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The military came some seven days after the earth split open.
While they built the fence, they promised safety. They were just inquiring about the natural disaster, the residents would only be quarantined until they deduced they were safe to be unmonitored, to contact those from the outside world.
Nancy remembers her father standing with his arms crossed, peering out the front window of the house as big armored cars rolled by. He had grumbled about it being unconstitutional to do something like this, to keep them here, but never did much more than that.
It stressed her mother out, she could tell by the way there was always something cooking in the oven, always something set to rest on the counter, always a treat to bring to whoever she or her sister or brother were visiting that day.
Some twenty-three days after the military had come and built fences and guard towers and started routine medical checks, they packed up and left. Sheet metal patched up the rifts in the ground, gates and walls sealed off the gate downtown, and the military retreated back to wherever they came from.
Nancy remembered the last time she ever saw the chain-link fence gates open.
She and Mike and Holly had been curious, and it was a rare thing for all three siblings to be in the house at the same time, so they had gone ahead and followed the convoy to the edge of town on their bikes. One of the men on the back of the final camouflage-painted truck had looked at them with an odd sort of sorrow. They hadn’t understood it then. They understood it now.
First, the gates wouldn’t open for anybody. That had stirred quite the ruckus, and groups of people had taken to gathering outside the guard stations and hollering at them about their rights and the constitution and unlawful imprisonment. The throngs had been informed it was for their safety, until the government figured out what to do with the town, with their disaster, with the unpredicted circumstances.
Maybe a week after people had begrudgingly settled into their now unsupervised lives in the holding pen, the power went out.
Nancy remembered the lights flickering once, then turning off in the newsroom. None of the printers or projectors or even lights would come back on, and after talking to the buildings next door, her boss had deduced the power had gone out for the whole street, and she had driven home early.
The lights were out at home, too. She had sat on the couch in the living room with a book and waited for Mike to come home, to talk to someone who might have some sort of idea about something.
Mike and Holly came home maybe ten minutes later, fifteen tops. Holly had walked in the door midway through wondering aloud how long the power would be out, if they’d get to keep missing school, if their mom would still let her go to Mary’s house.
Mike looked to Nancy on the couch. She raised her eyebrows, Upside Down? He shrugged, I don’t know.
Holly had run upstairs with a flashlight and the book she had recently been obsessed with and Mike sat down on the couch by Nancy, sighing. “Do you think it’s him?” Nancy asked, quietly.
Mike shrugged. “I talked about it with the others for a bit before we left school. Will doesn’t even… sense him. Well, he does, but you know— not more than usual.”
“Okay,” Nancy said, chewing her lip. “We should talk to Jane. And Will.” Nancy had taken to calling El by her birth name recently, feeling guilty for calling her by her number.
“Yeah. We planned to all radio in around four,” Mike picked at a hangnail. “We need to get you and Jonathan radios by this point. I mean, Steve and Robin have them, and it’s not like we’re always together.”
Get radios. Nancy added it to her mental to-do list. “Right. Yeah, of course, I don’t know why we haven’t thought about this before.”
“Something just feels off, this time.”
“Yeah, Nancy replied, “It does.”
Mike headed upstairs briefly afterwards. Nancy could barely sit still, but it felt off to leave the house, so she tried sitting on her front steps and reading her book. She was stuck reading the same paragraph over and over when Will and Jonathan get home, their bikes clinking and scraping the pavement.
“You okay?” Jonathan asked, brows furrowed. “
Yeah,” Nancy answered, and shook her head as if to clear it. “Just spooked, with the power being out.” She closed her book and looked up. “You two okay? Any… sign of him?”
Will shook his head. “No. I think it’s just a normal power outage. At least for now.” He glanced to Jonathan and added, “…I’m gonna head inside.”
After Will parked his bike in the garage and closed the door, Jonathan sat beside Nancy and let out a shaky sigh. “We’re gonna be okay,” He said, hesitantly. “It’s not him. Will would tell me.”
Nancy offered him a nervous smile. “I know. I just… feel like something terrible will happen. It’s not like he’s scared to, to show me his plans. What if he gave me a spidey sense or something for things like this?”
“Hey,” Jonathan said, and reached for her hand. “Even if it is him, we can figure it out. We always have. Okay?”
“Okay,” Nancy sighed, and scrubbed her hands over her face. “Alright, yeah. I’m just freaking out. Jesus.”
“It’s okay! Really, Nance. We’ve been through a lot. We’re gonna radio in with the others later, and I dunno— just try to figure stuff out.”
“Yeah.” She looked up at him. “We’ll figure it out.”
They sat out there for a while after. Maybe to absorb one last normal day. Eventually, when Nancy’s little pink watch she had gotten for her birthday pointed to three forty-five, they headed inside.
The basement was currently the Byers’ boys’ place of residence, sprawled across the spare mattress and the couch, but it had really turned into Mike and Will’s personal hangout space with how much time Jonathan spent in Nancy’s room. That was, of course, where they found the two, the radio tuned in on the table, and a flashlight pointed at a full glass of water illuminating the place. The pair were talking to Dustin on the other end of the line, who must’ve been anxious to see what was going on as well.
“Find anything out?” Jonathan asked from the top of the stairs.
“Just that Steve’s had his whole house to himself since the gate went up,” Mike replied flatly.
“And he always has Robin over,” Will added, smirking to himself. “My brother and Nancy are here, by the way,” He added, addressing Dustin.
“I thought they were just friends?” Jonathan asked, taking a seat beside Mike on the couch.
“Yeah, that’s what Robin told me,” Nancy remarked, perching on the edge of the coffee table.
“Well, they’re having sleepovers every night!” Dustin crackled through the walkie. “Steve keeps saying ‘nah, man, we’re just friends,’ but I just don’t buy it!”
“Good for him, I guess?” Nancy said quizzically, shrugging. “It’s really not our business, anyway.”
“Well as his best friend, it is MY business!” Dustin exclaimed.
“Can you guys hear me on this thing?” Steve crackled suddenly. “I feel like such a dork using this, Jesus…”
“You’re fine!” Came Robin’s voice, fainter. “It’s not like we could use a phone!”
“Speak of the Devil!” Dustin remarked. “How was your sleepover?”
Steve’s sigh resounded through the walkie. “It was great, thanks. We watched Top Gun again and fought over my Atari and got high.”
“I still don’t know what you have against Charlie!” Robin remarked in the background.
“She doesn’t matter to the story, like, at all!”
“You weren’t even paying attention—“
“Is this thing on?” Cut in Hopper’s gruff voice.
“Yeah, we can hear you,” Dustin responded.
“Hi, Mom,” Will and Jonathan chorused.
“Hi boys!”
“Hi, guys,” Jane said, sounding like she was a little too close to the walkie.
Joyce asked, “Do we have everyone?”
“Still waiting on Lucas,” Dustin sighed.
“And Max,” Jane corrected.
No one remarked that Max couldn’t contribute to the conversation.
While they waited for Lucas to check in, Robin and Steve continued to bicker over Top Gun, Hopper noisily tried to adjust the walkie, and Will and Mike were deep in their own conversation about the meaning of a song in The Hobbit. Jonathan looked to Nancy with his bemused, same shit as always smile.
“Hello? Guys?” Lucas asked.
“There he is!” Dustin exclaimed.
“Man of the hour!” Steve added.
“Tell Max I say hi.” Jane requested.
“Alright, alright, everyone’s here,” Hopper huffed.
“First things first. Anything going on that’s definitely our department?” Our department. The way they spoke about the Upside Down over the radio and on the phone, just in case. After a quiet chorus of no’s and I don’t think so’s, Hopper remarked, “At least we got that. We’re gonna let El poke around in some people’s heads, try to get some idea of the power situation. You kids know anything about that?”
Nancy hesitated. “The guards. At the gate. The last ones out the other day, one of them mans the tower near the trailer park.”
“You think they know something?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Steve defended.
“Yeah, it’s better than nothing. Anyone else think of anything?” Jonathan asked.
It was silent for a moment.
“The… nurses. Some of them worked with the military for the mandatory checkups,” Lucas said. “Maybe they have something El can find out.”
“Alright, we got guards and nurses. Anybody else?” The line was quiet. Remarkably, there wasn’t much to go off of.
“I’ll start looking, then,” Said Jane, in her usual soft tone.
“Good luck,” Dustin told her.
“Yeah, Good luck, kiddo,” Robin added.
The rest of the party wished her luck as well, and finally, before everyone started closing their antennas and heading back to their lives, Joyce cut in, “Hang on—“ “Yeah?” Will asked. “Just— I know I sound paranoid, I know, but please try not to go out at night. Not with the lights out. Any of you, not just my sons. Okay?” There was always something comforting about Joyce’s usual rasp, her worried wobble in her voice.
“Okay.” “Alright, Ms. Byers.”
“Sounds good over here.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“Alright. Check back in at 4 tomorrow. If the power’s not back, we’re gonna need to start planning for it to be gone a while.”
With that delightfully uneasy note, Mike says okay, and slides the antenna on the radio shut. The four of them sit in the dim basement for a while.
“Do you think the power’s gonna come back on soon?” Will asks.
“Yeah, I mean, it has too,” Mike assures him. “Especially with the military dudes. I bet they just knocked a line down with one of their big armored cars or something, and we’ll have it back in a couple days.“
“Yeah,” Jonathan added, less sure than Mike, “They won’t just leave us without power in here.”
“They definitely won’t,” Nancy said, more to herself than the boys.
“I mean, they can’t.”
“They can’t,” Mike agrees. “We’ll be back to normal quarantine in no time!” Jonathan and Nancy eyed each other uneasily. They could only hope.
Eventually, Nancy found the darkness of the basement stifling, and headed back up, Jonathan soon after. Nancy’s mother had come home at some point, and was refusing to let the outage interfere with her nightly ritual of dinner, and was working on lighting the stove with a match when Nancy came upstairs. She filled a glass with water from the sink— careful not to open the fridge— and sat at the dinner table, where she could see the afternoon sun through the window. Jonathan took the seat across from her, and they just sat for a while.
This was weird. She was used to horrors out of her control being contained, separate. A different dimension. Otherworldly creatures. Doom did not come to her home and turn all the lights off. Doom was reserved for the walls of the Byers’ house and the woods at night. Doom came swinging like a bat, not flashing in her face like a camera.
“Nancy, Jonathan, how hungry are you? I don’t want leftovers, since we can’t open the fridge,” Nancy’s mom called from the kitchen.
”Only sort of hungry, Mrs. Wheeler,” Jonathan responded.
”Yeah, I’m not feeling dinner, really, with everything going on.”
“I’ll just make your brothers eat all this, then,” Mrs Wheeler shrugged and popped the cardboard box of spaghetti open. “They’re always hungry, I can’t keep Mike out of my ingredients.” Jonathan and Nancy chuckled quietly at that. The boys really did have a tendency to eat anything in sight, at their age.
Dinner was oddly normal, that night. Holly had remarked with a smile that with the flashlights and everything, it felt a little like camping. Nancy had smiled at that. The spaghetti was comforting, made things feel like just another school night. Nothing felt like an emergency, as Mike passed her the salt over the camping lantern set on the table. If she squinted, she could pretend Mike had school in the morning, she had work the next day, maybe she and Jonathan would go get ice cream tomorrow afternoon.
But the street was dark, still, when her mother made Mike and Holly do the dishes. Not a light was on, not a TV glowed through the windows, even the cars were parked in their driveways, lights off and dormant. Like the whole world was asleep.
Mike headed to bed first, getting out of the kitchen to leave Holly with the final dirty plate as fast as possible. Will followed him upstairs moments later, and eventually, Nancy went up herself.
Her room was dark and quiet, and she did not like it. She changed quickly, feeling vulnerable without a light to turn on, and by the time she had brushed her teeth, Jonathan had managed to sneak in her room after her. A boyfriend is always comforting to have around when you’re scared of the dark and the lights are off. But, when Nancy saw him sitting on the edge of her bed, entranced by her photos and knickknacks and stuffed animals as always, there was a sense of relief stronger than boyfriend.
“You doing okay?” He asked as she shut the door softly behind her.
“Yeah.” She said, and sat down beside him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Mostly.”
“It’s okay to be freaked out, Nance. I’m freaked out. But we’re gonna be okay.” It felt like that was all they’d been saying. We’ll figure this out. We’ll be okay. She’s not so sure.
She wrapped her arm around his and sighed, “I hope so.” She hated to be so negative. To be the one that didn’t believe in the good ending. Jonathan was always alright with it, though, and he laced his fingers through hers and rested his head on her hair.
They sat like that for a while, Nancy watching his leg bounce on her bedroom floor until the room was so dark she could only feel the fabric of his pajama pants rubbing against her thigh.
“We should go to sleep,” Jonathan murmured, eventually.
“Yeah,” Nancy said, uneasy still. He pressed a kiss to her hair before shifting on the bed, setting under the covers before peeling back the blankets so Nancy could settle in.
He liked doing little things like that, peeling back the covers and opening doors and remembering her favorite pen. She settled with her arms wrapped around his bicep, her face tucked into his shoulder.
And hesitantly, she had let herself say, “Do you really think we’ll be okay?”
“Yeah. We’ve always figured this stuff out. I mean, it’s not even a monster, it’s just the lights going out.” She could hear the gentle laugh in his voice at that.
“Okay,” She said, and sighed.
“Yeah. We’re gonna be okay.”
“Yeah.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then, “Oh, Jonathan?”
“Yeah?”
“Mike thinks we should get radios. One for each of us, since we’re not always with the boys.”
”That sounds good. We can go get ‘em tomorrow?”
”Yeah. Tomorrow.”
”Goodnight, Jonathan.”
“Goodnight, Nancy.”