Chapter Text
Steve takes one final drag on the joint and erupts into a coughing fit that brings tears to his eyes. Luckily, he’s down the block from Kathy Graham’s house, so no one sees him choke like an idiot.
Kathy’s parents are away for the week on business, so she’s hosting a Halloween party. Robin invites him. It’s not his usual scene, but considering his social life went the way of the Starcourt Mall, it’s not like he has a lot of options, or any, if he’s being honest, so he says yes. There’s something too sad about spending the Saturday night before Halloween home, alone, for Steve to let that happen—even if he doesn't really care if he sees any of the people who are probably there. Steve doesn't want to dwell on the fact he's a huge loser now, so he pretends this is just any other party in his life.
He drops the joint and shakes out the cuffs of the white blouse he stole from his mother’s closet. He has to, otherwise the billowing cuffs catch on the tin foil sword he made earlier in his kitchen, now attached to his hip. With a deep breath, he reaches into his hair and flips an eye patch over his right eye. A pirate is as good as it’s going to get this year under such short notice.
The bass line of some Night Ranger song radiates from the house, even from where he stands by the curb. He walks up the driveway and studiously ignores the girl puking in the bushes as her friend holds back her hair. He hops up the front step, twists the doorknob, and lets himself in. A wall of noise packs a punch. Most of it is music, but the sounds of people yelling to be overheard fill in the notes.
There’s more yelling as the people closest to the door look at him in surprise, and he escapes with a nod and wave. Being stared at like he's a monkey in a zoo has nothing to do with the reason why he pushes through air thick with smoke in search of a drink. Steve heads for the kitchen, assuming it’s where the keg is, and he’s right. He nods at the guys standing next to it—“You’re gonna have to pump it, dude,” says one of them—and he fills up a cup.
He sips at it as he surveys the crowd over the rim of the cup, taking in everyone’s costumes. It looks like most people take Halloween a lot more seriously than Steve. In one corner, Indiana Jones talks to Princess Leia in next to nothing. Dracula dances with the Hamburglar in front of the couch, while Papa Smurf attempts to pick up Smurfette and throw her over his shoulder. Some greasers fail to look a very convincing Elvira in the eyes. Someone in an off-white bed sheet fiddles with the records.
It's the typical sort of shit Steve sees every Halloween until he spots the zombie in the corner of the living room.
A mouthful of beer goes down the wrong pipe, and he nearly aspirates on suds.
It's Billy. He's standing right next to a giant speaker, and he's either committed wholeheartedly to the dazed look of the undead or the volume has left him concussed.
Steve creeps around the kitchen counter and lifts his eye patch to get a better look. Yellow-green bruises cast a sallow look to Billy's face where it isn’t seeping blood, and grease flattens his usual curly mullet to his head. Underneath all the shitty Halloween makeup, it’s Billy. It can’t not be. No one else has that stupid moustache. There are even two gaping holes in his chest right where the Mind Flayer pierced his chest back at the mall. The mall where Billy died.
What the fuck.
Steve checks to see if anyone else has noticed Billy, but nobody screams or tries to get away. They don't notice much beyond their immediate conversation and their own drinks. Looking through the crowd, a platinum blonde mullet, hacked and backcombed to death, catches his eye. He turns back so fast he almost gives himself whiplash: it’s Robin. She’s talking to Kathy, who’s dressed in what looks like her regular clothes. Kathy looks small and unassuming next to Robin, whose shoulders jut out like a linebacker’s in a dress with serious shoulder padding. The fabric drapes down to her knees, where matching pants and shoes meet in one unifying look. Under the kitchen lights, she glints like something silver and sharp. Holy shit. Steve thinks it might actually be real chainmail.
“Oh, heyyy Kathy,” Steve says as he slides up next to Robin. Earrings the size of doughnuts swing from her ears when she turns to look. “Great costume. What are you supposed to be?”
“Hi, Steve. I’m Molly Ringwald in the Breakfast Club. Obviously.” Kathy rolls her eyes, but her irritation is short-lived. “Isn’t Robin’s costume amazing? She’s. . . what are you again?”
Robin smiles tightly. “Aunty Entity. From Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” She and Steve watched it in its last week in theatres sometime after Starcourt imploded. She hated it. Steve thought it wasn’t so bad. But they could both agree on one thing: Tina Turner as Aunty Entity holds a certain appeal. Relief comes to Steve quickly when he realizes her version shows a lot less skin.
“And I’m a pirate,” Steve fake-laughs jovially, as he flicks the eye patch down and up. “So uh, can I borrow Robin for a minute, real quick?” He doesn’t wait for Kathy to nod before he puts his arm around Robin and steers her away.
Robin dances out of his reach, and her bracelets jingle when she hits his arm. “What is your problem?”
“My problem is that zombie.”
Steve points. Billy continues to stare slack-jawed into the crowd. Only now he has a red silo cup and a girl—Stacey might be her name? Steve can’t remember—hangs off his arm, laughing like he just told a joke that requires about one hundred more IQ points than he has at his disposal.
Robin looks, a smile dawning slowly over her face, and tells him: “They’re coming to get you, Steve.” She pitches her voice low, drawing out his name with a smile. It disappears immediately. Now she’s looking at him like he’s a disappointment. Again.
“Steve,” she sighs. “You work at a video store.”
“So?” The last thing he wants to think about at a party is work. Especially not now they might have a Situation on their hands.
“Night of the Living Dead. George A. Romero’s first zombie movie? It’s in our Halloween display you helped build!”
Oh, that Night of the Living Dead. Yeah, Steve remembers now. The corrugated cardboard of the display sliced open the fleshy bit where his thumb meets his palm, and he lost about a gallon of blood. He shakes his head.
“Now’s not the time for movies,” Steve says. He grabs her shoulder pads and twists her so that she’s facing the zombie. “Look at the zombie. I mean, really look."
“You know, when you point out a crush at a party, you’re supposed to say, ‘don’t look now but check her out’. And that's when I casually yawn into my arm as I look over totally nonchalant to see if you have any taste yet.”
Steve shakes her shoulders slightly.
“Alright, I’m looking!”
“Doesn’t he remind you of someone?”
“Uh, maybe one of the Day of the Dead extras?” She twists her head around to catch Steve’s eye with a reproving look. “That’s the third and final movie in Romero’s series, dingus. It came out earlier this year.” She turns back and assesses the zombie with surprise. “Actually, that’s a pretty good costume. Like, better than the movie even.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I don’t think it’s a costume. It’s Billy.”
She laughs. It’s the laugh she makes when Steve bets he can sign up more customers to their rewards points program than she can. She folds her arms and really looks at Steve.
“You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.”
“Okay, just how much did you smoke tonight?” She looks at the silo cup in his hand. “You know you get weird when you mix. Billy—” She casts an eye around to see if anyone’s too close. “He’s dead.” She says it like he didn't witness Billy's death right beside her.
He shakes his head. He’s barely had a sip of the beer in his cup, and he only took a few tokes, and that was before he even got to the party as a kind of good luck hail Mary to grease the social wheels. This isn’t some hallucination.
“Robin, think of all the—.” Freddie Kruger knocks into Steve’s shoulder, claws patting his chest in apology as he moves deeper into the living room. Steve hunches, suddenly aware of just how many people are around them, and whispers: “Think of the wacky stuff we got up to at Scoops Ahoy.”
Nobody in town but them and the kids know what truly happened last summer. Officially, an unprecedented sinkhole swallowed up the Starcourt Mall, taking Hooper and Billy as its only casualties. But Steve, Robin, and their respective bank accounts—on account of their workplace literally imploding—know better.
He uses his eyes to say what he can’t out loud surrounded by other people. Hers go wide in understanding.
“Okay, but what—Wait, where did he go?”
Steve swivels towards the corner. It’s empty.
Oh shit.
"I thought zombies are supposed to be slow," Steve says, turning to look at the people. Everyone looks suspicious, as if they could be hiding a full-grown man underneath their costumes.
“They are. They’re dead. You can’t move dead flesh around like your Carl Lewis.” Robin pulls out these facts as if she’s an expert. Considering how often she watches movies, maybe she is. “But that relies on the assumption that zombies are real. Which they are not.”
“After all we’ve been through, you’re going to call time on zombies. Really?”
“I’m not “calling time” on anything. I just have a healthy dose of scepticism, which apparently one of us need considering you’ve just accepted Billy’s back as a zombie.”
“I’m not being paranoid.” Now, if this was two years or so ago, he would have said bullshit on himself right there with Robin. Or, with Carol and Tommy, more like, because King Steve ran with a different crowd back then. He didn't even know who Robin Buckley was two years ago, let alone most of the people in this house. But a lot of freaky shit has unfolded in his life between then and now. He can't be delusional if there's actually an evil dimension of face-sucking monsters controlled by a bunch of Commie scientists in a maze of tunnels underneath the town. When you wind up underground, tied up, and at the business end of syringe as said Commies interrogate you, suspension of disbelief is your normal setting.
“I don’t know, from here it sure looks like it.”
“We’re wasting time!" Steve groans. "Please, just trust me on this one.”
And because she’s a true friend—and also because she was right there with him for their stay with the Russians and after, when the mall and Billy went kablooey—all she does is shrug her massive shoulders and says: “Okay.”
“We gotta find him,” he says. He points at what might be a second living room or den. “You check the kitchen and those rooms through there. I’ll check back in the living room.”
Robin opens her mouth, looking affronted, but Steve doesn’t wait around long enough to hear her opinions before he’s pressing through people. Maybe by putting himself in Billy’s shoes, he can recreate the scene and know where he went. He regrets his decision as soon as he’s under the speaker; Cheap Trick blares so loudly it threatens to vibrate Steve apart. He winces out into the crowd, hoping his ears don’t start to bleed. From his vantage point under the speaker, he can see the whole room including where it opens up to the front hall and staircase. That’s it. The stairs must go to the bedrooms, and where else would Billy want to be with Stacey?
The din of people yelling weakens with every step he takes. On the darkened landing, Robin Zander is still audible, but it doesn’t sound like he’s singing inside Steve's brain anymore, so he has space to think. Cautiously, Steve swings open the first door he sees.
“What the fuck!” Hulk Hogan yells over his shoulder from his spot in front of the toilet.
“Oh, fuck. Sorry!” Steve slams the door shut. “Sorry!” He yells again from the hallway, wincing. He never wants to see that much of Hulk Hogan ever again.
Shaking his head, he turns to the next closest door. It swings open easily and reveals an empty office, moonlight shining through the blinds onto a neat desk. Steve closes it quietly and moves down the hall to the next door.
He curls his hand over the handle, takes a deep breath, and pushes it open.
“Hey!” A guy straddled by a girl on a bed yells out, mouth and nose smeared with green. The girl flips herself of his hips and nearly crashes to the floor, arms coming up to cover her exposed chest. “Get out of here!” She screams. Steve sees her face covered in green paint and puts two and two together. Steve clenches his eyes shut and raises one hand in apology as he gropes for the door with the other. He slams it shut and hangs his head in the empty hallway. That image is going to be etched into his brain forever.
“Fuck,” he says, softly.
He turns. If he doesn’t quit soon, he’s gonna be that weirdo at a party, and that’s the last thing his reputation needs now. But he needs to check one more room upstairs, at the end of the hall. The door is halfway open, and Steve can’t see shit. It’s too dark—a black curtain of shadow hangs there, as effective as a wall in blocking his sight.
It’s just a doorway to a room without the lights on, clearly, but something about it stops him up short. Walls are usually a sign you can't go any further, but maybe that only applies if they're actual walls made of bricks and dry wall. Right? This is some kind of metaphor shit that Nance used to tell him about for English class. Except anything can be beyond it, hiding, not just a failing grade he has to explain to his dad.
“Fuck.” This time the word comes out a resigned whisper because even though everything is telling him to turn around and find Robin, he’s going to go in that room. Taking short, tentative steps in time with the bass line, he moves slowly towards the door.
At the threshold, he holds his breath. He can’t hear anything in the room before him but that doesn’t mean anything. Up close, the shadows remain a thick, solid thing. It makes his eyes hurt. They’re trying so hard to find some semblance of light in the inky nothingness before him that they sting.
What he wouldn't give to have a bat in his fist right now. Why did he dress as a lame pirate and not Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds? His sword is a piece of useless junk, flimsy arts and crafts in comparison to a solid Louisville Slugger.
Empty handed, Steve lifts his arm with an audible swallow to grope along the inner wall for a light switch. His arm dips into the darkness, disappearing into it like it's a calm, cool lake at midnight without the light of the moon to penetrate the depths.
Where is that fucking light?
His fingers meet plastic, and the cold, harsh overhead fanlight bathes the room in light. It reveals a large bed sits in the centre of the room, its floral comforter untouched, between two side tables and lamps. This must be Kathy’s parents’ room, and it’s empty, thankfully, but an empty room means Billy could be anywhere.
A hand grabs his shoulder.
“Guah!” Steven turns, raising his arms to shield his head. When no attack follows, he peeks through his hands. Robin stands there, hands covering her mouth, shoulders shaking with silent laughter and earrings jingling softly.
“Oh my god, you loser,” she wheezes. “It’s just me.”
Now that his heart rate’s through the roof, his breath leaves him in a shudder. “What is wrong with you?”
“Sorry, it was too good not to, you spaz."
He glares balefully. “Any luck down there?”
“Nada,” she tsks. “No Zombie-Billy in the house, at least, but I’m not checking the backyard alone.”
He nods. That’s a smart plan.
“What about you? Anything up here?”
Steve shakes his head and elects not to tell her about what he saw in the other rooms. Some details are better kept to himself. “Nothing.”
“So,” she drawls, “Hulk Hogan saying Steve “The Hair” Harrington is going around, walking into bathrooms, is a total liar, right?”
Great. He throws out his hands. “It’s his fault for not locking the door!”
“Smooth.”
“Whatever. We gotta find Billy before. . .”
“Before he eats everyone’s brains?”
Fucking gross. Steve’s stomach twists and wonders why, not for the first time, he couldn't get decent grades so he could go to college and leave behind a town where a brain-eating zombie is entirely plausible.