Chapter Text
She squeezes the handle in her palm, waits for her racing heart to die down.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi....
She hears a grunt behind her, a soft slide as Jonathan drags the body off the road.
Nancy thinks make she should feel sick, or sad, or something.
But she's seen worse in the time preceding their departure from Hawkins, and she doesn’t feel much of anything at all.
"Hey," He comes up behind her, hand brushing her back.
"You wanna drive?"
He holds out the key ring, and there's blood on his tips of his fingers.
Her thumb throbs, the minuscule injury reasserting itself. She sucks in a breath, reaches out, takes the keys.
In retrospect, yeah, it's pretty freaking weird. She's fighting zombies with Jonathan Byers, trekking through the woods and trying to find her brother, all at once, in some horrible Stephen King knockoff.
She's also learning to drive, like her mother promised they'd do this summer. So at least one thing worked out.
A thousand other things didn’t.
It’s a disease, the news says, so cover your mouths and close your windows.
It’s the environment, the paper reads, so don’t go outside at night.
It’s all of that, and something else, horrible secrets spilling out of the lab at the edge of town.
It’s not like they wake up one day and Hawkins is a wasteland. It’s more of a gradual progression of small town America to apocalypse movie set.
School’s suspended, so she and Mike spend their days at home, flitting between the basement and their bedrooms and trying not to overhear what their parents are discussing.
Steve’s family already left. Hawkins, definitely, Indiana, maybe.
“It’s bad, Nance.” He says on the phone one night, only he doesn’t seem to know exactly why either.
The first ‘confirmed’ attack is a joke, she thinks. Some stupid teenager with nothing but time on his hands now. Trying to scare a whole town.
Only later that same day she sees the white in her dad’s eyes, the sweat dripping down his neck.
Mom locks her, Holly, and Mike all in his bedroom, gives Nancy a kitchen knife and tells them to stay there.
But Mike gets on the walkie talkie and he and Lucas are swapping stories, talking about their neighbors who left last week.
This is serious, she wants to say. But she doesn’t totally understand how, or why, or what the hell is going on.
It’s like being stuck in a really, really slow moving nightmare.
The baby cries and Nancy sits on Mike’s bed, rereads his movie posters. The boys talk about their monster game.
Monsters are real, now, aren’t they?
The bus station is beyond crowded, people shoving at them every which way, and in half a second her hand slips out of Mike’s, and then-
When she shuts her eyes she can still see her mother clutching at Holly, trying to pull the two of them down the street, hurry, Nancy, come on!
But the bus only fits so many, and she's young and fit and able, so they don't deem her at risk.
Her mom bangs on the windows as the bus pulls away, and Nancy is pushed at on every side by the crowd running after it.
When she makes it out of the downtown Jonathan is there, and so is she, and their respective siblings have as good a chance as any of being with each other, so.
It makes sense, in the way everything else seems to these days.
They left Hawkins three days ago. The highways aren’t crowded anymore; anyone who could got out long ago.
But the city was still filled with those who couldn't, and the thought haunts Nancy as they leave.
Her house is empty when she packs her bag, her neighborhood deserted.
She takes a change of clothes and whatever food she can find, shoves it all in a backpack that used to hold her Creative Fiction essay and tuna sandwiches for lunch.
The last look she gets at her hometown is out the fogged back window of Jonathan’s car, main street crumbling and buildings empty.
She sinks down in his front seat, looks out the window at the bare trees and acts like there aren’t tears blurring in her eyes.
Jonathan has a pistol and a shot gun.
She has Mike’s old little league bat.
They’ll make it work.
“You ever actually see one?” She asks him over breakfast, which is a couple handfuls of Golden Grahams.
He shakes his head.
She didn’t really know Jonathan much before this. She supposes she still doesn’t, because their conversations are mostly limited to “Are you tired?” and “Where next?”
He has a map of all of Indiana in his car. It’s roughly divided into sections, from here to Indianapolis. On foot, they figure, the boys can’t have gotten that far.
“Where’s your mom?” Nancy folds the cereal box, crushes it in her hands.
He stiffens.
Maybe she shouldn’t have.
“Did she get on a bus?”
Jonathan shakes his head again, his bangs settling over his eyes, so she can’t see his expression.
Nancy bites her lip.
“They wouldn’t take me or Will, so she wouldn’t go. And, uh..” He looks just over her shoulder, clenches his jaw. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I lost them.”
She feels the twist in her gut too, the feeling of Mike’s fingers slipping through hers.
And Barb, her face in the crowd, looking right at her, her mouth forming her name.
Nancy!
But it was a madhouse everywhere you turned, Nancy’s still not sure how she even made it out of downtown in one piece. A mob, desperate for any safety, and them the whispers all said, they have to be here.
Jonathan gets off the trunk and goes to open the front door.
She sits for a second, her boots dangling two feet from the asphalt. Grey, old, worn.
Her heel is falling off, and as she slides down from the car trunk to take a better look, her hand runs along the worn key hole, slices on an outstretched piece of metal.
“Dammit..”
She brings her thumb to her mouth, sucks the blood. Jonathan pops his head out of the front.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.” She wraps the edge of her shirt around the thin cut, watches it bleed through the light pink coloring.
It’s not deep, it shouldn’t bleed too much. An inconvenience, but not-
Gravel crunches ahead of them. Nancy looks up, and it’s like the first time she caught a sneak peek of a scary movie; the shout of surprise dies in her throat, her hands are frozen at her sides.
It’s a man, sort of. Only his jaw is definitely no longer attached to the rest of his face, and his hands just clench and unclench as he stares straight at her with dead eyes.
“Jonathan.” She whispers, and It takes a little step forward.
She hears the door open, and then a rustling in the car as he, presumably, searches for a weapon.
He comes to stand next to her, and the man-it-thing is regarding the both of them, and Nancy’s still squeezing her thumb in her shirt.
He fires and misses, widely. The thing looks almost offended, but doesn’t make another move forward.
They both stand there, frozen in the moment, until another car comes whizzing by, and the action starts at once.
It moves quick for something… Dead, maybe. A sort of half-run, half-gallop down the side of the highway, and Jonathan’s still firing and still missing.
So she reaches over in a Hail Mary, and he lets her, shoves the gun right in her hands.
Nancy pulls the trigger twice, one after the other, and It falls down just beside the overgrown grass.
They sleep in the car the same way they have for the past few nights, him in the front seat, her in the back. It’s a big car but she’s curled up nearly in half, hands pressed together, wishing they’d stop shaking.
He shifts in the front, the leather creaking.
Nancy closes her eyes, but she sees It standing there. Looking at her. Watching.
She rolls over, so she can see Jonathan through the space between the seats.
Their eyes meet and it’s more familiar than she thinks it ought to be.
His car breaks down twenty miles from Indianapolis.
It’s been a week, roughly. And they’ve only come this far. Nancy remembers day trips to the city when she was a kid, school buses there and back in a travel time of two hours.
Of course, those didn’t include vigorously searching all available areas in between for any sign of her family.
Jonathan’s really mad about the car. He tries to hide it, but she can see the creases around his eyes, watches him ball a fist at his side.
“It’s alright.” She says, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. “We’re close to the city. We can pick up another one.”
Close is relative now that their primary mode of transportation is good old fashioned walking, but she’s trying to cheer him up.
He’s silent for most of the afternoon, trekking through the woods lining the freeway. He swings the bat back and forth, lets it crush the bushes they push through.
The sun sets slowly, creeping golden below the horizon.
When it’s too dark to see very far ahead Jonathan slows to a stop. He’s not spoken to her since this morning, since they abandoned his car on the side of the road with a stubborn kick to the wheels.
“Where are we going to sleep?” He asks, like the thought is just occurring to him.
Nancy rubs her toe in the dirt, looks up at him, standing and scowling under a tree.
She’s got a jacket in her backpack; if she really stretches it could covers maybe half her body length.
So she drapes it on the ground, careful to smooth out lumps, and looks up at him.
“Like camping.” She says once they’ve both settled, the ground hard and unmoving beneath them.
Jonathan laughs, maybe the first time she’s ever heard that from him.
“Yeah, real intense camping.” He turns on his side, slides a hand under his head. He’s a foot from her, the nighttime air settling over them.
She watches him watch her for a moment, before she lets her eyes fall closed.
In the morning they’re close beside each other, not quite touching, but a brush of shoulders.
Her stomach twists a little when she wakes up to see his face. She’s not woken up next to a boy like this, not even Steve, whatever that was.
Then her brain wakes up a little more and hisses that they’re literally hiding from Goddamn zombies, get out of high school, Wheeler.
They have a nice routine going.
They follow the highway, far enough off that they can’t be spotted. Not that there's people out anyway.
Nancy wonders where everyone has gone. If they have enough money, probably out of the state. Maybe the country. Is it all like this? Or is it just Indiana, doomed to a special fate.
Still, sometimes at night she can hear the very occasional, solitary car.
Sometimes at night she presses her ear to his chest and hears his heartbeat, too.
During the day they take turns carrying the heaviest of their equipment; passing the shotgun back and forth, dreaming up all the food they’d eat if they could.
Jonathan wants pizza. She wants a turkey sandwich.
Mostly they just have beans, so many beans, and tomatoes and corn. Why didn’t they pack anything but beans? Why didn’t they predict that this would take so long?
Even in the beginning it felt like a flash, like a nightmare moment, soon to be over.
But now it’s…. Life. Sort of.
Nancy thinks of Mike often. Her mom and Holly, too, but they're more than likely safe (or as safe as they can be). Yet, Mike.
She thinks he’s okay; maybe she’d feel it if he wasn’t. He’s probably tall now. Skinny as ever, though.
She imagines his hair long, without their mother's constant trims. Straight black locks, scrawny little arms and lanky legs.
The other boys are hard to see. But she always likes to think of them together. One entity.
She thinks of Will as a smaller version of Jonathan, broad shoulders and hard jaw. But in Jonathan’s picture he’s small, wide-eyed. Sleek hair and big smile.
Dustin had that mop of curls; Nancy hopes he still does. And then Lucas, tall and thin, like Mike.
Right?
It's Holly's fourth birthday.
She thinks, anyway. The days are blurred.
She makes a mud cake on the bank of a pond like she's a child, lights a flare and watches it burn.
The woods are too big, they’re lost, she figures.
Jonathan swears if they follow the road they’ll hit the city, and she doesn’t have any better ideas.
What else could she possibly do? Now that she’s seen Them, she doesn’t want to go out on her own.
Plus, she and Jonathan are a good team.
She’s not sure how common They are, anyhow; why there haven’t been any in the woods when that one found her on the highway in an instant. There had been nothing out there; she remembers looking down the highway towards Hawkins, thinking of how far away Barb might be now. If she was still in the city, if she'd gotten out.
Nothing but empty road, just the two of them for as far as she could see.
Then she'd cut heself, and-
Nancy runs a finger over the healed scar on her thumb.
She puts together two and two to make four, and of course that’s the morning Jonathan nearly chops his own finger off.
He’s trying to open a can with a knife, and he just misses the edge, and his hand’s coated in red in the time it takes her to blink.
“Shit.”
“It’s fine.” He mumbles, because of course he does.
But Jonathan can save being a masochist for later, because she’s not exactly sure how much time they have.
Nancy reaches for the shotgun, rises to her feet. She presses her back up against the tree, figuring it’ll give her some cover, only now she can’t see behind her and-
“What’s going on?” He stumbles to standing, and she watches the blood drip from his hand to the ground.
“It’s coming.” She tries to glance behind the tree, but there’s a rustle up ahead, footsteps, maybe-
Something stumbles out of the green and she readies, aims.
It’s smaller than the other one, with yellow skin and red blotches all down the arms. Nancy shoots, watches it get thrown back into the bushes with a satisfying thud.
She’s lowering the gun when Jonathan pulls at her arm, and she turns to see the same sight coming from the trees to their left, and there’s a noise behind her and it’s so much harder to turn and fire a gun than action movies let on.
She gets the one on the left, straight in the face. She swivels, points it again, but the trigger won’t work, stuck right at this very minute, of course.
The pistol’s in her bag, Jesus, Goddammit.
Something grabs at her hair, tugs her head back. It’s fingers hold on tight, pressing bone into her scalp and she’s not entirely sure what comes next.
The pressure on her head releases instantly, and out of the corner of her eyes she sees It crumble in on itself.
Jonathan keeps swinging, again and again, and his blood’s running down the bat.
She swallows down the bile in her throat, waits until he stills.
There’s no sound but their panted breathing. The sun’s streaming through the branches, and they both reek of blood.
He washes his hand and wraps it with the few bandages they have left. The bleeding has stopped, she hopes, because she’s not about to deal with that again.
“I think they can smell it.” She explains as she checks his hand, turns it over in her own. “The blood, like- it draws them.”
Jonathan closes his eyes.
She presses on the finger, gentle as she can, but no red dots invade the white strips.
He still winces.
Nancy dunks her head in the shallow pond, tries her hardest to scrub the gunk from her hair.
Blood and other things she really, really doesn’t want to think about.
The water around her runs red, but the back of her hair won’t budge.
She tugs and twists and pulls at it, so hard it makes tears burn in her eyes.
“Can you-“ She glances back at Jonathan, gestures aimlessly at her head.
He nods sharply.
His fingers are softer than hers, rubbing the dried bits together in an attempt to disintegrate them. A good idea in theory, probably, but it’s just as fruitless.
“I can’t… It’s stuck.” He shakes the clump softly, and she feels the light tug on her scalp. “Nancy-“
“Cut it.” She swallows dryly, wipes the water from the sides of her face.
“What?”
“Cut it out.” Her hand digs in her pack, emerges with a pair of school scissors.
Mike’s, she thinks. From years ago.
His fingers brush against her skin, and her hand hovers in its attempt to pass him the scissors.
“Jonathan.”
He takes them, finally, sets his bandaged hand around the base of her neck.
“You sure?”
Nancy just nods.
He works quietly, precisely. She feels the locks fall down her back, soft at first, then the weight of the mess clinging to her strands.
She looks straight out ahead, watching the trees opposite them.
When he’s finished he presses the scissors back into her lap, and the metal hits her skin through the rips in her jeans.
They sit there in silence for a minute, then two. Then ten.
When she at last turns around, he’s gazing at her with that intense focus, the look that feels as if he’s going to eat her up.
“I’m sorry.” He whispers, and she only nods.