Love Is A Battlefield (A Stranger Things/Steve Harrington Fanfiction)

Chapter Seventy-Six: What No One Else Can

"Her body, just like, lifted up into the air, and uh...and she just like hung there, in the air," Eddie recounted, "And her bones...uh, she..." 

He squeezed his eyes shut, and I wrapped an arm around him, rubbing his arm with my free hand. 

"I know." I whispered. 

"Her bones started to snap," He said, looking at the others with tear-filled eyes. I nodded, images of Chrissy filling my mind at a rapid rate. I tried to cancel them out by looking up at Steve, who was back on his feet and watching me intently while Robin, Max, and Dustin had their eyes glued to Eddie, "Her eyes, man. It-it was like there was something, like inside her head, pulling. I-I didn't know what to do, so I...I ran away. I left her there. You all think I'm crazy, right?"

"No. We don't think you're crazy." Dustin said sincerely. 

"Don't lie to me man, I know how this sounds!" 

"We're not lying to you." Max told him.

"We believe you." Robin said.

"Look," Dustin continued, "What I'm about to tell you might be a little...difficult to take. You know how people say Hawkins is...cursed? They're not...way off. There's another world..."

Another headache came over me, and suddenly I was seeing the burning car again. There was a boy in a blue sweater vest, slowly walking towards it. I thought I had recognized him as standing with Nancy at the basketball game, presumably someone from the school paper. 

"...A world hidden beneath Hawkins. Sometimes it...bleeds into ours."

"Like ghosts and crap?" Eddie questioned.

"There are some things...worse than ghosts."

The window of the car shattered and a bloody, battered boy clawed his way through it. He was shouting to the other boy begging him for help. The boy in the vest took a step backwards, going to run away, only to fall backwards into a deep hole. His back hit the ground, and it seemed like the impact was enough to jar my mind so that rather than the jarring, painful flashes of what this boy was seeing, I was laying right in that hole beside him, just like with Chrissy.

The boy looked to his left, screaming as he spotted a rotting corpse with spiders coming out of its eyes. He backed up against the wall of the grave, recovering his glasses from the ground and looking at me with wide, scared eyes. 

"Who are you?!" He exclaimed. "Where am I, what are you doing here-"

"I don't really have time to explain," I said, standing up and offering him my hand, "I need to know exactly where you are right now."

"I...I don't know...I just ran, I don't know where I am."

"These monsters from this other world," Dustin's voice floated into the grave, but it sounded fuzzy and distant, "We thought they were gone."

"Do you hear that?" I asked, pointing up at the sky. "That boy, talking, do you hear it?"

"No! I don't hear anything!" He said, starting to panic as he began clawing the side of the grave. "Somebody help us! Please, Nancy, Please!"

"Nancy?" I asked.

"...But they've come back before. And that's why we needed to find you. "

"If they're back again," Max's voice continued, "We need to know."

"Guys?!" I called, looking around the grave. "Guys, can you hear me?!"