WILDFIRE ↝ E. MUNSON

[36]

Lily sat up in bed, eyes shut tightly to keep out the rays of sunlight that streamed in through the window, and she reached up a hand to rub groggily at her eyes before forcing them open. On the other side of the room, Max's bed lay empty, the sheets rumpled from where Nick had lay the night before, though neither of the girls could say they'd had the pleasure of getting a good night's sleep, as they'd become accustomed to over the past week.

The clock sitting on top of Lily's dresser read that it was shortly past eight, and as she crossed the room to peek out the window, she caught sight of Nick across the field, where the shredded remains of the Munson family trailer lay scattered on the ground as she dug through the items in what used to be the family's kitchen. Quickly pulling on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, Lily left the bedroom, getting a pot of coffee ready in the kitchen and lacing up her sneakers to join her friend outside before Wayne was set to meet them at any minute.

It was warm for a spring Indiana morning, though the breeze made Lily cross her arms over her chest as she walked towards the wreckage. Already, Nick had made a small pile of salvageable things from the kitchen, though littering the ground were an endless amount of glass shards from Wayne's shattered mug collection, comprised of presents Eddie and Nick had given him for birthdays, Father's Days, and Christmases over the years.

The damage from the gate had begun in the living room, where Chrissy's body had been found, and spread outwards, in the direction of town. The pile of mattresses they'd left on the floor had disintegrated, the singed edges little more than a pile of ash at the edges of the cracked earth. While the other half of the trailer hadn't been split open, the accompanying earthquake had left little to be desired, broken glass from the mugs and other personal artifacts lining what remained of the floors along with splintered wood and jagged metal ends. While, the last time she'd seen the gate it had been red and covered in vines on the ceiling, it was gone, appearing as nothing more than jagged cracks splitting the earth, as if they could go on all the way down to the center of the world.

Just another tragedy to befall the cursed town of Hawkins, Indiana.

"Good morning," Lily called out to Nick, who was crouched over a pile of rubble, dusting off an old lampshade in an attempt to see if it was salvageable.

"Morning," Nick called back over her shoulder, dusting off her palms onto her jeans as she stood back up. "I wanted to start in here, so I had an idea of what we were working with before Wayne got here. I left you Eddie's room, figured you should be the one to see what you can save in there."

Lily nodded, turning to the other half of the trailer, where the roof still remained intact, though as if it were holding on for dear life. She stepped over the rubble and glass as she moved through the halls, stopping to pick up a broken picture frame that lay on the floor, depicting a photograph of Wayne and the kids at a carnival when they were young, Eddie no more than eleven as he flashed the camera a cheesy smile, Nick's nearly identical except for a couple missing baby teeth. Wayne stood between the kids, a proud grin on his face as they each brandished a goldfish in a bag, no doubt a winning prize from one of the games. Lily pulled the photograph from the frame, dusting it off and placing it in the pocket of her sweatshirt as she pushed open the door to Eddie's room, bracing herself for the worst.

Eddie Munson was no stranger to a messy bedroom, but Lily was fairly certain that, at one point in time, his floor had been visible. Cassette tapes were strewn across the floor from the bins that had been upturned in their attempts to save Nancy from Vecna, made worse by the earthquake as they'd been thrown from his bed frame onto the floor. His acoustic guitar lay crushed into splintering pieces under a fallen amp, though where his electric guitar sat in a pile of broken glass from his mirror, aside from a couple broken strings, it appeared mostly untouched.