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One day after the end of the world
Max wakes up with a blanket over her, face pressed against sticky leather. There's steady vibration through her body, the rumble of an engine, the smell of leather and exhaust and Billy's stupid aftershave.
She unkinks herself slowly, uncurls her legs. She's stretched out on the backseat of Billy's car, thirsty and too hot with a cramp in her knee and that puffy-eyed squinty feeling that you get when you cry before falling asleep. Her hair is stuck to her face with sweat and dried tears, and for all she knows, she and her least favorite not-really-relative might be the only people alive in the world.
She doesn't want to start crying again. She really doesn't. She hates crying, and every time she starts to think about Mom, or her friends, or ...
Clenching her teeth, she sheds the blanket and starts to wiggle forward between the seats. The car swerves.
"Jesus Christ. Stop that, dumbass. You're gonna kill us." Billy tries to jam her back with an elbow, but one thing she's learned over the past year is that there are a lot of much scarier things out there in the world than her not-a-brother.
She pushes past him and worms over the back of the seat and falls facefirst into the seat, legs in the air. Billy laughs, and that's it, that's the final straw; she lashes out at him, clawing and biting. He yelps and then curses, the car swerving again. For a minute she thinks she wouldn't care if it went right off the road, and then she does care, she cares a lot, but by that time it's already stopped on the shoulder.
"Happy?" Billy says.
Max thrashes and squirms and finally gets herself sitting upright. The light is weird, a dull throbbing red. She looks out the window at low dark clouds with that weird light along the horizon. Closer to them, it's all cornfields, dull red under the oppressive sky. The air coming through the rolled-down windows is muggy and smells funny, an awful smoky hot-metal smell. In the weird light, the scratches down the side of Billy's face look like stripes of fresh blood; you'd have to lean closer to see that it's had a chance to dry, like her tears.
"Where are we?" she asks, rubbing her scratchy, swollen eyes.
"Uh, dunno. Illinois, maybe?" Billy leans over and fishes in the door pocket, comes up with a bottle of soda that he holds out to her. "Want this?"
"Yeah, I guess." She takes it. Ugh, Dr Pepper. Warm Dr Pepper. The absolute worst. But she's so thirsty she almost doesn't care.
Still, she doesn't open it right away. Instead, she leans out the window, then grasps the warm metal on either side and eels through the window. The hot-metal smell is stronger out here. It's like the way a parking lot smells on a hot day, except it's not actually that hot. Just heavy, like it gets before a storm.
"Hey," Billy snaps. "Hey! Get the fuck back in here."
"I'm not going anywhere," she mutters, holding herself up with her arms stiff. She just wants to look around.
"If you get out, I swear to God I'm leaving you here."
"Shut up," she says absently, looking around. It's not any less horrible hanging half out of the car window, looking over the Camaro's roof; if anything, it's worse. They're on a narrow country highway, two lanes of cracked asphalt. There are no other cars. No sign of people, in fact, except a very distant farmhouse and an even more distant grain elevator, a lonely speck against the ominous red sky.
The leaves on the corn look ashy and gray. She hangs even farther out the window, trying to reach for one. It's not ash, at least she doesn't think so. It's more like mold.
A fist grabs her shirt and yanks her roughly through the window, slamming her into her seat. Her arm rakes against the side of the window frame, scraping all down the side.
"I told you to get in here," Billy snarls.
He's furious in that incandescent way that usually means punching and screaming is right around the corner. It used to make her cower in fear. Now she just spits out, "Fuck. You." She's clutching her arm and tears are starting to spring into her eyes, of pain, not of hurt.
Billy throws the car into gear and they pull away. The muggy air streaming through the window doesn't manage to be any cooler, but at least it pulls her hair away from her face.
"I wish it had been you," she says into the hot stream of air blowing in the window.
Billy doesn't say anything. He tries to find a radio station but just gets static. The road unspools to the horizon.
After a little while, she feels around for the bottle of Dr Pepper. It's rolled under the seat. She curls her feet up and drinks the spicy-sweet, warm nastiness. Billy doesn't tell her to put on her seatbelt. He just drives. The anger seeps out of her, leaving a dead numbness behind.
It's hard to believe that just yesterday she was eating a bowl of her favorite sugared cereal in the kitchen, on the phone with Lucas. Just yesterday, she was helping Mom bake a cake to take to some stupid summer block party in the evening.
And then a gateway opened up and spit hell all over Hawkins, and the rest of the world.
*
"Where do you think all the people are?" she asks Billy later that endless day, as she helps him siphon gas out of a tank at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. The power is off, the station dark, no sign of anyone anywhere, although they passed a couple of crashed cars on the way to this feeble outpost of civilization in the middle of a cornfield. "We can't be the only survivors, can we?"
"Well, I know where all the dead people are," Billy says, not looking at her, as he works on filling the Camaro's tank, and then a couple of gas cans they took from the station. "They're on the freeway in endless traffic jams. Which is why we're here, on the bumfuck backroads."
Max doesn't say this to Billy because she doesn't want him to laugh at her, but she doesn't think they're on Earth anymore. She thinks this is one of those places like the Upside Down, except not quite the Upside Down; this isn't the place she saw very briefly with Steve Harrington --
(is Steve still alive, is Lucas alive, is anyone alive)
-- in the tunnels under Hawkins; it's not the place Will used to talk about. That place was cold and dark, full of creepy vines and Demodogs and things.
This place is hot, and dusted lightly with ash. Whatever happened here was different, but just as bad. Every now and then they pass the burned-out husk of a car, but there have been no people, not a single one. Even the animals are absent, the birds and deer. Occasionally she sees a crow, but that's all.
Maybe she just wants to believe it's another world because that's better than thinking it's their world, and everyone she loves is dead.
Anyway, she knows Mom is dead, because she was there for it; and that's something too huge to think about, something she has to keep turning from as her thoughts churn it up again.
It wasn't a Demodog and it wasn't a Mind Flayer, and she doesn't know if Dustin would have some kind of nerdy name for it because Dustin isn't ... isn't here. She doesn't know what it was; it wasn't like anything she read about in any of the books she's borrowed from the boys over the past winter and spring. It was blades and fire and the smell of hot metal, and she's ...
She's still alive because Billy grabbed her and dragged her out of the house, while she fought to get away, to get back to Mom, clawing Billy's face so viciously that she came within half an inch of gouging an eye out. She can still remember the sheer intensity of her rage and fear. She remembers wishing that she had the strength to fling Billy onto those awful blades so she could go and -- and --
And save Mom.
But in the end she broke down crying and Billy threw her in the backseat of his car, and nobody saved anyone.
Sometimes the worst thing is knowing that you're not the hero you always wanted to be. You're Background Villager #4 in the big fight scene, and when it really counts, all you can do is roll 2's.
*
Before leaving the gas station, they stock up on snacks and drinks. The ice cream has already melted to puddles in the warm cooler, and the drinks have only the faintest hint of cool when she presses a bottle of Pepsi to her cheek. But there's lots of other stuff, and Billy fills up a couple of shopping bags with cans of stew and bags of jerky. He cleans out the toiletries aisle, gets them little packages of moist towelettes and travel-size scissors and a folding toothbrush kit each.
"Are you fucking kidding me," Max says, hauling two bags full of Snickers and single-serving-size boxes of Sugar Smacks out to the car. "I'm not brushing my teeth at the end of the world. That's the one freaking good thing about it."
"Let them rot out of your head then," Billy says, and slams the trunk. "You're such a fucking pain in my ass. I don't know why I brought you along."
"Just leave me here, then!" she yells at him.
"I'm planning on it!" he snaps back, and he raises a hand -- quick, instinctive, the kind of backhand pose that comes right before you get hit.
She's out on the edge of the road in fucking nowheresville with her stepbrother. There's nobody coming to save her. He's gonna hit her. She stands there and curls her hands into fists and doesn't even really think about it, just throws everything she has into looking bigger than she is, the way cats puff up big, like, you can hit me but you're gonna pay for it. She made him scared of her once. She can do it again.
But he just stands there for a minute, and then lowers his hand -- a little bit shocked, like he surprised himself -- and goes into the gas station.
Max takes some deep breaths until she's calm. She goes and uses the dark restroom, leaving the door open for a bit of light. After she comes out, she screws up her courage and goes to find Billy.
He is, as it turns out, not hard to find; the sound that tips her off is the plastic crunching of tape covers. Just inside the door of the station, there's a spinner rack of cassettes. Billy is taking off each tape, one at a time, and looking at the cover, then either dropping it into a bag he's holding, or flinging it to smash on the floor of the gas station.
Max puts up with this for a while. She knows he knows she's there, but she doesn't really want to interrupt ... whatever is going on here. She taps her foot anxiously and looks over her shoulder.
It doesn't look noticeably more apocalyptic behind them than ahead of them; everywhere has that same dim red glow, that same dark cloud cover. But it feels bad. It feels like there's a hot wind blowing from behind them, and Max doesn't want it to catch up to them.
As if triggered by the thought, a sticky breeze tugs at her hair. It's the first time anything has moved in all this muggy, still air, but it doesn't improve things; there's something unhealthy about it, something dead. It makes the corn rustle in all directions. Max spins around and looks back down the long, empty road again.
"Billy, come onnnnn, literally how long can this take. Just take all of them."
"Fuck you, Max, I'm not wasting room on ..." He sneers at a cassette and tosses it aside. "-- fucking John Denver, all right?"
"Let's go, Billy, let's go, let's go, go go go, please."
He glanced up, and something in his face changes. He gathers up a handful of cassettes, and they pile into the Camaro. Max doesn't even question the urgency; it's only a relief that he feels it too.
Billy slides Black Sabbath into the tape deck, and Max puts her feet up on the dashboard and opens a Pepsi and a bag of corn nuts. The fingernail gouges on Billy's cheek are lurid in the bloody light. It would be the side of his face turned toward her.
After a while, she opens a Pepsi for him too, and passes it over.
Three days after the end of the world
"You know," Max says, lying on her back, looking up at the pitch-black sky lit with flickering hints of red, "I didn't know the Midwest was this big."
She didn't drive to Hawkins; she and Mom flew, while Billy and Neil drove. Max remembers thinking that she wouldn't have been trapped in a car with them for all the Sugar Smacks in California.
She turns to look at Billy when he doesn't say anything. It's night, or at least what passes for night around here. It's a bleak not-quite-blackness, lit by flashes of red along the horizon like heat lightning. When daylight comes, it's wan and sickly, but at least it's not pitch dark. Max has been picking up flashlights and batteries in the gas stations and defunct Walmarts, so she can read comics from the spinner racks in those stores that have them. The daytime light is enough to see by, but not enough to comfortably read by.
"Hey, Billy?" she says, and he turns to look at her. Their fire flickers faintly in the dusk. They always make one; at least with all these dead and dying cornstalks, there's lots to burn. "Billy ... do you miss your dad?"
She still misses Mom like a piece of her was cut off. She's not ready to try approaching those feelings, but maybe she can edge up to them sideways. Maybe it would help to have someone else to share those feelings, to know that it's not just her.
"No," Billy says, one short harsh syllable.
"Oh."
The distance between them grows again. Max folds her hands behind her head and squeezes her eyes shut until they stop trying to leak tears, and then looks up at the sky. She never really was a looking-at-stars person, but she misses the stars right now. She wonders if the clouds will ever go away.
And she thinks about doing a road trip like this, but with Neil Hargrove. She thinks about the heavy tread of Neil's steps as he walked around the house ... thinks about the way it stopped feeling like her house and started feeling like his house the minute he walked through the door. She thinks about being stuck in a car with Neil for hour on endless hour.
After a little while of these thoughts, she sits up. "Are you still awake?" she asks.
"Mmm," Billy says, which she guesses is a yes. Neither of them sleeps much. They drive late into the night and jerk awake ten times a night, each of them in their own little pile of blankets on either side of the fire.
"Let me put some of the stuff on that again."
He makes another grunting noise, but sits up again, leaning forward so Max can carefully smear convenience-store disinfectant on the gouges she tore in his face.
Billy's face isn't healing right. Sometimes it oozes a little blood; she'll turn back from the empty cornfields to see blood trickling down the side of his jaw. It's just one of the things that makes everything feel not quite right. But then she wonders if she's the one who's wrong; maybe it's just that he keeps tearing it open again.
Now she sits and carefully rubs off-brand Neosporin into the hot, ragged edges of the gashes she tore down the side of his face, and then presses Band-Aids in a jagged line, zigzagging down his cheek.
Six days after the end of the world
"The Midwest isn't this big," Billy says abruptly, interrupting Kiss telling them about rocking and rolling all night.
"What?" Max asks, looking up from half-drowsing against the window.
Billy slams on the brakes and they veer over to the shoulder. The car tips slightly as the off wheels settle into the gravel.
"Jeez, now what," Max says, sitting up.
"It's not. It's just not." Billy is looking off toward the horizon, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "We haven't come to a single big town. Just shitty little gas stations and podunk towns with nobody in them. There's something wrong with this place."
Max has been getting the same feeling, but she isn't really sure what to do with it. After all, she's never been on a road trip before. She's not really clear on how long it takes to drive across the Midwest, or how big Kansas is, or how empty.
But it's uncomfortably true that she's been getting the feeling for the last couple of days that something's not right here.
"So, are we lost, or what?"
"We can't be lost enough that we haven't found the Rocky Mountains in five fucking days," Billy says.
"Six," Max says, because she's been keeping track. Six days since Mom.
"What-fucking-ever. Even if we accidentally drove north instead, which in this shitty light is totally a thing we could be doing, we'd have hit something instead, Canada or whatever, you can't just keep driving forever, that's literally not a thing!"
"So where are we?" Max asks, looking out at the fields and the eye-hurting light. She's almost gotten used to it by now.
"I don't know," Billy says after a minute, slumping a little. "We could turn around. Go back."
"Maybe," Max says, looking out the rear window.
*
Like fate decides to give them a little present for a change, there's a motel to stop in that night. It's one of those cheap roadside motels, shaped like a L wrapped around a gravel parking lot, with no power (like everywhere else) and no cars in the lot and a loose-hanging VACANCY sign.
They pick a room at random and carry in their bags full of snacks, replenished from the last Walmart, along with the gun they got from behind the firearms counter at the same Walmart. Max actually misses healthy food, kind of. She's been living on jerky and canned stew heated over a fire for the last week. She actually wishes Walmart sold fruit. Maybe in some future world it does.
"Do showers work with no power?" Max asks. "Because I could murder somebody for a shower."
The shower actually does work, although she has to use a flashlight propped on the sink to shower by. And there are the same stinky, sweaty clothes to put on. Okay, new mission when they find the next Walmart: get clean clothes.
It's weird the things you don't think about when your parents aren't around to remind you.
Still, having her hair washed and a face that's clean, not just splashed in a restroom sink, is kind of a big deal. She flops on the scratchy blanket on a motel-room bed and listens to the shower running while Billy takes his turn.
It's really dark in here. She reads a comic for a little while by flashlight, then gets up and pulls on her sneakers over her bare feet, and goes out into the parking lot.
The sky is that same black heat-lightning sky that's been over them for the last week. She climb up on the hood of Billy's car and sits with her legs sprawled out and her hands propping her up, looking back behind them.
She hasn't really thought about the others. She hasn't been able to. Now she starts to let the leash of memory slip a little bit, as she gazes out at the dark cornfields.
She can imagine each of them, tough and fighting in their own way - Lucas with his slingshot, Dustin with the science he loves, Mike pulling them all together like a leader should, Will with his brains and courage. Steve too, because where the rest of them are, he wouldn't be far away.
And Eleven, of course. Nothing could possibly happen to any of them if Eleven is with them. They must be okay.
But if Eleven is all right, why hasn't she found them yet?
Because Eleven can find people. Anywhere. That's what she does.
Max's eyes leak again. She doesn't want to cry. She hates crying. She sniffles a little and rubs her eyes and just feels ... so alone. So desperately, completely alone.
The door of the motel room bangs suddenly open, making her nearly jump out of her skin, and Billy bellows, "Max!"
Her reaction is instant and visceral; she cowers on the car hood in fear, a buried reaction from all those months when Billy ruled her life.
Billy's flashlight spears her, catching her in mid-cower. There's a moment when neither of them moves, and then anger and shame floods her, and she tosses back her hair and sits up straight. She doesn't want him to know, can't let him know that he still scares her sometimes. And then he grabs her, and she lashes out, kicking him with a sneaker-clad foot in the shin.
"Ow," he yelps, hopping away. Max realizes that he's barefoot -- in fact, he's naked ... well, mostly, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, which now has the flashlight shoved precariously into it. He's got the gun in the other hand.
"What are you gonna do with that, shoot me?" she yells at him. "So I stepped out for some air. You wanna read me the riot act about it?"
"I didn't know where the hell you were, Max!"
"So what! You're not the boss of me."
He stares at her, and there's a moment of disconnect in which she's baffled by what she's seeing on his face. It occurs to her only now, belatedly, that he wasn't yelling her name in anger; that was fear in his voice.
Then he gets himself together and points at the door. "Get inside."
"You're not the boss of me," she mutters, but she goes.
*
"Max. Max. Hey."
She jerks away, flailing, her face wet with tears. It's stifling and dark, with just enough dull reddish light for her to make out Bill looming over her, and she thinks for a minute that she's still dreaming -- except he pulls back immediately, just fast enough to avoid being punched in the face.
The motel, she thinks. They're in the motel, and she's trapped with her not-a-brother in Hell.
"This is my side of the room," she mutters, pulling her knees up to her chin. "Get back on your own side."
"You were making noise over here. Crying."
"No I wasn't," she mutters. She turns her face against the scratchy blanket, rubbing the tears off. "I was snoring."
"Yeah, well, your snoring was keeping me awake," Billy says. He gets up and goes back over to his side.
Max sits there, her eyes adjusting slowly to the dark. She feels cored out and raw, the nightmare still fresh behind her eyes, full of blades and blood. She's pretty sure she's not going to fall back asleep, but there's nothing to do except sit in the dark and read by flashlight, and she's really tired of reading comic books.
Billy's breathing is steady from the other side of the room, but he doesn't sound like he's asleep.
When Max was a little girl and nightmares woke her up, she used to get up and pad down the hall to her parents' room and slip into bed with them. They never told her not to, even if her feet were cold.
She misses them both so much right now that it makes her throat close up. The tears well up and the shadow shapes of furniture in the room blur into a haze.
She just .... can't. She slides out of bed and pads over to Billy's side.
When she sits down on the bed next to him, he jerks awake and starts to sit up. He reaches under the pillow where she knows he's keeping the gun.
"Don't," she says. It comes out thick and teary-sounding. Max rubs the back of her hand across her nose and tries to make herself sound normal -- casual, even, as if coming to Billy's room in the middle of the night after a nightmare was something she'd ever in a million years dream of doing. "Don't," she says again, and he huffs out a sigh, settles back down and rolls over.
After a little while, she lies down next to him, her side pressed against his back.
It's not like being in bed with her parents, the cozy sense of safety, as if nothing could ever hurt her there. Which was a lie, of course; her parents got divorced and her mom married Neil and it turned out that the safety she'd always felt with her parents when they were together was as much of an illusion as using a blanket for protection against the dark.
But it's better than being alone.
After a little while, Billy reaches over and flips a blanket over her.
She sleeps without dreams for the rest of the night.
Two weeks after the end of the world
Max spends a lot of time, as she sits in the passenger side of the car with her feet tucked up and the hot wind flowing past her, thinking about Eleven. If Eleven can hear them, maybe Eleven can bring them home somehow.
"Billy," she says. "Think about Eleven."
"About who?"
Max starts to say something back, something angry and a little bit bantering -- there's not really that much of a difference with Billy, honestly -- but then she crosses her arms over her knees and rests her head on them and looks sideways at him. "I've got a story to tell you," she says.
And so she tells him. She tells him in bits and pieces, as they cruise through the empty cornfields, past ghost towns and water towers, through a world where they might be the only living people left at all. She tells him about what really happened to that girl who went missing in Hawkins before they moved here, and about Demodogs and Eleven and creepy vines and Steve Harrington in a junkyard with a baseball bat.
It's weird telling it all to someone else; it makes her understand why it was so hard to get the story out of Lucas and the others, in the beginning. But there's also a sense of relief. She never realized that she wanted Billy in their weird, exclusive little club, but it's oddly nice to have him there.
"So you guys just happened to have a syringe full of horse tranquilizers to stab me with," Billy says slowly, "because you needed it to stab into the Byers kid to stop him from turning into a monster and eating everyone's brain."
"Uh ... okay, that's not ... completely inaccurate, I guess."
"Huh," he says thoughtfully, staring out the bug-splattered, dusty windshield down the long stretch of the road.
Max looks at him sideways. It feels almost like they're talking about a stranger, that terrifying, violent person who tried to kill Steve that night. Things are so different now.
"Do you ever think about it?" she says suddenly. "What happened that night."
"Of course I think about it."
He doesn't talk for a while -- the space of two or three songs on the cassette in the tape deck -- and then he says suddenly, "It's like there's a different person inside me sometimes. I'm just so angry, at ... everything. It's like it's trying to tear its way out of me. Does that make any sense?"
Max doesn't say anything. She knows that feeling. But she also knows that she never beat anybody half to death because of it.
"You know," Billy says after another few miles, "I probably had a headache for a week after you stuck that thing in my neck."
"Good," Max says.
"Yeah," he says quietly, to the road. "Good."
They let the entire topic drop for the time being. But that night when they stop to camp -- under an awning flapping in the wind outside an abandoned used car lot -- neither of them says anything when Max rolls up in her blanket and then rests against his back, with Billy like a bulwark between her and the night.
One month after the end of the world
"It's a good thing junk food doesn't go bad," Max remarks, running her flashlight over the glass cases and cardboard cartons before she settles on a package of Ding Dongs.
Billy grunts, digging through the coolers. "I think the power was probably on here 'til pretty recently."
"Why?" Max asks.
"Whaddya mean, why? This should be full of toxic sludge after a week in this heat." Billy waves a half-defrosted frozen hamburger at her. "We can eat this."
Max feels a chill go through her. "I know it's been longer than a week, though. Hasn't it?"
"I don't know, Einstein, you tell me."
There are steaks in the cooler that still smell okay, so they cook them over an open fire and have a pretty decent dinner that night. Max is pretty sure that Billy's face is starting to heal up a little bit. She's glad.
"Seriously," she says, "where do you think we are?"
"Probably somewhere between Missouri and the Dakotas."
"Stop." She pokes him with the toe of her sneaker, and he grins. There was a time when she couldn't even have imagined they'd be this easy with each other. "You know what I mean."
She expects jokes, a change of subject, or maybe just an order to shut up. Instead he pokes at the fire with a stick, frowning, and doesn't say anything.
"Do you think we're ... dead?" It's the first time she's said it out loud, the first time either of them have brought up what Max has been thinking all along. "Is this what being dead is like?"
"Don't be stupid."
"Don't call me stupid," she fires back.
"We're not dead."
"How do you know?"
"Because I got you out of there." It's the first time they've ever talked about that day -- the day when those things came to Hawkins, and the sky turned the wrong color, and day turned dark as night, and everything changed.
Max takes a few deep breaths, gulping to keep herself from sobbing. "What if you didn't? What if neither of us did?"
"Stop it."
She scrambles to her feet. Suddenly she's overwhelmed with the weirdness and wrongness of this place, the metal-ash smell and the way that time doesn't seem to work right and nothing is right. They haven't come to a single big city or met a single other person; they haven't even seen any dead ones. The only animals seem to be insects and sometimes crows or some other dark birds, flying around in the distance. It's like this place was created just for them.
"You can't tell me what to do," she says, clenching her fists.
"Yeah, I can." He gets up too, looming over her, but she's not afraid of him anymore. "Sit back down."
"You let them die!" she yells at him.
He's brought up short by this. "I what?"
"You let them die!" It all wells up and pours out of her, a pent-up tide of rage and grief. "My mom and your dad and ... and Lucas, and Steve, and Eleven, and --"
"Shut it, brat."
"You left them!" she screams. "We just ran off and left them! And we never went back!"
"I had to get you out of there! If we'd stayed we were both gonna die!"
"They stayed!" she screams at him. She didn't have to see it to know it's true. Lucas and Will and Dustin and Mike and Steve and Eleven -- all of them would have gone down fighting, because that's who they are. "I wish you'd died instead of them!"
And she turns and runs off the road. Away. Just ... away, stumbling over ruts in the dark cornfield.
"Max!" Billy yells after her. "Get back here!"
She doesn't answer. She just runs. The corn closes around her, shutting out the world. The dry leaves rake across her hands and face. The ashy smell is stronger here, but she also smells dirt and crushed leaves. It's a living kind of smell, more alive than anything else she's smelled so far in this terrible, dead world.
She stumbles to a stop at last. Around her, the corn whispers in a light breeze. She is suddenly, deeply afraid, for no reason she can name.
"Billy?" she calls, turning all the way around.
It's hard to figure out which way she came from. Every direction looks the same. It occurs to her that she ought to be able to find the way back by following the trail of crushed and broken cornstalks, and her heart leaps when she finds some -- but then she finds more in the opposite direction.
Like something other than her has been walking around out here.
The wind rustles among the corn. Or is it only the wind? When she listens to it, it seems as if there's purpose in it, as if the rustling is more intense from some directions than others.
"Billy?" she whispers.
The wind changes. The smell of hot metal, like a car engine after a long day on the road, washes over her.
That smell hits her low in the gut. Suddenly she's there, back in her house, the day the sky changed color and that thing tore through the living room wall, all blades and metal and heat, like some kind of harvest machine gone horribly wrong. She is, for an instant, frozen as if she just walked into a snapshot and can't walk out again. She can smell Mom's perfume and those awful cheap cigarettes that Neil likes and the smell of cookies baking, or more like burning, in the oven. Neil is on the couch and Mom's in the kitchen and the TV is talking about freak tornadoes, and she doesn't even know where Billy is because this is in the time before she really cared where Billy was at all.
No, she's at the window with the walkie-talkie in hand, looking up at the crazy-colored sky while Dustin babbles something about rifts and something destroying downtown. And then --
And then the air is full of a blizzard of flying drywall and bits of couch and books and Billy's stupid shelf full of sports trophies. Mom is screaming, and she's screaming, and Billy is grabbing her and dragging her out of the house while she claws at him and screams and screams --
"Whoa, whoa, hey. Calm down. Chill the fuck out."
Max gasps. Her throat hurts and Billy is crouching in front of her, holding her by the shoulders. She has a dim feeling he was shaking her a minute ago, but now his grip is firm but not painful. Steadying. Grounding.
"What happened? You hurt?" He starts patting down her arms. She shakes him off.
"I'm fine," she says hoarsely. Her throat really hurts, and she blinks tears out of her eyes. She ran away like a baby and ended up screaming her head off out here in the middle of the corn. It's embarrassing. "Can we just ... get back to the car. Please."
"Yeah." He straightens up, one hand resting on her shoulder. Max decides to leave it there. It's strange how much safer she feels with him here, standing above her, big and powerful and solid. All that barely-contained violence that used to have her walking on eggshells is now directed outward; it's like there used to be this little bubble that just contained Billy, and now it contains both her and Billy, with all his rage directed toward anything that would hurt either one of them. And even out here in the middle of this hell-cornfield, she feels safer with him than she remembers feeling since her father left, leaving her alone in that house full of simmering emotions and sudden, unpredictable rages.
"Billy?" she says after a minute, when he doesn't move.
"Right. Yeah." He starts off into the corn, decisively. Max follows, but then he stops and she bumps into him.
"You don't know which way the road is either, do you?"
"It all looks the same out here!" he snaps.
Max doesn't say anything, because she's thinking that he doesn't know where the road is because he wasn't paying attention either -- she ran off without looking where she was going because she was upset, and Billy should have been paying attention but he wasn't; he heard her screaming and ran to her.
Not that she's going to say anything about it.
"Well ... look ... there's got to be a trail to follow, right? I mean, like broken cornstalks and things?"
"Like you're an expert," Billy says, but they start forward slowly. There definitely is some crushed and broken corn this way, and though it's hard to tell in the dim light, it seems a bit more open up ahead.
The reason becomes clear a couple minutes later, when they step out into a wide clear space through the corn.
"What the hell," Billy says.
It's as wide as a car, a clear swath of stubble cutting through the head-high cornstalks on both sides. Like some sort of big mowing machine just chewed through the corn.
Recently. It's fresh. Max is no expert at anything involving corn, but she can smell the sticky green smell of crushed plants, much stronger here than it was back there among the cornstalks. The mowed stripe is littered with bits and pieces of chewed-up plants, still fresh and green.
She takes a step back, but there's nothing at her back but corn, which isn't very comforting.
Billy pulls the gun out of the waistband of his jeans.
"What's that gonna do?" Max asks.
He makes a shushing sound, turning around with the gun in his hands like some kind of action hero. Max is almost as worried that he's going to shoot her by accident as she is about whatever he might need to point a gun at.
Max is about to say something anyway, when she catches a strong whiff of that hot-metal smell. It doesn't kick her quite so hard in the back of the eyeballs this time, though her knees get a little wobbly and she steps closer to Billy.
"Billy --"
"I know, I --"
"Billy!"
She sees it first, a glint of light behind him, the reflection of the ominous red sky-light off something metal.
Billy spins around, shoving her behind him like it's pure instinct, not something he even thinks about, just putting himself between her and whatever it is, just like that. He stands rock solid with the gun held in both hands, and Max is suddenly, shockingly proud of him, so full of it that for a minute she forgets to be afraid. He's brave and strong and scarier than anything else out here, and she's never been so glad to not be alone.
There's a clattering of blades and a hot wind blows over them and Billy jumps back, dropping one hand free of the gun so he can grab her, and they both tumble back into the corn as something huge and metal swishes past them. Bits of corn pepper her face and arms.
Billy hauls her to her feet. His face is white, eyes wide. There's a new stripe threshed out of the corn right past them, curving so it's impossible to see where it goes. The wind seems to be blowing in every direction, rustling the corn all around them, and Max can hear that chattering, clattering sound, just out of sight. The wind catches it and makes it impossible to tell where it's coming from.
"Run!" Billy snaps, and pushes her into the clear area, the one they were just standing in.
This seems like the worst idea, but it's not like running blindly through the corn is any better, and they can run faster here where it's clear. Max is a zoomer, after all; she pours everything she's got into just running, running, running, feet pounding over the stubble, the hot air heavy in her lungs.
Billy is right behind her. He probably could have outdistanced her, with his longer legs, but he doesn't. He's right there at her back, letting her go first.
And then he grabs her shoulder and yanks her backward, a bruising grip that drags her to a painful stop, his reflexes an instant faster than her own.
The thing is in front of them.
It is something mechanical, she thinks. Mechanical and also somehow more, somehow alive, a dense tangle of bladed machinery like a dozen harvest machines all got smashed together somehow.
It's absolutely terrifying, and yet, finally being able to see it strips away some of the nightmare. It's been the bogeyman haunting her sleep for night after night, and yet, even as it rears up above them like a nightmare preying mantis, it's just a thing. Real things can be broken, killed, defeated.
Billy fires at it. The bullet pings off one of its blades with a little flash, and the gun's sharp bark, just above her head, leaves her half deaf.
The top row of blades move, swinging forward, and crash into the dirt like it's trying to spear them.
It can be defeated, destroyed, but a handgun sure isn't going to do it.
Max looks wildly around -- and through a gap between cornstalks, she glimpses a flicker of orange light. Their campfire.
"Billy!" she gasps, tugging at his shirt. She can't get the words out, so she points.
There's a sudden horrific screeching like bending, tearing metal. The thing raises its blades again, like a -- what's the thing, castles have them --
"Portcullis," she gasps out nonsensically.
"What?"
"Never m --"
The harvest-thing moves, lurching forward. She gets a pretty good look at the way that all the blades seem to be able to move independently; it's not just a harvest-type machine, it's also got all these moving bits all over. Dustin would be fascinated. There's some vague thought in her head that she wants to take a good look so she can describe it to him later. But mostly she just wants to get away.
Billy fires at it as they both scramble back into the corn. The bullets ping off the metal and do absolutely nothing. He drops the gun and spins around, all but throwing Max into the cornfield. He wraps around her and she feels him jerk and then suddenly he's yanked away from her.
Max tumbles backward and lands bruisingly. Billy stumbles the other way; she sees something like a pitchfork wrenched away from his body, gleaming with blood.
"Billy!"
She doesn't even think, she just throws herself under the front end of the thing, as the blades in front crash into the ground not more than a foot or two away from her -- and then somehow still alive, she's stumbling out the other side and grabbing onto Billy and they're both running. He's weaving, leaning on her. She feels blood slick on her hands. She doesn't know if it's his or hers; she doesn't know what they're going to do because there don't seem to be any hospitals in this hell-world, but that's a problem for five minutes from now, if they're still alive.
She's become so resigned to being trapped in a cornfield for the rest of her life that it's a complete shock when they stagger out of the corn onto the shoulder of the road. Billy's car and their campsite are only a few yards away.
"Come on, come on." She chants it over and over, as he leans increasing amounts of weight on her, but somehow they make it to the car. She looks back and sees something that will haunt her nightmares along with all the rest of it, a rippling furrow in the corn, headed for the road.
Max starts for the passenger seat, but Billy gasps out, "No," and grabs her wrist. His hand is wet and slick with blood. He presses something into her hand, the blood-sticky car keys.
"No, I --"
"You drove it once, didn't you?" he pants out, and tumbles into the passenger seat.
She falls into the driver's seat and fumbles the keys into the ignition. Beside her, Billy is sprawled with his head back and his arm wrapped around his ribs. There's blood everywhere. She can't even tell for a moment if he's breathing.
"Billy -- Billy, no --"
His throat works and he gasps out, "Drive!"
It's like a crazy reversal of that mad drive last fall, Max behind the wheel of this very car, with Billy drugged and unconscious back at the Byers' house. That time, she had to strap blocks to the pedals to reach. It turns out that her legs have grown in the most-of-a-year since then, or maybe it's just that panic is a really good motivator. Her bloody hands slip on the wheel, but she throws the car into gear and slides her hips all the way forward so she can shift her weight from clutch to accelerator. Immediately the engine floods and dies.
It took her a few tries to get the hang of shifting at the Byers' house, too.
"You couldn't drive an automatic, could you?" she yells at Billy, slumped and semiconscious in the passenger seat, as she finally finds the right combination of clutch and accelerator to get the car moving. It tries to die again when she shifts up a gear, but it turns out that it's easier to shift without killing the engine when the car is moving.
There's a tremendous screeching crunch and the car slews sideways. Max looks back and sees that the harvest-thing is behind them, and has literally latched onto them. There are blades embedded in the trunk. The car's tires spin, but the thing's weight is dragging them backwards.
Max screams.
"Reverse," Billy rasps out.
Oh. Okay. She slams it into reverse, and suddenly instead of being pulled backward by the thing, she's rocketing into it. The car, a massive hunk of steel propelled by a turbo-charged engine, crunches into the huge tangle of blades and machinery with a horrific crunch that is somehow satisfying. The back end of the car rises up into the air as they literally drive partway onto the thing, and then Max throws the gearshift forward and the tires squeal and they're pulling forward again, now free, though with a spare blade or two embedded in the trunk.
Max has about half a second to think that they're actually going to get away this time. But the car's not working right. It's sliding all over the road.
Tires, she thinks. The back tires were shredded on the blades. She doesn't know enough about driving to think how to compensate for it. They end up in a skid that turns them all the way around to face backward, toward the thing that's rolling ... or spinning ... or whatever it does, coming toward them like a tornado made out of knives.
Max screams again and puts the car into reverse. There's a horrific shrieking of metal: the back bumper scraping on pavement. The car slews wildly from side to side and makes almost no progress at all.
Beside her, Billy stirs, half raising his head. She hadn't even realized he was still conscious. "Shit," he murmurs.
She's half in tears. "I don't know what to do. The car won't drive."
Billy leans over and catches hold of the steering wheel, stopping her frantic attempts to wrestle it back and forth to keep the car straight. She takes her foot off the gas too. The engine instantly stalls and dies.
"Get in the backseat," Billy rasps, leaning over her as he forces himself to move. His T-shirt is stuck to his back with blood, and she can see long tears in the fabric. "Get down on the floor. It might not know you're there."
"No," she says, looking straight ahead, as the advancing thing fills the windshield.
"Max, damn it --"
She can't get her mind to wrap around what she wants to say. She ran once, and left her friends to die. She won't do it again.
"I'd rather die," she says, "than be left here alone," and she takes his hand, tangles their bloody fingers together.
Billy huffs out a breath and starts to say something, but she never finds out what.
The world cracks open, and floods with light.
Three days after the day before the end of the world
Max has almost forgotten what real sunlight looks like. It floods through the growing crack in the air behind the thresher-thing, throwing a pattern of dark crazy-quilt shadows across the car. Max risks taking her eyes off the monster long enough to glance at Billy, and sees his pale, blood-splattered face fixed in shock, lit up with the clear gold light of a Midwest summer.
And then suddenly the thing is flung to the side as if a great hand smacked it away.
Max only knows one person who can do something like that, but she doesn't really have time to process it before the car shudders and jerks and, despite the engine still being dead, lurches forward and then launches into the rift in the air like it was shot out of a cannon.
They land very hard on the pavement in what looks like, and in fact probably is, the parking lot at the construction zone for the new Starcourt Mall. Max's chest bounces off the steering wheel, and then she collapses back in the seat. All she can do is breathe. The sunlight is shockingly, painfully bright. The sky is blue, flecked with clouds.
Then the door is wrenched open and there are hands on her, pulling her out.
"Max, Jesus Christ," someone is saying. It sounds like Dustin. But that's not possible.
She can't take it in. She's being set down on the pavement, and her legs buckle, and then someone is holding her by the shoulders and there's a blanket wrapped around her and it's all such a shocking contrast from where she was a few minutes ago that she doesn't even recognize Chief Hopper at first.
"Kid?" he's saying. "Maxine? You hurt? Is this your blood?"
"I -- I -- Billy --" She starts thrashing, trying to turn around and see what's happening with Billy. There are too many people around, and even though she knows most of them, she's suddenly, horribly overwhelmed. She just needs to get back to Billy and find out what's happening with him.
"Whoa, hey, settle down," the Chief says, but she gets away and half-falls, half-slides across the hood of the car.
Billy is there on the other side, with two people -- Will's big brother and his girlfriend -- dragging him out of the car and laying him down on a blanket. There's blood all over everything. It was black in the weird light of the other place, but it's shockingly bright red here, almost dazzling. Max staggers and falls on her knees on the blanket.
Billy is still breathing, short shallow gasps. She takes his hand and tries to match her breathing to his, as if it'll help somehow.
"Hargrove," Steve Harrington says from somewhere not far away, "dude, your car is trashed."
Max bursts into tears.
*
So it turns out in the real world, they've been gone just a little over two days. Max wasn't wrong about Eleven being able to find them. It's just that Eleven hadn't been searching nearly as long as Max thought she would have, and also, there was a lot to take care of first.
Three people in Hawkins died, including Neil Hargrove. The town was attacked by two of what Dustin calls Threshosauruses and Steve calls heavy metal death machines. Eleven destroyed one, and the Chief ran over the other one with a bulldozer, apparently.
Max's mom is not just alive but perfectly fine, if completely frantic. She hugs and hugs Max in the waiting room at the hospital, even though Max is a sweaty, filthy, blood-covered mess.
Max feels like she's floating through a dazzling haze. None of this feels real. She sits and lets a doctor poke at her and hears words like "dehydrated" and "rest and fluids" bounce around over her head. She wants them to let her see Billy and has to be told over and over again that he's in surgery. She starts crying again when her mom takes her out of the hospital, into an evening that somehow still feels too bright and too clean, with too many people around.
They're staying at a hotel since their house is pretty much destroyed. Max showers and showers, and cries some more in the shower, and then she eats two cheeseburgers and falls asleep for twelve hours.
She wakes up screaming Billy's name, and won't be calmed down until her mom bundles her into the car and drives her to the hospital.
Billy is out of surgery and resting. There's some talk about visiting hours and underage visitors and family; Max doesn't really register much of it. While her mom is talking to the doctors, Max ducks away and slips through a door swinging shut after the nurse who just went through it.
She wanders around for a while before she finds the right room. Luckily the Hawkins hospital is not very big, and she had a chance to get a feel for the lay of the land while she and the others were visiting Steve last fall.
Billy looks awful, maybe even worse than Steve did. His face is pale and bruised, shadowed by what she now realizes is just a couple of days' worth of stubble -- which, okay, maybe that was another sign that time was weird in that hot red place, but how was she supposed to know how fast beards grow? The purplish creases on the side of his face where she gouged him with her fingernails, just a couple of days ago in the real world, stand out against his bloodless skin. What she can see of his chest above the blankets is heavily bandaged, and there are some tube that she really doesn't want to know too much about.
But he's alive. The machine above his head says so.
She never would have believed that it would matter this much.
"Hi," she says quietly. She sits on the edge of the bed and takes his hand, naturally and comfortably, as if there's just no question now that of course she would.
Right now the future -- like the sun, when it first broke through Eleven's gate into that strange, red, dead world -- feels too big and too bright, like a great white nothing washing out everything except the next few minutes. In days to come, she's going to have to figure out how to have a future again.
But for now, she sits on the edge of Billy's bed and slowly feels the panicked tension seeping out of her, paced in the soft beeps of the pulse monitor above his bed.
The cold fingers in hers twitch, and Billy turns his head to the side. "Max?" he murmurs.
"Yes," she says, the word rushing out of her on a relieved breath. "Yes, I'm here."
He blinks sleepily at her. Slowly, his gaze goes from Max to the room around them. "What happened?" he whispers.
"We're, uh. We're back. Eleven got us back."
Slowly and wearily, his brow draws together in a frown. "Eleven."
"Mike's friend. I told you about her."
"Oh." A silence. He's still really drugged up. "Where's the ... where is it?"
"I think Eleven killed it. Or broke it, or ... whatever."
"Just to make sure I've got this straight," Billy says after another pause, "Eleven is a kid. Like, she's your age."
"Yeah."
"Okay."
"I told you she blew up a whole entire Demogorgon."
He huffs out a faint, pained breath, not quite a laugh. "I'm still not sure what that is." His features contort in a look of concentration. "Where's my car?"
"Probably still in the Starcourt Mall parking lot."
"Oh."
"It's pretty banged up."
"How 'bout you?" he whispers.
There's a feeling like her heart being squeezed. It's the same feeling she got when he came for her in the cornfield. "I'm okay." She thinks of him standing over her, putting himself in the way, throwing her down and letting that thing stab him instead of her. "Thank you."
Billy nods slightly. His eyes start to drift shut.
"Billy, wait. Billy, uh ..." She feels like she needs to tell him the worst news, get it out of the way. "Your dad, he's, uh ... He's dead."
He blinks slowly, and turns to look at the ceiling. "Oh," he says at last.
"I'm sorry," she says, although she's not. All she feels at the idea of no longer having Neil Hargrove tramping around, turning her home into a prison, is relief. But she feels sorry for Billy.
After another silence, he says in a low voice, "I'm not."
Max doesn't know what to say to that. So she just sits with him, hand twined in hand, until her mom comes to find her.
Epilogue
Max missed her friends more than she can say, but there are times when she wonders why.
"So Dustin thinks you guys were underneath the Upside Down," Steve says.
Sitting on the edge of Billy's bed, the place where she's been for the better part of the last two days, Max just listens. She finds herself wanting to talk much less since she got back. It's like she's almost forgotten how.
"Dude!" Dustin protests, sounding deeply affronted. "That's not what I said at all!"
"That is literally exactly what you said," Will says, nodding.
"No, I -- okay, look --" Dustin grabs a sheet off the notepad on the bedside table. "Look, look." He holds it out horizontally, the edge toward them. "This side, us. The other side, the Upside Down. Got it?"
"No," several voices reply.
Dustin ignores them, forging onward. He begins to fold the paper into multiple creases, turning it into some kind of origami object. "Okay, so, we're pretty sure it's not just the Upside Down, all right? Mr. Clarke can explain it better, he's the one who was telling us about fourth and fifth dimensions earlier this year --"
"Isn't that a band?" Steve says.
"... shut up, Steve. Anyway, it's like, if you imagine there's a direction like down, but more like out to the side, except it's not the side, it's a direction we don't have a name for. And that's probably also why time is really different there. I guess."
Max lets it wash over her. Billy is either asleep or pretending to be. He seems very confused about having his room turn into a hangout for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds and their intermittently visiting older brothers and sisters, and Max is pretty sure the feeling is mutual, but they all want to be where Max is, and right now, Max is where Billy is, as much as she can arrange it.
She hasn't talked to them about what it was like there. She hasn't really talked to anyone. Dustin keeps asking about it, often while everyone else tries to shut him up, but his questions are things like "Did you think to take any barometric pressure readings while you were there?" and "Did either of you happen to have a working watch over there?", and not things like "How come you were gone for two days and came back joined at the hip with your psychotic stepbrother?"
Max isn't quite sure, yet, if the way she and Billy are with each other now is going to be able to survive in a world where they aren't each other's only thing and everything. But things are going pretty okay so far. He's been sleeping a lot. Sometimes she sits with him and reads to him, mostly from the assigned reading she's supposed to be doing over the summer to make up for her bad grades last year. The books are boring, all about kids with ordinary-world problems like drug addiction and suicidal best friends, or educational books set in foreign places. She doubts Billy is listening -- he drowses, eyes closed -- but when she stops he stirs and nudges her and mutters something about wanting to find out what happened to those little assholes in Terebithia or whatever, so she clears her throat and takes a sip of water and goes on.
And sometimes she just sits with him, hour after hour, knees drawn up under her chin, not really thinking about anything. Just ... being.
"So the Upside Down is cold and blue, and this place you went is hot and red, right?" Mike says. "So it's like basically the opposite of it."
Dustin puts down the folded paper in exasperation. "None of you guys get this at all, do you?" He looks around at the room, at the others all draped on whatever furniture is available or sitting on the floor, very similar to the way they all did in Steve's hospital room, last fall, back when Max was new to this and new to them. "Anyone? Am I the only one who cares about this? Max?"
"It was another place, and now we're back," Max says. She squeezes Billy's hand. "And that's good enough for me."