, her decision not to bring gloves really dawning on her, and she was worried that if her finger slipped just one bit, the trigger would be pulled and she could accidentally hit something.
“Lottie?”
Charlie swung herself around, expecting to see Nancy behind her, trying to catch up, but there was no one there. Not Nancy, not Jonathan, no one. Her flashlight swung along with her and she turned her head through the dark, trying to see further into the distance.
“Drew?” Charlie called back, letting it float through the air for a few seconds, until she realized she wasn’t going to get an answer. Her heart started to pound in her chest again, palms clamming up with nerves as she realized she was alone in the woods, as presumably, so were the other two. “Drew! Jonathan!”
She still got no answer and she started to run, needing to move her body in some way, feel like she was doing something. She ran until her lungs started to burn, her neck aching as she turned her head this way and that, trying to see a flashlight bobbing in the distance, or a figure standing close by. As she looked behind her to make sure no one was following, her back hit something and she jumped around, finding Jonathan doing the same, his gun pointed at her head.
“Holy shit!” she yelled, stumbling backwards and her legs caught on a fallen log, back hitting the forest floor, a groan escaping her lips. All the wind had been thrown out of her and Jonathan rushed around, lowering his gun quickly.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” the boy apologized multiple times, helping the girl up to her feet again, having to grab her gun and flashlight that she had dropped.
“It’s fine,” she murmured, snatching her stuff back from his hands and going back to trying to search around the woods. “Have you seen her?”
“Who?” Jonathan questioned, and Charlie was about to answer angrily, but instead Nancy’s voice shouted through the woods at them.
“Charlie! Jonathan!”
“Goddamn it,” Charlie complained, pushing herself to run again and Jonathan nearly slipped on leaves before following after her. They ran back to where they had been originally, back to the end of the deer’s blood trail, but there was still no continuation of it. “Shit, shit. Shit!”
“Where did she go!?” Jonanthan asked in a panic, but Charlie ignored him, shining her flashlight around them, trying to spot anything.
“Nancy!”