Haze & Hellfire

Chapter 7: We're not in Hawkins anymore

Dallas POV:

"What happened?"

While rubbing her hands up and down the cold, wet leather of Eddie's sleeves, Dallas tries to make out some kind of expression on his face. The darkness makes it hard and the moonlight only luminates them faintly, as its pale, eerie glow doesn't reach the ground beneath the tree crowns.

They sit huddled together underneath an almost collapsed windbreak behind a boulder, about a mile off the road out to Lovers Lake. Without getting an answer, Dallas continues to rub Eddie's arms to get his blood flowing faster, to increase his body temperature. His soft brown curls are beginning to dry up and return to their voluminous, lively state, but his clothes are still soaking wet.

Dallas had never rode her racer faster before in her life than when she rode out of Hawkins towards Lovers Lake. Fearing that someone, the cops or anyone else knowing that she was missing, would see her she quickened up the pace. 

With her heartbeat banging like drumsticks on her eardrums, Dallas thanked her lucky soul that coach Carter forced the wrestling team to run laps once a week.

Her frantic bike ride came to an abrupt end when all of a sudden someone stood right in front of her in the road. Someone as in Eddie. 

Out of sheer surprise of being startled by his sudden appearance outside the area around the Lipton residence, Dallas clutched the handbrake tightly. Unfortunately it was the front one and the wheels screamed when the bike came to a sudden halt. In the blink of a second she found herself laying on the ground.

The six-pack of beer that she took out of the backpack -fearing that its seams would break from the heavy load- and strapped to the cargo rack had flown out into the vegetation, never to be seen again by anyone other than rodents and maybe some lucky hitchhiker.

Three meters away Eddie crawled out from underneath the bike, with its wheels still spinning, not having understood that it had tipped over like a turtle.

"Are you completely insane!" Dallas cried at Eddie as she got up from the ground. "What are you doing here!?"

"We gotta go." Eddie's voice was overstrained and short as he stumbled up to her.

Luckily his soaked clothes seemed to have taken most of the impact damage. Dallas, who wasn't done scolding -she could've hurt him badly if she hadn't hit the brakes on time and why the hell wasn't he at the cabin- looked at him dumbfounded.

"What?" She frowned while rubbing her sore elbow.

"They found me!" Eddie shouted and hurried over to her. Haywired, he grabbed her by her leather-clad, aching shoulders. "Patrick's dead. We gotta go!"

Not entirely sure if she followed through, Dallas nodded. At this point, she trusted Eddie with her life. If he said run, she'd run.

Relieved, Eddie nodded back, spun around and grabbed her battered white charger from the ground, stumbled into the edge of the ditch where he put it down next to a tree. Dallas hurried after, fastened the chain around the tree and the bike frame and made sure it was unstealable, as long as the potential thief didn't want the tree too.

Then Eddie grabbed her by the hand and took off into the pitch black vegetation, away from the road. Dallas tried her best to keep up. Fear really made him fast; even Alonzo Babers would have a hard time catching up as they bolted through the dark forest.

They didn't halter until Dallas, halfway folded in on herself from an aching stitch, put the heels of her docs into the mushy ground.

"Eddie." Dallas rests her palm on his icy cheek. "What happened?"