With What Strength Remains (A Stranger Things Fanfic)

CHAPTER ONE - THE MOTORIST

"You can head home now, Chief."

Jim Hopper looked up from the paperwork he was filling out on his desk, a half-smoked cigarette dangling precariously between his lips. Officer Jones stood in the Chief's office doorway, his eyebrows raised and waiting for his superior's response. He had started his shift nearly twenty minutes ago, but Hopper hadn't budged from his seat.

It was the same at every Christmas. And Thanksgiving. And Halloween. Usually the station had to fight to get Hopper into work. Big family holidays and other occasional days that were significant to the Chief, however, posed the opposite problem; getting him to leave work. But Jones couldn't blame the man for that given what he, and everyone else he worked with, knew about his past.

He watched as Hopper plucked the smoking stem from his mouth and stubbed it out in the filled ashtray on his desk.

"Alright, alright. I just gotta finish this report and I'll be on my way."

"You should probably finish it when you come back in on Monday. The snow is starting to pick up out there. Don't wanna be caught in that mess." And before Hopper could reply, Jones moved away from the door and headed to his own desk leaving Hopper to stare at the empty space with a disgruntled look. The man wasn't that much older than Hopper, but he occasionally felt the need to talk to him like he was his father, an impulse no doubt born from the fact that Jones had been working at the station for nearly twenty years without making more than sergeant and Hopper arrived back from the city four years ago as the department's new chief in one swift move.

Hopper gave a quick glance over his shoulder out his office window and noted the swirling gusts of white specks under the streetlights of downtown Hawkins, Indiana. The weatherman was right after all: it was going to be quite the white Christmas.

He grimaced.

Ignoring the biting urge to light up another Camel, buckle down and just go ahead and finish the stupid report, he puffed a heavy sigh and pushed back from his desk, shrugging on his winter coat. He grabbed his hat from where he had tossed it hours earlier, snapped off the lamp and headed out of his office, locking the door behind him. As he passed through the reception area, he called out to Jones,

"Try not to fall asleep again," before forcing himself out into the progressing winter storm.

He didn't see Jones roll his eyes, but he knew it happened just the same.

The drive from the police station down Route 421 out to his single wide mobile home normally took approximately twenty minutes, in both directions. If he was running late for work, he could make it in about ten. Tonight, he hazarded an ETA of thirty five minutes the way visibility was running and also on account of the road conditions which meant he could be drinking his first beer in sixteen hours not long after midnight.

He would be enormously mistaken.

His favorite stretch on the way home was the last four miles where the roadway passed through large areas of farmland and then finished with densely wooded scenery that coughed him up, eventually, onto his property on Loon Pond. His fellow officers liked this same bit of asphalt because there were a couple of good hiding spots they could set speed traps on unsuspecting drivers passing through or the occasional carload of energetic and overly confident youth. But tonight Route 421 swallowed Hopper's Blazer in a whirling, muffled tunnel of steady snowfall that kept his wipers beating rhythmically and his pace slow and cautious.

Even at his glacial clip, he didn't see the stopped car until he was nearly on top of it.

Slamming on his break pedal, Hopper swerved to his left, uttering curse words that would've made his mother cringe, but avoiding the heap of snow-covered metal. His Chevy gave a small slide before stopping, where then he turned around in his seat to look back at the vehicle sitting darkly off to the side of the road.