Alex is a runner. Always has been. Always will be. She runs from her problems. She runs from her family (maybe that's why it seems like they're worlds apart. Is this her fault?). She runs from the bad men. They're stumbling blindly through the dark hallways, twisting and turning through the labyrinth. She can hear the bad men in the distance with the shouts and pounding footsteps, and somehow that is worse than them being directly on their tails. At least then, they knew exactly where the bad men were. Now, they're running blindly and hoping beyond all hope that fortune is on their side today and they escape the school without running into the bad men.
"How did they find us?" Lucas asks in a hushed whisper as they scramble down a set of stairs, two at a time.
"I don't know, but they knew we were in the gym," Mike responds.
"Lando," is all Dustin says.
And this time, Alex knows that he is right. They should have never trusted Hopper. But they had been scared and fear is the relinquishment of logic. He had saved them and bought them a few hours of safety, but time has never been on their side. And now he's sold them out. And for what? What does he get out of it? Had he been apprehended? Was that what this boiled down to? The lives of five children for his own? Five lives snuffed out so that one single life would continue to burn brightly.
Traitor.
Lucas pulls to a jarring halt and Alex barely manages to pull to a stop behind him. She watches as flashlights pierce through the glass on the double doors, just yards before them. A few moments later, the doors burst open to reveal a swarm of bad men armed with flashlights and guns. They shout something, but Alex doesn't hear it, the pounding in her ears drowns out all the other sounds as they turn on their heels and scramble back up the stairs. Alex's foot catches the top of one stair and she stumbles. For a heart-stopping moment, she thinks that she's going to fall, but Lucas reaches out and steadies her before she can fall behind.
They burst through a doorway and into another hallway, only for the other end to fill with more bad men. They shout for them to freeze as if they expected the children to listen. Instead, they only whirl around and run back through the way that they came only for both ends of the hallway to be filled with bad men.
A blonde woman in a khaki trench coat steps forward from the swarm. Her voice is void of emotions as she aims the gun right at them. Alex's blood runs cold as she hears the clicking of a bullet in the chamber of her gun followed by a sea of clicks from the bad men that surround them on all sides. They're an island surrounded by a deadly ocean of weapons and there's no way to send out an SOS signal. This is it. This is really truly the end.
